South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in has vowed to lead country towards a ‘nuclear-free era’ following fears of a Fukushima-style meltdown. He pledged to to scrap all existing plans for new nuclear power plants and cancel lifetime extensions for aged reactors. It marks the president’s second major announcement to change the country’s energy mix, the Financial Times notes, after Moon ordered a temporary shutdown of eight of South Korea’s older coal plants, amid air pollution concerns. “So far, the country’s energy policy focused on low prices and efficiency. But this should change now with our top priority on public safety and the environment”, Moon said on Monday. The Guardian, the Times, EnergyDesk and Carbon Pulse also have the story.

The risk of deadly heatwaves have climbed steadily since 1980, new research has found, and the number of people in danger will grow to 48% by 2100 even if emissions are drastically reduced. Scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa reviewed previous scientific papers and found more than 1,900 places around the planet where people had died as a result of hot and humid weather since 1980. They found that around 30% of the world’s population now living in climatic conditions that deliver deadly temperatures at least 20 days a year. The research in Nature Climate Change suggests that New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Orlando and Houston will all suffer badly from heatwaves in the future. “For heatwaves, our options are now between bad or terrible,” said Camilo Mora, the study’s lead author. Carbon Brief, the Independent, Inside Climate News, the Washington Post the Birmingham Mail and the Mail Online also have the story.

Rick Perry, US secretary of energy, has as said he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to climate change, putting him at odds with the scientific consensus, and contradicting research done by his own agency. Speaking on CNBC, Perry said that “the most likely the primary control knob [for climate change] is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.” He did not elaborate on his statement. Scott Pruitt, the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has voiced similar opinions in the past to CNBC, arguing that “there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The Mail Online, InsideClimate News, the Washington Post, Think Progress and the Hill also have the story.

After eight years of research, a collaboration between Synthetic Genomics and ExxonMobil has produced a “breakthrough” in their attempt to produce biofuels from algae. They genetically engineered their algal strain to double its oil content from 20 to 40%, according to the findings published in Nature Biotechnology. “This key milestone in our advanced biofuels programme confirms our belief that algae can be incredibly productive as a renewable energy source without adverse impacts on climate, land and water”, Vijay Swarup, vice-president for research and development at ExxonMobil, told the Financial Times. Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Reuters also cover the story.

Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and a number of other corporate giants announced yesterday that they are supporting a plan to tax carbon emissions put forth by a group of Republican statesmen. The idea is that, by making energy derived from fossil fuels more expensive, the free market will move more quickly and effectively toward low-carbon solutions, the Financial Times reports. The plan calls for scrapping Obama-era regulations intended to fight climate change, arguing that a market-driven approach will have the same effect in reducing emissions, and also argues that companies that emit greenhouse gases should be protected from lawsuits over their contribution to climate change. Bloomberg also carries the story.

A mass bleaching event that affected coral reefs worldwide has finally ended, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced yesterday, in the agency’s latest ocean forecast. About three-quarters of the world’s delicate coral reefs were damaged or killed by hot water, making it worse than than previous global bleaching events in 1998 and 2010. The hardest-hit stretches of the Great Barrier Reef saw 60-80% coral mortality. Now as ocean temperatures finally drop, struggling reefs will get a chance to recover. “Whether corals survive the 21st century will depend on how quickly we can get carbon pollution under control” Grist notes.

Britain’s last deep coalmine closed two years ago, but now a £200m project in Cumbria wants to revive the industry, the Financial Times writes. West Cumbria Mining plans to extract high value metallurgical — or coking — coal used for steelmaking, using existing tunnels at a disused drift mine to access undersea resources off the coast of St Bees Head. “Metallurgical coal was the best performing commodity of 2016,” said Mark Kirkbride, their chief executive. “There is no source of it in Europe.” The Woodhouse colliery would be the first to open in the UK since Asfordby in Leicestershire in 1987.

Dr Jonathan Marshall, energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, has written an in-depth feature explaining why so many have warned that Trump “will be unable to resurrect the coal industry”. “It’s unclear that Mr Trump’s administration has so far created a single new coal job”, he says.

Chris Mooney explores an “an increasingly bitter and personal feud” that scientists are engaged in over how much power the US can get from renewables. A recent paper that claimed the country could move beyond fossil fuels entirely by 2055, but this idea is “contentious”, and now a new paper argues that they “used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” “The debate is crucial”, Mooney writes, “while it’s great to talk about wind and solar in theory, the reality is that the electrons that they generate have to be sent through wires and transmission stations to satisfy needs at particular places and at particular times…which remains a mostly unsolved problem right now”. Vice also covers what it describes as “one of the most vitriolic fights in science publishing”, and MIT technology review also covers the story.

A feature in the Guardian suggests reasons to be hopeful, despite the blow dealt by the US withdrawing from the Paris climate deal. “Worries that the US exit from the Paris Agreement will trigger others to do the same” are “unlikely” they say, while the EU, China and India “can fill the vacuum in leadership”. Moreover they note that the US private sector and finance still support renewables.

Rising temperatures and declining rainfall could see 39-59% of Ethiopia’s current growing area for coffee become unsuitable by the end of the century, a new study says. Coffee farming provides livelihoods for around 15 million farmers in Ethiopia and generates a quarter of the country’s export earnings. However, relocation of coffee, in combination with forest conservation or re-establishment, could see at least a fourfold increase in coffee-growing areas, the study also finds.

Recent projections of changes in energy intensity probably overstate future reductions even if they accurately project economic growth, a new paper suggests. The study assesses the accuracy of the “business as usual” energy intensity projections from the annual World Energy Outlook produced by the International Energy Agency. The projections may overestimate a decline in energy intensity because “energy efficiency policies are not implemented as effectively as expected or because the economy-wide rebound effect is larger than modelling assumes,” the paper concludes.

Abrupt changes in northern hemisphere climate during the Earth’s last ice age might have been caused by gradual fluctuations in atmospheric CO2, a new study suggests. The natural changes, known as “Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles”, involved spikes of rapid warming and gradual cooling in the northern hemisphere high-latitudes. Earlier research had suggested the cycles were caused by sudden floods of freshwater across the North Atlantic, brought about by “Heinrich events” – large influxes of icebergs from the Laurentide Ice Sheet.