UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has “set us back” on climate change and left the country at risk of falling behind others, Chris Stark, the head of the government’s climate watchdog, has said in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. Stark, who is soon set to leave his role as chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), says Sunak had “clearly not” prioritised the issue as much as his predecessors. He accuses Sunak of sending the world a message that the UK is now “less ambitious” than it once was, says the BBC News article about the interview, which aired yesterday. The article continues: “Stark said the country had made enormous progress towards reaching the climate target of net-zero by 2050 under Theresa May and Boris Johnson. But Sunak’s Downing Street had sent a message to the rest of the world that ‘the UK is less ambitious on climate than it once was and that is extremely hard to recover’…He said the UK had been successful in ‘decarbonising how we generate electricity, especially by closing coal-fired powerplants’. But to get to net-zero, more needs to be done on ‘how we heat homes, or how we deal with the industrial emissions that we have in this country, what we do with farming [and] transport systems’. ‘It’s in those other areas that we see the gap,’ he said. ‘I definitely feel we’re at risk.’” A separate BBC News article notes that Claire Coutinho, the UK secretary of state for energy security and net-zero, has responded to Stark’s comment in her own interview with Kuenssberg, saying the UK government has a “very strong track record of delivery”, but adding that she also did not want to “heap costs on families” in its pursuit of net-zero targets.

In other UK news, the Press Association reports that in Bath “broadcaster Chris Packham joined hundreds of protesters in a ‘funeral procession’ for the natural world destroyed by climate change”. The Daily Telegraph says that the “government has promised to proactively promote a ‘positive vision’ of electric cars to boost the market in response to a call from a House of Lords committee”. The climate-sceptic Sunday Telegraph claims in a frontpage story that “drivers in London could have to pay-per-mile charges by the end of the decade in order to achieve Sadiq Khan’s ‘accelerated’ plan to hit net-zero, documents reveal”. (In September, Khan told the London Assembly: “I want to be crystal clear.  A pay-per-mile scheme is not on the table and not on my agenda.”) The Times says that the “vast global overproduction of electric cars at a time of stalling consumer demand is likely to result in millions of zero-emission vehicles being left unsold over the next two years and hasten price wars, according to private industry research”. Another Times article examines the “wave of dozens of huge new solar farms planned around the country, which is being described as a ‘sunrush’”. And the Observer has a feature about Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, the last coal-fired power station in the country, which will see its turbines “stop spinning for good this year as the UK meets its pledge to ban coal use”.

Finally, the Financial Times reports: “The UK government is struggling to seal a deal with British Steel to secure the future of the country’s second-largest steelworks 18 months after the Chinese-owned company asked ministers for a £500m financial aid package. Jingye, which bought Britain’s second biggest steelmaker out of insolvency in 2020, is yet to submit a detailed, fully costed proposal that can be put before the Treasury for approval, according to people familiar with the matter. The potential aid package would keep steelmaking alive at British Steel’s flagship Scunthorpe site by funding a switch to greener forms of steelmaking that would protect some jobs.”

Scottish Greens are to hold a vote to determine the future of the party’s power-sharing agreement with the Scottish National party (SNP), after the government abandoned its pledge to cut carbon emissions 75% by 2030, reports the Guardian. BBC News says the Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie says things have “come to a head” with the party expected to hold an extraordinary general meeting to decide the issue. Sky News notes that Harvie has said “he would be urging members to back the power-sharing agreement so the party could ‘put Green values into practice’ in government”. The Times reports the views of the CCC’s Chris Stark (see above) who has described Scotland as a “salutary tale” of overambitious politics, adding that he says that a goal set in 2019 of slashing carbon emissions by 75% from their 1990 level by 2030 had always been “overambitious”.

Meanwhile, the Scotsman reports on its frontpage today that the SNP’s net-zero secretary Mairi McAllan has revealed she faced scenarios including “taking petrol and diesel cars off the road tomorrow” in order to keep Scotland’s 2030 climate target on track. The Press Association covers remarks made by Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow climate change and net-zero secretary, who has said that abandoning the goal to reduce emissions by 75% by 2030 was “humiliating” for Scottish ministers and would leave Scots “vulnerable to Putin’s whims”. And the Scotsman reports: “The Scottish government has been accused of ‘letting jobs slip away’ after being blamed for delays to an offshore wind farm.”

The annual World Bank and IMF meetings have “wrapped up without a concrete plan to mobilise the trillions of dollars needed to fight climate change, in a year where agreement on [the] New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) or a new climate finance goal will be the key issue at the United Nations climate conference (COP29) in Azerbaijan”, reports the Press Trust of India. The newswire continues: “Discussions between G7 and G20 finance ministers on the sidelines of the spring meetings [in Washington DC] that wrapped up on Saturday touched on providing finance to developing countries for meeting climate and development objectives. The Vulnerable Group of Twenty Countries (V20) called for increased concessional finance for climate-vulnerable nations, and urged G7 and high-emitting G21 countries to safeguard the 1.5C limit. The Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four on International Monetary Affairs and Development (G24) called for reforms to ensure timely assistance to vulnerable nations and urged reform of the G20 Common Framework to support countries in debt distress. World Bank president Ajay Banga expressed hope that donor contributions could add up to an additional $100bn to the poorest countries through its lending arm, the International Development Association (IDA)…While Banga reiterated the bank’s commitment to ramp up climate-aligned finance, he said the bank has no plan to stop investments in gas projects.” The Financial Times says “11 wealthy countries have pledged a combined $11bn to fund World Bank efforts to tackle global challenges such as climate change and pandemics”. It adds: “The contributions from countries including the US, Japan, France, Germany and the UK will help to fund the bank’s portfolio guarantee scheme, which allows rich countries to pay borrowers’ debts, and its hybrid capital instrument. The two instruments, which can be leveraged between six to eight times by the bank, were launched last year in a bid to boost the institutions’ lending capacity. The World Bank is under growing pressure to help poorer countries deal with the effects of global warming. Japan will also become the first country donor to the bank’s Livable Planet Fund, with a pledge of $20m. It has promised $1bn for the portfolio guarantee platform, making it the scheme’s largest declared donor.” The FT quotes Tina Stege, climate envoy to the Marshall Islands, saying there was a “willingness by everyone to pursue reform…but the question remains whether systemic reform at speed and scale will be delivered…If action does not overtake inertia in the [multilateral development banks], people across the world will be paying the cost in lives and livelihoods.”

The Biden administration is “contemplating scrapping the most cutting-edge aspect of its highly anticipated and impactful power plant pollution rules”, two sources “familiar with the plan” have told CNN. The outlet continues: “The administration may also allow a slower phase-in for a portion of the rules, which are due to be finalised as soon as next week.

The potential change of plans comes as the administration faces fierce political headwinds, a conservative Supreme Court majority that has shown aggressive interest in curtailing the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority and questions over how fast electric utilities can pivot to the most innovative climate solutions. The EPA is considering eliminating a proposal for new natural gas plants to use hydrogen alongside natural gas to make electricity, the sources said. The expected changes mean both existing coal and new gas plants would primarily rely on carbon capture and storage to cut their climate pollution, rather than hydrogen fuels…The power plant rules are still under review and no final decisions on them have been made.”

Separately, E&E News reports that “top Biden administration officials announced Friday the first tranche of $10bn in manufacturing tax credits tied to the Inflation Reduction Act, saying some of the funds will provide a lifeline for communities with shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants”. It adds: “The Energy Department unveiled 35 of 100 recipients – the first to allow for their information to be publicly disclosed – including projects tied to the production of critical minerals, renewable energy technologies and electric vehicle batteries. Some of the projects are located in communities with closed mines or plants. Split across 20 states, the projects altogether received a total of $1.93bn in allocations from competitive manufacturing tax credits under a program called 48C, which sets aside credits for former industrial sites. The announcement marks an acceleration of the administration’s strategy to inject struggling communities with funds tied to the climate law heading into an election year.”

Elsewhere, the Financial Times reports that “advisers to former US climate envoy John Kerry’s heavily lobbied the world’s top corporate climate targets oversight group to reverse its opposition to the use of controversial carbon credits, according to sources familiar with the process”. The newspaper adds: “Officials involved in shaping a US clean-energy scheme to channel funds to developing countries made repeated requests to the leadership of the Science-Based Targets initiative [SBTi] over a period of more than two years. The push came ahead of a policy decision by SBTi announced last week to allow companies to use carbon credits to offset their pollution. In the absence of another body or regulator, SBTi has evolved as a verification organisation for corporate climate plans, backed by non-profit groups.”

A Pakistani province has issued a flood alert “because of glacial melting and warned of a heavy loss of life if safety measures aren’t undertaken”, reports the Associated Press, adding: “Pakistan has witnessed days of extreme weather, killing scores of people and destroying property and farmland. Experts say the country is experiencing heavier rains than normal in April because of climate change. In the mountainous northwest province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has been hit particularly hard by the deluges, authorities issued a flood alert because of the melting of glaciers in several districts. They said the flood could worsen and that people should move to safer locations ahead of any danger…Latest figures from the province said that 59 people, including 33 children, have died in the past five days because of rain-related incidents. At least 2,875 houses and 26 schools have either collapsed or been damaged.”

Meanwhile, in India, NDTV reports that Lopamudra Sinha, a TV anchor with the Kolkata branch of public service broadcaster Doordarshan, has fainted on air “while reading heatwave updates”. The article says: “Parts of India are being seared under a heatwave with maximum temperatures ranging from 40-46C in many areas. Amid the intense heat, a TV anchor recently fainted while reading heatwave updates live on air as her blood pressure suddenly fell.” The Hindustan Times interviews UK-based German climate scientist (and Carbon Brief contributing editor) Dr Fredi Otto who argues that “addressing the climate crisis, not wars, should be on top of world’s to-do list”. She adds that “every city and every region that is affected by extreme heat in India should develop a heat action plan”. Separately, the Guardian reports that new research shows that the clean-up of Indian coal-fired power plants “could have saved 720,000 lives”.

The Financial Times is among several outlets covering new analysis by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Meteorological Organization which concludes that last year was the warmest on record in Europe, or the second warmest by a small margin depending on data sets used. The newspaper adds: “It ranked as the hottest if Greenland and some other areas were included. Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus Climate Service, said a record number of Europeans had been affected by health stress and the continent’s largest wildfire last year. Seasonable forecasts indicated the coming June, July and August in Europe were also ‘more likely than not to be warmer than average for temperatures’. But Burgess cautioned that this summer’s temperatures were also harder to predict because of the waning of the naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern that warms the Pacific Ocean.” The Press Association says: “Heat-related deaths are on the rise in Europe, while 63 lives were lost to storms, 44 to floods and 44 to wildfires in 2023, and weather and climate-related, economic losses were an estimated €13.4bn (£11.5bn), the report said.” The Guardian, Reuters, Bloomberg and Le Monde are among the outer outlets covering the story. Meanwhile, the Financial Times suggests weather extremes are affecting Europe into this year, saying “Ireland faces the risk of serious potato shortages as heavy rains delay planting of its biggest vegetable crop and Brexit continues to complicate the supply of seeds”.

Separately, the Washington Post carries a feature headlined: “Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era.” It says Nasa’s Dr Gavin Schmidt indicates that |what happens in the next few months…could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift – a quantum leap in warming that is confounding climate models and stoking ever more dangerous weather extremes”. The article also quotes Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, saying: “I hope we’re going to return to a predictable regime. But if we keep setting records, then we have to revisit some of our assumptions, because it may be there is some new persistent forcing that is not being accounted for.” Elsewhere, the New York Times says that global carbon dioxide levels have “passed a new milestone”, adding: “In 2023, global levels of the greenhouse gas rose to 419 parts per million, around 50% more than before the industrial revolution. That means there are roughly 50% more carbon dioxide molecules in the air than there were in 1750.”

The Associated Press has published an interview with Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s environment minister who will serve as the COP29 president. The article says: “‘We had only 10 months for preparation,’ Babayev said. Azerbaijan only recently picked a venue, Baku’s large Olympic stadium, to try to fit in the 85,000 or so people who come to these conferences. ‘A lot of things, they’re not clear now but I think within this year everything will be more or less clear.’ Babayev said his team is still gathering information, meeting people and making connections, but hasn’t yet set specific goals for the conference. But there is one general goal: More financial help for the developing world to shift to cleaner energy systems, and to cope with the extra heat, floods, storms and droughts worsened by climate change. ‘The agenda is to invite all the donors to at least increase their contribution for developing countries,’ Babayev said. ‘Because with the climate change there we are daily faced with all these impacts’…Babayev, 56, was in Washington for the spring meetings of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other powerful financial institutions. He and his team were mostly gathering information.”

Several UK outlets cover the findings of a new report by the Resolution Foundation which concludes that, according to Bloomberg, “persistently high interest rates could add £29bn ($36bn) a year to UK energy bills by 2050, as investments to make the energy system greener lock in high costs for years to come”. The article continues: “Green power is more capital intensive than fossil fuels, with most investment needed up front, leaving overall costs vulnerable to changes in interest rates. ‘Cleaner energy could be cheaper energy, if interest rates return to the low levels seen during the 2010s,’ said Jonathan Marshall, a senior economist at the thinktank. ‘But we can’t count on that being the case. If interest rates stay high, energy costs will rise rather than fall in the years ahead.’ Much of the costs of electricity infrastructure are currently passed through to consumers’ energy bills. In terms of portions of incomes, that leaves low-income households more exposed than higher earners. In a high-cost scenario where borrowing costs in the private sector stay at 9%, that would contribute to ‘severe financial strain for low-income households,’ adding £29bn to bills, the study found. Compared with a borrowing rate of 5%, the cost of electricity would be almost a third higher. Those high costs would also outweigh the increased efficiency of green measures like the electrification of transport, according to the study. The report proposed methods to limit the burden on consumers. For example, using government money, rather than charges on energy bills, to finance construction of new power networks could spread costs more fairly across income levels.” The Guardian notes that the report also stresses that “the green transition would still save consumers billions of pounds compared with current sky-high energy costs, and slowing down the pace of transition was not an option”. The Times and Daily Telegraph also cover the report.

Energy news outlet IN-EN.com reports that 127 wind power projects with a total capacity of 17.5 gigawatts (GW) were approved by the Chinese government between January and March 2024. The Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily quotes Tao Qing, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), saying that, in the first quarter of 2024, the production of “new energy” vehicles (NEVs) grew 28.2% year-on-year, with the NEV market share reaching 31.1%. It quotes Tao adding that the development of “hydrogen energy and new energy storage” have continuously expanded. Bloomberg says that, with capacity expected to reach 5.84 terawatt-hours in 2025, battery production in China alone will be enough to meet global demand. State news agency Xinhua reports that the Chinese economy continued to improve in the first quarter of 2024, driven in part by “green innovations”, adding that “new quality productive forces are, by nature, green”. The state-run newspaper Economic Daily reports that China’s carbon market activity has increased, quoting one expert saying that “stable price increases will promote enterprises to carry out emission reduction efforts”.

In response to a study finding that China had provided “relatively little investment in renewable energy”, foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning says that “China has already implemented hundreds of clean energy…projects in Africa”, state-run newspaper China News reports. Christopher Mutsvangwa, a senior Zimbabwean government official, says in an interview with Xinhua that “you can’t argue that [Chinese clean-technology companies] are relying on state subsidies; they are just doing the job better than the others”. Another Xinhua article quotes foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian saying that countries who “spread[] narrative[s] to justify protectionism…will only destabilise and disrupt industrial and supply chains [and] hinder [the] global green transition”. An editorial in the state-supporting Global Times argues that China’s manufacturing industry has become a “scapegoat” for the US and that tariffs are “another dangerous step by Washington dragging the US and China into an escalating trade war vortex”.

Elsewhere, BBC News covers research finding that “nearly half of China’s major cities are sinking because of water extraction” and the weight of expanding buildings, adding that a combination of this subsidence and “sea level rise brought about by climate change” could increase the exposure of urban populations to flooding. Reuters also covers the study, saying that “overmining” in China’s “old coal districts” has also increased the chances of cities sinking.

A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work, reports the Guardian. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to underestate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which the Guardian says it has seen. Paul Behrens, an associate professor at Leiden University, and Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor at New York University, both accuse the FAO study of systematic errors, poor framing and highly inappropriate use of source data. Hayek tells the Guardian: “The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious, conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be. None of the mistakes had the opposite effect.” The Guardian notes a meat-industry lobbyist called the report “music to our ears” when it was released at COP28 in Dubai last year. The FAO says it will “look into the issues raised by the academics and undertake a technical exchange of views with them”.

German research minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger is advocating for a dedicated law to regulate the potential energy generation from nuclear fusion, reports Die Zeit. The move comes as power plants based on nuclear fusion are viewed as “future technology for CO2-neutral energy production”, adds the newspaper. Stark-Watzinger has highlighted that the existing Atomic Energy Act, overseen by the ministry of economy, is not suited for this purpose due to the involvement of “different technologies with different risks”. In an interview with the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland, she emphasises the necessity for Germany to pioneer the establishment of a legal framework, stating that “companies and investors require legal and planning certainty”. [The technology is widely considered to be decades away from commercialisation.]

Meanwhile, the Kyiv Independent reports that Germany is considering sending parts from its decommissioned thermal power plants to Ukraine to help repair energy infrastructure damaged by Russian strikes. In addition, German vice-chancellor Rober Habeck argues that destroying distributed energy sources would require more significant effort for Russia, noting that “a large power plant is a target, but 1,000 solar roofs are difficult to hit, and 30 wind turbines are also harder to hit”, Merkur adds.

Finally, Die Zeit reports that the largest solar park in the German state of Rheinland-Pfalz opened on Friday, consisting of eleven sites with photovoltaic (PV) installations, which are intended to generate a total peak capacity of more than 200 megawatts (MW), providing electricity to around 60,000 households.

Phillip Inman, the Observer’s economics editor, argues that “[opposition Labour leader] Keir Starmer must learn from the Tories’ failures and ensure green projects are well planned and resourced”. He continues: “In the run-up to the election, some on the left and in green groups will defend any waste and fraud as collateral damage. On the right, the waste and fraud will be used as an excuse to abandon all moves to net-zero. Neither approach is right. The focus needs to be on the boring, nitty-gritty issues of coordination and planning. Hundreds of UK councils have set 2030 as a target for more than halving emissions or even going completely net zero, mostly without the powers to achieve it…If Labour wants to revive the [green homes grant] or start something similar, it needs a strategy that allows time for proper training. Anything else risks a backlash that could make Starmer a one-term prime minister.” An editorial in the Daily Telegraph says the “political tussles [in Scotland] risk disguising a more fundamental issue: the unrealistic nature of environmental policies blithely announced by politicians with little idea how they can be achieved”. In the Scotsman, its Westminster correspondent Alexander Brown argues that the “SNP’s u-turn on climate change is an abject humiliation – one that shows a lack of planning, a failure of governance and is absolutely their own fault”.

Elsewhere, the Guardian carries an interview with Green MP Caroline Lucas in which she reflects on the government’s net-zero rollbacks: “That’s been just so demoralising. And dangerous. So cynical.” In the Sun, columnist Jeremy Clarkson bemoans how “in Greta-worshipping Brit scientists’ minds, every disaster is caused by global warming…even my dog’s refusal to ‘sit’”.

Climate change will increase the value of rooftop solar by up to 19% by the end of the century, under the moderate warming RCP4.5 pathway, a new study finds. The authors quantify the household-level effects of climate change on the value of rooftop solar in the US. They use “empirical demand data” for more than 2,000 households, “household-level simulation and optimisation models” and weather data for historic and future climates. The paper finds that by 2100, climate change will “increase techno-economically optimal household capacity by up to 25%”. The authors says the increase in value is “robust across cities, households, future warming scenarios and retail tariff structures”.