The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will have endless political and policy ramifications, particularly on Obama’s Clean Power Plan to tackle climate change, reports Vox. Last Thursday the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to delay enforcement of the plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the electricity sector, leading to concerns that the courts five conservative justices – including Scalia – would eventually strike it down, with knock-on implications for the international climate deal made in Paris. But with 79-year-old Scalia’s death the court is now split 4-4, and the future of the plan lies with the US Court of Appeals for the DC circuit. Now, the Obama administration looks likely to prevail, and it falls to Obama to nominate a replacement. However, the ultimate fate of the plan still depends on the 2016 election, Vox notes. Climate central, Climate Home and Grist also discuss the story.

The Sunday Telegraph used its frontpage splash to report the views of Owen Paterson, the climate sceptic Conservative MP and former environment secretary. The paper said: “Ministers have been accused of planning a U-turn that would see consumers fund new onshore wind farms through green levies. The Government confirmed it was ‘looking carefully’ at a wind industry proposal to continue public financial support for new turbines, despite a manifesto pledge to halt expansion. Critics described the proposal as a con, and said the Conservatives’ policy had been ‘crystal clear’ that the subsidies would stop.” The paper also reported the views of three other anti-wind voices, including Peter Lilley MP and the new energy editor of the climate sceptic lobby group, Global Warming Policy Foundation. The “con” centres around what have been described as “subsidy-free” contracts, an idea championed by right-leaning thinktank Policy Exchange. The paper also ran a critical Telegraph editorial, which seemed to confuse onshore with offshore wind.

An ambitious project to lay a multibillion-pound interconnector between the UK and Norway is being considered by the government, in a bid to access the country’s vast supply of green energy. The proposal has the potential to generate more than three times the energy of Hinkley Point, a £24bn nuclear power station being planned in Somerset. The scheme would take years to build and cost billions, but access to Norway’s hydropower could counteract any drop in supply when the wind isn’t blowing. The UK is already connected to a number of other countries’ energy supplies via interconnectors – including Belgium, France and Ireland.

The board of the largely state-owned French energy company is expected to postpone a decision once again on whether to commit to the £18.6bn Hinkley Point C project, which is supposed to provide 7% of Britain’s electricity by 2025. An internal report has warned that for technical reasons it will be impossible to complete within the nine-year timetable, and would be financially disastrous for the struggling company, despite a commitment by the UK to pay double the market rate for the station’s electricity. Two people close to the process told the Financial Times that EDF had not secured the necessary funding, and so will not make the final investment decision at a board meeting on Monday. Elsewhere, the chief of Horizon Nuclear Power warned that Hinkley would fail without private investors: “We have to look to widen the pool of investors as far as we can. We can’t just rely on state-owned enterprises to provide that investment”, he told the Telegraph.

In the past the UK has relied on the North Sea for a predictable gas supply, but the UK could face gas supply shocks and spiking prices as the oil rout accelerates the decline of North Sea reserves, former energy minister Charles Hendry has warned. He said the Department of Energy and Climate Change was “reluctant” to push for gas storage, the UK could become increasingly exposed to supply interruptions from imported gas.

Scientists led by a team at Nasa’s Jet propulsion Laboratory used satellite measurements to show the rate of sea level rise has slowed by 22%, as the planet’s continents have soaked up and stored 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers. However, the effect may be temporary. The latest data came from a pair of satellites known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, that has measured changes in gravity and therefore underlying changes in water storage from 2002-2014.

The European Systemic Risk Board has called for governments to consider imposing asset disclosures on industry and stress tests on banks as a guard against the economic crisis that could be caused by an emergency switchover to clean energy, should the move to a low carbon economy happen too late and abruptly. A scramble to take fossil fuels offline could reduce energy supplies, while increasing their cost and exposing investors to the worst effects of ‘stranded assets’, it warns in a report.

Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary Lisa Nandy argues that the roll out of clean tech will continue in the UK, but that the government could make it a whole lot easier. Conservative policy limiting deployment of the cheapest clean technologies and the lack of a clear long-term strategy means that Britain could be “left dependent upon ageing technologies that mean we bust the climate change commitments made at the historic Paris Summit and miss the economic opportunities available from devolution and the technological breakthroughs that are happening all the time”, Nandy writes.

As oil prices bottom out and fossil fuels no longer offer strong returns, investment dollars are starting to move to renewable energy, argues writer Bruce Watson.

The FT’s Nick Butler mulls over two papers published recently that provide a “sobering reality check” after the diplomatic triumph of the Paris climate change conference: ExxonMobil’s long-term energy outlook, and the Grantham Institute’s assessment of the pledges made in Paris by the G20 nations. It takes “heroic assumptions” to get the numbers necessary to keep warming below 2C, Butler concludes, and the danger after the “success” of Paris is that it “creates a mood of complacency”.

A new review of climate services – the use of up to date climate information in political and economic decision making processes – looks specifically at the problems hampering its progress in recent decades. The authors say insufficient awareness of vulnerability to climate change, a lack of relevant products offered by the scientific community and delivering information in an inappropriate format are all reasons why climate services may not have been as effective as anticipated.