More than 30 Conservative MPs and peers, including former chief Brexit negotiator Lord Frost, have called on the prime minister to lift the ban on fracking, the Sunday Telegraph reports on its frontpage. The group, also including John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary, and Bob Blackman, the 1922 committee executive secretary, have signed a joint letter to Boris Johnson, labelling the 2019 ban on fracking as “unconservative”, the Sunday Telegraph says. Lord Frost told the paper: “If our economy is to boom after Brexit, British industry needs a competitive and reliable source of energy which we hold in our own hands and brings investment into this country. Shale gas production achieves all this and more. If we don’t produce it here, as we have seen, all we do is import gas from elsewhere, and push up overall carbon emissions too. So let’s reverse the moratorium on shale gas and let a British energy renaissance begin.” The paper also quotes the chief executive of oil and gas company Cuadrilla, who says: “Using domestic shale gas should be a no-brainer.” The letter was organised by by Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker, the chairman and deputy chairman of the “net-zero scrutiny group” of Conversative politicans. [Baker is a trustee of the UK’s climate-sceptic lobby group Net Zero Watch, which is also known as the Global Warming Policy Foundation, while Mackinlay has said he is sourcing the material for these same lobbyists who refuse to reveal their funders.] The Guardian also reports on the letter, noting that some researchers argue the net-zero scrutiny group appears “to be trying to delay a shift towards lower emissions by including climate policies in a culture war and spreading disinformation”. Most of the 30 signatories of the letter have refused to reveal their identities.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports on a separate letter to Johnson from fracking firm executives, also calling for the ban to be lifted. The Daily Telegraph also reports that environment minister Lord Goldsmith has spoken out against the call to lift the fracking ban. On Twitter, he said: “It’s hard to overstate just how unpopular fracking is with the British public. People do not want large-scale industrialisation of the British countryside. And given the gas would be produced by private firms and sold at the highest price internationally, there would likely be no measurable impact on UK gas prices anyway.” [There is also a considerable number of opinion pieces and editorials backing the call to revive fracking published in right-leaning publications over recent days – please see Comment section below.]

Meanwhile, the Times reports that energy minister Greg Hands has said that the UK must keep drilling for gas in the North Sea for “reasons of national security”. However, he rejected calls to revive fracking and added that “net zero is part of the solution, not part of the problem”, according to the Times. The Sunday Times reports that Stanlow, one of the biggest oil refineries in the UK, could be taken over by a private equity firm led by a team including a key ally of Donald Trump. And, separately, the Times reports that the government has shelved plans to put a £160-a-year green levy on gas bills “until the energy price rise crisis ends”.

In addition, the Guardian reports that a large Norfolk offshore windfarm has been approved by ministers for a second time, after a “local man convinced a high court judge to overturn the first decision a year ago”. Meanwhile, Sky News reports on evidence suggesting the government is falling behind on its plans to build a UK battery industry.

UK architects are calling for England’s draughty “interwar suburbs” to be insulated in a national effort to reach net-zero, the Guardian reports. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has calculated that insulation, double- or triple-glazing and gas boiler replacement in 3.3m interwar homes in England could cut the country’s CO2 emissions by 4%, the Guardian says. The professional body is calling for a national programme that it says will cost £38bn, a figure that far exceeds current government subsidies, the Guardian says. The paper adds: “But it believes the works could prove cheaper because the repetitive designs of the terraced and semi-detached homes should allow for economies of scale in a mass rollout. It also foresees savings of more than £500 a year in energy bills in many cases.” Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that the cost of running a heat pump in the average UK home will hit £1,251 this year, which it says is 27% higher than for a gas boiler. (The Times reports that Octopus Energy says that “by April it would be able to install a pump for a similar price to a gas boiler”.) A second Daily Telegraph story says “landlords have scrambled to buy energy-efficient properties in a bid to get ahead of costly eco upgrades that could land them with a £10,000 bill”.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that “an arcane housing-price system being used to determine who gets financial support to cope with soaring energy bills means millions of Britons who don’t really need it will be eligible for state aid”. The Guardian produces an analysis on how the UK can cut CO2 emissions and household bills. And, a separate Daily Telegraph story reports on Carbon Brief analysis finding energy from a biomass plant will “cost almost three times as much as new wind and solar power and could ultimately push up bills”.

The Amazon rainforest saw record deforestation in January, BBC News reports. Brazilian Amazon deforestation in January was five times larger this year than in 2021 and higher than in any January since records began in 2015, BBC News says. The i newspaper adds the data comes from Brazil’s government space research agency Inpe. “Environmental researchers said they were not surprised to see destruction still rising and pointed to President Jair Bolsonaro’s weakening of environmental protections since he took office in 2019,” the i adds. Reuters also has the story.

Europe’s biggest banks have provided £24bn to oil and gas companies that are expanding production less than a year after announcing net-zero pledges, the Guardian reports. An analysis by campaign group ShareAction finds that banks such as HSBC, Barclays and BNP Paribas have offered £24bn in loans and other financing to 50 companies with large oil and gas expansion plans since signing up to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) last April, according to the Guardian. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that a London-based activist investor has set out plan for a Glencore coal demerger.

There have been a number of editorials and opinion pieces in support of reviving fracking in the UK published across right-leaning publications over recent days. Writing for the Daily Mail, broadcaster and commentator Andrew Neil (who has a history of casting doubt on climate science) calls for a lift on the 2019 fracking ban in response to the energy crisis. He writes that ministers have in the past been “cowed into submission by the propaganda of the green lobby, which hugely exaggerated the environmental dangers and spread scare stories when exploratory drilling produced the mildest of earth tremors in the Blackpool area”. [On Twitter, BusinessGreen editor James Murray describes Neil’s column as “almost the ur-text for the new climate sceptics”.] In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Matt Lynn boldly claims, without evidence, that: “Fracking would have saved Britain from the energy crisis.” He continues: “Britain could be self-sufficient in energy, and even exporting it at vast profits to the rest of Europe – but a series of epically bad decisions by a series of governments made that impossible.”. An editorial in the Sun says Lord Frost is “spot on” to call for a fracking revival. “All the more reason to get cracking on fracking right now,” it adds. A separate Sun editorial says the government has “lost both its nerve and its mind on fracking” and claims net-zero is “still just a dream”. An editorial in the Daily Mail criticises the “reckless dash” to net-zero and cites Neil’s column, saying “experts say we have a wealth of shale gas under our feet, which could provide affordable energy for decades”. In addition, an editorial in the Daily Telegraph describes the fracking ban as “foolish and dangerous”. Elsewhere, Matt Ridley, a climate-sceptic Conservative former hereditary peer who owns land which has been mined for coal and who also oversaw the collapse of Northern Rock bank a decade when he was its hereditary chair, writes for the Daily Telegraph on recent developments on fusion power, claiming: “The hair shirt eco-elite don’t want pain-free fusion power.” A separate Daily Telegraph column by economist and writer Liam Halligan says that “net-zero may become as divisive as Brexit”.

There are also a number of editorials and opinion pieces commenting on the ongoing energy crisis. An editorial in the Daily Mirror backs calls for a windfall tax on highly profiting oil and gas companies to help ease the cost-of-living crisis. It says: “The government could have ended the unfairness by levying a windfall tax on oil and gas giants and using the proceeds to cushion households from the cost of living crisis. The fact they rejected this idea shows how little understanding they have of how tough life is for so many people at the moment.” For the Guardian, Michael Jacobs, a professor of political economy at the University of Sheffield and former climate advisor to the Gordon Brown government, writes: “The case for a UK windfall tax on oil and gas giants is unanswerable.” Meanwhile, Sunday Times deputy business editor Jon Yeomans says the call for a windfall tax “follows in the footsteps” of Margaret Thatcher. But in the Financial Times, commentator Camilla Cavendish says that “taxing energy profits won’t be the windfall politicians hope for”. Elsewhere, an editorial in the Times says the “west’s energy failures have given Putin his chance”.

“Plausible” future warming scenarios project a 2-3C global temperature increase by 2100, according to new research. The authors identify the warming scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth and sixth assessment reports that project 2005–50 fossil-fuel and industry CO2 emissions most consistent with observations from 2005-20 and International Energy Agency projections to 2050. They conclude that “the world is still off track from limiting 21st-century warming to 1.5 or below 2C”.

There were a greater number of conflicts over 1989-2014 at the global scale during El Niño years, according to a new study. The author used data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program to analyse the role of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation on regional conflicts. The paper finds that conflicts became more frequent in south and southeast Asia, the Middle East, and central and eastern Africa during El Niño years compared to La Niña years. “Specifically, intensifying hot spots of conflicts overlapped with the relatively arid and semi-arid areas of the Global South,” it adds.