The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is hosting this year’s COP28 UN climate summit, has “the third biggest net zero-busting plans for oil and gas expansion in the world”, according to the Guardian. The nation has plans to produce oil and gas equivalent to 7.5bn barrels of oil, 90% of which “would have to remain in the ground to meet the net-zero scenario set out by the International Energy Agency”, the newspaper continues. This places its national oil company, Adnoc, behind only those of the UAE’s fellow Middle Eastern petrostates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in its expansion plans, the piece says. The newspaper adds that this is particularly notable given that Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of Adnoc, has been “controversially appointed” COP28 president. “Recent statements by Al Jaber also appear difficult to reconcile with Adnoc’s huge plans for new oil and gas production”, the piece says. It points to a speech at a “Road to COP28” conference in Dubai on 15 March, in which he said: “We [the world] have to rapidly reduce emissions.” The data for the Guardian’s article comes from a database assembled by German NGO Urgewald, which in turn comes from Rystad Energy, an industry standard source that is not available to the public.

US president Joe Biden’s administration is making $450m available for low-carbon energy projects such as solar farms on the site of current or former coal mines, the Associated Press reports. The funds will be handed out to five projects through the bipartisan infrastructure law, which was enacted in 2021, according to the newswire. Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm said recipients of the funds could also include advanced nuclear projects and power plants with carbon capture capabilities, noting that “they’ll prove out the potential to reactivate or repurpose existing infrastructure like transmission lines and substations”, the Hill adds. Reuters reports that the Biden administration has also released final guidance on how low-carbon energy companies can secure additional tax credits “when investing in US communities economically tied to fossil fuels like oil and coal”. In another piece of support for mining areas, Reuters reports that the government will provide $16m to the University of North Dakota and West Virginia University to complete design studies for a domestic refinery that will extract rare earth and other critical minerals from coal mine waste. Inside Climate News reports that protesters gathered outside the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington DC calling for faster progress on climate regulations.

Elsewhere, the New York Times has a piece explaining why US vice president Kamala Harris has been visiting Zambia – in part because the nation has large reserves of copper and cobalt, which are required in battery manufacture.

Finally, Politico reports that the US has promised to keep sending large supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to EU ports “as the continent aims to continue weaning itself off Russian energy supplies”.

China’s state media China Daily discusses the planned expansion of the country’s coal power capacity, which it says is expected “to play [a] larger role as emergency backup power source”, even as low-carbon sources expand.  Lin Boqiang, head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University, is quoted by the newspaper saying that “the replacement of outdated coal capacity has accelerated” this year “to ensure sufficient power supply”. Lin added that switching to renewable energy sources doesn’t imply an immediate closure of all coal-fired power plants, the outlet says.

Separately, Bloomberg analysis says that global carmakers are “slowly but steadily getting squeezed out of the Chinese auto market” because they “misjudged how fast the Chinese market was shifting to EVs”. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that China hopes to cooperate more with Australian coal mining firm BHP in “emerging” areas such as “climate change and new energy”, according to a foreign ministry statement on Tuesday.

Within China, state-run newspaper Prosecution Daily reports that China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate announced its achievements in cracking down on environmental crimes, with Chinese police and the environment department. It prosecuted thousands of people who have damaged the environment including illegally selling used oil, the publication reports. 

Finally, the local government of the city of Chengdu in southwestern China, issued an action plan of “50 initiatives in six areas” to tackle air pollution, according to Chengdu-based newspaper Hongxing News. The council will take measures on “collaborative carbon reduction” and continue to “promote the implementation of clean energy substitution”, including registering more than 100,000 new  EVs, the outlet adds.

The Australian government has “brushed aside a call from former defence leaders who are urging it to release a secret report into the national security risks posed by climate change”, according to ABC News. Last year, the government commissioned the nation’s Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to examine the external risks posed by climate change, it notes. The report has been completed, says the broadcaster, adding that it has not been made public and former Australian defence force chief Chris Barrie, speaking on behalf of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, has stated that the government should release a declassified version. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Barrie described climate change as a “bigger risk to Australia than China’s rapid military build-up”. It adds that he said it was crucial to inform the Australian public about the security implications of rising temperatures and increased natural disasters. 

In more Australia news, Queensland senator Gerard Rennick has come under fire after making a “bizarre viral claim” about climate change, according to the Guardian. The opposition Liberal politician posted a video with the words “scientists ignore the fact that gravity plays a role in heating the earth”, the newspaper explains.

Oil major ExxonMobil’s new low-carbon businesses could one day be more lucrative than its fossil fuel production, according to Dan Ammann, the company’s president of low-carbon solutions, as quoted in the Financial Times. This comes as the firm launches “the most comprehensive view yet” of its energy transition plans, which includes “ambitious plans” to generate tens of billions of dollars from biofuels, hydrogen and carbon capture within a decade, the newspaper says. The article notes that “Exxon said it planned to spend about $17bn on the low-carbon business through to the end of 2027, about 10% of what it aims to spend on fossil fuel projects over the same period”. Reuters notes that “unlike its peers, Exxon has stayed away from renewable energy like solar and wind”. It also notes that Ammann was clear that the speed of the company’s transition would depend on “regulatory and policy support for carbon pricing” and the cost of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Shell could be in line for a $1.2bn payment for its 27.5% stake in  Sakhalin-2, a Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) venture that was nationalised by the Kremlin, the Times reports. Shell said soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it would quit its partnerships with Gazprom, including Sakhalin-2, “but then it prompted controversy by buying a cargo of Russian crude on the spot market”, the newspaper adds. It notes that the company “continues to buy gas from Novatek’s Yamal LNG plant in Siberia under a long-term contract”. Elsewhere, Reuters reports taht lawyers representing more than 13,000 Nigerians argued at London’s High Court this week that Shell is “attempting to shield itself from scrutiny over pollution in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta”, by making a move that could put off a final decision on the lawsuits against it until 2029.

Many news outlets in the UK and elsewhere carry obituaries for the former UK chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who served under Margaret Thatcher and founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the nation’s most prominent climate-sceptic thintank. Contrary to much of the commentary in right-wing media, Adam Ramsay, openDemocracy’s special correspondent, argues that the growth of the UK economy in the 1980s under Lawson was not the result of him cutting taxes and privatising industry, but from the start of the North Sea oil industry at the end of the 1970s. “By the mid-1980s, when Lawson was chancellor, 10% of annual government revenue, or £18bn a year, came directly from North Sea oil,” he writes. Ramsay also adds that “just as significantly, the oil boom played a vital role in delivering the Big Bang in the City of London, for which Lawson usually gets both credit and blame, with money flooding in to invest in Britain’s new hydrocarbon glut”. He writes that while this dynamic has been forgotten by many, it was not forgotten by Lawson himself. “He seemed to retain a gratitude to the oil industry over the decades after he resigned as chancellor” as a “leading figure in the movement to deny the science of climate change”, Ramsay notes.

The Washington Post’s obituary says Lawson used the GWPF “to mock leading climate campaigners such as [Al] Gore and Greta Thunberg, and to promote his vision that humans will somehow learn to live with rising temperatures and effects such as higher sea levels”. The Guardian identifies his “main interest” in retirement as “a campaign to counter the case for global heating”. Sean O’Grady in the Independent describes the former chancellor’s views as “off-key”, characterising them as “a mix of scepticism and resignation to the inevitable”.

In the Daily Mail, columnist Daniel Johnson describes Lawson as the “most brilliant politician of his generation”, and his founding of the GWPF as a “major contribution to public life”. He also, misleadingly, describes the foundation’s goal as “campaigning for better research on how to adapt to climate change”. Climate-sceptic Sun columnist Trevor Kavanagh says Lawson “fought right up until the end to save hardworking, car-driving families from the crippling timetable for zero-emission policies”.

David Ho, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, takes aim at carbon dioxide (CO2) removal (CDR) technologies in a piece for Nature. He says that he has scrutinised dozens of proposals for these technologies and, as nations such as the US invest in early-stage demonstration projects, he supports “the need to develop CO2 removal methods over the longer term”. However, he continues: “[I]t’s clear to me that deploying them to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is pointless until society has almost completely eliminated its polluting activities…Humanity has never removed an atmospheric pollutant at a global, continental or, even, regional scale – we have only ever shut down the source and let nature do the clearing up.…We must be prepared for CDR to be a failure, leaving us to rely on the environment to stabilise atmospheric CO2 over thousands of years. This is another argument for rapid decarbonisation.”

The first global survey of how sea level rise (SLR) projections are used in coastal adaptation reveals a “wide range” of projections being applied, a new study says. The researchers surveyed around 250 coastal practitioners engaged in adaptation and planning from 49 countries. While recognition of the threat of SLR is “almost universal”, the researchers find, “only 72% of respondents currently utilise SLR projections”, with lower levels of use in developing countries. There is “no global standard in the use of SLR projections”, the researchers note, and they find that, of those surveyed, “53% are planning using a single projection, while the remainder are using multiple projections, with 13% considering a low-probability high-end scenario”.

In a new study, researchers work with policymakers in eight cities worldwide to identify technology pathways toward “their near- and long-term carbon emissions reduction targets for existing buildings”. The researchers develop “city-specific shallow and deep retrofitting packages along with onsite photovoltaic generation potential”. Without further grid decarbonisation, implementation of these retrofits in the investigated neighbourhoods “reduces energy use and carbon emissions by up to 66% and 84%, respectively, helping Braga, Dublin, Florianopolis, Middlebury, and Singapore to meet their 2030 goals”, the authors say. In addition, with projected grid decarbonisation, Florianopolis and Singapore will reach their 2050 goals”, they say. The authors add: “Twenty months after the project ended, seven cities have implemented policy measures or expanded the analysis across their building stock.”