Sinister right wing forces are set on crushing UK environmental laws, the country’s top climate change advisor told a meeting of business leaders in London on Wednesday. Lord Deben said the Brexit vote on 23 June had empowered what he termed an “unpleasant group of politicians” who saw it as a “first step” to cutting green regulations. “We will be faced by a concerted very well-funded series of attempts to reduce protection of environment and workers’ rights and we are going to have to have to fight it,” he said an event hosted by the Aldersgate Group. Also speaking at the event, Foreign Office climate envoy Sir David King said he agreed with Deben’s sentiments, but stressed the current government was “totally committed” to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

The US has surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia as the global leader in oil reserves, according to a report by a Norwegian consultancy firm. “We have done this benchmarking every year, and this is the first year we’ve seen that the US is above Saudi Arabia and Russia,” Per Magnus Nysveen, head of analysis at Rystad Energy, said. He credited the rise to a sharp increase in the number of discoveries in the Permian basin in Texas over the past two years. The report found that many, especially members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, exaggerated the size of their reserves in self-reported surveys. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports the views of Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, who warns that the world risks becoming ever more reliant on Middle Eastern oil as lower prices derail efforts by governments to curb demand. He tells the FT that policymakers risk becoming complacent as rhetoric surrounding a rise in North American energy supplies has overshadowed the world’s growing reliance on Middle Eastern crude.

There is continuing coverage of Monday’s news that Dong Energy has set a record low price for offshore wind power in winning a bid to build two arrays off the coast of the Netherlands. ClimateHome explains: “The Danish company committed to supply electricity at €72.70/MWh (US$80.40), not including transmission costs. The cables will add about €14/MWh, experts say. That beats an industry goal of bringing costs below €100/MWh by 2020. The closest any rival had previously come was €103/MWh by Vattenfall in Denmark last year.” The Copenhagen Post andCleanTechnica also carry the story.

Environmental campaigners have appealed against North Yorkshire County Council’s decision to allow fracking. In May, the council approved Third Energy’s application to extract shale gas near the North York Moors National Park in Ryedale. Friends of the Earth has sent an application to the High Court for a judicial review of the decision following a letter it sent to the council saying it would take legal action. It said the council failed to properly assess climate change as it didn’t consider the environmental impacts of fracking.

City AM reports a blog post by a Bank of England staffer which looks at the effect of climate change news on energy firms’ valuations. “The findings will help allay some people’s fears that a carbon bubble will plunge the world into another financial crisis,” says the newspaper. “Rhiannon Sowerbutts, an economist in the bank’s macro prudential strategy and support division, has looked at whether signs that the world is moving towards a low carbon future has adversely affected these firms’ share prices. She said that while energy firms’ share prices had been falling, so had the price of their main asset, oil. To disentangle the two, she looked at share price changes around the time climate change news was released, and compared this to a firm’s country’s main stock market index. Sowerbutts found that while the Paris Agreement moved some energy firms’ share prices, other events were slightly less dramatic.” The original blog post is available on the Bank of England website.

For developing countries seeking to turn their national climate action plans into reality, help will soon be at hand in the form of a support service announced by the German government and the U.S.-based World Resources Institute. The German government says one of the main tasks of the initiative will be to organise quick access to “tailor-made advice” for developing countries, drawing on know-how and technical assistance from a range of organisations and experts. The partnership – which will have offices in Washington and Bonn, funded by Germany – will also offer a contact point for climate-related questions, such as on expanding the use of renewable energies, sustainable urban development or climate-resilient agriculture.

Speaking via videolink at last night’s BusinessGreen Leaders Awards, the former French foreign minister and chairman of the UN climate talks in Paris last December called on businesses to ensure the “spirit of Paris” lives on. He also called for governments around the world to ratify the Paris Agreement as soon as possible.

Later today, the candidates for leading the Conservative Party – and thus become prime minister – will be whittled from three to the final two candidates who will then face a vote by party members. Energydesk provides a rundown of the candidates from an environmental perspective, as well as taking a look at who their donors and supporters are.

The decision by the local council to approve an opencast coal mine near Druridge Bay on the Northumberland Coast runs completely counter to the government’s climate strategy – it should be reversed as swiftly as possible, says Murray: “It’s one of the most reckless, short-sighted, and irresponsible environmental moves in years. I cannot remember a worse UK environmental decision in the nine years BusinessGreen has been going. I am apoplectic…There is no place for unabated coal in a modern, competitive low-carbon economy.”

Nader, the independent politician who has run run five times for the US presidency, argues that candidates running for Congress and the presidency aren’t offering real solutions to climate change, despite growing scientific alarm: “Despite claiming COP21 as a victory, Obama’s legacy will tell the story of the US surpassing all other nations in oil and gas production…In this election year, we cannot afford to let candidates for federal, state and local office lose sight of the perils of climate change.”

In an interview with John Holdren, President Obama’s top scientific adviser, Nature asks him if the Paris Agreement would survive a Donald Trump presidency: “The United States would become a pariah if we backed out of the Paris agreement…I suspect that if Mr Trump were elected, he would discover that what he said during the campaign about Paris is not quite right..I think he — as any new president is likely to do — will stick with the Paris agreement.”

In a long feature for the Guardian, the author Simon Parkin looks at how the UK is threatened by “catastrophic flooding” – and how the nation might cope. Looking at published research, he looks ahead to the “Great Tide of 2026”: “If the storm strikes after a period of heavy rain, which will have swollen tributaries in west London, the Thames Barrier will not be able to cope. The fatal conjunction of coastal, river and surface water flooding will break the Thames’ banks for the first time in 70 years.”

A model experiment to examine the impacts of sea spray geoengineering as a way to control global temperature show a reduction in global ocean net primary productivity and, consequently, decreased ocean carbon uptake. Reduced light availability had a minor effect on global total production but a major effect off the coast of Peru, where light availability is the main limiting factor for phytoplankton growth.

Despite being one of the strongest events on record, the 2015-16 El Niño had only a weak impact on the California Current System compared to similarly large events in the past, according to new research. An examination of temperature and density fields using a regional ocean model and underwater glider observations means the authors are anticipating little impact on spring/summer productivity, especially when compared to the 1982–1983 and 1997–1998 El Niños, which triggered widespread ecosystem change in the North Pacific.