Our tracker monitoring which countries have submitted theirpledges to the UN on how far they intend to reduce their greenhousegas emissions has been updated to include Macedonia’ssubmission.

Carbon dioxide emissions from US power plants hit a 27-yearlow in April, the Department of Energy has announced. A big factorwas the long-term shift from coal to cleaner and cheaper naturalgas, said Energy Department economist Allen McFarland. Outsideexperts also credit more renewable fuel use and energy efficiency.”A factor behind all these trends is that the writing is on thewall about the future of coal,” said Princeton University professorMichael Oppenheimer.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has announcedapproval for the Dogger Bank Teesside A and B Offshore windproject, which is expected to deliver up to 400 offshore windturbines providing 2.4GW of clean power capacity. The project,which is being proposed by the Forewind consortium that bringstogether SSE, RWE, Statkraft and Statoil, has the potential toprovide enough electricity for up to 1.8m Britishhomes.

Sixteen US states have asked the government to put Obama’sclean energy plan rules on hold. West Virginia Attorney GeneralPatrick Morrisey, who is leading the charge against the rules,banded together with 15 other state attorneys general in a letterto Environmental Protection Agency’s Gina McCarthy requesting thatthe agency temporarily suspend the rules while they challenge theirlegality in court. The letter called for the EPA to respond byFriday. Meanwhile, Bloombergreports that SenateRepublicans have advanced a bill to block Obama’s regulations,overcoming a walkout by Democrats from a committee meeting that wasconsidering the measure.

Negotiators working on a global climate change plan have”considerable common ground” according to a review of recentdiscussions published by the French and Peruvian governments. Afive-page ‘aide-memoire’ indicates a significant number ofcountries are in agreement over the structure and goals of theproposed deal, due to be signed off in December. It suggests thereis now widespread support for five-yearly reviews of globalgreenhouse gas cuts, although countries may only be compelled toincrease national targets every decade. But the document underlinesthe need for “clarity” on how $100bn of climate finance will flowfrom rich to poor countries by 2020.

France has launched a tender for several floating offshorewind turbine projects in what is set to be the first attempt totest this new technology on an industrial scale. French environmentagency ADEME has posted a tender document inviting companies tosubmit proposals to build floating wind farms with between three tosix turbines each, with a capacity of at least 5 megawatts perturbine in three sites in the Mediterranean and one site offsouthern Brittany.

The New Scientist reports that later this year, the UKgovernment is expected to give the go-ahead for the £500m WhiteRose carbon capture and storage project at Drax in North Yorkshire.”From 2020 it could capture 2m tonnes of CO2 annually from a newpower plant burning coal and biomass, sending it down a 165kmpipeline for burial under the North Sea. With CO2 burial up andrunning, the White Rose project will make electricitycarbon-negative for the equivalent of around 600,000 homes. Thepipeline will be big enough to take most of the rest of the CO2produced at Drax if it were captured in future.”

The Telegraph’s international business editor says that “ifthe oil futures market is correct, Saudi Arabia will start runninginto trouble within two years”. He adds: “It will be in existentialcrisis by the end of the decade…The Saudis took a huge gamblelast November when they stopped supporting prices and opted insteadto flood the market and drive out rivals, boosting their own outputto 10.6m barrels a day into the teeth of the downturn…If the aimwas to choke the US shale industry, the Saudis have misjudgedbadly…By causing the oil price to crash, the Saudis and theirGulf allies have certainly killed off prospects for a raft ofhigh-cost ventures in the Russian Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, thedeep waters of the mid-Atlantic, and the Canadian tar sands…Theproblem for the Saudis is that US shale frackers are nothigh-cost.”

Black, the director of the Energy and Climate IntelligenceUnit and a former BBC science and environment correspondent, saysthat a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 yesterday called “What’sthe point of…the Met Office?” ended up “in territoryunrecognisable in the editorial guidelines”. The 30-minuteprogramme, which featured a string of climate sceptics appeared, tocontravene internal BBC editorial guidelines: “Material was not’well sourced and based on sound evidence’, as the guidelinesprescribe. The responsibility to ‘check and cross check facts’appears to have been neglected, along with the commitment to’corroborate claims and allegations made by contributors whereverpossible.”

A year before China hopes to launch what will eventuallybecome the world’s biggest emissions trading scheme (ETS),officials have yet to make a series of decisions crucial to themarket’s success. Reklev outlines the key issues the Chinese needto solve if they want the national ETS to be an efficient tool inhelping meet emission targets.

Wynn looks at the issue of “power density” which is theamount of power made available by a particular energy technology orfuel, per unit of the Earth’s surface area. He calculates that ifthe UK were to ever achieve 100% renewable energy, it would “use upnearly 2.9m hectares, or 12% of the total [land[“. He concludes:”Such large impacts can be mistakenly forgotten, and show why it’simportant to think through the consequences of a possibletransition to 100% renewables, even if it would take decades toachieve.”

Readfearn looks at a a new book which investigates how theAustralian industries that stood to lose the most from theirgovernment pledging in 1990 it would cut emissions by 20% by 2005worked to undermine the science and entirely reshape the storybeing told to the public. “We have been propagandised,” says theauthor, Maria Taylor. “In the book Taylor explains how from thelate 1980s industry groups, free market advocates and climatecontrarians got to work to reframe the issue from the science tothe economics. By 1996 much of the damage was done. The advent ofJohn Howard’s government ensured there would be no more genuineprogress.”

Despite past studies suggesting urbanisation contributes10-40% of China’s national warming, a new study suggests the UrbanHeat Island (UHI) could account for as little as 1%. Whether or noturbanisation has a substantial effect on warming in China, whereurban areas constitute 0.7% of the country, has long been a topicof some debate, the paper notes.

Instead of using global mean temperature to evaluate climatechange, a new study attempts to calculate the temperature asperceived by humans, something the authors call the “heat index”.Calculated from temperature and humidity and adjusted to accountfor a country’s population, the paper shows how the heat index canserve as a basis for better understanding the impact of climatechange on human health and productivity.