Philip Hammond, the UK chancellor, said in his Budget speech yesterday that an expert panel would examine ways of making it easier to buy and sell North Sea oil and gasfields, with the aim of keeping them in production for longer. The Financial Times says: “The announcement reflects the Treasury’s focus on how to wring as much as possible out of the remaining North Sea resources as decommissioning costs become an increasing burden for industry and taxpayers.” DeSmogUK headlines its coverage of the move: “North Sea Oil Industry Asked the Government for More Help to Drill and Decommission — Got Both.” The Independent focused on renewables and said that the UK’s solar industry is “facing devastation and consumers could see energy bills rise after the Chancellor Philip Hammond refused to listen to pleas to cancel a planned tax hike of up to 800 per cent on rooftop solar schemes”. Emily Gosden, the Times‘s energy editor, focused on the news that the Levy Control Framework, set up in 2011 to place an annual cap of the cost levied on energy bills to support renewables, is set to be abolished. She writes: “The government had promised to set out the long-term future of the levy mechanism in the budget. Instead, it announced that it would be ‘replaced by a new set of controls’ that would be ‘set out later in the year’. It is understood that the existing cap will remain in place until 2020-21, with the new scheme to follow after that.” BusinessGreen covered the budget in depth with a summary piece, two round-ups of reaction and a comment piece by “disappointed” editor James Murray: “Hammond delivered a budget that made no mention of climate change, clean tech, renewable energy, or the environment as a whole.” Carbon Brief also has a detailed round-up of the budget’s key climate and energy announcements.

“Clean” coal technologies in Australia won’t be commercially viable before 2030 without government subsidy and are fundamentally out of sync with the move towards more flexible power generation, according to the energy market analysis firm RepuTex. The analyst argues that the rising price of gas, coupled with the falling cost of energy storage, has now made renewable energy the cheapest source of reliable power generation in Australia.

MIT professor Richard Lindzen’s contrarian views about climate change has spurred the rest of the programme’s faculty to write a letter to President Trump rebutting Lindzen’s position that climate change doesn’t pose a threat worth addressing and informing him that their colleague doesn’t represent their views or those of the vast majority of other climate scientists. In interviews with the Boston Globe, some of the professors accused Lindzen – who acknowledges accepting thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry – of “intellectual dishonesty” that has tarred their programme.

The White House is seeking to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget of an Energy Department division that has funded technological research in projects ranging from the LED light bulb to plug-in electric trucks, according to people familiar with the plans. The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, currently funded at $2.1bn a year, would see its allocation slashed by at least $700m under a proposal from the Office of Management and Budget, according to three people briefed on the plans who asked not to be identified discussing the internal deliberations. Meanwhile, the Hill reports that President Trump’s executive order to begin repealing Obama’s main climate change rule is “unlikely” to be signed this week, according to a White House official.

A sharp drop in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions at the end of last year came courtesy of a spike in renewable energy generation in a single month, according to a new study produced by Ndevr Environmental. Australia’s emissions fell by 3.57m tonnes in the three months to December, putting them back on track to meet quarterly commitments made in Paris after a blowout the previous quarter. The fall is the largest for the quarter since the government began recording emissions in 2001. The report’s authors said this was entirely due to record levels of hydro and wind generation in October.

Dawson, a reader in physical geography at the University of Dundee, argues: “Planners need to start moving away from hard engineering solutions such as sea walls and rock armour. Instead, they should consider working with natural processes to increase coastal resilience. For instance, many European coastal areas have extensive wetlands and beach systems, which can provide a natural “buffer” against the impact of sea level rise and intermittent storm surges…A well-rounded approach which considers natural coastal processes, urban planning and economic vulnerability is crucial to building resilience, and protecting coastal cities from climate change.”

Connor, the CEO of the Climate Institute in Australia for the past 10 years which is now facing closure, reflects on the “rollercoaster ride though the bumpy minefield of Australian climate politics”: “My hope is that philanthropists will realise that centrist advocacy, which we have pursued, has a rightful place in a mixed portfolio of support for the transition Australia can and must make – which science and international commitments have all indicated is the necessary goal – to a zero emissions economy by 2050 – a fair, clean, safe, but prosperous one.” Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Guardian, Katharine Murphy slams Australia’s energy policy as a “world-class failure”: “What Australians are experiencing now – rising prices, rising emissions and a grid that creaks and sputters in extreme weather – is the logical consequence of a decade of unconscionable public policy failure.”

A new detailed exploration of the environmental factors that influence potentially infectious mosquitos in four African locations finds that both temperature and rainfall are needed to explain the observed patterns in malaria occurrence. The authors say the results enhance scientists’ understanding of future malaria risk and how it might change in response to rising temperatures, potentially allowing more effective interventions.

In an effort to understand what makes some corals better able to withstand high temperatures than others, a group of scientists has identified the genes responsible for initiating a defence mechanism against bleaching when the coral are stressed. Acropora hyacinthus corals exposed to temperatures above 30.5C in their natural environment and in the lab showed enhanced expression of 71 individual genes. With no sign of damage to the corals, the scientists suggest brief periods of mild heat could even contribute to making corals hardier.