Bloomberg is reporting that, after failing to win a bailout for cash-strapped coal plants, some Trump administration officials are considering emergency orders that could keep at least some coal generators online, according to “people familiar with the discussions”. Bloomberg explains: “The approach would require Rick Perry to use his authority as U.S. energy secretary to spur emergency compensation for coal plants run by FirstEnergy Solutions that may be at risk of shutting, said the people, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. Some Energy Department officials are weighing this option after federal regulators rejected a proposal by Perry last month to pay coal plants more for their ‘resilience’, they said. FirstEnergy hasn’t formally requested the aid, one of the people said.” When asked to confirm the talks, an agency spokeswoman told Bloomberg “that is not correct information”, but declined to provide further detail. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that China’s coal imports hit their highest in four years in January, according to newly released customs data. They have been “driven up as snowstorms across the country boosted demand from utilities and snarled domestic transport networks”.

California regulators have recommended a target that would see utilities cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030 from 2015 levels. Bloomberg says it is part of a state-wide effort to combat climate change. “Utilities and other electricity providers would have to secure 10,200 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy resources and 2,000MW of new battery storage to meet the target that the California Public Utilities Commission recommended to state environmental regulators on Thursday. The commission began a two-year planning process for utilities to propose resources that can be used to reach the goal. California has already set a target of cutting its carbon emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.” Separately, the Los Angeles Times has a story about how Chevron is fighting California cities’ climate-change lawsuits with “creative lawyering”.

Reuters reports that the UK’s latest auction for back-up electricity cleared well below expectations, “casting doubt on how much new capacity will be built to avoid winter supply shortages in the future”. It adds: “The National Grid’s website showed Thursday’s auction for 2021/22 supply cleared at 8.40 pounds ($11.71) per kilowatt (kW)/year, below the 15 to 25 pounds/kW/yr range which analysts had forecast. The auction results…shows the majority of capacity agreements – more than 45% – were awarded to combined cycle gas turbine units. However, CCGTs, mostly new builds, were also the largest group of generation capacity units which exited the auction above the clearing price.”

National governments around the world are neglecting the needs of their major cities with non-existent or inadequate development policies, a new report has found. The report, from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Coalition for Urban Transitions and funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, suggests national governments are neglecting the needs of their major cities even when they have in place national policies on issues such as climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. The report looks at “the key measures of energy generation, transport, waste management and infrastructure”, says the Guardian.

The FT reports that Australia’s largest rail freight operator has withdrawn an application for a A$1bn state-backed loan to build a rail line to support development of the Galilee Basin, one of the world’s largest untapped coal reserves. The papers says: “The decision by Aurizon represents a blow to Indian mining groups, Adani and GVK Hancock, which are seeking financial backing to push ahead with developing coal mines in the basin…The move was welcomed by environmental groups which oppose the Indian companies’ plans to develop new thermal coal mines in the Galilee basin, which they claim would pump 700m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year for over half a century.” Separately, the Guardian reports that coalminers in Australia have been given approval to clear nearly 10% of endangered forest in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

The Times reports that old mine shafts could be revived as storage sites for renewable energy under a scheme being prepared by a Scottish engineering company. Gravitricity has secured a £650,000 grant from Innovate UK, the government innovation agency, to explore the commercial viability of its idea, which involves using the force of gravity on huge weights to provide a novel storage method. The paper explains: “Gravitricity is proposing to put a weight of up to 2,000 tonnes down a mine shaft, which would be held by cables attached to winches on the surface. On days when more electricity is being generated than is needed, the weight would be lifted to the top of the shaft. On days when demand was outstripping supply, it would be lowered and the movement of the winches would generate additional power.”

With the Winter Olympics starting today, the New York Times has a feature about Jessie Diggins, a member of the US women’s cross-country skiing team, who has become an advocate for climate action due to the threat to snow resorts. Diggins says: “I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world where they’ve never experienced snow because we weren’t responsible enough…One reason I feel that I can say how much climate change is affecting us is because I’ve seen it all over the world.” Separately, Al Jazeera has a feature on “how global warming threatens future winter olympics”.

A new study finds strong agreement that flood risks in central and western Europe are rising due to global warming, writes Abraham: “The researchers are quite certain regarding increased risks in the central and western parts of Europe but less certain about what will happen in the east. But the authors went a step further; they calculated the expected economic damage from future flooding for the three different temperature increases…Studies like this give lie to people who claim that it is too expensive to take action on climate change. What this study shows is it may be too expensive to do nothing.”

Holthaus says that, other than greenhouse gases, there’s another product of industry changing the climate that has received scant public attention: aerosols: “They’re microscopic particles of pollution that, on balance, reflect sunlight back to space and help cool the planet down, providing a crucial counterweight to greenhouse-powered global warming… Research by an international team of scientists recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters says that the cooling effect of aerosols is so large that it has masked as much as half of the warming effect from greenhouse gases. So aerosols can’t be wiped out. Take them away and temperatures would soar overnight.” Now there is pressure, says Holthaus, to study how aerosols might be used for geonengineering purposes. “Geoengineering is dangerous, but so are aerosols, and so is accelerating climate change. Absent a real-life Hollywood miracle, we’ll likely need to try some interventions that would have been better left to the movies.”

Lord Howard, the former leader of the Conservative party, says that “ten years ago parliament passed one of its most remarkable laws: the Climate Change Act. It was remarkable for two reasons. It was the first piece of legislation anywhere in the world to set legally binding carbon emission reduction targets for successive governments and it was passed almost unanimously, with only five MPs voting against”. He continues: “It is a more pragmatic approach than most other nations possess and is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why the UK is outperforming the G7 on both per capita economic growth and per capita emission reduction.” He then lists why all the reasons the sceptics tried to push to obstruct the act’s passage have been proved wrong. He ends: “There is one thing further that we should do this year: ask whether the targets contained in the Climate Change Act are strong enough.”

Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in the US – which is critical of many climate policies, but seeks clean energy innovation – explains in Foreign Affairs why he is opposed to the 2C goal advocated by many climate campaigners: “From its earliest days, climate policy and advocacy has always been predicated, sometimes explicitly and always implicitly, on the idea that climate change was a problem that could be solved. The two-degree threshold is a reflection of that impulse. In reality, climate change is now a permanent condition of the human present and future, one that we will manage more or less successfully but that we will never solve. Liberating international climate policy efforts from the various constraints that the two-degree threshold imposes can’t eliminate all of the risks that climate change will bring. But doing so might allow us to manage them better.”

Many have argued that removing fossil fuel subsidies could help to mitigate climate change by levelling the playing field for renewable energy. A new study in Nature finds that removing fossil fuel subsidies would have an unexpectedly small impact on global energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and would not increase renewable energy use by 2030. Subsidy removal would reduce the carbon price necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at 550 parts per million by only 2–12 per cent under low oil prices. Removing subsidies in most regions would deliver smaller emission reductions than the Paris Agreement (2015) climate pledges and in some regions global subsidy removal may actually lead to an increase in emissions, owing to either coal replacing subsidized oil and natural gas or natural-gas use shifting from subsidizing, energy-exporting regions to non-subsidizing, importing regions. Their results show that subsidy removal would result in the largest CO2 emission reductions in high-income oil- and gas-exporting regions, where the reductions would exceed the climate pledges of these regions and where subsidy removal would affect fewer people living below the poverty line than in lower-income regions.