A Senate committee temporarily suspended rules on Thursday to approve President Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, after the panel’s Democrat members boycotted the vote on his nomination for a second day. Amid concerns that Pruitt, who has sued the EPA 16 times, doubts the science on climate change and has too many conflicts of interest with the companies he would be charged with regulating, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, John Barrasso, justified the move by saying Pruitt reflects the agenda of the president who won the election. Democrats’ objections to Pruitt also centre on concerns that he did not adequately answer the written questions they sent him following his confirmation hearing, reports The Washington Post. Inside Climate News reports that the US House Science Committee, led by Texas representative Lamar Smith, has scheduled a hearing for next week after a report by Myron Ebell’s EPA transition team described what it calls “problems with EPA science”. The familiar-sounding name of the enquiry – “”Making the EPA Great Again” – will reportedly examine how the agency evaluates and incorporates science into its regulatory decision-making process. Overnight, US senators voted 54-45 to kill an Obama-era rule aimed at protecting streams from the effects of coal mining, reports The Hill, a move Bloomberg is calling Republicans’ “biggest step yet to reverse Barack Obama’s regulatory legacy”.

Danish energy giant DONG has announced it will phase out coal for power and heat generation by 2023, opting instead to run its power plants on sustainable wood pellets sourced from the Baltic states. The company’s annual report said it had taken important steps in its “green transformation”, reporting good financial results in 2016 driven by a doubling of earnings from wind power. Alongside construction on the Hornsea project off the Yorkshire coast due to start by the end of the year, which will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm, 2016 also saw DONG complete the biomass conversion of two Danish power stations in 2016 and initiate the construction of a plant in the UK that converts unsorted household waste into green energy. A separate report from the Economist Intelligence Unit yesterday showed how coal generation in Europe has fallen consistently since 2013, taking its share of the power mix below 25%, reports BusinessGreen. It’s not all rosy for Dong, says Reuters, warning that the energy giant will face tough competition for projects in Europe and the United States from new players that are pushing down margins. The Financial Times also covers the story.

Sweden has set a goal of phasing out greenhouse gas emissions to become carbon neutral by 2045, putting it among the most ambitious plans to tackle climate change by any developed nation. The new climate law is set to come into effect on 1 Jan 2018 and will see emissions within Sweden’s borders cut by 85% on 1990 levels, with remaining emissions offset with investment in green projects overseas. Sweden’s prime minister warned on Thursday that all countries need to “step up and fulfill the Paris Agreement”, reports AP while Reuters points out Sweden is “ignoring uncertainty about climate change policies under U.S. President Donald Trump”.

Donald Trump will not derail the “unstoppable” growth in renewable energy, according to the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell. In response to questions about the likely impact of the new US president on energy policy, Ben van Beurden said the transition to cleaner forms of energy would continue irrespective of the new president’s agenda, asserting that “climate change is real [and] action is needed”. While the Anglo-Dutch oil group has won a contract to build a large wind farm off the Dutch coast and been shortlisted for a similar US project in waters off North Carolina, Shell’s investment in renewables is less than $1bn a year — a fraction of its annual capital expenditure budget of $25bn to $30bn, the FT notes.

A new study of the Great Barrier Reef has shown how rising carbon emissions could accelerate the destruction of coral reefs worldwide by help coral-killing seaweeds grow more poisonous and take over, reports The Guardian. Rising CO2 emissions trigger more potency in chemicals from common “weed-like” algae that poison corals in just a few weeks as they compete for space, say reef and chemical ecology experts from the University of Queensland and the US. One of the researchers, Guillermo Diaz-Pulido, a Griffith University associate professor, said: “the scale of the problem is so big, removing a bunch of seaweed from the reef isn’t going to do much because it just regrows and regenerates..the way to address this really is to reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere”.

Justin Gillis takes an in-depth look at how the answer from Republicans when asked about the changing climate has evolved over time, from what he calls “hard core climate denial” to a more nuanced and well-crafted argument that is axiomatically true while at the same time sowing “enough doubt to justify inaction on emissions.” All of President Trump’s cabinet picks have “labored to avoid overt denial” but the public should not be fooled, he argues: “The deep consensus among climate scientists, arrived at through decades of research, is that human activity is the cause of most of the planetary warming of recent decades, and probably all of it.” Glimmers of hope in the congressional hearings came from the new secretary of state Rex W. Tillerson, who implied that he might try to keep the US in the Paris Agreement, and from Rick Perry, Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Energy, who Gillis suggests was “surprisingly positive about the role the federal government might play in developing advanced clean-energy technology.”

While deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has declined by more than 80% in the past decade, forest clearance for farming in the neighbouring Cerrado region is increasing, a new study says. Using satellite data on cropland, forest cover and vegetation, the researchers estimated annual forest carbon emissions from cropland expansion in the Cerrado biome. They found that emissions increased over the past decade in Matopiba, a new frontier of agricultural production in the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia.

Amidst increasing intensity and frequency of climate impacts on coastal areas, some habitats show signs of resilience or quick recovery, a new study suggests. Researchers surveyed 97 experts on six types of coastal marine ecosystems to identify “bright spots” of resilience in the face of climate change. 80% of experts had seen evidence of ecosystem resilience to impacts such as extreme storms, temperature changes and ocean acidification, the survey found. The next step is to uncover why some habitats cope better than others, the researchers say, to identify how to help manage impacts in future.