President Trump’s budget proposal for 2018 would reap $36bn from selling off American resources and opening up land for oil and gas drilling while cutting $3.1bn from the Energy Department that would “effectively neuter” critical clean energy programmes, reports the New York Times. The budget also takes a knife to research and development on clean cars, energy efficiency and terminates payments to the Green Climate Fund, reports Inside Climate News. The Washington Post takes a look at the proposed 69% cut in funding to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, from $2.069 billion in 2017 to $636 million in new funding in 2018. But Tuesday’s budget is just one more point along a long and winding road, says Scientific American, with Congress holding the final say on federal spending. Carbon Brief has the details on what Trump is proposing and what it means for climate science.

German chancellor Angela Merkel has called on counties to work together to uphold the Paris Agreement, arguing that there will be economic benefits to doing so. She cites a new report by the OECD, which finds that tackling climate change could boost the world’s 20 biggest economies to the tune of nearly 5% in 2050, once the costs of avoided impacts, such as flooding or storms, are factored in. Ahead of the G7 on Friday, Bloomberg also covers Merkel’s comments that she won’t give up efforts to “persuade the doubters” among her global peers of the need to tackle climate change. While Donald Trump continues to give mixed signals about the fate of the Paris deal under his administration, a separate Bloomberg piece reports how China, Canada and the European Union are joining forces to keep the momentum going. Canada’s environment minister Catherine McKenna, EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete and China’s special envoy for climate change Xie Zhenhua met on Tuesday in Berlin to discuss climate leadership in the event of a US departure.

Royal Dutch Shell shareholders have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal calling for the oil company to set and publish annual targets to reduce carbon emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. Around 94% of Shell shareholders who participated voted against the resolution, while 5% abstained. Chief Executive Ben van Beurden promised to engage further with investors on how the oil company can become more transparent about its plans to tackle climate change but argued the proposals were an” unreasonable ask” and “not in the best interest of the company”. He told shareholders at the company’s AGM in The Hague, “Even though we are a large company, we are a small company in relation to the overall energy system…The only thing that will happen if we would indeed implement the resolution … is we will see our competitors benefit, and it may actually have an adverse effect on greenhouse gas emissions.” The Independent and The Telegraph have more on the story.

A growing number of people are taking to the courts to challenge governments to do more to combat climate change, according to a global survey of climate change litigation published on Tuesday. From a group’s attempt to stop an airport runway in Austria to a Pakistani farmer suing his government over its failure to adapt to rising temperatures, the study carried out by UN Environment and Columbia law school found the number of countries with such cases has tripled since 2014. Some 884 climate change cases have been in Africa, Asia, Pacific, Europe and the Americas, with the US taking the lion’s share with 654 cases. Many lawsuits are filed by individuals and NGOs and governments are nearly always the defendants, said executive director, Michael Burger in a statement, “In the United States, climate change litigation has been absolutely essential… Similar litigation all over the world will continue to push governments and corporations to address the most pressing environmental challenge of our times.” Reuters and Carbon Pulse also cover the new survey.

A new survey has revealed that 69% people in the UK support the creation of a world government that could force countries to deal with major global risks, such as climate change and nuclear weapons. The ComRes survey, commissioned ahead of the G7 Summit in Sicily by the Global Challenges Foundation, interviewed 8,100 people in eight countries, Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, South Africa, the UK and US – all of which showed significant support for taking action on global warming. In the UK, 80% of people agreed climate change could turn into a global catastrophe, compared to 74% in the US. Brazil and South Africa were the most concerned with 91%, followed by India with 90% and China with 86%.

A new study claims to have found the reason why blue whales are so big. An ‘evolutionary jump’ after the most recent ice age caused the vertebrates to grow in size so that they could eat more krill, say the researchers. The group traced the evolution of whale size through more than 30 million years of history and found that it was only recently in their evolutionary past that they became so enormous. As ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere grew about 2 to 3 million years ago, this likely altered the way whales’ food was distributed in the oceans and enhanced the benefits of a large body size. How whales got so big has remained a mystery up till now but a new method tracking the width of fossilised whales’ skulls is finally providing some answers, says lead author Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

As protests against Latin America’s pursuit of hydropower mount up, is the end of the region’s mega dams in sight? The Guardian’s John Vidal takes a look at a recent accident in Brazil’s Ferreira Gomes, that he says served as evidence to many that big dams are dangerous to people and the environment. While big dams in South America have long been seen by politicians as symbols of national pride, the damage done after millions of gallons of water rushed out of the temporary coffer dam on 7 May and swamped the town has been more or less repeated across Latin America over the past 40 years, as countries have rushed to industrialise and generate electricity for cities, he says. The Guardian has helpfully translated the article for Spanish speakers.

While the ability to generate revenue might motivate a government to implement a carbon tax, that motivation could actually cause emissions far into the future, a new study suggests. If a carbon tax is to result in near-zero emissions, at some point policymakers will be required to increase the tax to the extent that revenue will fall. This could create “a perverse incentive to continue carbon emissions” to protect revenue streams, the researchers say. Using an integrated assessment model, the study finds this incentive occurs around the year 2085, though this depends on various factors such as the cost of climate damages.

The frost-free season in the US has lengthened by around 10 days over the past century. A new study estimates that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns are responsible for three to five of these extra days, while three days can be chalked up to global warming, and two to four to local cloud cover changes. The authors also found evidence that the circulation patterns themselves have been altered by rising temperatures, particularly in the western and northwestern US.

A new study explores the possibility of using CO2 captured directly from the atmosphere for applications that don’t require the highest purity gas. It takes more energy to separate high purity CO2 from air than it does from flue gas from gas or coal power stations. But energy use is comparable where low or moderate purity CO2 is needed, the researchers say. The most beneficial applications of this dilute CO2 are enhanced oil recovery and microalgae cultivation technologies, the study says.