There is widespread coverage across the UK media of the start of the Conservative Party’s conference in Manchester. The Sun reports that the Tories have “unveil[ed] an array of new environmental initiatives in a bid to ensure Britain goes green by 2050”, which include planting one million trees and investing “up to £1bn” in “green” technology in the motor industry over the next five years: “Money will go towards developing clean batteries, electric motors and hydrogen fuel cells,” says the Sun. [The government is already committed to planting 11m trees in the five years to 2022.] The Sun adds: “Some £200m will go towards the development phase of a planned nuclear fusion power station – offering the prospect of limitless electrical power with minimal waste from 2040.” However, the Independent reports that green groups have been quick to criticise the proposals for “lacking urgency and practical solutions”. It adds: “There is no mention of hugely controversial recommendations from the government’s own advisers to achieve net-zero, such as an earlier ban on petrol and diesel cars, an end to gas boilers, huge investment in green energy, or sharp curbs to meat-eating.” The Guardian quotes Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth who says the Tories are “throwing money away in Never Never Land” by focusing on nuclear fusion. And there has been further criticism today, reports Sky News, of the Tories’s infrastructure announcement that it will spend “more than £25bn” on “strategic road-building” from 2020-2025, which is also reported by BBC News. Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph has published an extract of the latest Margaret Thatcher biography which focuses on her awakening awareness of climate change in the late 1980s. And BBC News reports that the Scottish government is considering proposals that would see “developments that tackle climate change” avoiding having to get planning permission.

Huge crowds gathered in Canada on Friday to join Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes, reports BBC News. In Montreal, where the teenage campaigner addressed the crowd, organisers say around half a million people took part. “Officials told local media the number was closer to 315,000,” says BBC News. “These figures place the Montreal event among some of the most attended environmental marches in history. The September 2014 People’s Climate March in New York attracted at least 310,000.” With a general election looming, all the party leaders took part in the country-wide marches – except Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who, BBC News explains, “has a large base of support in Canada’s oil and gas producing regions”. In a separate piece for BBC News, Jessica Murphy examines whether Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “is doing enough on climate change”. Trudeau, who had a one-to-one meeting with Thunberg over the weekend, “has been laying out increasingly ambitious climate policies this week on the federal campaign trail – though they lacked key details on how they would be achieved – from a commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 to a vow to plant two billion trees over the next decade”. Meanwhile, Thunberg has hit back at critics, reports Reuters. Before addressing a rally in Montreal she told journalists: “I guess they must feel like their world view or their interests or whatever…is threatened by us. We’ve become too loud for people to handle so they try to silence us,. We should also take that as a compliment.” The Guardian says that an estimated six million people worldwide have joined the recent climate protests: “On Friday there were huge protests in Italy – where more than 1 million people were reported to have taken part – Spain, the Netherlands and New Zealand, where more than 3.5% of the country’s population joined the demonstrations.”

New analysis by Vivid Economics estimates that the UK will need as much as £20bn a year to remove up to 130m tonnes of CO2 from the air, reports the Guardian. “Even if emissions are reduced aggressively across the economy, the UK is expected to continue to emit a significant amount of greenhouse gases annually,” says Vivid. “The rate of rollout [of CO2 removal] will need to be rapid, particularly in the 2030s and 2040s, and will require significant policy support.” The Guardian adds that Vivid urges ministers to consider supporting investment in greenhouse gas removal. The Independent says that the implications of the report would “involve the conversion of large areas of land into forests, and the planting of trees and shrubs among crops by farmers”. iNews says that the report highlights how three “hard-to-abate” sectors need to be targeted – aviation, agriculture and industry.

Sky News’s climate change correspondent Hannah Thomas-Peter has written an analysis piece looking back over a week which saw a UN climate summit in New York and a global wave of climate protests inspired by Greta Thunberg: “This was the week it became crystal clear that the growing, global, grassroots movement has real momentum, support and power. It has also become clear that they are unwilling to back down, to be quiet, or to be charitable about the efforts of even the most progressive politicians…But these incremental steps forward feel, well, incremental, in the face of some awkward facts. The world’s biggest polluters, like China and America, aren’t doing enough…Real change will come when people start voting as if the planet depends on it, and we are not there yet.” CNN’s Drew Kann agrees, adding: “Based on the wan commitments to reduce planet-warming emissions that were announced at the UN Climate Summit this week – and the absence of major polluters like the US from the stage entirely – key world leaders still aren’t willing to take the transformative action scientists say we need to rid the global economy of its fossil fuel dependence”. However, he notes that “the global climate strikes that brought millions out last Friday weren’t just notable for their size…the crowds are more diverse, more female and younger than they’ve ever been before”. In a feature for BBC News, Justin Rowlatt, the corporation’s new chief environment correspondent, says that Thunberg is calling out the “haters”: “She is clearly very annoyed, accusing critics of ‘crossing every line to avert the focus’ with, what she calls, lies and conspiracy theories. Of course, the attention isn’t surprising. Over the past year, Greta Thunberg has arguably done more to galvanise global action on climate than any other single individual. And there is no question the unnerving power of her rhetoric comes in part from the fact that she is so young.” Metro reports on one such critic – motoring journalist Jeremy Clarkson – who has used his Sun column to call Thunberg a “spoiled brat”. Meanwhile, Nada Farhoud in the Daily Mirror looks at the latest “sobering” IPCC report and concludes: “Climate change is not a future threat. It is happening now and speeding up. The science could not be any clearer for the need for urgent action.”

Jonathan Ford looks at the recent UK government auction (covered by Carbon Brief) which revealed that the next wave of offshore wind farms will generate electricity for a price guaranteed at around £40 per megawatt hour (MWh), which the government say will mean they “come online below market prices and without additional subsidy on bills”. Ford responds: “Now that would really change the weather for renewables, potentially unleashing construction on a scale that would allow these technologies to play a much larger role in the power network…But is it really true that offshore wind is on course for this by going ‘subsidy free’?”, Ford asks. [See Carbon Brief’s explainer of this term.] He continues: “Not yet – at least not in the sense of dispensing with public assistance…While wind may be abundant in the British Isles, nature also dictates that its output is intermittent…The next challenge then is to squeeze down the cost of intermittency. That’s not impossible…But that will need investment – and plenty of it.”

In a special supplement, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has published its “State of the Climate” for 2018. The 300-page report is an “annual physical of the climate system”, the authors say, which “endeavours to bring a comprehensive set of measurements to detail the status of the climate system and our capacity and willingness to observe it”. 2018 saw average atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach 407 parts per million, the authors say. This is “the highest in the modern instrumental record and in ice core records dating back 800,000 years”. The authors note: “With a weak La Niña in early 2018 transitioning to a weak El Niño by the year’s end, the global surface (land and ocean) temperature was the fourth highest on record, with only 2015 through 2017 being warmer.” The report is free to download.