After nearly four months, the gas leak at the Aliso Canyon well near Los Angeles has been permanently sealed, the company responsible for the facility announced yesterday. Southern California Gas Co drilled a relief well, eventually managing to intercept the pipeline breach and halt the gas flow. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that the leak emitted more than 90,000 metric tons of natural gas into the atmosphere, making it the biggest source of greenhouse gases in California. Reuters and BBC News also cover the story while a Dot Earth blog asks, now that the gas gusher is stanched, where are tougher rules on leaks? The company is facing criminal charges for failing to report the leak in a timely manner and is being sued by residents forced to leave their homes, accusations the company is refuting. Inside Climate News looks at what the health risks could be of more than 100 days of exposure to the methane leak. Carbon Brief has updated its coverage of this story.

British Gas parent company Centrica has criticised the government’s plans to pay fossil fuel and nuclear power plant owners to guarantee availability of their energy supply. Chief executive Iain Conn has called for an overhaul of the capacity market scheme to get subsidies “up to a level where it encourages new investment”, saying prices were currently too low for investors to build new plants. While the energy giant’s profits have taken a tumble, the slumping oil price has failed to dent those of its daughter company British Gas, report the Financial Times, The Telegraph and BBC News. The Telegraph is also reporting analysts’ predictions that low gas prices could see gas firms’ energy bills tumble by 20% this summer.

American climate envoy, Todd Stern, allayed concerns yesterday about the possibility of the US pulling out of the landmark Paris agreement to cut global emissions. Stern said the diplomatic blowback would be huge, making it highly unlikely that a new US Republican president would renege on recent commitments. Stern also told reporters in London he anticipated the Clean Power Plan will be upheld, after the recent decision by the Supreme Court to postpone its rollout stoked concern that the US might not live up to its promises. The UN’s shiny new climate deal wouldn’t collapse without the US, but it would look a whole lot weaker, says Climate Home.

A new Greenpeace report has called on the candidates for London Mayor to put forward specific policies to boost the city’s flagging solar industry. The group argues a Solar Power Task Force, the issuing of green bonds to fund solar projects in the capital and a London equivalent of the feed in tariff could restore some of the incentives cut by the government last year and see London deliver a ten-fold increase in solar power over the next 10 years.

Antarctica and Greenland may be among the most remote places on Earth but there are some very worrying signs about their stability, says Professor Chris Stokes from Durham University. But while it is clear ice sheet melt has accelerated in the last decade or so, there is much more uncertainty about how ice sheets might respond in the future and much can be learned from looking at how ice streams responded to previous periods of climate warming. A new paper by Stokes and colleagues reconstructs what happened when an ice sheet the size of Antarctica disappeared over North America at the end of the last ice age between around 20,000 and 7,000 years ago.

BusinessGreen’s James Murray reacts to a Guardian story yesterday, which featured guidance from the government to local councils to expect “severe penalties” if they “use pensions and procurement policies to pursue their own boycotts and sanctions”. But these are not the same thing, says Murray. Fossil fuel divestment and green procurement are neither boycotts nor sanctions, they are simply sensible investment decisions that are increasingly favoured by any organisation that understands long term risks and opportunities.

The fastest and most significant changes in glaciers occur in those that flow into the ocean. All “water-terminating” glaciers share the ability to lose substantial volumes of ice at the front – either through direct melting into the water, or chunks of ice breaking off. This new study reviews the process of underwater melting, and finds it can be an important trigger for glacier change and can explain many of the structural differences between glaciers.