French energy giant EDF is set to receive a state bailout worth billions of euros, enabling it to continue with plans to build an £18 billion nuclear power station at Hinkley Point in Somerset, as union repeats a call for project to be shelved. “If we need to recapitalise, we will do it,” Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister said. “If we need to renounce dividend payments again, we will do it.” The promise of aid brings relief to the British government, which has billed Hinkley as a vital part of its move to a lower-carbon and secure energy system, and is planned to provide 7% of power generation. The news was less welcome to the French CGT union, which fears the scheme will lead to more job losses in France. “It will jeopardise the company. We are not saying don’t do it but it must be delayed. It’s too premature”, said Sebastien Menesplier, a spokesperson for the union. The Guardian and the Financial Times also have the story.

Oil prices rose to their highest this year, passing the $40/barrel mark. “We are seeing a decline in US production starting to kick in”, Michael Hulme, a fund manager at Carmignac Gestion told the Times. An agreement led by Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and other leading oil producers to cap output levels at January levels is also starting to take effect, the Times writes, making oil traders increasingly optimistic about prices.

The former Labour leader Ed Miliband is deeply critical of government cuts to green policies, and blames the current government for damaging the UK’s cross-party consensus for action on climate change, the Guardian reports. “The truth is the consensus has frayed”, Miliband said, speaking with George Monbiot to an audience in London yesterday. He also argued that cutting a pioneering carbon capture and storage scheme, and hasty cuts to solar subsidies, are among the worst things David Cameron’s government has done.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has reiterated his plans to implement policies in Canada to help tackle climate change, in an interview with Bloomberg yesterday, and said that climate change provides an incentive to help create jobs and new industries in the country. “[Climate change] is going to impose real challenges on Canada, but we also see climate change as an incredible opportunity. And the opportunity to invest in green tech and renewable energies is where the world is going, and Canada can either be dragged along by it, kicking and screaming, or we can choose to lead it”, he said.

Campaigners in Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have joined forces to try to shut down two ageing Belgian nuclear reactors close to their borders, the Guardian reports. Cologne, Dusseldorf, Luxembourg City and Maastricht are among the cities co-funding a lawsuit to close Tihange 2. Around 60% of Belgium’s electricity comes from seven reactors in the country’s Tihange and Doel plants.

Rising levels of CO2 in the oceans will muffle sounds that are crucial to marine life such as the snapping noise made by shrimps, the Independent reports. A wide variety of marine life use the sounds made by the shrimp to orient themselves, gleaning information from them about the location and quality of crucial resources such as food and shelter. This could hit fish populations hard, the new research in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B warns.

A small Native American tribe known as the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in coastal Louisiana is to be resettled after losing nearly all its land, in part due to sea level rise, as well as erosion and sediment mismanagement. This is the first time an entire community has had to be relocated due in part to rising sea levels, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told Reuters. Land loss has caused the Isle de Jean Charles to shrink from 15,000 acres to a strip of about a quarter-mile wide by a half-mile long.

The appetite for coal assets, at any price, “is questionable”, writes the FT’s Lex column, considering the downfall of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal mining company, which yesterday warned of a bankruptcy risk. The regulators want the structural demise of the most polluting form of energy, and the current price of Peabody’s bonds, trading at seven cents, suggests that “the regulators may win”.

If Intended Nationally Determined Contributions are going to be the foundations of a global climate solution, we need to make sure they are durable and clear, argue Pieter Pauw and Kennedy Mbeva of the German Development Institute and the African Centre for Technology Studies, which built a model to analyse and compare the ambitions of governments. They found that as countries set their own targets, the “old and ineffective” developed – and developing countries divide has now progressed to three country groupings.

The chancellor’s budget fails to address green issues says Michael Jacobs, visiting professor at the Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment, and former special advisor to Gordon Brown. But “crunch time” is coming for the man previously known as the architect of the government’s anti-climate policies: when the government announces its fifth carbon budget within the next few weeks, Osborne “will have to decide which side he is on”, Jacobs writes.

Thinning of the Pyrenees’ third largest glacier, Monte Perdido, has accelerated since 1999, a new study finds. Researchers analysed changes in ice surface area and volume using aerial photos and surveys, digital elevation models and laser scans. Their findings show the rate of ice surface loss was almost three times greater in 1999-2006 than during the 1980s and 1990s. The rapid thinning cannot be explained by warming temperatures alone, the researchers say, but positive feedbacks – such as warming of exposed rock – must also be contributing.

China’s future CO2 emissions from energy production are likely to grow at a much slower rate and may peak during the decade before 2025, a new study suggests. 2000–2013 was an exceptional phase in China’s development, the paper says, where very high greenhouse gas emissions were driven by growth in energy-intensive industries. But China’s economy is now undergoing a major transformation towards more sustainable growth, the researchers say, and data for 2014-15 suggest emissions are already rising more slowly.