The New York Times leads the widespread coverage of Donald Trump’s selection of Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a “close ally of the fossil fuel industry”, to run the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The paper says it signals “Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change”. Overnight, the paper changed its headline which original described Pruitt as a climate “dissenter” to a climate “denialist”. The Washington Post says that “Pruitt has spent much of his energy as attorney general fighting the very agency he is being nominated to lead”. It adds: “Pruitt, who has written that the debate on climate change is ‘far from settled’, joined a coalition of state attorneys general in suing the agency’s Clean Power Plan, the principal Obama-era policy aimed at reducing US greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector.” The Hill says that “Dems and Greens” will now “gear up” to fight Trump’s EPA pick. The Financial Times echoes the same views: “If confirmed by the Senate he would be catapulted from the US’s oil-producing heartland to the centre of global policymaking on climate change, a position from which green groups worry he would wreck progress to stem carbon emissions…In his 2015 interview with the FT, Mr Pruitt said he had been compelled to fight Mr Obama’s plans because they infringed on states’ rights as enshrined in the law, not because of any beliefs about climate change.” Desmog describes Pruitt as a fossil fuel industry “stenographer”. The story is also covered by, among others, Reuters, AP and Climate Home. Meanwhile, the Telegraph and Guardian are among the publications reporting that the actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio met with Trump yesterday. The Guardian reports: “Terry Tamminen, the CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, confirmed the meeting at Trump Tower in New York. Tamminen said the pair gave a presentation to Trump, daughter Ivanka, and other members of Trump’s team on how focusing on renewable, clean energy could create millions of jobs.”

Nature News reports on two new studies which show that “evidence buried in Greenland’s bedrock shows the island’s massive ice sheet melted nearly completely at least once in the last 2.6 million years”. It says this suggests that Greenland’s ice may be less stable than previously believed. “Our study puts Greenland back on the endangered ice-sheet map,” says Joerg Schaefer, a palaeoclimatologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author of the Nature paper. Nature News adds: “A second paper in the same issue paints a slightly different view of the ice sheet’s past stability. A group led by Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington, found that ice covered eastern Greenland for all of the past 7.5m years. Experts say the two papers do not necessarily contradict one another: at times, nearly all of Greenland’s ice could have melted (as seen by Schaefer’s team) while a frosty cap remained in the eastern highlands (as seen by Bierman’s group).” Time magazine says that the new studies suggest “Greenland’s ice sheet could melt far faster than scientists believed”. Inside Climate News and the Mail Online also carry the story.

The UK has cut the number of Foreign Office staff working on climate change, despite ministers arguing the issue should be a top foreign policy priority. The Liberal Democrats said it was “appalling” and sent “the wrong signals” to the world, after a minister revealed the figures in a recent parliamentary answer. In London, the number of staff working full time on climate change is down by more than two thirds, from 26 in July 2013 to eight now. Overseas, the figure is down from 177 in March 2013 to 149 today.

Tata Steel has confirmed that, following talks with unions, that it will commit to securing jobs and steel production at its Port Talbot plant in Wales. The BBC says it could “bring an end to eight months of uncertainty for thousands of workers who faced losing their jobs when Tata’s UK business was put up for sale”. The company’s commitments include a guaranteed, minimum five-year commitment to keeping two blast furnaces at the Port Talbot plant and a 10-year £1bn investment plan to support steel making at the site. Koushik Chatterjee, group executive director Tata Steel, said: “We look to other stakeholders such as the UK government to play their part in addressing the UK’s manufacturing competitiveness position especially with relation to energy prices.” The Times also carries the story. Carbon Brief has published a factcheck on steel and UK electricity prices.

The New York Times uses an editorial to strongly criticise Trump’s pick to lead the EPA: “Had Donald Trump spent an entire year scouring the country for someone to weaken clean air and clean water laws and repudiate America’s leadership role in the global battle against climate change, he could not have found a more suitable candidate than Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general…This is an aggressively bad choice, a poke in the eye to a long history of bipartisan cooperation on environmental issues, to a nation that has come to depend on the agency for healthy air and drinkable water, and to 195 countries that agreed in Paris last year to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases in the belief that the United States would show the way…Mr. Pruitt has repeatedly suggested that the science of climate change is far from settled, when in fact it is…Should a Trump administration step back from that commitment, other nations could follow suit, rendering the Paris agreement irrelevant and driving the world toward irreversible climate change…If the Senate cares about the public good, it needs to send his nomination to the dust bin.”

Marshall, ECIU’s energy analyst, looks at the UK’s capacity market auction taking place this week: “It would seem logical to establish a principle under which no policy would create a perverse incentive, answering short-term concerns but working against long-term ambitions. And this is where the Capacity Market process, as currently constituted, arguably falls down – paying to keep coal-fired power stations open, failing to discriminate between genuine demand-side response and dirty diesel generators, and aiming to build gas-fired power stations whose usage might be severely restricted within about a decade. After all, if we end up needing to overhaul the power sector again by the half-way point of the 21st century, won’t this all be a chronic waste of money?”

Policy Exchange’ Richard Howard sets out a blueprint for a modern industrial strategy that could deliver clean growth for the UK: “The government needs to ensure that economic growth goes hand in hand with the protection of natural assets, sustainable use of natural resources, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. This should not be seen as putting a limit on growth, but as part of a sensible strategy to maximise the benefits and minimise the costs of transitioning to a lower carbon and more environmentally benign economy.”

Terrestrial deposits of ancient glacial and interglacial periods tend to be overrun and eroded by more recent glacial advances, making understanding ice-sheet variations before the last interglacial 125,000 years ago fragmentary. A new paper uses material shed from continents and preserved as marine sediment to analyse the East Greenland Ice Sheet, finding that it existed over the past 7.5 million years. While ice cover was dynamic during the early Pleistocene epoch, East Greenland was mostly ice-covered during the mid-to-late Pleistocene. The authors say the findings challenge the possibility of complete and extended deglaciation over the past several million years.