During his first speech to Congress last night, president Trump touted his “historic effort” to eliminate “job-crushing regulations”, reports the Hill. His effort to roll back Obama’s environmental rules just began with efforts to dismantle the Clean Water Rule, explains Vox. He also plans to “revamp” the national biofuel programme, reports Reuters. Trump’s plans to deeply cut the budget of the US Environmental Protection Agency have divided Republicans, reports the Hill, with some key figures cautious about the plans. Trump’s efforts to revive the coal industry face “headwinds”, says Axios. A second Axios article says the Trump administration is keeping the UN climate body in the dark as to whether it will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Member state ministers have agreed a common position on reforms of the EU Emissions Trading System (EUETS), report the Guardian and others. The European Parliament has drafted, but not finalised its position on the proposals, set out last year by the European Commission. Ministers from 19 member states backed the compromise text, reports Reuters, adding in a second article that Poland’s minister “said he felt ‘cheated’ by the deal”. The EUETS reforms still need to be finalised in joint talks between the Parliament, ministers and European Commission, Reuters notes. Yesterday’s member state deal helped EUETS permits recover lost ground, reports Carbon Pulse. The surplus of permits fell to 1.7bn tonnes in 2016, the European Commission says, according to a second report from Carbon Pulse.

US lawmakers held their first hearing on the country’s social cost of carbon assessment on Tuesday, in what some called the new administration’s first attack on the tool, which attempts to put a dollar cost on climate change. The Washington Post observed that “By its close, the conversation had disintegrated into yet another debate about the extent to which man-made climate change exists.” See also the recent Carbon Brief Q&A on the social cost of carbon.

Plans to leave the Euratom treaty at the same time as leaving the European Union will “shut down [the] nuclear industry if international safety agreements are not made in time”, reports the Guardian, covering a hearing in parliament yesterday. Leaving Euratom could see trade in nuclear fuel grind to a halt, MPs were told.

Heathrow airport has revealed an ambition for its planned new runway to be carbon neutral. The sustainability plan suggests the leap in emissions could be offset by a variety of measures including a move to 100% renewable energy, encouraging more public transport and by restoring British peat bogs. It also announced it has invested an initial £500,000 in a new R&D incubator tasked with identifying ways to minimise noise and carbon emissions from flights, reports BusinessGreen. Aviation faces a struggle to cap emissions, as suggested by the Committee on Climate Change – see this from Carbon Brief for more.

The world needs a way to make sure nearly 200 nations who signed up to the Paris Agreement are following through on their pledges, says John Fialka in Scientific American. Currently nations estimate their annual emissions rates by self-reporting, adding up industry, government and utility inventories of the use of fossil fuels and estimates of emissions from coal mining and oil and gas drilling – but “this doesn’t involve more sophisticated, real-time measurements that are now possible”.

Rupert Darwall, of free-market thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies has a comment piece in the Telegraph repeating the conclusions of a House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report published last week. Like the report, he derides the UK’s “deluded” energy policies, which he blames for rising energy bills. As Carbon Brief noted last week, the Lords’ report says most of the increase in bills since 2003 is due to rising fossil fuel prices.

New research shows that 54% of global hydropower capacity competes with irrigation, potentially reducing water availability for food production. Regions where such competition exists include the Central US, northern Europe, India, Central Asia and Oceania. Reduced water availability in a warming climate may lead to “increased tradeoffs between irrigation and hydropower,” the researchers say, particularly in India, South China, and southern US.

The Indian Ocean witnessed a weak positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event from the northern hemisphere summer to autumn in 2015, while an extreme El Niño occurred in the tropical Pacific. This was different from the case in 1997/1998 when an extreme El Niño and the strongest IOD occurred at the same time. A new study suggests that the unique sea surface temperature anomaly pattern of El Niño in 2015 contributed to the weak IOD of that year.