As the new Conservative government enjoys its first week in
power, the speculation has already began about where it will make
its pledged cuts in spending. Carbon Brief takes a look at DECC’s
budget and explains where it has spent its money – and where it
currently plans to up to 2016. The legacy cost of cleaning up and
storing nuclear waste still accounts for a huge proportion of the
department’s budget.

The UK’s renewable energy industry had its best year yet for
new investment, attracting £10.7bn in 2014, according to new
analysis, but the country still requires a further £50bn over the
next five years if it is to meet its green energy targets. Analysis
by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) on behalf of the Renewable Energy
Association (REA), shows that solar power alone attracted £4.5bn of
investment, accounting for half of new investment in UK renewables
last year.

Centrica has extended its gas supply deal with Norway’s
Statoil and Russia’s Gazprom. Both agreements will provide enough
gas to meet demand from 9m homes in the UK annually, the company
said in a statement. The Telegraph says the deal highlights
Britain’s growing dependence on overseas supplies of natural gas as
domestic stocks from the North Sea dwindle. The Timesand the Financial Timesalso carry the
story.

The Marshall Islands, the world’s third largest shipping
registry, may stop registering oil rigs because of climate change,
according to the Pacific nation’s foreign minister Tony de Brum. De
Brum said that his government may consider the move, but it would
be useless in isolation and would only damage a business worth $5m
each year, 2.5% of the country’s GDP. Meanwhile, according
to RTCC, a meeting of the International
Maritime Organisation in London has failed to agree a proposal from
the Marshall Islands to sign up to a pledge ahead of the Paris
climate summit in December to reduce global shipping emissions.

US Senate Republicans have announced a bill with a
multi-pronged approach to fight the Environmental Protection
Agency’s (EPA) carbon limits for power plants. The bill would
immediately repeal the proposed climate rules both for new and
existing power plants and attach various provisions that the EPA
would have to follow if it wanted to rewrite them. The Republicans
are presenting the legislation as its main Senate effort against
the rules that were proposed last year.

Energy chiefs from the G7 group of industrialised countries
say they are optimistic plans for a global climate change treaty
will come together in Paris this December. A joint statement
released by the group, which numbers the US, Canada, Japan,
Germany, France, Italy and the UK as members stressed the “urgency”
of “deep” greenhouse gas cuts.

Nicolas Hulot, France’s special envoy for the environment,
says he was “greatly surprised” by the changing attitudes in Russia
towards climate change, saying any potential blockage at this
year’s UN climate conference in Paris is unlikely to come from
Moscow. “To be honest, we went there not knowing how we would be
received,” Hulot said of a recent trip he made to Moscow with a
French diplomatic delegation. But “in the end, we were not at all
in this state of mind”.

A UN climate deal in Paris will seek to lift world economic
growth and be based more on encouragement than threats of
punishment for non-compliance, according to Christiana Figueres,
the UN’s climate chief. The deal would be “enabling and
facilitating” rather than a “punitive-type” agreement, she said.
The deal’s main thrust would be to decouple greenhouse gas
emissions from gross domestic product growth. RTCCalso carry the story.

Fracking could unlock nearly 140bn barrels of new global oil
supplies, an amount equivalent to Russia’s known reserves,
according to analysis by research company IHS. Countries such as
Iran, Russia, Mexico and China stand to gain most. IHS said it had
been “surprised at the impressive potential for increased recovery
using these unconventional techniques” outside the US.

Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth has become the latest ministerial
addition to DECC. He joins newly appointed secretary of state Amber
Rudd and energy minister Andrea Leadsom, who replaced Matt Hancock.
Lord Bourne, who becomes the parliamentary under secretary of
state, has been a member of the Lords since September 2013 and was
appointed as a government whip last August. He served as leader of
the opposition in the Welsh Assembly from 2007 to 2011.

RWE has warned of “drastic” consequences for the energy
group if plans by the German government to increase emissions
charges for older coal-fired power stations go ahead. Like its
rival Eon, earnings at RWE have been squeezed by the German
government backing renewable energy, says the FT. The subsidised
expansion of clean energy, which now accounts for more than a
quarter of electricity generation in Germany, has led to a glut of
power production that has pushed down wholesale prices.

The US government has downgraded its forecast for oil
production for the next two years as the International Energy
Agency (IEA), the world’s top energy watchdog, warned that the
market is still oversupplied with crude. The new US government
estimate reflects the collapse in US rig counts over the last six
months as oil prices below $100 per barrel hit frackers in North
America hard.

The Conservatives must not undermine the so-called green
economy and cause job losses through their manifesto pledge to end
subsidies for onshore windfarms, figures in the renewable energy
industry have said. Dale Vince, founder of Ecotricity and a major
donor to Labour in the run-up to the election, said the new
government would be mistaken to ignore the green economy, which is
worth about £128bn a year.

Saudi Arabia says its strategy of squeezing high-cost
rivals, such as US shale producers, is succeeding, as the world’s
largest crude exporter seeks to reassert itself as the dominant
force in the global oil market. The kingdom’s production rose to a
record high of 10.3m barrels a day in April and there is no sign,
says the FT, that it plans to reverse its policy at next month’s
meeting of Opec, the producers’ cartel.

RenewableUK’s Maria McCaffery argues the industry can play a
major role in delivering economic success throughout this
parliament, but only if the government delivers a clear and stable
vision for the sector. “It is utterly logical that [onshore wind]
should continue to play a role. We urgently need clarity on
this.”

Two co-authors of a recent study in Scientific Reports
entitled “Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to
observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise”, respond
to “misleading” media articles about their work. They say: “Part of
the confusion stems form the Duke University press release which
used the headline ‘Global Warming More Moderate Than Worst-Case
Models’. The news department created this headline as a replacement
for our suggested headline of ‘Global Warming Progressing at
Moderate Rate, Empirical Data Suggest’.”

Sixty experts met in February to review recent progress in
El Niño research, specifically why a much-anticipated even last
year failed to materialise. The reason may, at least in part, be “a
reflection of our incomplete knowledge of extreme El Niño and its
predictability or perhaps the very nature of the ENSO system
itself”, the scientists’ report from the meeting concludes.

A new discussion paper discusses the plight of Small Island
Developing States, noting that while these nations risk losing
their physical homeland, cultural loss as a matter of justice is
often neglected. Cultural loss is “often seen as merely unfortunate
but not unjust” but climate change affects people’s basic rights
and needs urgent attention through ambitious adaptation plans the
authors argue.

A new study looks at how much carbon the world’s rivers
flush into the ocean and whether it mostly derives from vegetation
on land or from rocks. The new estimate, which finds that the rate
of physical erosion plays a big role in burial of carbon in marine
sediments, will help modellers predict how carbon export to the
oceans may shift as Earth’s climate changes.