President Barack Obama has proposed a new $10-per-barrel fee on every barrel of oil, which will be included in his budget request to Congress next week. The initiative will bring in up to $32 billion in new federal revenue annually, which will be used to fund clean transportation projects — the Hill spells out in detail how the White House plans to spend the money. This surcharge would have to be paid by the oil companies — though Politico says that this would “presumably be passed along to consumers”. The move is expected to die in the Republican-controlled Congress. Reutersand the BBC also cover the news.

A bipartisan energy bill currently passing through the US Senate hit a stalemate after Democrats blocked the deal. Democrats had sought to use the bill to direct funds towards Flint, a city near Detroit, where the water system has been contaminated. They energy bill would have taken steps to speed up permission for liquified natural gas facilities, fund research in nuclear, and protect the grid from cyber attacks, says Reuters. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he hopes that the bill will nonetheless be “salvaged” over the coming days.

Shell confirmed that 10,000 jobs would be cut after it confirmed an 80% slide in profits after the price of oil dropped over the course of 2015. Last year, Shell made $3.8bn, compared to $19bn in 2014, the company reported yesterday. Nonetheless, the company’s shares rose after the announcement, and the BBC‘s industry correspondent John Moylan saying that the figures do not tell the whole story, with Shell’s takeover of BG Group making 2015 a “defining year” for the firm. Shell’s CEO Ben van Beurden predicted that oil prices would rebound, reports the Financial Times, which points out that US oil producer ConocoPhillips reported a net loss for the fourth quarter of 2015.

Morocco’s king has switched on the first stage of a vast solar plant in Morocco, which will be the world’s largest once completed. At the edge of the Sahara desert, the plant will be the size of the country’s capital city when finished in 2018, and provide electricity for 1.1 million people. Noor 1, the first section switched on, provides 160MW of the ultimate 580MW capacity and will provide 650,000 local people with solar electricity from dawn until three hours after sunset. Climate Homeand the Associated Press also covered the story.

The Welsh Assembly has unanimously approved a new law that sets binding emissions reductions of at least 80% by 2050 for Wales. The legislation requires Natural Resources Wales to put sustainability at the centre of its policy-making, and to produce a five-yearly report examining how Wales it looking after its nature, land, water and air. BusinessGreen also covered the story.

After a week of dramatic falls in profit being reported by oil companies, Nick Butler looks at the thinking behind the companies. The only forward thinking at the moment seems to be limited to the view that prices must rise again, he writes, and there is no sense that any of the companies have repositioned themselves for a world in which oil prices and profit margins could stay low for a long time. These oil companies “are not too big to fail,” he says.

Naomi Klein outlines her latest climate change initiative — The Leap manifesto. This calls for a rapid shift to 100% renewable electricity, and insists that new energy projects should be democratically controlled, with priority going to indigenous people and communities whose health is impacted by industrial activities. To put this into effect, it calls for a dramatic change in how public revenues are collected and spent. 2016 is a leap year, and it should also be the year “we started to leap,” says Klein.

For most of the past 250 years, Europe’s managed forests have been a net source of carbon, a new study says. The preference to plant more commercially valuable trees – such as Scot pines, Norway spruce and beech – rather than broadleaved species has caused substantial changes to evapotranspiration and albedo, the paper says. These changes, in combination with the release of carbon that is associated with managed forests, are contributing to warming rather than mitigating it – despite an overall increase in tree coverage.

A new study proposes an explanation why the centre of the Greenland Ice Sheet has grown thicker in recent years while melting at its edges has sped up. Using radar data, the researchers find that ice forming during the most recent geological age is stiffer than the ice beneath. The paper says this stiffer ice is putting pressure on the soft ice below, stemming its flow. The findings suggest that the ice sheet is not only responding to the modern climate, but is still being affected by long-term changes, the researchers say.

Increasingly large amounts of June rainfall in northern India is linked to human-caused climate change, a new study says. Using climate models, researchers analysed heavy rainfall events in the region since the late 1980s – including the floods of 13–17 June 2013 in Uttarakhand that resulted in more than 5000 casualties and a huge loss of property. The researchers attribute 60-90% of the rainfall during that event to rising greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions.