Royal Dutch Shell has approved its first significant development in the North Sea for more than six years. Shell said it would redevelop the Penguins field north-east of the Shetland Islands, together with its partner ExxonMobil, in a project expected to cost more than $1bn. The investment includes construction of a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, says Reuters. The plan is to drill eight new wells that should take the output to 45,000 barrels a day at peak, reports the Times and enable them to recover 80m more barrels from the field. Shell said that Penguins now had a “competitive go-forward break-even price” of less than $40 per barrel, compared with Brent crude prices of almost $70 a barrel today. EnergyLiveNews also has the story. Elsewhere, the Financial Times reports that the new coalition government in Norway will ban oil exploration in the Lofoten Islands and other Arctic areas for four more years. And Reuters also reports that Shell has agreed to acquire a 44% stake in the US solar company Silicon Ranch.

The government should not abandon a £1.3bn tidal power project in Swansea Bay, according to the former minister whose official report recommended the scheme. Charles Hendry, a Conservative who served as energy minister in the coalition government, acknowledged that Swansea Bay would be significantly more expensive than the latest offshore wind projects but said tidal power could make similar cost improvements with government backing. “Some people’s reaction has been to say, ‘if you can get offshore wind at £57.50, why do you need anything else?’,” said Mr Hendry. “I think that is 100% the wrong conclusion. If we can do that in offshore wind, we should be asking what are the other low-carbon power sources where the UK can realistically aspire to lead.”

A new study ranks shale gas ranks among the least sustainable sources of electricity. The research, published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, examines the environmental, economic and social sustainability of a variety of energy sources, including fossils fuels, renewables and nuclear power. The team found that when ascribing equal importance to the environmental, economic and social impacts of shale gas extraction, it ranked seventh out of nine electricity options. This places it above coal, but far below renewable options, such as wind and solar, which were ranked at the top.

BP will accept a $1.7bn charge for claims over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as the lengthy process of settling claims from the 2010 disaster winds down. Payments related to the accident are now anticipated to be around $3bn in 2018 rather than the company’s previous estimate of just over $2bn. By December last year, BP’s total bill for fines and settlements over Deepwater Horizon had reached around $62bn. “With the claims facility’s work very nearly done, we now have better visibility into the remaining liability,” said Brian Gilvary, BP’s chief financial officer, reports Reuters. In related news, Reuters reports that the stricken Iranian tanker that sank in the East China Sea on Sunday has produced a large oil slick that is 13km long and 11km wide. And the Financial Timesreports new analysis of the recent sweeping overhaul of the US tax system, which shows that US oil and gas producers are among companies hit hardest by new restrictions on tax relief for interest payments. The new law will put pressure on heavily indebted companies to reduce their borrowings, and could push over-burdened companies into steeper decline if their earnings fall, the FT says.

New York’s decision to divest city pension funds from fossil fuel companies puts London “to shame”, say a group of climate campaigners, who accuse London mayor Sadiq Khan of not meeting a similar promise he made in his election manifesto. City Hall has quietly sold off about half of its fossil fuel assets, but divestment campaigners complain that London’s policies are full of loopholes that could be copied by other institutions. “While progress is being made in the UK, the New York announcement puts some of the commitments, especially London’s to shame and shows what’s possible with good leadership,” said Danielle Paffard of 350.org. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London responded that “The mayor is delivering one of the strongest and most ambitious divestment plans of any world city, as he promised in his manifesto…He will ensure the LFPA honours his commitment to divest from fossil fuel industries and implements all necessary divestment by 2020″.

The leaked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on 1.5C “appear[s] to be admitting defeat when it comes to international climate protection,” writes reporter Jens Thurau for Deutsche Welle. Their message, he says, is that “you can forget about keeping global warming below 1.5C”. “But this doesn’t have to be the end of climate protection politics,” Thurau argues. “Around the world, solar and wind power plants are being built and investments in sustainable economies are being made”. “Maybe this new honesty on the part of the IPCC could present an opportunity,” he concludes. “Developing nations in particular don’t have many alternatives to keeping international climate talks under UN leadership alive. And saying goodbye to unrealistic goals that only caused frustration could maybe even free some energy.”

“Scotland is well known for its wealth of historic sites, and cultural heritage is undoubtedly one of the things that rightly makes us proud. But how far will we be prepared to go to save our heritage for future generations?” asks an editorial in Herald Scotland. Commenting on a report that 70% of the Scotland’s historic sites are at a “high risk” of damage because of climate change, the editorial says that the “scale of the problem makes for grim reading” with “some of the biggest names in Scottish tourism are at risk”. The report “is a prescient reminder that a far bigger issue is already causing real and lasting damage”, the article argues. “Indeed, it provides a timely reminder to all of us that climate change is the biggest political, economic and social problem of our time.” There has also been continued news coverage of the story, with articles from the BBC News and the Times.

A New York Times editorial comments on the recent announcement from mayor Bill de Blasio that New York City will divest its $189 billion pension fund from fossil fuel investments, and sue five big oil companies for the costs of protecting the city from sea level rise and extreme weather events. “De Blasio’s decision to confront some of the world’s biggest polluters is possibly transformative and certainly timely,” the article argues. The lawsuit process “will be useful for many reasons, not least in spotlighting evidence that companies like Exxon had long known from their own scientists about the damage their products would cause the environment,” it says. The suit has similarities with an investigation of Exxon by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman to try to determine whether Exxon had defrauded shareholders by failing to disclose the risks of fossil fuels. “The two cases are quite different,” the article notes, “but both are about reparations, and both could speed the day of corporate reckoning.”

In an article for New Zealand website Stuff, Dr James Renwick, professor of physical geography at Victoria University, responds to a recent op-ed on the same website by soil scientist Dr Doug Edmeades entitled “Why I’m a global warming sceptic”. “Edmeades is clearly looking to sow seeds of doubt,” writes Renwick, “to undermine established science, and to argue that there’s nothing to worry about”. “About the only way to argue against the findings of decades of research by thousands of scientists is to ignore the evidence and to claim that our understanding of climate change is ‘just a hypothesis'”, Renwick says. Edmeades’s ideas “are easily shown to be false with a bit of googling,” he points out. “None of us want the sorts of disruptions that the changing climate is bringing,” Renwick concludes, “but, if we are to get on top of this biggest of problems, we must get our heads around the fact that after thousands of years of stability, things are changing, sea levels are rising, and we must respond.

Polar anticyclones could enhance Arctic summertime sea-ice melt, a new study finds. Anticyclones are weather systems with high pressure in the centre, around which air slowly circulates. Anticyclones are associated with calm, fine weather. “We reveal that these episodic upper-level induced Arctic anticyclones are relevant for generating seasonal circulation anomalies,” the researchers say. “Sea-ice reduction is systematically enhanced during the transient episodes with Arctic anticyclones and the seasonal reduction of sea-ice volume correlates with the area-averaged frequency of Arctic anticyclones poleward of 70° N.”

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a phase of natural rapid global warming around 55 millions years ago, may have caused huge shifts in the types of species found on Earth, new research shows. A new study of fossilised organisms suggests that, during the PETM, a large rise in temperature caused the rapid acidification of the world’s oceans, which in turn led to a poleward shift in the range of some marine organisms.