David Malpass, the “embattled” head of the World Bank nominated by former US president Donald Trump, is to step down in June, around a year early, the New York Times reports. The paper says he “came under fire for his own views on climate change” last September. It continues: “The departure of Malpass is likely to add new urgency to sweeping changes that were already underway at the World Bank. It will also give President Biden, who came to office with an ambitious climate agenda, the opportunity to install a leader whose term will stretch until 2028.” The outlet adds: “Possible replacements could include Rajiv Shah, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation; Samantha Power, the head of the US Agency for International Development; and Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive of PepsiCo; according to global development experts.” The Financial Times says Malpass is stepping down “following sustained criticism over [the bank’s] response to climate change under his leadership”. It adds: “The US and other big World Bank shareholders have been pressing the institution over the past year to step up efforts on tackling global challenges, including climate change, alongside its traditional mandate of tackling global poverty.” Reuters says Malpass is to leave “months after running afoul of the White House for failing to say whether he accepts the scientific consensus on global warming”. Politico reports: “The bank has defended its record on climate finance under Malpass, noting it devoted a record $32bn to the sector last year to best all other multilateral institutions combined. But the bank nonetheless faced charges that it was not moving fast enough and that its design precluded major greenhouse gas-emitting nations from accessing cheap finance to fund their transitions off fossil fuels.” A Reuters “factbox” looks at potential replacements for Malpass, listing those mentioned by the New York Times and several others, including Minouche Shafik “an Egypt-born, British American economist who is currently president of the London School of Economics and has served as deputy governor of the Bank of England and deputy managing director of the IMF” and Wally Adeyemo, “deputy secretary of the US Treasury”. Axios also covers the news.

Swiss mining and commodity trading firm Glencore has reported “record full-year earnings driven by high energy prices and the Ukraine war”, the Financial Times reports. It says more than half of the $34bn the firm earned last year came from coal mining, where profits “more than tripled” on the previous year. The paper says: “Glencore’s rival Trafigura also generated a record $7.1bn in net profit last year.” It adds: “While traditional energy companies such as oil and gas producers have been subjected to windfall taxes in several European countries, including the UK, the trading houses have largely avoided similar treatment.” The Times says Glencore has “cashed in on the high coal prices and energy market chaos caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. Bloomberg also has the story. Separately, the Press Association reports that British Gas owner Centrica “more than treble[d]” its profits in 2022 “amid rocketing energy prices that have sparked a cost-of-living crisis”. 

Related comment by Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews says: “The boss of $80bn commodity giant Glencore is minting money from coal while prices are high, but planning to keep production of the fossil fuel roughly steady until 2025. It’s a plan that risks pleasing no one, while also dirtying the company’s valuation.” She continues: “On the one hand, purely financially motivated investors might want him to make even more money by ramping up production. On the other, green investors like Legal & General Investment Management and HSBC Asset Management are pushing to find out more details about how Nagle reconciles his plans with the objectives of the Paris Agreement on climate change, according to the Financial Times.” Kwok adds: “Nagle is not caving in to either side. His plan is to hang on to coal and keep annual production steady at around 110 million tonnes up to 2025. Using the prodigious cash flows from that business, he can reward shareholders while also funding investments in copper and cobalt. Over the longer term, he’ll then start shutting coal mines, with at least a dozen closures planned before 2035. The risk is that Nagle’s compromise pleases neither the green crowd nor the others.” In the Times, chief business commentator Alistair Osborne writes: “Someone was always going to benefit from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And who more deserving than Glencore, the miner and commodity trader lately famous for setting aside $1.5bn to settle historic bribery claims?” He adds: “In an ideal world, Glencore’s success would be down to its production of copper, zinc and nickel: minerals crucial to the battery power, wind farms and solar panels of a decarbonising world. But, back in the real one, it’s lucking out on coal…Nagle’s pragmatic approach is to ‘responsibly deplete’ coal over time, with 12 mines earmarked for closure by 2035: a sort of ‘make me chaste but not yet’ St Augustine stance.”

There is widespread coverage of new research showing, says Axios, that the Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica’s largest, “is melting faster in some spots than its shape would at first suggest”. The outlet notes: “Thwaites tops the list of glaciers that keep polar scientists up at night. If it were to disintegrate into the ocean, the portions of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet it holds back could raise global sea levels by up to 10 feet [3m].” BBC News reports: “Antarctic glaciers may be more sensitive to changes in sea temperature than was thought, new research shows.” Reuters says: “Scientists studying Antarctica’s vast Thwaites Glacier – nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier – say warm water is seeping into its weak spots, worsening melting caused by rising temperatures, two papers published in Nature journal showed on Wednesday.” It adds: “Thwaites, which is roughly the size of Florida, represents more than half a metre (1.6 feet) of global sea level rise potential, and could destabilise neighbouring glaciers that have the potential to cause a further three-metre (9.8-foot) rise.” The New York Times and the Independent also have the story. The Guardian reports: “The area of sea ice around Antarctica has hit a record low, with scientists reporting ‘never having seen such an extreme situation before’.” Another Guardian article says: “A major scientific expedition to urgently assess record-low sea ice levels in Antarctica has been cancelled due to ongoing repairs of Australia’s icebreaking vessel, RSV Nuyina.”

Chinese renewable energy generation capacity “edged out coal power capacity for the first time” last year, with “new solar driving the electricity sector’s efforts to reach ambitious national carbon emission goals even as the removal of subsidies continued to drag the growth of wind turbine construction”, writes Caixin Global. It adds that renewable energy, a category which in China also includes nuclear and hydropower, “accounted for 47.3% of China’s total installed generation capacity” by the end of 2022, with coal accounting for “just 43.8% of generation capacity”. The data comes from Wang Dapeng, deputy director of the New and Renewable Energy Department of the National Energy Administration (NEA), the country’s top energy regulator, at a press conference on Monday. Separately, Bloomberg covers new analysis for Carbon Brief under the headline: “China’s coal emissions are a mystery in fog of conflicting data.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes that China’s thermal coal price “plunged to the lowest in a year…weighed down by high inventories amid weak demand and Beijing’s focus on energy security”. It highlights that the Chinese “benchmark” power-station coal price “fell to a one-year low of 1,000 yuan ($147) per tonne this week, dropping below government-set caps”, citing consultant Fengkuang Coal Logistics. The current rate is “about 40% lower than a record high four months ago”, citing data compiled by the China Coal Resource, the outlet adds. A further Bloomberg article reports that China has “ramped up its oil purchases as an expected recovery in the nation’s crude consumption gathers pace following the end of its strict Covid-zero policy…boosting optimism in the outlook for global demand”. Another Bloomberg piece says that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has “boosted forecasts for global oil demand as China reopens its economy following years of anti-Covid lockdowns”.

Xinhua writes that Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, has “called on the international community to take all necessary actions to rigorously slow down global warming and contain the trend of rapid sea-level rise”. Noting that “climate change is the root cause of sea-level rise”, Zhang Jun “urged” the international community to “adopt a greater sense of urgency without delay, seize the opportunity to take all necessary actions and prevent climate change from causing irreversible catastrophes to humanity”. The state news agency also notes that Zhang said at a Security Council debate that “to achieve the temperature cap set out in the Paris Agreement, developed countries must take the lead in further reducing emissions’. The state-run newspaper Global Times covers the same news.

Finally, the state-run newspaper China Daily has a comment piece by former UK chancellor Philip Hammond, He writes: “In the context of the damage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the changes brought about by Britain’s departure from the European Union and the further deterioration in global trade and economic productivity, it is important for the UK and China to return to business as usual.” He continues, “While we [the UK] are very much focused on trade and investment, it is not only about economics. As we begin to address the challenge of climate change, China will be our indispensable partner in the battle against global warming, a battle that cannot be won without China’s wholehearted commitment.”

India has “slammed” carbon border measures being implemented by “some countries”, dubbing them “discriminatory and protectionist”, the Economic Times reports. In a submission to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last week, India says these rules are being “selectively applied” to “trade-exposed industries”, including steel, aluminium, chemicals, polymers, plastics and fertilisers which “reflects the underlying competitiveness concerns driving such measures”, the story continues. The outlet reports that in the letter India said that carbon border measures “will amount to imposing a unilateral vision of how to combat climate change” and “undermine the multilaterally-agreed mandate of NDCs [nationally determined contributions] of the country of export”. The EU’s new deforestation law is among the measures listed in the story. Bloomberg reports: “India’s plan to lift a key trade barrier on solar modules will deliver a blow to the nation’s ambition of quickly expanding local production, according to domestic manufacturers.”

Separately, Business Standard reports that “a day after BBC India’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai were searched by income tax officers, a senior government official said this will not affect the ongoing free trade agreement negotiations between India and the UK”, the latter seeking concessions for its automotive sector.

Elsewhere, Germany’s climate envoy Jennifer Morgan has said India’s G20 presidency is “crucial for resolving climate finance issues and scaling up global mitigation efforts” and “stressed the need to accelerate energy transition and phase out all fossil fuels”, the PTI newswire reports. In an interview with the Economic Times, Denmark’s minister for development and global climate policy Dan Jorgensen is quoted saying: “India’s push to recognise the need to phase out all fossil fuels and not just coal has Denmark’s full support”. Jorgensen tells the paper: “[W]e have been one of the proponents and frontrunners in arguing that we should actually expand the formulation…as proposed by India…Even though it wasn’t reflected in the [COP27] conclusions, what was positive was that [an estimated] 80 countries supported [India’s] formulation, a huge success.”

Meanwhile, a detailed comment piece for Carbon Copy by M Rajshekhar examines the impact of “Adani’s current crisis on India’s clean energy goals”, given the group’s “oversized imprint” on “any part of India’s energy sector”. The story points out that shares of Adani Power, Adani Transmission and Adani Green Energy – “all heavily implicated in the report – have at the time of writing shed 46%, 61% and 66% of their value since the report was released”. According to the writer, “it seems safe to assume that, in the short term, the group will have to focus on businesses with high returns”, such as coal imports. The piece concludes that “if the group fails to add 45GW [gigawatts] in renewables by 2030, India will indeed lose”, but the “larger answer” is that Adani’s thwarted green-growth plans “will likely be more of a blip rather than a death knell for the country’s ambitions” and that “what India has today is a chance to roll that clock back”.

The Biden administration has announced new rules for electric vehicle chargers receiving federal funds that include serving all brands, the Hill reports, adding that this is “expected to push Tesla in particular away from chargers that only serve its own vehicles”. Reuters says Tesla “will open part of its US charging network to electric vehicles (EVs) made by rivals as part of a $7.5bn federal program to expand the use of EVs and cut carbon emissions”. The Financial Times and Axios also have the story. Reuters reports that the “long-awaited” rules from the Biden administration “require chargers to be built in the US immediately and with 55% of their cost coming from US-made components by 2024”. Separately, Reuters reports that Tesla has “sold out its Model Y for this quarter in the US”. Another Reuters article says Ford has suspended production of its electric F-150 “until at least the end of next week after a battery fire involving one of the vehicles earlier in the month”. And a final Reuters piece says: “Interest in using hydrogen fuel cells to power trucks and vans is getting a boost from fleet operators looking for a more practical alternative to electric vehicles and rising government aid, particularly the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).”

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and Microsoft founder Bill Gates have met to “hail a new wave of innovative British firms using technology to combat climate change”, the Daily Mail reports. It continues: “The prime minister and the billionaire Microsoft founder attended the launch at Imperial College London of so-called cleantech companies hoping to ‘supercharge the UK’s green economy’.” The paper quotes Sunak saying: “It is fantastic to see these researchers, scientists, business people solving the challenges of net-zero, and creating jobs in the process. That’s amazing.” It quotes Gates saying: “The UK has all the ingredients to become a major player in the global push to build a net-zero emissions future.” Elsewhere in the Daily Mail, columnist Stephen Glover decries the “the anti-car zealots making money out of punishing motorists”. He also questions climate change, saying greenhouse gases are “believed” to be behind warming. Glover says “[o]f course, more needs to be done to reduce emissions”, but adds that the UK “accounts for about 1% of the world’s greenhouse gases”.

In other UK news, BusinessGreen reports: “The UK’s lead in the global offshore wind market is being squeezed, according to fresh industry figures today which show its global market share has fallen below 10% for the first time amid increasing competition worldwide.”

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has been “hit with a rare legal action by an environmental group that claims the [watchdog] unlawfully signed off listing documents that allegedly failed to adequately outline oil and gas producer Ithaca Energy’s climate change risks”, the Financial Times reports. It says this is the first time environmental law charity ClientEarth has targeted the UK’s financial regulator. According to the paper, the challenge “said Ithaca’s prospectus acknowledged that climate change posed a risk to oil and gas companies, but was too general to leave investors fully informed or to meet prospectus regulation, which requires companies to disclose material risks”.

The UK “capacity market” auction to secure sufficient electricity capacity for winter 2023/24 has “cleared” at £60 per kilowatt (kW), Reuters reports, adding that this is down from last year’s record-high of £75/kW. The newswire says 5.8 gigawatts (GW) of capacity won contracts in the auction, including 2.6GW of gas plants, 1.4GW of nuclear and 0.6GW of batteries. [Note that these are “derated” figures that account for expected availability. The total capacity of new batteries winning contracts in the auction is 2.3GW, according to consultancy Aurora, which says this will “more than double” the UK’s battery storage capacity by next winter.]

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that Norway “may tax power exports to keep domestic prices down”. It explains: “The Labour-led government has…faced a domestic backlash over new power exchange cables to Britain and Germany, which have been partly blamed for higher electricity prices.”

Barclays says it is tightening lending rules for coal power and will no longer finance oil sands exploration projects, Reuters reports, adding that the bank failed to “announce new restrictions on oil and gas lending as some rivals have”. The newswire says the bank has extended its plan to phase out financing for coal power in the UK and EU by 2030, to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The outlet adds: “Barclays also set its first emission-cutting target for the automotive manufacturing industry, with a pledge to reduce emissions intensity between 40% and 64% by 2030 against a 2022 baseline.”

A Financial Times “big read” looks at the Biden administration’s “revolution in American industrial policy”, which it says “has huge geopolitical ramifications” but is “also a gamble”. The piece says: “Across the country, a new revolution is under way in sectors from solar to nuclear, carbon capture to green hydrogen – and its goals are profound: to rejuvenate the country’s rustbelt, decarbonise the world’s biggest economy, and wrest control of the 21st-century’s energy supply chains from China, the world’s cleantech superpower.” It looks at risks to the policy, noting: “The ring of protectionism, and the sheer scale of the state intervention, has alarmed allies.” The piece also says: “Yet some of the IRA tax credits also depend on paying prevailing wages and including apprenticeships in the workforce – measures designed explicitly to address the longstanding complaints of American workers who have watched jobs ‘shipped overseas’ over decades of globalisation, but which are also increasing costs.” In related news, Bloomberg reports: “The booming US residential solar market is at a crossroads. It’s being supported like never before by expanded federal funding and fears of increasingly fragile grids and volatile fuel prices. But solar also faces unprecedented headwinds, from soaring interest rates and state subsidy cuts to a weaker economy and historic rainstorms.”

In a comment for Euronews, Laurence Tubiana, the head of the European Climate Foundation (which funds Carbon Brief), writes: “Europe has always been a leader in the fight against climate change. The US’s recent commitment to catching up is cause for celebration, not concern.” She says: “Yes, greening our industries and attracting innovators will entail competition with trade partners as we jostle to create growth and jobs under new economic conditions.” Tubiana continues: “While the EU’s attempts to design meaningful industrial strategies have often lacked urgency, the IRA shows that we have entered a new and welcome phase in the climate fight. Building upon existing climate laws and policies, Brussels must identify the path to a socially-just economic and industrial paradigm that prioritises enterprise and innovation rather than solely underpinning the profitability of existing value chains.”

Separately, Bloomberg interviews German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan for its “Zero” podcast, discussing matters including what it calls the “new climate race between the EU and US”.

Two new studies conclude that complex ice–ocean interactions will play a key role in the future of Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier. Both papers report observations of ice melt rates, plus the properties of the glacier and surrounding ocean, taken via an access hole drilled through more than 500 metres of ice. The authors of the first study found warm water beneath the floating ice shelf. They note that stratification separates these waters from the ice, thereby suppressing melting. These findings show that rapid retreat of the Thwaites Glacier can occur without extensive basal melting, they say. The second study, published in the same journal, finds that high melt rates occur where ice is sharply sloped at the ocean interface, whereas melting was suppressed at flat interfaces. These observations demonstrate the influence of ice morphology on ice loss, according to the paper.

Ice-dam floods today originate at higher elevations and happen about six weeks earlier than they did in 1900, new research finds. The authors assess trends in the peak discharge, volume, annual timing and source elevation of failing ice-dammed lakes over 1900-2021, using data on more than 1,500 ice-dammed lakes in six major mountain regions. They find that “extreme peak flows and volumes” declined around tenfold over the study period in five of the six regions. “We anticipate that ice dams will continue to fail in the near future, even as glaciers thin and recede,” the paper adds.

New research finds that vegetation is shifting to higher elevations across mountain ranges in western North America. The authors use 27 years of high-resolution satellite data to quantify elevation changes in vegetation cover across nine mountain ranges in western North America. “At these highest elevations, the realised velocity of vegetation varies among mountain ranges from 19.8–112.8 metres per decade,” the paper finds. This is more than four times faster than previously reported for plants, it notes. The authors add that “in three of the five mountain ranges with long-term climate data, realised velocities fail to keep pace with changes in temperature”.