The UK government should approve its 2030s carbon target following the signing of the Paris agreement on climate change, an influential committee of MPs has urged. Known as the fifth carbon budget, the target sets a limit on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be produced across the country between 2028-2032, as a way of meeting national and international commitments on climate change. “The UK can’t afford any further delays when it comes to replacing dirty power stations with cleaner forms of generation,” said Angus MacNeil, the chair of the committee. The MPs also recommended that the UK’s share of international transport should be included for the first time in a carbon budget. Energy Live News also covers the story.

Exxon Mobil Corp lost its top-tier credit rating for the first time in almost 70 years yesterday, as slumping crude oil prices curbed the oil giant’s ability to fund projects and produce large returns for shareholders. Standard & Poor cut Exxon’s rating to “AA+” from “AAA”, a symbolic blow, although the rating is still as high as for US government bonds. “The company’s debt level has more than doubled in recent years, reflecting high capital spending on major projects in a high commodity price environment and dividends and share repurchases that substantially exceeded internally generated cash flow,” Ben Tsocanos, an analyst at Standard & Poor, told the Financial Times.

Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull has criticised Labor’s plan to reintroduce an emissions trading scheme, warning it would be a “jobs-destroying” measure, a handbrake on the economy, lead to “much higher energy prices” and do little to combat climate change, the Guardian reports. Despite coalition criticism the plan drew “surprise praise” from the lobby group the Business Council of Australia. The Guardian Australia’s political editor, Lenore Taylor, gives six reasons why she thinks Malcolm Turnbull’s is “scare campaign” to discredit Labor’s plan is wrong.

EDF chiefs have been called back to parliament to explain why they have further delayed an investment decision on a planned £18bn nuclear power station in Somerset, the Guardian reports. The French economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, said the final decision could be delayed until September, four months later than expected. The hearing is expected to take place in late May. “If Hinkley does not go ahead, it could have huge implications for our future energy security and efforts to cut climate-changing emissions. We will therefore be watching progress on this closely” said Angus MacNeil, chair of the energy and climate change committee.

Billionaire environmentalist Thomas F. Steyer and his political advocacy group, NextGen Climate, will spend at least $25m on encouraging young Americans to vote. The campaign will target at least 203 college and university campuses in seven mostly battleground states. “On climate change, we have the starkest contrast I’ve ever seen between candidates in my life — and I’m fairly old,” Mr. Steyer told the New York Times. “As I traveled around the country in the 2014 election cycle, I saw that young voters care deeply about climate change, but what they haven’t been is as engaged in the electoral process as older Americans.”

Oil giant ExxonMobil knew that CO2 was a harmful pollutant in the atmosphere years earlier than previously reported. DeSmogBlog has found corporate documents from the late 1970s stating unequivocally “there is no doubt” that CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels was a growing “problem” well understood within the company. “It is assumed that the major contributors of CO2 are the burning of fossil fuels… There is no doubt that increases in fossil fuel usage and decreases of forest cover are aggravating the potential problem of increased CO2 in the atmosphere” says a report dating from 1980. Despite this knowledge, the company shelved its internal concerns and “launched a sophisticated, global campaign to sow doubt and create public distrust of climate science” DeSmogBlog writes.

The UK government needs to take urgent action to stop the deaths of up to 50,000 people a year from illnesses caused by air pollution, according to a report by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, branding the pollution a “public health emergency”. It calls for a scrappage scheme to be set up for diesel cars over about 10 years old, greater powers for councils to set up ‘clean air zones’, and for for tougher, EU-wide regulations on car manufacturers. None of the 37 top-selling diesel cars meet pollution limits in real-world conditions, the Department for Transport found last week. Elsewhere, Paris introduced a once a month ban on cars in a bid to tackle air pollution. The Guardian and the BBC also have the story.

Mitsubishi admitted yesterday that it has been lying about the fuel efficiency of its vehicles for 25 years, and that fraudulent fuel consumption tests were far more widespread than it initially confessed, provoking concerns that the scandal may affect those sold outside Japan, the Times reports. The company falsified tyre pressure data to improve fuel consumption results for four models.

Bangladesh’s capital city of 20 million people is growing by close to 5% a year, in part as rural families migrate to the city seeking work or having lost their homes to worsening river erosion and storm surges, and the stream of migrants is expected to surge as climate change problems like sea-level rise intensify. Laurie Goering takes a look at this “testing ground” for solutions to deal with migration from climate change.

The leave campaigners appear to have no plan (at least in public) for how UK environmental and climate policy would evolve outside the EU – green businesses and investors should be very worried, argues BusinessGreen’s James Murray. After a fortnight in which a flurry of committees, NGOs, academics, ministers and ex-ministers have all warned a vote for Brexit is a vote for a dirtier, more polluted, and carbon intensive UK, the response from the Brexit camp has been nothing more than an “eerie silence”. Either the Brexiters do not care about these issues, care about them but do not see them as a priority, or are planning to torch green policies for ideological reasons. This silence “should make anyone who cares about the green economy and the UK’s environment very suspicious”, Murray concludes.

The global land area suitable for the Aedes (Ae). aegypti mosquito could increase by 13% by 2061-80 under climate change, a new study says. Ae. aegypti mosquitoes transmit viruses that cause dengue, chikungunya, Zika and yellow fever. Combined with population rise, climate change will see an increase in the number of people exposed to the mosquito, the study says. Australia, Europe and North America are projected to have the largest percentage increases in exposure to Ae. aegypti considering only climate change.

By the end of the century, US farming is projected to experience fewer frosts, a longer growing season, more heat stress and an earlier start of field operations, a new study finds. Using a collection of climate impact projections, researchers investigated future climate changes that are particularly relevant for farming. The results suggest that cutting greenhouse gas emissions globally has the potential to significantly reduce adverse effects (heat stress, risks of pest and disease) of climate change on farming, while also curtailing potentially beneficial impacts (earlier planting, possibility for multiple cropping).