A government-commissioned review by Conservative MP Chris Skidmore warns that the UK is failing on its net-zero plans unless it takes a “new approach” to green targets, BBC News reports. The review says the government needs to be clearer and more consistent with its own climate policies, the outlet continues, and that the “delay on climate action also puts the UK at an economic disadvantage”. The report was commissioned by former prime minister Liz Truss to review the government’s delivery of net-zero, to ensure it was “pro-growth and pro-business”. On top of setting out long-term goals, the report outlines 25 actions the government should take in the next two years, the outlet says, including: “Implementing plans this year to increase solar and onshore wind generation, including a target of increasing solar generation fivefold by 2035…Scrapping planning rules for solar panels [and] ’eco-labelling’ more environmentally friendly foods to lower carbon emissions.”

The recommendation for gas boilers is the focus for several articles – including the main story on the frontpage of the Daily Telegraph, which also includes a comment piece by Skidmore headlined: “We are now in a net zero race – to stand still is not an option.” The review says “new and replacement gas boilers should be banned by 2033, two years earlier than planned – with the installation of heat pumps ‘turbocharged’”, the paper reports. The Times also leads on boilers, but notes that “the average household could save between £400 and £6,000 a year through the move to net-zero”. It adds: “Most of the savings would come from switching petrol and diesel for electric cars, with some from people also swapping boilers for heat pumps.” The Sun says these savings require households to “fork out huge sums upfront to make their homes more energy efficient”. It adds: “Thousands of families will only break even unless they get a £2,000 subsidy to help bear some of the eye-watering costs.”

The Independent explains that the 340-page review “follows extensive engagement across the country including more than 1,800 responses and 50 roundtable meetings with businesses, local government, organisations and other individuals”. The report says that, “overwhelmingly, the common message has been the need for clarity, certainty, consistency and continuity from government”, the outlet explains. The Financial Times quotes Grant Shapps, business and energy secretary, who says: “The UK is well placed to ensure that tackling climate change also brings new jobs and investment for businesses and communities. I am grateful to Chris Skidmore for his detailed report today, which offers a range of ideas and innovations for us to consider as we work to grasp the opportunities from green growth.”

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that climate campaigners have “criticised the review for being unambitious and for not calling for strong policies to avert the climate crisis”. The paper quotes Doug Parr, policy director for Greenpeace UK, who says: “Whilst there is much useful analysis of the problem the review stops short of recommending the kind of muscular policies that would really drive change towards the massive growth in renewables which will be necessary.”

New research suggests that Exxon scientists accurately predicted the pace and scale of climate change more than 40 years ago, reports New Scientist. The study authors say the findings add weight to claims the oil firm knew about – and sought to downplay – the risks posed by continued fossil fuel use. Leaked internal documents published in 2015 suggest Exxon, which became ExxonMobil in 1999, was aware of the threat of climate change in the 1970s, the outlet explains. Analysing publicly available internal documents and research publications, the new study finds that “scientists working for Exxon between 1977 and 2003 accurately forecasted the rate at which global average temperatures would rise as a result of carbon emissions, correctly predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable by around 2000 and reasonably estimated how much carbon dioxide would lead to dangerous warming”, New Scientist says. The New York Times explains further: “Overall, Exxon’s global warming projections closely tracked subsequent temperature increases of around 0.2C of global warming per decade, the study found. The company’s scientists, in fact, excluded the possibility that human-caused global warming was not occurring, the researchers found.” Exxon scientists also correctly rejected the theory that an ice age was coming at a time when other researchers were still debating the prospect, notes BBC News.

Lead author Geoffrey Supran tells the Guardian that it was “breathtaking” to see Exxon’s projections line up so closely with what subsequently happened. He adds: “This really does sum up what Exxon knew, years before many of us were born…We now have the smoking gun showing that they accurately predicted warming years before they started attacking the science. These graphs confirm the complicity of what Exxon knew and how they misled.” Exxon “dismissed the study’s findings while touting its climate research” in a response given to Axios. But, the outlet says, the research “may play a role in ongoing legal action against the company for allegedly misleading investors and the public about the dangers of global warming”. The Times, Bloomberg, MailOnline, Al Jazeera, Inside Climate News and CNN all have the story.

Newly released data shows that 2022 was “one of the warmest years ever recorded”, reports the Guardian, meaning “the past eight years [are] now collectively the hottest documented by modern science”. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which draws on six different global temperature datasets, “last year’s average temperature was about 1.15C warmer globally than levels seen in the pre-industrial era”, the paper explains. It adds: “The cooling influence of La Niña, a periodic climate event now in its third year that delivers brisker temperatures to parts of the globe, helped take some of the edge off the 2022 heat, with the year ranking as either the fifth or sixth hottest year on record.” Bloomberg quotes Carbon Brief’s Dr Zeke Hausfather, who tells the outlet that if you draw a straight line through a chart of global average temperatures since 1970, “2022 is pretty much dead on the trend”. He adds: “So even though it’s a little cooler than some of the last few years, it’s right around where we’d expect global temperatures to be, given the underlying rate of warming of about 0.2C per decade.” Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tells Reuters that “at the rate that we’re going, it’s not going to take more than two decades to get us” to 1.5C of warming. “And the only way that we’re not going to do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” he says. Schmidt adds that he expects 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, the newswire notes. The Hill and Independent also cover the story.

Sweden’s state-owned mining company LKAB says it has discovered Europe’s largest deposit of rare earth metals, reports the Financial Times, in a discovery that “bolsters the continent’s ambition to rely less on imported raw materials needed for the green transition”. The deposit, dubbed Per Geijer, is located north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden’s province of Lapland and contains more than 1m tonnes of rare earth oxides – the largest known deposit of its kind in Europe, the FT explains. While it would take 10 to 15 years before the raw materials could be delivered to the market, the FT notes, “if permitting processes at a Swedish and EU level can be accelerated this timescale could be cut by upwards of 50%”. BBC News says that the term “rare earth” refers to a group of 17 elements that “are used to make a range of products and infrastructure which are increasingly important to everyday life”, but are “also important for green technology including wind turbines and electric vehicles”. Politico notes that “no rare earth elements are currently mined in Europe, with China providing nearly 98% of the EU’s supply”. The outlet quotes Jan Moström, LKAB’s president and CEO, who said: “This is the largest known deposit of rare earth elements in our part of the world, and it could become a significant building block for producing the critical raw materials that are absolutely crucial to enable the green transition.”

Economists have forecast that falling energy prices will give the UK government a windfall of nearly £10bn before the budget and drive down inflation by a further 3%, the Times reports. It explains: “The wholesale cost of [fossil] gas has fallen to levels last seen before Russia invaded Ukraine last year, meaning that household bills in June will be below the government’s £3,000 energy price guarantee. The forecasts, from Deutsche Bank, suggest that the government will be subsidising household bills for only three months between April and June, saving the Treasury £11bn. While this will be partly offset by a new support scheme, analysis suggests Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, will still have an extra £9.2bn of headroom.” Analysis by the Times’ political editor Steven Swinford in the same article notes that “for consumers, there is little respite. Energy bills are still expected to reach more than £2,500 in October, more than double the level a year ago”. The extra £10bn for government finances “could go a long way”, he adds: “While significant tax cuts are not likely in March — the economy is set to be in recession – Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, is expected to retain the 5p cut in fuel duty for another year. As a policy, it is far from cheap – £6bn a year – but the political cost of failing to retain the cut could be damaging. The additional headroom would help cover the gap.” The Economist also reports on how lower gas prices “will provide only limited relief to Britons”.

Meanwhile, the Times also reports that “Centrica, the owner of British Gas, expects to report a more than sevenfold increase in net profits for 2022 after benefiting from high and volatile energy prices”. It continues: “Centrica has emerged a winner from the energy crisis thanks to its North Sea gas production, the Rough gas storage facility and nuclear power generation assets, which have benefited as wholesale prices soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Its trading arm has also cashed in during volatile markets.” The Press Association also has the story.

California took advantage of a break in a “weeks-long deluge” to haul away dead trees, restore downed power lines and prepare new stacks of sandbags before another series of storms hits the state from today, reports Reuters. As many as 19 people have been killed in the storms, including two deaths announced on Wednesday, the newswire says. It continues: “At least two more storm systems were set to pound California and the Pacific north-west starting Friday and over the weekend, the National Weather Service said, including another atmospheric river, systems of dense moisture funnelled into California from the tropical Pacific. The state has already been hit with seven such weather systems over the past two weeks.” Axois notes that “by Saturday, a separate storm is forecast to strike hard-hit areas once again, including San Francisco and Sacramento, with at least a few more inches of rain”.

Reuters has an explainer on why the weeks of rain “will not end” California’s historic drought. It says: “Virtually none of the storms has reached the Colorado River basin, which means the river that provides drinking water to 40 million people in seven states will continue to be endangered.” It adds that “California cannot solve its long-term water crisis without major infrastructure investments to capture more stormwater, restore flood plains and recycle wastewater”. The Washington Post looks at “how climate change will make atmospheric rivers even worse”, while the Week has an article on how climate change is affecting California more broadly. In a comment piece, the Independent‘s US reporter Josh Marcus says that “living in California, or anywhere else, during our era of climate crisis is a long exercise of wondering when your luck will run out”.

New analysis – backed by environmental activists – suggests that a campaign by US Republican state officials to bar financial institutions from winning business because of their stance on issues like climate change could have cost taxpayers as much as an estimated $708m in higher interest payments, Reuters reports. The report, commissioned by the non-profit Sunrise Project, attributes the higher costs primarily to reduced competition to underwrite government bonds in six states furthest along in restricting financial firms or considering doing so, the newswire explains. Republicans last year “stepped up their backlash against firms that incorporate environmental, social or governance (ESG) goals into their business, arguing they should focus more on investment returns”, the article says. The new work finds that taxpayers in six states – Kentucky, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Missouri – could have faced up to $708m in additional interest charges on municipal bonds over the past 12 months.

In other US news, Reuters reports that the US Department of the Interior has said it “will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country’s outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals”. In a statement, the department said the proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1bn over a 20-year period, the newswire reports, “by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs”. Reuters also reports that “the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday to ban releases of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve from being exported to China”. The Hill says that “the bill’s prospects are uncertain in a Democrat-controlled Senate, but it still represents a significant window into Republican energy and foreign policy priorities for the new Congress”. Finally, the Economist has an article entitled: “Go to Texas to see the anti-green future of clean energy.”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world is at the “dawn of a new industrial age” of clean-energy manufacturing that will triple in value by 2030 and create millions of jobs, Al Jazeera writes. The global market for “key mass-manufactured technologies – including solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, heat pumps and electrolysers for hydrogen – will be worth about $650bn a year by the end of the decade”, the article adds, citing a report released by the IEA yesterday. It added that China has been “dominating both the production and trade of ‘most clean energy technologies’”, the article notes.

Meanwhile, the Japan Times carries analysis by Michael Taylor of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, titled: “China and Canada pressed on biodiversity leadership after delivering COP15 pact.” He cites Li Shuo, a policy advisor at Greenpeace China, who said in an interview that “now we’ve managed the ‘easier’ part at COP15, the hard work of implementation should immediately begin…China and Canada, as the parents of the deal, should keep injecting momentum into the global nature protection agenda in 2023”.

There is continuing coverage on the talks this week between China’s top climate envoy Xie Zhenhua with his US counterpart John Kerry, with Caixin Global reporting that the two sides “agreed to maintain communication to address climate change challenges together”, according to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Finally, China’s trade deficit with Russia “reached a record $38b” last year as “global energy prices surged following the outbreak of war in Ukraine”, reports Bloomberg. It adds that the world’s “second-largest economy” purchased “$114.1b worth of goods from Russia in 2022, up 44% from a year earlier”, citing figures from China’s General Administration of Customs showed Friday.

Climate protesters who have occupied the German village of Lützerath for two years to save it from being demolished to make way for a coal mine have been discovered in tunnels while the police were trying to “clear” the site, reports Tagesschau. It quotes Aachen police chief Dirk Weinspach: “There are people in at least one of these underground floor structures who have to be rescued. We don’t know how stable these underground soil structures are. We also don’t know what the air supply is there”. The outlet continues that the climate activists have endured heavy rain, strong winds and low temperatures. Deutsche Welle explains that a court order gave authorities and German energy company RWE “the go-ahead to remove the activists”, but the standoff has become the latest flashpoint in a long-running battle between climate protesters and German authorities. The outlet adds that, according to police, most protestors occupying the village have been removed. T-Online reports that German climate activist Luisa Neubauer was carried away by the police after a sit-in.

Robert Habeck, the German economic and climate minister, has said he has “great respect” for climate protesters, but sees the village Lützerath as the wrong symbol, reports Clean Energy Wire. It adds that Habeck argues that the recent deal made with energy company RWE should be “in line with the demands made by the climate movement”. However, Al Jazeera reports that a study by the German Institute for Economic Research calls into question the government’s stance. Its authors found other existing coal fields could be used instead, notes the outlet. BBC also covers the protest.

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel carries an article about the role of the Green party in the protest describing its participation as being “on both sides of the barricades”. The outlet quotes Zora Fotidou, spokeswoman for the Lützerath Lebt campaign, saying that “it is clear that the Greens had and still have the chance to initiate political ways to save Lützerath…But we have seen again and again: we cannot rely on the government.” The Financial Times notes that Habeck is the second most powerful politician in Germany and often ranked by polls as its most popular. However, the war and Germany’s long-standing reliance on Russia sees him now “walking on a razor’s edge”, adds the newspaper.

Finally, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports that the Greens want to see more speed in climate protection in the transport sector and have decided on a “starter package” with a focus on strengthening local public transport and reform of “environmentally harmful subsidies”. In addition, the federal government should concentrate more on the construction of dilapidated bridges and cancel the new road construction that has already been planned, notes the outlet. Clean Energy Wire also covers the story.

An editorial in the Times celebrates the “unexpectedly encouraging start” to 2023 “thanks to a sharp fall in wholesale gas prices over the past month”, which will save the government around £10bn on its energy price guarantee. This “remarkable turnaround” is partly due to “the unusually warm winter that most of Europe has experienced, with much of the continent basking in spring-like temperatures”, the paper says: “What may have been a disaster for many Alpine ski resorts has helped curb energy demand. This, combined with the impressively decisive action taken by European governments to cut energy usage, means that Europe’s gas storage facilities are still nearly 90% full. So far this winter, Europe has sucked half as much gas from its storage facilities as in the past two years.” On current trends, the paper says, “it seems likely that Europe will emerge from this winter with gas storage facilities still above 50% full”. That will “make it far easier to refill them before next winter, even without Russian gas, thereby reducing the risk of another price spike next year”. On the £10bn “windfall”, the editorial argues that leaving the price guarantee “at £2,500 rather than raising it to £3,000 in July, or even lowering it further” would “be a mistake” because it is “poorly targeted”. A better option, it says, “would be to boost investment in home insulation and green energy, which would have the benefit of further reducing gas demand and prices while improving energy security and curbing emissions”.

An article in the Economist makes a similar point, arguing that “Europe would do well to bank its luck”. It says: “Leaders could use the chance to rethink the myriad support schemes they introduced over the summer, many of which are costly, inefficient and untargeted. They would be wise to focus money on the vulnerable, and to tie it to green investments. After all, it is weirdly hot weather that has given Europe its current reprieve. The fight against climate change will only become more acute as the energy crisis fades.”

Snowpack cover in the Alps is currently 36 days shorter than the long-term average – “a decline that is unprecedented over the last six centuries” – according to new research. The authors use proxy data from 572 ring-width series extracted from a shrub growing at high elevation in Val Ventina, Italy. The findings “highlight the urgent need to develop adaptation strategies for some of the most sensitive environmental and socio-economic sectors in this region”, according to the study.

New research finds that, globally, 86% of ports are exposed to more than three hazards – including cyclones, fluvial and coastal hazards. The authors “perform an asset-level risk analysis of global port infrastructure from multiple hazards, quantifying the risk to physical asset damages and logistics services and maritime trade flows at-risk”. They find that port-specific risk totals $7.5bn per year – one third of which is due to tropical cyclone impacts – while $61bn of trade is at risk every year. Small island developing states face particular trade risks, the paper finds.