There is widespread coverage in the UK media of a new report by MPs warning that, says the Financial Times, “the UK government’s net-zero emissions goal would be impossible to achieve unless urgent action was taken to improve the energy efficiency of homes”. The MPs from the environmental audit committee (EAC) add that it is a “colossal” challenge for which the cost has been “significantly underestimated”. The FT adds: “The government has estimated that its ambition to make about 19m of the UK’s 29m homes more energy efficient by 2035 will cost anywhere between £35bn-£65bn. But the EAC said the figure did not include the roughly 8m properties with solid walls rather than cavity walls, which are more expensive to insulate. It also did not take into account the cost of installing low-carbon heating such as heat pumps.” The Times focuses on the MPs’s cost estimate, saying: “Adapting homes to meet climate targets will be far more expensive than the government claims and could cost more than £20,000 a property.” It adds: “Nearly 19m properties, two-thirds of the total, would fail to achieve a grade C energy performance certificate, the minimum standard which the Climate Change Committee has said all homes must meet by 2035 for Britain to hit its legally binding target of becoming carbon neutral by 2050.” BBC News says that the MPs highlights how the green homes grant has been “botched” and must now be urgently overhauled. It continues: “The MPs warn that unless urgent action is taken to improve energy efficiency of homes this decade, the UK will fail to meet its climate targets. That is because the UK’s housing stock accounts for 20% of its carbon emissions through heating, hot water and cooking.” BusinessGreen and Bloomberg also cover the story.

In related news, the Daily Telegraph says that “one million commercial properties will need to be renovated in order to meet the government’s new carbon targets, according to impact assessments”. It continues: “New plans would mean commercial properties having to score a ‘B’ rating in energy efficiency by 2030. While key players in the property industry say they support the government’s ambition to make the UK carbon net-zero by 2050, they have complained about the amount of time until the new rules become law and said officials must provide a clearer idea of regulations beyond 2030.”

In other UK news, the Times says that “Britain will have only one power station still burning coal by the end of next year under plans by EDF to close its West Burton A plant”. It adds: “The decision will leave Uniper’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant, also in Nottinghamshire, as the only power station still burning the polluting fuel before a government deadline to phase out unabated coal usage by October 2024.” (See Carbon Brief’s UK coal phaseout tracker.) Reuters has a feature on how UK regions are now pushing for a green transition done “by the people, for the people”. BBC News says that, later today, “Northern Ireland’s first-ever piece of climate legislation will be introduced to the assembly”. The bill, drafted by academics and environmentalists, proposes a net-zero target of 2045, whereas a departmental bill would set a goal of an 82% emissions cuts by 2050. Finally, the Scotsman carries a frontpage story under the headline, “Climate conference rip-off as COP26 delegates asked to pay £12,000 for windowless room”.

Parts of New South Wales in Australia have been struck by more than 800mm of rain in less than a week causing devastating flooding, reports the Guardian and many other outlets. The Guardian continues: “Dozens of communities have been declared disaster zones, more than 18,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, and emergency service personnel have been called to hundreds of rescues as three colliding weather systems continue to cause flooding chaos across New South Wales…The floods come less than 18 months after Australia was gripped by a bushfire crisis which saw towns levelled and dozens killed. Many of the places which have found themselves inundated by a record downfall were still recovering from that firey disaster.” Reuters says that “Australia’s east coast was smashed by heavy rains on Saturday, sparking dangerous flash flooding that forced the evacuation of multiple regions as the fast-moving waters unmoored houses, engulfed roads, stranded towns and cut power lines”. The state’s premier Gladys Berejiklian has warned the rains could continue until Friday. In Sydney, the country’s biggest city, authorities have “pleaded for people to stay at home as a major dam overflowed and a mini-tornado tore through a western suburb”, adds the newswire. BBC News says officials have described the extreme weather as a “one-in-a-50-year event”. An article in the Guardian explains that “three weather systems are crashing together to deliver extreme and relentless rainfall”. The Bureau of Meteorology tells the newspaper that weather systems usually liked to travel from west to east, but high pressure between Tasmania and New Zealand was remaining “stubbornly there”, acting as a block. The report concludes: “Australia’s latest State of the Climate report, released in 2020, says there has been an increase in the intensity of heavy rainfall events in Australia. According to the report, as the climate warms these events are expected to become even more intense because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.” The floods, reports the New York Times, have “quicken[ed] concerns about climate change”.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the “worst flooding in half a century” means that “coal deliveries to Australia’s Port of Newcastle, the world’s biggest coal export port, have been halted because flooding in the Hunter Valley region has shut rail lines”. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Prof Jamie Pittock, who teaches a climate change masters course at Australian National University, argues that “dangerous floods are inevitable, so stop putting people in their way”. He continues: “The dangers of more frequent large floods are increasing with a changing climate, making government action to reduce risk more urgent.”

Separately, in other Australia news, the Guardian says that “Australia’s miners [have] urge[d] Europe to define nuclear power and fossil fuels with carbon capture as ‘sustainable’”. Finally, the Sydney Morning Herald carries a comment piece by Australia’s former chief scientist Alan Finkel who writes: “We cannot simply shut down the use of fossil fuels overnight, because our civilisation needs energy. Instead, we must harness science and technology to develop alternatives that make fossil fuels obsolete.”

There have been confused media reports regarding how the topic of climate change was handled at last week’s diplomatic meetings in Alaska between officials from the US and China, the first to take place face-to-face since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Axios says that, contrary to earlier reporting by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, a US State Department spokesperson told it that the two sides did not form a working group on climate change. Instead, a delegation for the Biden administration “discussed the climate crisis” with Chinese counterparts. Axios quotes the spokesperson as saying: “More broadly, we know the climate challenge does not get successfully addressed without significant additional action by China. China represents almost 30% of global emissions, in addition to its carbon-intensive investments abroad.” The spokesperson added that the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s promise to achieve net-zero emissions before 2060 “a significant step forward,” but added that China needs to do more to reach Paris Agreement goals. “We will continue to engage China and other key countries as we move forward to address the climate crisis. All countries must raise their ambitions as we move toward COP26 in Glasgow.”

In other US news, NBC News reports on how a “vigorous influence campaign is underway over the president’s forthcoming commitment to the Paris Agreement”. It adds: “How low can US emissions go? Under president Joe Biden, the number to watch for may be 50% [reduction by 2030. relative to 2005 levels]…Behind the scenes, some Democrats and European officials are pushing for an ever more aggressive pledge. Yet the administration is getting pushback on the other end from business groups who say 50% is unrealistic, especially before Biden can even explain how he’ll get there, according to interviews with nearly a dozen industry officials, lobbyists and congressional aides.”

The Guardian has an article on how the Environmental Protection Agency’s website has now had a section with information about climate change returned after it was “canceled four years ago by a president who considered global warming a hoax”. Reuters reports that “Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist with wide federal government experience, has joined the Biden administration to lead climate and environment efforts at the Office of Science and Technology Policy”. Bloomberg reports that “the Biden administration is considering ways to push the global finance industry to consistently account for CO2 emissions and green investments, according to people familiar with the matter”. It adds: “The Treasury department and US regulators are in the early stages of working on measures to improve companies’ environmental impact disclosure, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. The moves seek to address carbon leakage – where producers move to regions with less restrictive pollution rules – and climate-related metrics for environmental, social and governance-based investing, the people said.”

Meanwhile, in Canada, Reuters reports that “main opposition Conservative party members have voted down a proposal to recognise the climate crisis as real, in a blow to their new leader’s efforts to embrace environmentally friendly policies before a likely federal election this year”.

The South China Morning Post reports comments made by Yi Gang, governor of the People’s Bank of China, at a closed-door session at China Development Forum over the weekend. Yi said that the target of reaching peak carbon emissions before 2030 and becoming carbon neutral by 2060 had raised new and higher demands for the bank. He estimated that it would need hundreds of trillions of yuan to fund the programme and the government could only cover a small proportion.

In other China news, the nation should use the “internet of energy” (IoE) to help reduce carbon emission, according to three new studies picked up by state-affiliated chinanews.com. The papers, all released by Beijing-based Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization, have proposed building the IoE in China for the first time, the news site reports. The authors suggest that an ultra-high-voltage (UHV) grid could lead the project to accelerate the introduction of renewable energy and help phase out coal in power sectors, the article says. The research describes the Chinese IoE as a combination of “smart grid + UHV grid + clean energy”, writes state broadcaster CCTV which also features the story.

Meanwhile, China’s national emissions trading scheme (ETS) – set to be launched in June – is undergoing a “smooth” trial run, reports state newspaper Global Times, citing a company involved in the programme. News portal Sina runs a quote that claims the two “core systems” supporting the ETS are “ready on the technical front”. The outlet nbd.com.cn cites Lu Xinming, deputy director-general for climate change at China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, who expects the first transaction through the ETS to be complete in the first half of this year. Separately, Reuters carries a comment piece by John Kemp on how China’s five-year plan focuses on energy security.

Prof Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor and chair in the environmental studies department at Humboldt State University, asks in Scientific American whether “climate anxiety” is “really just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get ‘back to normal?’” She continues: “One year ago, I published a book called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Since its publication, I have been struck by the fact that those responding to the concept of climate anxiety are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, these climate anxiety circles are even whiter than the environmental circles I’ve been in for decades…Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety?…The white response to climate change is literally suffocating to people of colour. Climate anxiety can operate like white fragility, sucking up all the oxygen in the room and devoting resources toward appeasing the dominant group. As climate refugees are framed as a climate security threat, will the climate-anxious recognise their role in displacing people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?”

In the Independent, UK energy minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan says that “I am making it my mission to show how safeguarding the world’s forests and tackling deforestation will help protect the critical role women and girls play in the fight against climate change”. She concludes: “Including women in our climate actions will not only improve equality, but will lead to more sustainable, better outcomes for the climate and for every member of our societies.” In the Guardian, columnist Owen Jones argues that “it will be the global south that pays the heaviest price” for rising emissions: “This is not a bug of capitalism: it is a central feature. The remorseless search for profit – and an economic system that enables the capture of our political systems by multinational companies with bottomless pockets – represents a fatal threat to our health, to our lives, and to our planet. Without a determined effort to drive back the political power of these corporate titans – which means questioning the very fundamentals of our economic system – our planet will continue to perish. Time is not on our side.”

The Times interview Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor who is now a climate advisor to both the UN and COP26, about his new 600-page book, “Value(s): Building A Better World For All”. He says: “The protests have worked, countries are shifting and pledging to go to net-zero. Companies vary in the scale of speed of response, but they increasingly realise that by doing the right thing they are going to be more successful…It’s been [Greta Thunberg’s] clarity and certainty of view with the cold hard facts of the carbon budget. She knows the math. Two years ago many people who ran companies and even countries didn’t know what the carbon budget was.” The Daily Mail also interviews Carney. He tells the newspaper: “‘I think the fact there has been one disaster has made people more conscious there could be another. If there are things we can do today, we should do them. It is to the great credit of the scientists that we have progress on the vaccines for Covid, but we are not going to get vaccines for climate.” Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph interviews Steve Holliday, the former boss of National Grid, who says he sees “Extinction Rebellion as a force for good”.

Repeated fires and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reduces the forest regrowth rate by between 8% and 55%, according to new research. The study notes that “tropical secondary forests” sequester carbon up to 20 times faster than old-growth forests, but that this rate does not account for “environmental and disturbance drivers”. Scientists use satellite data to detect changes in forest cover over time, and to quantify above-ground carbon, environmental factors and human activity. They find that Brazil’s 2017 secondary forest carbon stock could be 8% higher if fires and repeated deforestation were avoided, and that maintaining this forest area could contribute -5.5% to Brazil’s 2030 net emissions target under the Paris Agreement.

A new study finds that wildfires in China occur mainly between January and April, and that wildfire occurrence shows “a decreasing trend after reaching a peak in 2007”. The authors present a “detailed fire occurrence dataset” for China over 2005-18, based on continuous monitoring from multiple satellites and calibrated against field observations. 84% of wildfires occur in subtropical China with “two distinct clusters in its south-western and south-eastern parts”, according to the paper. It adds that a “fire-occurrence dipole” is seen between south-western and eastern China, which is “modulated” by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).