Companies hoping to build new windfarms, solar plants and tidal lagoons, have been “dealt a blow”, says the Guardian, after the chancellor Philip Hammond said in the budget yesterday there will be no new subsidies for clean power projects until 2025 at the earliest. The news was found in budget documents and not revealed by Hammond himself during his budget speech. The Guardian says environmental groups criticised the Treasury move. “WWF said it was a huge disappointment, while Greenpeace claimed Wednesday’s budget was one of the least green ever. Business groups also reacted with dismay.” The Financial Timesalso notes how the UK’s renewables industry expressed “deep concern” at the news: “Under the framework, existing contracts will still stand and a £557m pot of funding announced last month to support “less established” renewable technologies, including offshore wind, will be honoured. But supporters of green energy suggested the announcement could stymie the development of other emerging technologies while solar and onshore wind projects would have to be funded in the near-term without any burden to the public purse.” Unearthednotes how the news was “buried in the budget”, adding that it “could have a major impact on emerging new technology like tidal”. Elsewhere, the Daily Mailfocuses on how how Hammond gave “tax breaks to save ageing North Sea rigs in bid to keep production going in the crisis hit area”. It adds: “Under the new policy, they will be able to pass on their tax history when they sell the asset, helping the new owner claim a bigger credit. It is particularly warranted now because oil and gas in the basin is running out and some companies want to sell wells. However, the costs of dismantling can be a major turn-off for buyers.” The Express says the tax breaks are set to “bring investment” to the North Sea oil industry. Meanwhile, in other budget news, Reuters notes that Hammond will “hike levy on most polluting diesel cars”. It adds: “Britain will increase the tax paid by those driving new diesel cars that do not meet the latest emissions standards from next year, in the latest blow to the hard-pressed sector.” In contrast, the Guardian says the “Treasury backs electric cars but makes limited moves on diesel”. BBC News says that the chancellor made “investment in research the centrepiece of his budget”, with a particular focus on driverless cars. BusinessGreen has published a summary of how the “green economy” has reacted to the budget.

New nuclear power stations in the UK can no longer compete with windfarms on price, according to the boss of a German energy company’s green power arm, reports the Guardian. Hans Bunting, the chief operating officer of renewables at Innogy SE, part of the company that owns the UK energy supplier npower, said offshore windfarms had become mainstream and were destined to become even cheaper because of new, bigger turbines. Asked whether nuclear groups that want to build new reactors in the UK could compete with windfarms on cost, even when their intermittency was taken into account, Bunting replied: “Obviously they can’t.”

Eight of the world’s biggest energy groups have committed to cut methane emissions from their supply chains as part of efforts to promote natural gas as a “relatively climate-friendly fuel”, reports the FT. ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Total and BP are among those to have signed up to a series of “guiding principles” aimed at reducing releases of methane from leaky wells, pipes and other energy infrastructure. The FT adds: “Methane leakage has become a flashpoint in the US debate over energy and the environment. President Donald Trump has sought to suspend or cancel rules aimed at curbing emissions that were introduced by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and with the support of the American Petroleum Institute, the new administration is pressing ahead with the deregulatory policy despite setbacks in Congress and in the courts.” Reuters also carries the story.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of a report by Frontiers Economics, commissioned by the Australian government, which shows that renewables will drive a “steep decline” in wholesale electricity prices between 2018 and 2022 due to the entry of 6,000MW of renewable capacity. It adds: “Modelling commissioned by the Turnbull government as part of its efforts to back in the national energy guarantee says renewables will drive the first wave of price reductions under the policy. It also floats substantial regulatory intervention to stop the electricity market becoming even more concentrated…It also acknowledges that the policy, which imposes new reliability and emissions reduction guarantees on energy retailers and large energy users from 2020, could also lead to further market concentration in states like South Australia.”

A group of the some of the world’s biggest insurance companies has warned extreme weather disasters have put this year on track to be one of the most expensive on record, urging the sector to redouble efforts to tackle the huge shortfall in global insurance cover, reports BusinessGreen. The Climatewise initiative published an update this week detailing how a growing ‘climate risk protection gap’ has been exposed by 2017 events such as Hurricane Harvey in Texas – which alone cost the US $180bn in losses. The voluntary group, which is made up of 28 leading insurance firms, said extreme weather disasters over the past decade have contributed to a global climate risk protection gap of $1.7trn, the majority of which has been borne by governments and civil society.

The Times’s deputy business editor joins the growing calls to stop adding “stealth taxes” to energy bills to pay for things such as the new Hinkley C nuclear power plant, which he says is a “highly regressive form of tax”. Pagnamenta says: “Hinkley may be the most costly and egregious example, but it is not the only project to be funded in that way. These days, when consumers fork out for their monthly bills, they are bankrolling a host of government green tariffs, wind and solar projects, subsidies for smart meters and energy efficiency schemes for those in fuel poverty…Regardless of whether or not such schemes have merit, this surely cannot be the best way to fund them. And if the government insists it is, then ministers should at least be straight with consumers and fairer on the companies they rely on to do their work. The mechanism has grown so obfuscatory there is not even agreement on how much these tariffs cost.” He doesn’t say, though, how they should be paid.

An editorial in the journal Nature looks back at COP23 and says there is a “worrying disconnect between emissions rhetoric and real-world trends highlights urgent need for nations to honour their pledges”. It adds: “Governments should clearly lay out the steps and incentives — taxes, carbon-pricing schemes or clean-technology subsidies, for example — through which they hope to reduce emissions, and should be candid about what efforts will cost. Countries should also open up their national pledges for review by scientists and economists, to increase trust and transparency. Science can help in other ways. Fair burden sharing depends on reliable methods of reporting and verifying human-caused CO2 emissions. Research funders must provide sustained support for accurate atmospheric measurements to allow carbon researchers to disentangle emissions from human activity and natural processes.” Separately, Nature also carries an opinion article by Stephen O Andersen, who co-chaired the technology and economic assessment panel for the Montreal Protocol from 1988 to 2012. He argues that “we can and must govern climate engineering”.

In an already much-shared and discussed feature, Holthaus walks his readers through why the “rapid collapse of Antarctic glaciers could flood coastal cities by the end of this century”. Holthaus, who has claimed on Twitter that this is the most important article he’s ever written, examines the fate of two giant glaciers in Antarctica – Pine Island and Thwaites. “A wholesale collapse of Pine Island and Thwaites would set off a catastrophe. Giant icebergs would stream away from Antarctica like a parade of frozen soldiers. All over the world, high tides would creep higher, slowly burying every shoreline on the planet, flooding coastal cities and creating hundreds of millions of climate refugees. All this could play out in a mere 20 to 50 years — much too quickly for humanity to adapt.”

Mooney says “hopes are rising” that the Trump administration will, unlike with the Paris Agreement, not walk away from the Kigali Amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol aimed at limiting climate change-causing hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which themselves were introduced to replace ozone layer-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs): “If there’s a reason the Trump administration could support the rather narrowly targeted amendment — yet still plan to exit the far more sweeping Paris agreement — it may have something to do with the Montreal Protocol itself. It’s an uncontroversial treaty with bipartisan domestic support and has traditionally been able to forge a cooperative, rather than adversarial, relationship with the companies making the chemicals subject to regulation.”

The amount of the Earth’s outdoor area lit with artificial lighting increased by 2.2% per year between 2012 and 2016, new research says. The study uses “the first-ever calibrated satellite radiometer designed for night lights”, and finds large differences in national growth rates, with lighting remaining stable or decreasing in only a few countries. The findings “are not consistent with global scale energy reductions”, the researchers say, “but rather indicate increased light pollution, with corresponding negative consequences for flora, fauna, and human well-being”.

A new study estimates the carbon implications of recent changes in China’s economic development and its role in global trade in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Efficiency gains and changes in production structures caused CO2 emissions embodied in China’s exports to decline between 2007 and 2012, the findings show. Meanwhile, some less developed regions, such as Southwest China, have shifted from being a net emission exporter to being a net importer.

A warming climate could lead to more methane being released from the world’s wet ecosystems, a new study warns. The research analyses the “ebullition”, or “bubble flux” of methane from sediments beneath freshwater ecosystems. A controlled year-round experiment 1000-litre “mini-lakes” at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology finds that global warming strongly enhances freshwater methane emissions through an increase in bubble flux of 6–20% per 1 C of temperature rise.