Commenting on newly appointed UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, the Guardian says: “Sunak has never been considered a fully signed up member of the green agenda, and even allies admit he saw the ‘costs rather than the benefits’ of environmental action while chancellor. But after just over a month of a Liz Truss government, many see a Sunak premiership as a welcome relief.” It continues: “There was a glimmer of hope on Monday afternoon when Sunak made the environment a key pledge in his speech to Tory MPs…[But] Sunak has the backing of vocal climate action sceptic MPs including Kemi Badenoch, who has called the net-zero target ‘unilateral economic disarmament’, and Steve Baker, the founder of the Net-Zero Scrutiny Group of [climate-sceptic] Tory MPs.” The Independent calls Sunak’s record on climate change “mixed”. It continues: “He has said the country needs to insulate millions of homes, rewire the global financial system for net zero and implement plans to protect a third of the UK for nature. But he has also committed to driving up North Sea gas production…and said he would scrap plans to relax a ban on onshore wind farms”. As chancellor, Sunak “reluctantly” brought in a windfall tax on oil and gas companies, the paper adds. BusinessGreen says that, as chancellor, Sunak “signed off on the UK’s overarching net-zero strategy, vowed to make the UK the ‘world’s first net zero financial hub’, and oversaw the introduction of new climate risk reporting rules for publicly listed companies and financial institutions.  But he also came under fire for repeatedly refusing to unlock further funding to enhance domestic energy efficiency, while also slashing overseas development aid, cutting air passenger duty, and freezing fuel duty.” ITV News adds: “During the last leadership election, he said he wanted to see the UK become energy-independent by 2045, but also said he would keep the ban on building new onshore wind farms and vowed to prevent farmland being covered in solar panels.” Time says climate campaigners are “cautiously optimistic”, but calls Sunak’s record on climate action “pretty poor”.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times carries a warning from the head of a domestic heating provider that “ministers have not done enough to improve energy efficiency in UK homes”. And another FT article says “energy suppliers are set to force vulnerable British households to switch to expensive prepayment electricity and gas meters at a rate of 10,000 meters a month by the end of 2022, as consumers fall behind with regular payments”.

The government of Egypt has decided there will be no pavilion events on the first Monday of COP27, according to an email seen by the Guardian. The paper continues: “NGOs have raised concerns because they have carefully targeted their rosters of events to raise key issues they say must be addressed at the two-week-long conference. They fear the cancellations could restrict debate and undermine the role of non-state actors in the event. Media access to pavilions and other areas within the blue zone is also likely to be heavily restricted.” This comes as Reuters reports that concerned activists say “the decision to hold next month’s COP27 climate summit in a highly secured tourist resort in Egypt, along with restrictions on access, is curbing civil society’s participation in the event”. And the Associated Press says “COP27′s Coke sponsorship leaves bad taste with green groups”.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the European Union “is aiming to clinch deals” on three new “emissions-cutting laws” ahead of the summit, to “boost its political clout at the talks”. The newswire adds: “The policies being fast-tracked are a law to ban sales of new fossil fuel cars in the EU by 2035, expand Europe’s natural CO2-absorbing ‘sinks’ like forests, and set binding national emissions-cutting goals.” Separately, the newswire reports that, yesterday, the bloc agreed to raise its current goal of cutting emissions by 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels. The comes as the Associated Press reports that the African nations’ climate negotiators had their final meeting ahead of COP27 yesterday. Meanwhile, more than 100 environmental groups in the US have signed a letter urging John Kerry to support the creation of a loss and damage fund, according to Reuters.

Dozens of climate and energy activists from Greenpeace and Fuel Poverty Action occupied the central lobby in the Houses of Parliament hours after Rishi Sunak was named the UK’s new prime minister, the Independent reports. According to the paper, the activists stopped live interviews with MPs, unfurled a banner reading “chaos costs lives” and read testimonies from people struggling with their energy bills. They are demanding that Sunak “starts putting the welfare of the British people before fossil fuel companies by properly taxing oil and gas profits and launching a nationwide home insulation programme to tackle fuel poverty”, the paper says. Meanwhile, the Independent reports that Just Stop Oil protesters threw cake yesterday over King Charles III’s waxwork statue at Madame Tussauds in London. The group has “vowed to take action every day this month in a call for an end to new oil and gas licenses”, the paper adds.

Labour leader Keir Starmer has said in a live interview with LBC that he would “continue with Tory plans for stiff sentences for climate protesters who block roads”, the Guardian reports. The Independent adds that Starmer called activists who stopped traffic or threw food at paintings “wrong and arrogant”. This comes as the Guardian reports on an opinion poll, which finds that “two-thirds of Brits supported taking nonviolent direct action to protect the UK’s nature. It adds: “The poll indicates the unpopularity of a recent swathe of government policies, with more than twice as many people saying they trusted Labour to protect the environment as said they trusted the Conservatives.”

The Independent reports that, in the US, climate protesters interrupted an interview with the Texas Senator Ted Cruz on daytime talkshow “The View”. One protester stood up in the audience and criticised the network’s coverage of climate change, the paper says. She later told the Independent that ABC spent less than six hours covering climate change last year. The Associated Press reports that “two women began shouting ‘cover climate now’ while Cruz was answering a question. The Guardian says youth climate group Sunrise Movement later claimed responsibility for the protest. The Hill and the Independent also cover the protest. Elsewhere, student activists shut down an Exxon recruiting event, the Boston Globe reports.

Meanwhile, there is continuing coverage of two protesters who threw mashed potatoes over a Monet painting over the weekend in Germany. The Associated Press reports that the two activists from the “last generation” group were protesting against fossil fuel extraction. The Guardian, Independent, Times, Forbes and Wall Street Journal also cover the protest.

“The European Commission has warned countries that an EU-wide cap on the price of gas used to produce electricity could cause an increase in gas use and exports of EU-subsidised electricity”, according to a document seen by Reuters. The newswire notes that European Union countries’ energy ministers will meet on Tuesday to discuss options to cap EU gas prices, adding that countries are “still split over whether and how to do this after discussing it for weeks”. Bloomberg says the European Commission is warning that any price cap “would need to avoid boosting demand or subsidising electricity to foreign consumers”. It adds: “[The Commission] is advising EU members that such a price limit would have to be extended to power-importing countries like the UK or Switzerland for it be effective…Alternatively, the EU would have to export electricity at a higher price than in domestic trades, a move prohibited in a number of international agreements with partners.”

Elsewhere, Politico reports that “a succession of major European Union governments have now dumped the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a deal between 53 countries originally designed in the 1990s to protect Western investments in the energy systems of post-Soviet states”, in a piece with the headline: “The world’s biggest dirty energy club is cracking up”. This comes as the Financial Times reports that “European natural gas prices have dropped below €100 per megawatt hour for the first time since Russia slashed supplies this summer, with warm weather and close-to-full gas storage easing concerns over winter shortages”.

Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese has scrapped plans to underwrite new power generation in his budget, according to a Guardian “exclusive”. Introduced in 2018 under a previous coalition government, critics warned that the programme would “cost billions to prop up fossil fuels and would push up power prices”, the paper says. It adds that the scheme “was widely panned for delays in implementation, exposing taxpayers to billions of dollars worth of liabilities by guaranteeing a minimum price for dispatchable power, and competing with new-generation investments including the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project”.

The news comes as southeast Australia “braces for more rain”, with 209 flood warnings, Reuters reports. Local media reported a train crash 600km west of Sydney overnight after rail tracks “came loose” from the heavy rain, the newswire writes.

China’s GDP “grew 3.9% year-on-year” in the third quarter, as its economic recovery was held back by “strict” Covid-19 containment measures and an “ongoing property slump”, reports Caixin Global, citing “official data” published yesterday. China Energy News covers the same news. Citing the official website of the China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the state-run industry newspaper writes that, according to preliminary calculations, GDP in the first three quarters of 2022 reached “870,269bn yuan ($119,099bn), up 3.0% year-on-year at constant prices, which the is a 0.5 percentage points faster increase compared in the first half of 2022”. It adds that the “electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply industry grew by 5.6% year-on-year”; “new energy vehicles (NEV) and solar cell production increased by 112.5% and 33.7% year-on-year, respectively”. Additionally, Caixin has published a comment piece by its editorial team, titled: “Development is necessary for ‘rejuvenating’ China, but first comes growth.” Bloomberg carries a comment piece by David Fickling, titied “China’s new leadership hints at slower future for commodities.”

Separately, the South China Morning Post says that Beijing’s pledge a year ago has put a “significant dent” in planned coal-fired projects overseas, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Manila-based environmental policy group, People of Asia for Climate Solutions (PACS). Citing the analysts, the article adds that “greater support is needed to get low-emission projects up and running to replace the cancelled coal projects”. Relatedly, Reuters reports that, according to new research published by Boston University, “carbon dioxide emissions from China-invested power plants overseas now stand at an estimated 24m tonnes per year, about the same as the annual energy-related CO2 emissions from Spain or Thailand”.

China Energy News reports that last Friday the National Energy Administration (NEA), the country’s top energy regulator, issued a development plan, including “495 items” for “industry standards of the energy sector” in 2022. The state-run newspaper adds that the ministry of industry and information technology (MIIT) has also announced the “national industrial energy-saving supervision tasks” for 2022.

In other news, the state-run newspaper Global Times writes that Chinese experts said on Sunday that China-EU cooperation on “many areas such as climate change remains in focus” and “the EU should focus on practical cooperation, instead of US-instigated ideological rhetoric”. Bloomberg carries a comment piece by Marc Champion and Salma El Wardany, titled “Global climate summit is heading for a geopolitical hurricane”, saying relations between the “two largest emitters”, the US and China, had “devolved into zero-sum skirmishes over everything from trade to Taiwan”. The South China Morning Post says that China’s “diplomatic and economic engagement” with Africa has “risen” under leader Xi Jinping to become the continent’s “largest trading partner and main source of project finance”, adding that “mounting debt pressures” have seen projects under the Belt and Road Initiative “scaled down”. And, finally, Reuters reports that “Tesla has cut starter prices for its Model 3 and Model Y cars by as much as 9% in China, reversing a trend of increases across the industry amid signs of softening demand in the world’s largest auto market”.

There is continuing coverage of the news that, one year on from COP26, where 145 countries signed up to the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration “to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030”, a new assessment has warned that “not a single global indicator is on track”, the Independent reports. The assessment “found that the decrease in global deforestation in 2021 did not match the pace needed to reach the 2030 goal to eliminate deforestation laid out in the Glasgow pledge,” the paper says. It adds that “tropical Asia is the only region currently on track to halt deforestation by 2030, based largely on progress in Indonesia”. YaleE360 says “global deforestation dropped by just 6.3% in 2021”, noting that last year saw around 26,000 square miles of forest lost, releasing 3.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the Financial Times, former UK business secretary Peter Mandelson calls for “collaboration across the European neighbourhood” with regards to energy markets, offshore wind and North Sea oil and gas production. “Defeating Putin, achieving energy security, affordability and our net-zero ambitions depend on it”, he writes. Elsewhere in the FT, the Lex column says that offsetting the decline in Russian gas with other sources means Europe has stored enough gas to get through this winter (“unless it is very, very cold”). Unless it cuts consumption, however, Europe will feel “the full chill of Russia’s ill wind” the following winter, when a further 40bn cubic meters of gas are expected to be lost from Russia, the column adds.

Meanwhile, in its print edition, the Daily Mail welcomes new UK prime minister Rishi Sunak with a wide-ranging editorial, including its view on energy policy: “It makes senses…to secure our domestic energy supply by exploiting more North Sea oil and gas fields, looking closely at the potential for fracking and building more nuclear power stations.”

David Fogarty, climate change editor at the Straits Times in Singapore, has published excerpts from an “exclusive interview” with the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. In the interview, Birol was clear that the energy crisis will accelerate the clean energy transition. However, he warned: “If you look at the real economic impact of the energy crisis, it hurts the emerging economies very significantly as a result of high energy prices.” He warned that this could lead to geopolitical fracturing, which could spill over into COP27, the piece says. It adds that Birol “also questioned the wisdom of the Opec+ cartel’s decision this month to cut its oil production target by two million barrels per day, calling the move unprecedented and going against all expectations”.

Elsewhere, the Times chief business commentator Alistair Osborne shares concerns about the energy price cap introduced by the Truss government. He warns readers “at some of the prices being bandied around — a bit north of £50 per megawatt hour — there’s a risk it [the energy cap] halts investment in the green energy Britain needs”. Financial Times senior editor Leyla Boulton finds out firsthand that in a country with one of the oldest housing stocks “it would take 250 years to fit at least some renewable capacity in all UK homes which have none.” And journalist Tanya Gold, responding to coverage of Just Stop Oil protests, writes for the Evening Standard: “I can’t think of anything in which we [journalists] have failed the public more than in the coverage of the climate crisis.”

Producing gas-fired electricity around the world amounted to 3.6bn tonnes of CO2e in 2017 – equivalent to 10% of energy-related emissions, a new study says. The researchers estimate that deploying mitigation options can “reduce global emissions from gas-fired power by 71% with carbon capture and storage, methane abatement, and efficiency upgrades contributing 43%, 12% and 5%, respectively”. The authors note that “mitigation falls within national responsibilities, except an annual 20.5MtCO2e of ocean transport emissions”. And an accompanying News and Views article concludes that “for natural gas electricity to be on a net-zero trajectory, all countries in the natural gas electricity value chain must make efforts to cut emissions”.

New research suggests that reforming the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in the US to focus on “risk-based premiums” would yield “a positive societal benefit (US$10bn) because they will incentivise household risk-reduction investments”. The NFIP is currently a “financially unsustainable insurance programme in substantial debt”, says an accompanying Policy Brief article, where “insurance premiums insufficiently reflect flood risk and do not reward risk reduction actions satisfactorily”. The new study finds that “proactive investment in large-scale adaptation measures complements a transition to risk-based premiums to yield a higher overall societal benefit (US$26bn)”. The authors add that “investing in flood protection infrastructure will reduce some of the equity issues that arise when solely moving to risk-based premiums”.