Many news outlets are closely covering the sudden rise in global oil prices following the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure over the weekend. With the US administration claiming the attack was orchestrated by Iran, oil prices have surged as much as 20% to above $71 a barrel. The FT says this is the largest percentage spike in “nearly three decades”. It adds: “The rally, which followed news that Saudi Arabia’s oil production is expected to be well below maximum capacity for weeks, set oil on course for one of its biggest one-day gains as traders worried over the extent of the outage…The loss of more than 5m b/d [barrels per day] is the single biggest outage from one incident, and is equal to more than 5% of global supply. Brent’s spike on the open [market] was the largest move in percentage terms since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.” A separate FT article says that in tandem to the oil price rise, “emerging Asia currencies and airline stocks fell”. Reuters says that “source close to the matter told Reuters the return to full oil capacity could take ‘weeks, not days’”. Reuters has also published an explainer on how the attack “leaves the world without spare oil capacity”.

There is widespread coverage of the diverse range of climate protests being planned around the world on Friday, 20 September. The Press Association reports: “Businesses, trade unions and environmental groups are backing children and students as they take to the streets for what is being billed as the world’s largest climate strike. In the UK, youngsters are taking part in more than 150 demonstrations from Cornwall to Scotland and are urging people to join them to push for action to transform the economy to zero carbon and improve people’s lives. Worldwide, campaigners say there are more than 3,400 events planned in 120 countries, with numbers taking part expected to surpass the estimated 1.6 million people who took to the streets for a global climate strike in March. In New York, action will be led by youth strikers including teenage activist Greta Thunberg, whose strikes outside the Swedish parliament have inspired a global movement.” Last Friday, Thunberg led protests outside the White House, according to the Washington Post, which interviewed her. She told the newspaper: “I don’t really have any concrete things I want to have accomplished, because then I would just be disappointed all the time. But I’m just trying to make as much difference as I can, especially in informing people, spreading awareness about the climate crisis.” The Guardian has published “what you need to know about Friday’s climate strike”. The Daily Telegraph reports that a majority of UK teachers are in favour of pupils missing lessons to campaign and support causes they believe in, according to a poll.

Meanwhile, there is continuing coverage of the attempts by “Heathrow Pause” – a splinter group of Extinction Rebellion (XR) – to fly drone’s near the UK’s busiest airport. The Daily Telegraph reports on XR co-founder Roger Hallam’s rearrest on Saturday just hours after being released on bail. The Independent says his bail terms stipulated that he must not go within five miles of the airport. Reuters reports that XR says it will hold new “demonstrations in London from 7 October, with the aim of shutting down major roads near Britain’s parliament in Westminster”. In Germany, police said at least 15,000 climate protestors and cyclists disrupted the Frankfurt car show on Saturday, according to Reuters. The Financial Times says “the future of the world’s biggest motor show in Frankfurt has been thrown into doubt after a weekend of environmental protests disrupted the industry’s gala event”.

Hundreds of media outlets around the world are today ramping up their coverage of climate change for a week to mark the UN Climate Summit, which starts on 23 September. As the Guardian explains: “The Guardian is the lead partner in Covering Climate Now, an initiative founded earlier this year with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation to address the urgent need for stronger climate coverage. More than 250 newsrooms representing 32 countries – with a combined monthly reach of more than a billion people – have signed on. This week…the Covering Climate Now partners have pledged to increase the volume and visibility of their climate coverage in the first large-scale collaboration of the partnership…The Covering Climate Now network represents every corner of the media including TV networks (CBS News, Al Jazeera), newspapers (El País, the Toronto Star), digital players (BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Vox), wire services (Getty Images, Bloomberg), magazines (Nature, Scientific American), and dozens of podcasts, local publishers, radio and TV stations. Countries represented include Togo, Nepal, Argentina, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, The Netherlands and dozens more.” CNN also explains to its audience why it is increasing its climate coverage. In iNews, Tom Bawden provides an example of increased coverage with a lengthy feature on “everything you need to know about climate change”. The Conversation says it is joining the initiative because “our aim is to focus the attention of the world’s brightest minds on tackling the burning issue of our time”.

A number of publications report on a major new poll by CBS News, which shows that a “majority of Americans think action needs to be taken right now to address climate change”. CBS News explains: “Most consider it at least to be a serious problem — including more than a quarter who say it is a crisis. Seven in 10 think human activity contributes a lot or some to climate change, and most feel they have a personal responsibility to do something about it, although many say they cannot afford to. Opinions on the subject are marked by partisan divisions.” The Guardian says that poll shows that “amid a Democratic primary shaped by unprecedented alarm over the climate crisis and an insurgent youth climate movement that is sweeping the world, the polling shows substantial if uneven support for tackling the issue”. However, the Financial Times chooses to focus on a YouGov survey of climate attitudes around the world, which “underscores” the “high level” of climate scepticism in the US: “The US is a clear outlier in terms of public scepticism of the threat of climate change, according to a comprehensive survey of attitudes to the issue in 28 countries…The YouGov survey of 32,000 people showed that the US was also the country most riven with political division over climate change. The results show that 30% of Republicans are climate sceptics, compared with just 4% of Democrats.”

Reuters reports the views of a source inside the ongoing talks between Germany’s governing coalition: “Climate protection measures that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and their Social Democrat coalition partners want to unveil next week will cost at least 40bn euros (£35.42bn) until 2023, a person briefed on the talks told Reuters on Saturday.” The source is quoted as saying: “We agree that something needs to be done but it is still open which form this will take…We still have not agreed on a price for a tonne of C02.” Reuters adds: “The government wants to unveil its climate protection package on 20 September and Merkel has said the plans would include some sort of carbon emissions pricing to finance measures aimed at reducing emissions. The coalition partners, which include Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), their Bavaria Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are divided on how to finance Germany’s march toward a green future.”

Climate Home News reports the findings of new analysis by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which has found that only 19% of climate finance mobilised in 2017 went to projects that helped communities adapt to climate change. It adds: “The vast majority of the money went to efforts to reduce emissions with 8% identified as serving both goals. Developing countries have long pushed for climate finance to be evenly split between helping them to reduce emissions and to adapt to existing climate impacts. The UN’s Green Climate Fund aims to deliver a 50/50 split.” Late last year, Carbon Brief published an interactive showing how climate finance “flows” around the world based on OECD data.

Meanwhile, the Guardian covers a new report by the Food and Land Use Coalition, which finds that the “public is providing more than $1m per minute in global farm subsidies, much of which is driving the climate crisis and destruction of wildlife”.

The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that an advert by Norwegian energy giant Equinor was incorrect to claim that natural gas is a “low carbon energy” source. The Financial Times says it is the first time the watchdog has made such an assessment. The FT adds: “The ASA told the Norwegian state-backed energy major not to use the advertisement again after a complaint was submitted about a poster seen in Westminster tube station. The watchdog said the company had agreed not to use the ad again and will make changes if they decide to run a similar campaign in an email to Murray Worthy, senior campaigner at Global Witness, the NGO, who lodged the complaint.”

The Saturday edition of the Guardian carries a long extract of Naomi Klein’s latest book, On Fire, which is a collection of essays written over the past decade. “The No Logo author looks at why capitalism and politics have got in the way of addressing the climate crisis,” says the Guardian. A small snippet of the extract says: “I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localised market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance.” The Guardian also includes an interview with Klein, in which she explains why she is publishing this book now: “I still feel that the way that we talk about climate change is too compartmentalised, too siloed from the other crises we face. A really strong theme running through the book is the links between it and the crisis of rising white supremacy, the various forms of nationalism and the fact that so many people are being forced from their homelands, and the war that is waged on our attention spans.”

The LA Times has published a three-part editorial on why the “world is drifting steadily toward a climate catastrophe”. In a piece explaining why it has written the series of editorials, it says: “The Los Angeles Times editorial board has been writing about the climate change debacle for years…We’ve routinely sided with scientists over deniers, and we’ve consistently called for greater action to address the looming catastrophe…Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, however, the situation has gotten worse…The first instalment of the series lays out the scope of the problem, and argues that President Trump’s policies are making a very bad situation worse. The second addresses the responsibility of developed countries to the developing world. The third focuses on what needs to happen next to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.”

As global temperatures rise, driven by human-caused emissions, new surface temperature records are likely to be seen in years with an El Niño event, a new study suggests. Modelling the 21st century using 38 global climate models, the researchers find that, under a low emission scenario, one out of three El Niño events would break the global annual average surface temperature record. “The probability significantly increases to four out of five in a high emission scenario,” they add. Even 68% of weak El Niño events in the high emissions scenario would likely set a new record, the study finds, and around 20% of weak events in the low emissions scenario.

A new paper reviews the literature around calculating the embodied greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of rail infrastructure. The paper identified 22 studies containing 57 case studies, covering high speed rail, intercity rail, light rail, commuter rail, heavy rail, freight, and metro rail. There was a wide range in estimates for embodied emissions, the researchers note, which is largely explained by the “proportion of the rail line at-grade, elevated, or in a tunnel”. For example, tunnelling has 27 times more embodied GHG per kilometre than at-grade construction, they note. The review “highlights the need for standardisation across the reporting of embodied GHG for rail infrastructure to better facilitate hot spot detection, engineering design and GHG policy decision making”, the authors conclude.