EDF has bought a large offshore wind project near the coast of Scotland for more than €500m in the largest UK wind deal this year. The project, which will cost EDF a further £1.8bn to complete, will ultimately generate 450 megawatts of energy, which is enough to supply electricity to 375,000 homes. The proposed wind farm was delayed by several years because of a legal challenge concerning its impact on seabirds, but ultimately gained approval late last year and won a government subsidy contract. EDF says the project will be open to other investors looking to buy a stake, reports that Telegraph, and it hopes to have its turbines up and running by 2023. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May has officially opened the first renewable energy training facility at a Further Education college in the UK, reports Energy Live News.

Allianz, Europe’s biggest insurance company, has pledged to stop selling policies to coal companies in an effort to cut back the use of fossil fuels. The company will immediately pull its coverage from single coal-fired power plants and coal mines, and that it would phase all coal risks out of its business by 2040. In an extension of Allianz’s coal divestment policy that was announced in 2015, it will also stop investing in companies that do not cut their greenhouse gas emissions. “Allianz wants to cut the biggest climate killer out of the core business over time. We are getting even more serious on global warming,” said chief executive Oliver Bäte.

Poland’s climate envoy dismissed calls to keep polluters out of UN talks, ahead of a controversial negotiation in Bonn yesterday about widening participation. Activists concerned that fossil fuel companies could push to weaken climate action have put pressure on the EU to support a conflict of interest policy for businesses getting involved in the process. But Tomasz Chruszczow, who has a leading role in this December’s Katowice climate summit, said he did not recognise that problem. “We want everybody in this action,” he said: “The call for exclusion of anybody from the process…I don’t think that is very useful. Let’s think how to incentivise the transition [to a low carbon economy].”

Theresa May faces “crunch talks” over the future of the proposed new reactor at the Wylfa nuclear site in Wales, the Telegraph reports. Hitachi, the company behind the project, is expected to call on the Government to take a direct stake in the new plant, or risk the £27bn project falling through. Last-ditch talks between Hitachi chairman Hiroaki Nakanishi and the prime minister were scheduled for yesterday.

In a new report, industry leaders are trying persuade the Trump Administration to remain in an agreement to cut emissions of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), reports Time. US companies argue that the 2016 deal, formally known as the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, will create American jobs and that the Administration should submit it to the Senate for ratification. The report from the trade groups argues that the deal will “strengthen America’s exports and weaken the market for imported products. “Without Kigali ratification, growth opportunities will be lost along with the jobs to support that growth, the trade deficit will grow, and the US share of global export markets will decline,” the report says. Carbon Brief previously published an explainer on the Kigali Amendment.

The climate sceptic thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs was mooted as a co-host of an Australian visit by US Environment Protection Agency chief, Scott Pruitt, new documents show. Emails released to the US environment group the Sierra Club under freedom of information laws reveal proposed meetings in August last year regarding US-Australian environmental agreements and whether they should be “changed or updated or cancelled and replaced with others”. The visit was later cancelled when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas gulf coast. Meanwhile, Pruitt is the subject of numerous other stories, including The Hill reporting that Pruitt bought house with an Oklahoma lobbyist when he was still senator for the state, and that another EPA public affairs official has resigned, marking the third departure of one of Pruitt’s political aides this week. Vox has updated its running tally of the investigations currently involving Pruitt, and the Atlantic reports that the White House has been angered by Pruitt’s staff hoping to deflect attention by leaking negative stories about Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Finally, the New York Times carries an opinion piece on why “Pruitt Is Wrong on Burning Forests for Energy”.

Changing weather patterns in response to climate change are affecting the life cycle of Europe’s bats, researchers say. Scientists have been alarmed to find that some bats in Portugal skipped winter hibernation altogether this year while others gave birth early. This means they can struggle to find insects to eat and to feed their young, particularly if there is a period of spring rain. In the UK, horseshoe bats could be being affected too, says Dr Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter: “The increasing variability of weather conditions is potentially catastrophic for bats”.

“After a commitment last month to cut greenhouse gas emissions from shipping by at least 50% by 2050, the race is on to find new technologies that can green the 50,000-strong global shipping fleet,” writes environmental journalist Fred Pearce in the Guardian. Pearce takes a look at the potential different approaches to decarbonise shipping, including low-tech solutions, new ship designs and banishing conventional fuel. Pearce also has a piece on the same topic in Ensia.

“Just a little over two years since the world agreed in Paris to limit global warming to 1.5C, we are witnessing signs of climate leadership emerge from the shadows,” writes Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International, for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Morgan cites the “bold leadership” of heads of state such as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who banned new offshore oil and gas exploration. But it has been cities and corporations that “have so far driven climate momentum”, says Morgan, and “the baton now needs to pass to governments”. “Climate action is aligned with many goals that our leaders claim commitment to, such as improving public health, innovation or cost-effectiveness,” Morgan concludes: “As the cost of renewables falls and the awareness of climate risk grows, climate leadership makes sense on multiple levels”.

In a briefing article, the Economist explores the dichotomy between a rapidly-warming Arctic and the commercial opportunities that could be exploited as a result. Listing the changes the Arctic is undergoing, the article notes that “over the past three decades, the area of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by more than half” and Greenland “lost an average of 375bn tonnes of ice per year between 2011 and 2014”. Although “business opportunities associated with warming were supposed to cheer at least a few”, the article notes, “prospects look bleaker in many industries than they did five years ago as the risks are better understood”. For example, “an expected shipping boom has not materialised”, the briefing says, and “low prices and the difficulties of operating in the Arctic’s dangerous waters now repel big [oil and gas] firms”. Reporting from the other side of the planet, the Economist also has a video of a marine biologist exploring parts of the Antarctic seabed in a submarine.

Over the coming decade, the power sector is expected to invest ~7.2 trillion USD in power plants and grids globally, much of it into CO2-emitting coal and gas plants. These assets typically have long lifetimes and commit large amounts of (future) CO2 emissions. This paper compares the emissions committed by current and planned plants with remaining carbon budgets. They find that even though the growth of emission commitments has slowed down in recent years, currently operating plants still commit us to emissions above the levels compatible with the average 1.5°C–2°C scenario. Furthermore, the current pipeline of power plants would add almost the same amount of additional commitments. Even if the entire pipeline was cancelled, therefore, ~20% of global capacity would need to be stranded to meet the climate goals set out in the Paris Agreement.

Global climate policy is increasingly debating the value of very low warming targets, yet not many 1.5C experiments have been conducted with full global climate models. This raises the question whether a map of warming or precipitation change in a 1.5C warmer world can be estimated from existing models that reach higher warming targets, or whether entirely new model runs are required. This paper finds that for low warming in strong mitigation scenarios, climate change signals are quite linear as a function of global temperature. Emulation techniques amounting to linear rescaling on the basis of global temperature change ratios provide a viable way forward.