The UK could be facing nationwide festive blackouts next winter unless radical changes are made to the UK’s electricity network, MPs have warned. [Note: It has subsequently been shown by Carbon Brief that this report was not signed off by a “group of MPs”, as widely reported, but only by Grant Shapps.) A report called “Electric Shock: Will The Christmas Lights Go Out Next Winter?” has been published by the British Infrastructure Group (BIG) of MPs, chaired by former Tory minister Grant Shapps. It claims that government targets for closing coal power stations and expanding renewable sources to hit climate change goals have rapidly reduced the UK’s generating output. Shapps says the report focuses on the “dangerously small electricity capacity margins” that have been “left in the wake of a decade of target-led, interventionist energy policy”. He adds: “While nobody questions the noble intentions behind these interventions, it is clear that a perfect coincidence of numerous policies designed to reduce Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions has had the unintended effect of hollowing out the reliability of the electricity generating sector.” The Times says the report claims that British households “face an extra £30 per year on their energy bills by 2020 to pay for emergency power to keep the lights on”. Meanwhile, in the Sunday Telegraph, Emily Gosden writes that “ScottishPower is demanding the Government overhaul one of its key energy policies after the company’s proposed new gas power station missed out on subsidies for keeping the lights on in favour of old coal plants”. She adds: “Neil Clitheroe, a senior executive at the energy giant, said making consumers pay almost £130m to keep polluting coal plants running through winter 2020-21 instead of investing in cleaner new gas plants was a “waste of money”, given the coal plants were scheduled to close by 2025 anyway.” And the Financial Times reports the views of Peter Terium, chief executive of Innogy, one of Europe’s biggest utilities. He says that Britain will not receive the investment it needs to maintain energy security if power companies are not allowed to make more profit. Earlier this year, Carbon Brief summarised a report by the Conservative thinktank Bright Blue which said that the UK can phase out coal while keeping the lights on.

Gina McCarthy, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s climate change policies, has warned the incoming Trump administration that US law and the scientific evidence of global warming will constrain any attempt to overturn her work, reports the FT. “It’s going to be a very high burden of proof for them,” says the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. She continues: “I frankly am disappointed that we’re still talking about the science of climate, because that really has been long settled…If they choose [to] develop a different record then they have a right to do that, but it’s going to be a very high burden of proof for them, because I have no question that what we have done will be solid from a science perspective,” she said. They have to figure out why the climate science isn’t overwhelming and go back all the way to the Supreme Court to explain why decisions we’ve already made are no longer correct, and I wouldn’t want to have that burden myself.” Speaking about the US’s place in the world if it pulled out of its UN climate commitments, she says: “We’re going to be in the back. And we’re going to be in a very lonely place. I think it’s only us and Nicaragua that would be there. It’s sort of not the company you want to keep.”

The Chinese government triggered a surprise boom in coal prices this year, delivering a surprise windfall to hard-up miners – now experts are warning that the reversal of the policy will lead to a drop in prices that is just as sharp, writes the Times’s trade correspondent. He reports the views of Rosealea Yao, a Beijing-based analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, who recently wrote: “There is little sign that officials have learned any lessons from the policy-induced price spike, which means there is a real risk that their actions will cause prices to overshoot on the downside in coming months.”

The mayors of five of the world’s major cities have written a desperate plea to their counterparts in the US, urging them to ignore Donald Trump’s climate science denial and press ahead with steps to tackle global warming, reports the Independent. The cities – Oslo, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Sydney and Vancouver – are members of the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA), which wants to cut emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. Its membership already includes a number of US cities, such as New York, Washington DC and San Francisco, as well as the likes of London, Berlin and Yokohama in Japan. In the letter, they wrote: “You, the mayors of America’s leading cities, must continue to be at the forefront of climate action in the US going forward. This is increasingly important as your new national leadership abdicates responsibility for protecting Americans and the world from fossil fuel impacts to our people’s health, our economies, and our environment.” The New York Times also carries a related story about how some mayors in the US plan to fight back against Trump’s anti-climate agenda.

India needs no extra coal power stations until at least 2027, according to the government’s latest draft National Electricity Plan released late last week for public consultation. The plan makes no room for further generation capacity beyond the 50GW coal fleet that is under construction, reports Climate Home. “The plan covers two five-year periods beginning in 2017 and 2022. The first period allows for the completion of those plants already being built. But after that, the CEA is planning for zero new thermal power generation before 2027…At the same time, the report aims to add 100GW of solar and wind. These renewable energy additions would more than double India’s clean energy capacity.”

In a letter to the Times signed by dozens of politicians around the world – including Ed Miliband, Lord Prescott; Barry Gardiner, US Senator Ed Markey, Caroline Lucas – they state that “we the undersigned legislators recognise that many assets related to a carbon-intensive economy may be mispriced and present a financial risk as a ‘stranded asset’.” They continue: “Investors require a comprehensive and transparent disclosure of these risks by companies and markets. This means consistent, comparable and reliable measurement and assessment. We welcome the leadership being shown by the task force on climate-related financial disclosures. It is critical that adequate risk reporting is standardised across the world’s stock exchanges. To that end, we have written to the world’s stock exchanges urging them to adopt climate-related reporting guidance and disclosure for all listed companies. They should commit to implement best international practice for disclosing sustainability and climate-related risks, and ensure that progress in reporting is transparently monitored and easily accessible to all stakeholders.”

In a long feature for the New York Times, Goode travels to Kaktovik in Alaska to investigate the fate of polar bears – the “imperfect symbol” of climate change: “Climate-change denialists have seized on the uncertainties in the science to argue that polar bears are doing fine and that sea ice loss does not pose a threat to their survival. But wildlife biologists say there is little question that the trend, for both sea ice and polar bears, is downward. The decline of a species, they note, is never a steady march to extinction.”

The Times’s deputy business editor examines what impact the appointment of Rex Tillerson as “America’s diplomat-in-chief” might have on the Paris climate deal: “Where Mr Tillerson’s views are controversial are on the impact of rising carbon emissions and the speed with which they could affect the climate. He has suggested, for example, that sea levels will be “manageable”, a view that many scientists would reject. He also has argued that the solution may lie in developing new technology to strip carbon from the atmosphere, rather than the consensus that it would be better to avoid releasing it in the first place…With Mr Tillerson directing his old colleagues from Washington, the hunt for a technological fix, whether by building machines to suck carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or by firing aerosol particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, may be something we hear more about. Many people would feel that this is the wrong approach. In any case, Mr Tillerson may struggle to simply unpick the Paris Accord, even if he wants to.” Meanwhile, in ClimateProgress, Joe Romm says that the “Exxon CEO is Trump’s worst possible nominee for climate and America”.

Mann, who is a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, sets out the many personal threats and political attacks he has been forced to endure over the years: “[Climate scientists] fear an era of McCarthyist attacks on our work and our integrity. It’s easy to envision, because we’ve seen it all before. We know we could be hauled into Congress to face hostile questioning from climate change deniers. We know we could be publicly vilified by politicians. We know we could be at the receiving end of federal subpoenas demanding our personal emails. We know we could see our research grants audited or revoked. I faced all of those things a decade ago, the last time Republicans had full control of our government.”

The recent pace of slower warming Earth’s surface was accompanied by a Eurasian winter cooling trend though the causes for it are unclear, according to a new study. The authors show that the observed cooling was associated with weaker stratospheric polar vortices. Similar hiatus events may recur even as greenhouse gas concentrations rise, the paper explains.

A new reprocessed data set extending back to 1981 confirms that Antarctic sea ice has been slowly increasing, contrary to expectations of a warming planet. The new data, which addresses inconsistencies in the satellite time series, show a strong negative correlation between sea ice extent and surface temperature, particularly with a one-month lag in the latter. The pattern is a consequence of the non-uniform way the planet warms in response to greenhouse gases and better reproducing observed surface temperatures in models will lead to better forecasts, say the authors.