The Guardian reports that the UK government has “stopped asking the British public whether they are for or against fracking for shale gas just weeks before the first fracking operation in seven years is due to start”. The paper notes that the polling question was dropped from the latest update, published yesterday, of the four-year-old public attitudes tracker run by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). It adds: “The number of people against extracting shale gas has outweighed those in favour since 2015, and the latest polling by officials found 32% opposed with just 18% in support. Now the government, which backs fracking and recently relaxed planning rules to help the shale industry, has temporarily suspended that line of questioning.” Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s shadow business secretary, has reacted by saying the move by BEIS is “scandalous as the government knows full well that there is overwhelming public opposition to fracking”. BusinessGreen also carries the story adding that the BEIS survey has also stopped polling on a quarterly basis for attitudes about nuclear power, another controversial technology that the government is promoting: “BEIS said it is scaling back the survey to reduce the burden on respondents by cutting down the number of topics discussed. It added previous surveys suggest there is little seasonal variation in attitudes towards fracking, nuclear, and smart meters.” Meanwhile, the Times reports that “Ineos gets green light to drill for shale under Derbyshire”. it explains: “The petrochemicals company controlled by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire industrialist, bypassed Derbyshire county council after complaining that it was taking too long to decide and appealed to the Planning Inspectorate. It granted consent yesterday for the proposed well at a site between Sheffield and Chesterfield…Sir Jim, 65, is Britain’s richest man and recently decided to move to the tax haven of Monaco. Ineos makes most of its money in petrochemicals but has recently expanded into new areas, buying North Sea oil fields and infrastructure and amassing the biggest shale gas exploration rights of any company in Britain.” Carbon Brief has produced a detailed Q&A on what the return of UK fracking could mean for the climate.

BBC News reports that the “starting pistol has been fired in a race to develop ‘climate change resistant’ wheat with the publication of a map of the crop’s genes”. It says that researchers have published findings in the journal Science which has identified the location of more than 100,000 wheat genes: “The researchers say the map will accelerate the development of new strains to cope with the increased heat waves expected from climate change…Professor Cristobal Uauy, who is a project leader in crop genetics at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, described the pinpointing of wheat genes as ‘a game changer’. ‘We need to find ways to make sustainable production of wheat in the face of climate change and increasing demand,’ he told BBC News.” The Daily Mail also carries the story, adding that “[wheat] is the world’s most widely-cultivated crop on Earth and detailing it was a far more complex task than that of the human genome. Wheat has 16bn base pairs – the building blocks of DNA – five times more than the humans.”

The Guardian reports that Michael Gove, the environment secretary, is due later today to confirm plans to ban the sale of the most-polluting fuels for domestic wood burners in an attempt to cut harmful emissions. The newspaper says: “The sale of traditional house coal will be phased out under proposals set out in the government’s draft clean air strategy in May…Restrictions are also expected to be placed on the sale of wet wood, particularly in urban areas. Burning wood before it has been properly dried releases more of the damaging particulates that contribute to air pollution. The government will also tighten standards on solid fuels, forcing manufacturers to cut down on sulphur emissions and ensure only the cleanest stoves are sold…The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has suggested that he could go further than Gove and ban wood-burning stoves altogether in the capital.”

Bloomberg reports that “Canada and the UK are among six countries preparing the first carbon trades under the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change, part of an effort to unlock as much as $4 billion for the fight against global warming”. It adds: “The nations are assessing projects to cut greenhouse-gases in exchange for emission credits that can be used to comply with goals they set under the United Nations pact sealed in 2015, according to the World Bank Group, which is overseeing the programme.” The other countries contributing money to the bank’s $200m Transformative Carbon Asset Facility are Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

A source at the US Environmental Protection Agency has told Reuters that the Trump administration’s proposed replacement for the Obama-era’s central regulation on climate change, the Clean Power Plan, is expected to be released by late next week. Reuters adds: “The replacement for former President Barack Obama’s plan to slash carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants will grant states the ability to write their own weaker regulations for the plants, a Politico report, citing a portion of an unpublished draft of the plan, said this week…But a move to let states opt out would likely face staunch opposition from electricity industry associations because in many states the CPP’s limits on emissions have already been met. In addition, opting out of regulations by states would likely be fought by green groups in the courts.”

The editor of BusinessGreen takes aim at an opinion article in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph by Iain Duncan Smith, who, as James Murray describes him, is the “failed Conservative Party leader and failed work and pensions secretary”: “The real cause for concern for green business types comes via a throwaway line where IDS details how ‘outside the EU, and unencumbered by EU rules, the UK could, for example, decide how to reform emissions trading, and wider climate change policy.’ He adds that a ‘good way’ to start these ‘reforms’ would be with the ‘abolition of the damaging carbon price floor mechanism’. This contention merits unpacking, because a) it doesn’t make much sense, and b) it provides yet more worrying evidence about the Hard Brexiteers plans for a ‘dirty Brexit’.” The obvious flaw in “IDS”‘s idea, says Murray, is that the carbon floor price is a unilaterally British policy: “What is more, it is not just a unilaterally British policy, it is a highly effective one at that. It has been the primary mechanism for driving coal off the grid, which has been the primary mechanism for cutting UK emissions.”

The Guardian has a feature looking at a scheme in the French capital which aims to introduce “islands of cool” into the city by converting Paris’s concrete schoolyards: “The goal is to provide respite in periods of extreme heat, and perhaps even bring down temperatures across a city with a desperate shortage of green space. Just is given over to parks and gardens – the lowest proportion of any European city. (By comparison, London boasts 33% green space and Madrid 35%.)…If all goes to plan, all of Paris’s 800 schools will be transformed into green spaces by 2040.” The scheme will include features such as “a green wall here, a vegetable planter there, expanded areas of shade and special drainable concrete surfaces that can absorb water when it rains”.

Politico has a feature by Prof Stefan Rahmstorf who is head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He looks at the causes of this summer’s extreme weather. He argues that the jet stream has also been affected by global warming: “This is currently one of the hottest topics in climate research. The basic idea is that the jet stream — a band of high winds around the Northern Hemisphere that significantly influences our weather in the mid-latitudes — is changing…But the atmosphere is not the only player that can change its flow patterns. The ocean circulation may also have played a role, in particular the Gulf Stream System. Researchers have shown that particularly cold surface water in the subpolar North Atlantic favors summer heat in Europe, again by changing the pattern of highs and lows in the atmosphere and thus the undulations of the jet stream…Climate change does not just mean that everything is gradually getting warmer: It is also changing the major circulations of our atmosphere and ocean. This is making the weather increasingly weird and unpredictable.”

Climate change is expected to have a large impact on regions with permafrost. A new study examined peatland permafrost at five sites in Canada, in regions ranging from 51.4 degrees North to 53.7 degrees North. Most permafrost peatland is less than 5m thick, with a maximum of 10m. Despite the warm permafrost, model predictions using downscaled global warming scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5) indicate that perennially frozen ground will thaw from the base up and may persist at the southern site until the middle of the 21st century. At the northern site, permafrost is more resilient, persisting to the 2060s under RCP8.5, the 2090s under RCP4.5, or beyond the 21st century under RCP2.6. Despite evidence of peatland permafrost degradation in the study region, the local-scale modelling suggests that the southern boundary of permafrost may not move north as quickly as previously hypothesized.