Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt has hinted that the Agency will restrict researchers who get EPA grants from serving on their advisory boards. Speaking at the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, Pruitt said that “if we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency…that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way.” Pruitt said a directive next week will “fix that”, reports The Hill, though he did not say how restrictive the policy would be. Meanwhile, Pruitt also met with Midwestern senators to reassure them about his support for the federal biofuels mandate, says another article in The Hill. The gathering comes as lawmakers of both parties raise concerns about proposed changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which legislates how much biodiesel must be blended into diesel fuel. Iowa’s Republican senator, Chuck Grassley, had suggested he could hold up several EPA nominees if Pruitt and the agency don’t provide more support for ethanol, a major industry in his state and elsewhere. And finally in the US, Reuters reports that Democrat senators have vowed to fight a measure expected to be slipped into budget legislation that would open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil and gas drilling. Massachusetts Democrat senator, Edward Markey, called the measure “heartless,” “a budgetary scam” and “nothing more than a Big Oil polar payout”, reports The Hill.

Shell is opening its first wave of electric vehicle charging points at its petrol stations in the UK. Drivers will be able to recharge 80% of their battery in half an hour at forecourts in London, Surrey and Derby from this week, with a total of 10 service stations to be equipped with rapid chargers by the end of the year. The sites had been chosen due to their proximity to main driving routes, notes BusinessGreen. The launch follows Shell’s acquisition last week of NewMotion, one of Europe’s largest EV charging companies with 30,000 private home charging points and 50,000 public sites, says the Financial Times. Bloomberg also has the story.

Natural solutions such as tree planting, protecting peatlands and better land management could play a major role in limiting global warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, a new study says. “Natural climate solutions” could account for 37% of all actions needed by 2030, the researchers say, which would be equivalent to halting all burning of oil worldwide. To achieve these greenhouse gas reductions, nations would need to engage in reforestation efforts, peatland and coastal wetland restoration, and the conversion of former agricultural land to forests, as well as protect existing forests and wetlands from future development, reports Yale Environment 360. These would add up to preventing as much as 11.3bn tonnes of CO2 from reaching the atmosphere every year. Energy Live News also covers the research.

British Gas owner Centrica has not ruled out a legal challenge to the Government’s proposed price cap on energy bills. Grilled by MPs on the business and energy committee, Centrica’s UK boss of home supply, Sarwjit Sambhi, declined five opportunities to say whether the company would call for a judicial review of the cap. He said there was “not sufficient detail” in the bill thus far to declare Centrica’s position, but that “a key outcome if the energy bill is put to legislation is that the cap should reflect the cost of actually supplying energy to customers”. In the same session, Stephen Fitzpatrick, the chief executive of Ovo Energy, disagreed, says the Times. A cap was “by far and away the most simple way to protect customers,” he told MPs. There was currently “no safety net for customers that do not or cannot shop around for a better deal”, he said.

Fiji called on Tuesday for “absolute dedication” to limiting global warming to no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels as it prepares to preside over UN talks next month. Fiji is hosting a preparatory meeting of delegates before the November talks in Bonn, Germany, where environment ministers from around the world will work on a set of international guidelines for the Paris Agreement. “We can no longer ignore this [climate] crisis,” Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said in an address to delegates. “An absolute dedication to meet the 1.5C target is what we need and what we must take to Bonn.” “It’s hard to find any part of the world that is unaffected” by a changing climate, he said, listing Atlantic storms such as Ophelia, wildfires in California, Portugal and Spain, and floods in Nigeria, India and Bangladesh. Bainimarama also announced that Fiji will issue $50m of “green” bonds in coming weeks to raise money to combat the effects of climate change and reduce Fiji’s CO2 emissions, says Reuters. Poland and France have also issued sovereign green bonds, but Fiji will be the first developing country to do so.

As the UK and Ireland picks up the pieces after ex-hurricane Ophelia, several scientists tell the Evening Standard that more hurricane-force storms could hit Britain because of climate change. “There is evidence that hurricane-force storms hitting the UK, like Ophelia, will be enhanced in the future due to human-induced climate change,” said Dr Dann Mitchell of the University of Bristol. “Climate change could make hurricanes more frequent further north,” said Martin Bowles from the Met Office, but added there is much more variation which can affect the hurricane’s path and development – not just warmer air.

Steps being taken by EPA administrator Scott Pruitt to repeal former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan are “deeply shady”, says Vox writer David Roberts. “It relies on a succession of legal arguments, procedural gambits, and factual claims that, in toto, look retrofitted to support a predetermined policy conclusion: minimising or avoiding regulations on fossil fuel power plants, at all costs,” Roberts argues. Speaking to lawyers and advocates over the last week, Roberts delves into “the five shadiest aspects of Pruitt’s effort”, which include limiting the benefits of climate action to just the US and removing the financial savings of energy efficiency programmes.

Low-income countries “are innocent victims of changes for which they bear no responsibility,” writes Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator. Analysis by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows that the largest economic shocks caused by climate change are on tropical countries, Wolf says, and “nearly all low-income countries are tropical”. Wolf picks out six implications of the IMF analysis: “First and most important, low-income countries need to develop quickly to be better able to cope with weather shocks. Second, their development needs to be consistent with mitigating the rise in global temperatures. Third, we need rapid improvements in the relevant technologies and their swift dissemination. Fourth, we also need to help poor countries adapt to the changes in climate already sure to happen. Fifth, we need to develop insurance against weather-related shocks to poor countries. Finally, a moral case also exists for compensating losers from the costs of the unmitigated climate changes being imposed by richer countries.”

“A key argument used by climate sceptics to downplay the consequences of anthropogenic climate change is resurfacing: the idea that CO2 emissions are a net positive for the planet’s vegetation,” write E&E News reporters Chelsea Harvey and Scott Waldman. While “it’s true that an increase in available CO2 can be a boon for plants, which need it to make the food they turn into energy,” the idea that it is “pure advantage for plants everywhere ignores the negative side effects that human-induced climate change may have on vegetation”, they write. They speak to Dr William Anderegg, an expert on forests and climate change at the University of Utah, who says that it’s still a major scientific research area to figure out when and where the CO2 effects versus the climate change effects will dominate. “The rosy optimistic scenarios where CO2 ‘wins’ do exist,” notes Anderegg, “but there are also plenty of scenarios where drought and temperature and disturbances combined basically push global plants into accelerating climate change.”

Trees may be able to adapt to some of the effects of climate change by harnessing the power of soil microbes, new research finds. Researchers studying pinyon pine trees in the US found that some trees had evolved the ability to interact more with microbes beneath the ground. These trees were better able to tolerate drought, which could help them to survive in a changing climate. “Because these microbial communities are, at least partially, under plant genetic control, EMF [microbe] community composition is an extended phenotype [characteristic] of the host tree and potentially a mode of adaptation to the increased drought stress pinyon pines face in a changing climate,” the researchers say.