Daily Briefing

Several publications report on the National Grid’s preliminary investigation into the blackout that struck in England and Wales last week. The report “has raised the possibility that [the blackout] was caused by the world’s largest offshore wind farm accidentally going offline”, the Financial Times says. The provisional findings, submitted on Friday, say that the Hornsea offshore wind farm may have tripped offline seconds before a smaller gas-fired station also went out. The results “suggest the blackout may have been avoided if not for an error at the wind farm”, the FT says. “Investigators now suspect the problems on the grid started when lightning hit part of the network near Cambridge,” the FT says. The lightning strike “coincided with the almost instantaneous total loss of supply from the Hornsea wind farm”, the FT says. “This detail is significant because it was previously believed the loss of power took approximately 60 seconds. The instant shutdown suggests the safety systems at Hornsea could have taken the plant offline accidentally.” National Grid described these reports as “speculation” and said it “it will not comment until Ofgem has had time to look over its report”, Press Association says. The Sunday Telegraph carries the comments of Colin Gibson, a former power network director for National Grid, who has called on ministers to impose limits on new wind and solar farms in light of the news. Gibson cites analysis co-written with Dr Capell Aris, a contributor to the climate sceptic lobby-group Global Warming Policy Foundation. A story in the Daily Telegraph reports that UK taxpayers paid £173m in “constraint payments” to windfarms during the last financial year. Such payments are a tool used by National Grid to balance supply and demand on the system, the Daily Telegraph says. The Mail on Sunday also reports the National Grid’s preliminary findings, with the online headline reading: “Renewable energy is a blackout risk, warns National Grid after chaos during biggest outage in a decade.” Elsewhere, Press Association reports that the demolition of a coal plant in Oxfordshire on Sunday caused a power cut affecting around 40,000 people, and a story in the Times – trailed on the front page – reports that the “National Grid is routinely restricting the use of its own power cables from the Continent because of the risk of blackouts if they failed”.

Australia’s deputy prime minister Michael McCormack has claimed that Pacific islands will survive climate change “because many of their workers come here to pick our fruit”, the Guardian reports. His comments come after talks between Australia and other Pacific Island nations came close to collapse on Friday over Australia’s “red lines” on coal and taking more stringent action on climate change. In response to McCormack’s comments, Tuvalu’s prime minister has threatened to exit Australia’s seasonal worker programme, a second story in the Guardian reports. An opinion piece by anthropologist Victoria Stead, also in the Guardian, called McCormack’s comments “both insulting and wrong”. A third story in the Guardian offers more detail on the Pacific Islands Forum, which it describes as a “showdown on the climate crisis”. A column by Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine Murphy says the events revealed that prime minister Scott Morrison does not have “things under control” in terms of tackling climate change. On Saturday, Greg Jericho, who writes on economics for Guardian Australia, says in an opinion piece that the country has seen “10 years wasted” on inaction over climate change. In an editorial, the Sydney Morning Herald says Australia has lost the Pacific’s trust on climate change.

The Observer reports on an update from Greta Thunberg, who is now six days into her two-week Atlantic crossing from the UK to New York. “In an update posted to Twitter around midday on Saturday, the 16-year-old said she was eating and sleeping well and had no sea sickness so far,” the Observer reports.

Carrie Symonds, partner of Boris Johnson, has used her first solo appearance since Johnson became Prime Minister to say that politicians had a “gigantic responsibility to make the right decisions” over climate change, reports the Press Association. She said: “There are no simple answers to the environmental crisis this planet faces. It is immensely complicated. There is no escaping the fact that politicians, business leaders and journalists have a gigantic responsibility to make the right decisions, to change the way they do business and report the truth about what is happening in the world.”

Iceland’s prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir writes in the New York Times after the country saw its first glacier “lost to climate change”. She says: “The ice field that covered the mountain in 1900 – close to six square miles – has now been replaced by a crater lake. It is certainly beautiful, surrounded by patchy snowfields, and is now the highest lake in Iceland. But that beauty quickly fades in the eyes of anyone who knows what was there before and why it is no longer there. [The glacier’s] disappearance is yet another testimony of irreversible global climate change.” On Sunday, Jakobsdottir joined a group of artists and scientists to hold a funeral for the glacier, named “Okjökull”. The funeral was reported by the Guardian, Buzzfeed News and CBS News.

Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff writes on why far-right commentators have “turned on” Greta Thunberg with “frightening vitriol”. She says: “Something about female eco-warriors seems to bring out the worst in a certain kind of man, whether it’s Nigel Farage accusing Meghan Markle of destroying Prince Harry’s popularity with her woke enthusiasms, or the Australian shock jock Alan Jones suggesting this week that the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinta Ardern, should have a “sock shoved down her throat” for daring to argue that Australia go further in reducing emissions. Choke her, drown her, whatever; just shut her up. Who do they think they are, these women telling us how to live?”

An editorial in the Times writes on the need for an understanding of why the UK’s recent blackout was so “disruptive”. It says: “It is probably true that there was no single factor responsible for the power outage. A full report, to be published in three months’ time, will go into greater detail.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the Washington Post says that “global warming is already here” and “denying it is unforgivable”.

Figures and graphics in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “(still) focus primarily on showing that climate change is real and a problem, with little solution-oriented communication”, a new study says. Researchers assessed how 702 figures from IPCC Working Group II assessment reports frame climate impacts and adaptation. “We find that visuals are largely framed as distant in time and space and predominantly portray the threats of climate change rather than possible goals to be achieved,” the researchers find. Furthermore, the visuals “primarily depicted what the impacts and adaptations were, with minimal attention to who was impacted or needed to take adaption actions or adopt responsibility”, the researchers add.

A new study assesses how cities in California are contributing to meeting the statewide goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Researchers analysed more than “150 city climate action plans (CAPs) in California and examined their reduction goals”. The researchers identify five sets of factors that can explain whether a jurisdiction adopts a plan or not, and what kind of target it sets. The authors find that “size of the city, political ideology, and institutional capacity are related to a higher chance of adopting a climate action plan, while political ideology and air quality explain the extent of aspiration of targets”.