The devastation left by Hurricane Maria in Dominica is a sign of things to come under a changing climate, Prince Charles has told the Sun’s royal photographer Arthur Edwards. He said: “There’s a huge task, obviously, for these poor island communities to do. They are suffering more and more from the accumulating effects of climate change.” The prince added: “I think it’s worse than extraordinary that by now people can’t read the tea leaves and understand just what people are facing. Some people seem to think it’s somehow a threat to undermine capitalism if you mention climate change. It isn’t…The difficulty about all this is that if we don’t do more, rapidly, then there will be ever increasing conflict over scarce resources because of the effects of climate change, drought, everything else. It will be increasingly impossible for people to manage and then they will have to move in mass migration. It’s already happening. We have to remember there are so many people around the world in other parts who are suffering hugely from the accumulating effects of putting all this CO2 into the atmosphere from all kinds of pollution — from coal-fired power stations to cars, and goodness knows what…So we are heating up everything and the more you warm it up the more you warm the oceans as well.”

The German grid regulator has awarded just over 1 gigawatt of onshore wind contracts at a price 10% below the most recent awards, reports Business Green. The winning bids came in at an average of 3.8 euro cents per kilowatt hour, equivalent to £34 per megawatt hour, well below current UK wholesale power prices of around £40/MWh. Yesterday’s UK budget left the door open to new contracts for low-carbon electricity if they would cut bills, as Carbon Brief reported.

Germany’s Green Party will only join a coalition government if there is agreement on closing seven gigawatts (GW) of coal power capacity, reports Climate Home, citing Green MEP Reinhard Bütikofer, described as “a key negotiator”. The MEP tells Climate Home the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) had rejected the coal closure demand, among others, before walking out of coalition talks on Sunday. After coalition talks collapsed, Germany is facing the prospect of minority government run by Angela Merkel’s CDU plus the Greens or FDP, another grand coalition with the Social Democrats, who have so far rejected the idea, or a return to the polls.

Tesla has completed a 100 megawatt battery in South Australia, the world’s largest to date, report the BBC and others. The installation was built in response to a series of blackouts in September 2016 and February 2017. It will help avoid similar events in future, the BBC says. Mail Online and Energy Live News also have the story.

The UK’s high court has extended a “long-term, sweeping injunction against anti-fracking protestors”, the Guardian reports, adding that critics have called the injunction “draconian and anti-democratic”. The Guardian explains: “The injunction prohibits campaigners from interfering unlawfully with Ineos’s fracking operations. Anyone who obstructs the firm’s fracking activities faces being jailed, fined, or having their assets seized.” DeSmog UK and Energy Live News also have the story.

An “impressive fall” in the cost of renewable power has persuaded the European Commission to update its projections for 2030, EU vice president for the Energy Union Maroš Šefčovič told journalists, Euractiv reports. Šefčovič believes a 30% renewable energy target for 2030 could be up for discussion as the EU drafts laws on meeting its 2030 goals, Euractiv adds. This would raise the 27% target agreed by EU leaders in 2014.

Fatty acids released into the air from cooking may contribute to the formation of cooling clouds, say scientists, according to the BBC and others. “But researchers dismiss the idea that cooking fats could be used as a geo-engineering tool to reduce warming,” the BBC adds. In the Telegraph, science editor Sarah Knapton writes: “Fried fatty food not only has an impact on waistlines, it is also affecting our weather systems, according to scientists.” The Mail Online also has the story. The articles are based on a new paper in Nature Communications, which looks at the way fatty acids can help aerosols form in the lab. It says this process “could occur in atmospheric aerosols with a potential impact on key aerosol properties”.

In an article for the Guardian, climate scientist Tamsin Edwards responds to an “emotive article on the ‘ice apocalypse’ by Grist’s Eric Holthaus. She writes: “I’m glad Eric Holthaus is writing about an impact of climate change that is both certain (seas will rise around the world, no matter what we do) and incredibly important (we must adapt). I’m sympathetic to his concerns about the future. But I think his article is too pessimistic: that it overstates the possibility of disaster. Too soon, too certain.” She says she was “particularly concerned” by “some of the implied time scales and impacts” described in Holthaus’s piece, writing: “We absolutely should be concerned about climate risks, and reduce them. But black-and-white thinking and over-simplification don’t help with risk management, they hinder.”

The #WeAreStillIn campaign of US states and companies hoping to stick with the Paris Agreement on climate change “leaves the rest of the world slightly heartened, but also deeply confused”, writes Timmons Roberts for Climate Home. “What is this country – the world’s largest historical emitter – going to do?”, Roberts asks, adding: “The fact is, the US has always been an unreliable world citizen when it comes to climate change diplomacy…even if the US does not in the end withdraw from Paris and even if it comes in enthusiastically under its next leader, our credibility is deeply damaged. Four years of hard work to build trust in our nation’s ability to be a leader on climate are gone: who could trust an unreliable leader?”

The Guardian carries a series of images of the UK from the 2016 book of photojournalist Ashley Cooper, documenting the effects of climate change over 13 years in more than 30 countries. The images include harbour walls being battered by waves, flooded fields and destroyed bridges.

Storm Doris hit the UK on 23 February this year, causing disruption to public transport services. A new study uses electronic ticketing data to gain insights into the impact of the storm on the use of bus and rail services in Reading. The analysis supports previous research findings that there are fewer public transport trips during adverse weather, but an increase in bus trips on services parallel to the more severely-disrupted train services suggests that some travellers used the bus as an alternative, more resilient mode.