The new US administration has instructed Environmental Protection Agency officials to freeze its grants and contracts. The move could affect everything from state-led climate research, to local efforts to combat air pollution, water quality testing and environmental justice projects, the Washington Post reports. Each year the EPA awards $4bn in funding. Myron Ebell, who ran the EPA transition for the incoming administration, summarised: “They’re trying to freeze things to make sure nothing happens they don’t want to have happen, so any regulations going forward, contracts, grants, hires, they want to make sure to look at them first”. It’s unclear whether the freeze is temporary or indefinite, the Hill writes. In a separate piece the Hill notes that Trump’s team “is planning major budget cuts, as well as regulatory and scientific overhauls at the agency, according to a new report”, including “more than $800 million in planned budget cuts”. “All signs indicate that Trump will soon issue a flurry of executive orders as part of the process of weakening various air and water pollution rules and cutting agency budgets. It’s all part of his plan to dismantle President Obama’s climate policies and make life easier for America’s fossil fuel industry”, argues Brad Plumer in Vox. ProPublica also has the story.

UK government launched a new industrial strategy yesterday designed to boost Britain’s post-Brexit economy. It includes plans to slash green subsidies for projects such as wind and solar farms, with ministers saying that they wish to rely on “competitive markets” instead to deliver green energy, the Telegraph reports. The strategy argues that green levies should be reduced to help steel plants compete overseas, and that this help for industry would have the knock-on effect of bringing down household bills, the Daily Mail reports. However, despite reduced support, the document suggests that “Prime Minister Theresa May plans to try to turn the nation’s early adoption of clean energy into a global business after Brexit”, Bloomberg reports, with the paper listing clean energy manufacturing and services as a key area of focus. Indeed Carbon Pulse describes low-carbon growth as a “pillar” of the new strategy. Climate analysts have given “a cautious thumbs up” to the strategy, Climate Home reports, which they believe will support a clean energy transition, such as by its plan to boost support for smart grid technology and electric vehicles. Politico also has the story, while the Sun also focused on the green subsidy cuts.

Big corporate buyers are “driving a sea change in climate action” throughout the world’s industrial supply chain, according to a new report by the CDP report released today. Suppliers cut emissions by 434m tonnes of CO2 last year, delivering associated cost savings of $12.4bn, more than double the figure from 2015, BusinessGreen reports.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia 200 years ago cooled the climate, leading to the deaths of livestock and changing fish patterns in New England, leaving many dependent on mackerel, a new study has found. The researchers say that this knowledge could help climate change predictions today, giving us clues about what food security could be like in the modern era of climate change. “How we respond to these events is going to be critically important for how we come out of this in the long term,” said Karen Alexander. “We can learn from the past how people dealt with the unanticipated.”

The UK’s green energy industry “has hit another milestone” as offshore wind companies report that their costs have fallen much faster than expected, plunging to an average of £97 per megawatt hour during 2015-16, and should soon be level with coal or gas-fired power stations, the Financial Times reports. Offshore windfarms have had higher costs than forms of power generation on land because they are newer and have to withstand harsh weather conditions.

London has been put on “very high” alert as air pollution soars, with areas of London including Camden, the City of London and Westminster reaching 10 out of 10 on the air pollution index, according to data from King’s College London. Cold weather, traffic and the use of wood burning stoves have all contributed to the problem, the Guardian reports. Energy Live News and Bloomberg also have the story.

Climate change is not a controversial subject, so why shouldn’t the Prince of Wales help write a book on it, asks Tony Juniper, former Friends of the Earth Director and one of the co-authors of the new Ladybird book on climate change. The facts are established “whatever the Mail says”, he writes. Meanwhile Richard Littlejohn’s writes a comment piece in the Daily Mail, that describes Prince Charles’ latest project as a “puerile, alarmist Ladybird book on climate change”, and mocks the Prince’s suggestion that TV weather forecasts should include warnings about the effects of global warming.

Phasing out solid fuel cookstoves over the next 20 years could help slow global warming and prevent millions of premature deaths from air pollution, a new study says. The researchers modelled the impact of removing cookstoves in 101 countries where more than 5% of the population use them. They find that associated emissions reductions by 2050 would be largest in China, India, and Ethiopia. Globally, the health benefits of reduced emissions of particulate matter would amount to preventing around 22.5 million premature deaths between 2000 and 2100, the study says.

An intriguing new study suggests that the decorative traits that animals use to attract a mate (“ornamentation”) could be turned upside down by climate change. Researchers monitored the breeding habits of the collared flycatcher bird over the past 34 years. They find that highly-ornamented birds were less likely to find a mate in a warm spring, and were also less likely to survive – suggesting ornamentation actually hinders survival in a warmer world.

The uptake of carbon dioxide by the Earth’s land area increased during the recent slowdown in global surface temperature rise, a new study says. Using satellite and atmospheric observations, the researchers show that plants respired less between 1998 and 2004, while their rates of photosynthesis didn’t change. This means that, on balance, plants held on to larger amounts of carbon dioxide than usual. But this won’t last, the researchers say – as global warming rates speed up again, they expect “a greater fraction of terrestrial carbon to return to the atmosphere”.