Households could save an average £270 a year on energy bills in 2035 with policies to drive energy efficiency investments, according to the UK Energy Research Centre and the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand, the Press Association and others report. Efficiency policies have already helped keep £490 off bills in 2015, PA adds. Domestic energy demand could be cut by a quarter, the equivalent of six Hinkley C nuclear plants [note that the saving would include heat as well as power]. Given this potential, recent UK government cuts to energy efficiency programmes are “ludicrous”, one of the report’s authors tells the BBC. Another says: ““The ‘Green Crap’ reduced energy bills. Until that’s understood and acknowledged we’re not going to make any progress on this agenda.” One option would be to ban the sale of poorly insulated homes, report Bloomberg and the Times. The Guardian and Energy Live News also have the story.

Scotland aims to phase out petrol and diesel car sales by 2032, eight years earlier than the rest of the UK, reports Reuters. The idea is part of the Scottish government’s legislative programme for 2018, which will also include new greenhouse gas reduction targets in a Scottish Climate Change Bill, reports Business Green. The Scottish government has no powers to ban car sales, notes the Times. Instead, it hopes to tip the balance in favour of electric vehicles. The paper quotes a “senior government source” saying: “This is going to happen anyway so it is a question of timing. We know we have lots of problems to solve but we want to send out the message that we are…leading on this issue”. The Scotsman and Climate Home also have the story. Carbon Brief has outlined some of the issues that need to be addressed in a series of articles on electric cars and the power network

Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century, is headed towards northern Caribbean islands today, en route to a possible landfall in Florida by the weekend, Reuters reports. The category 5 storm has winds of up to 185 miles per hour. The Associated Press looks at the “spaghetti” of hurricane track scenarios, asking where Irma will go next.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has put a political operative in charge of vetting hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, reports the Washington Post. It says the “unusual step” has “assigned final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience”. The aide, John Konkus, “has told staff that he is on the lookout for the ‘double C-word’ – climate change – and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject”, the Post adds.

Scientists want public help to enter 100-year weather records from the summit of Ben Nevis into a database, the BBC reports. The data, collected by meteorologists stationed on top of the UK’s highest mountain from 1883 to 1904, includes temperature, precipitation and wind records spanning five large volumes. The initiative could improve knowledge of the baseline climate before global warming kicked in.

Electricity supplies could be hit if the UK leaves Euratom, the European nuclear treaty, without new measures to replace it, the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) says. In comments reported by the Press Association, NIA chief Tom Greatrex says a failure to plan ahead could also have ‘significant potential impact” on the Hinkley C new nuclear plant.

A new type of post-disaster litigation is soon likely to appear, writes Sebastien Malo for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Rapid scientific advances are making it possible to measure the portion of a disaster – such as Hurricane Harvey – that can be attributed to climate change, Malo writes. This could “feed negligence claims as some victims of the hurricane may seek to fault authorities or companies for failing to plan for such events, according to several lawyers interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.”

In the Washington Post, Robert O’Harrow Jr profiles the “organisations in the vanguard of efforts to cast doubt on the gravity of climate change and thwart government efforts to address it”. Characters in the story include Myron Ebell, for nearly two decades head of the Cooler Heads Coalition and more recently a member of Donald Trump’s transition team. The story behind these charities “illuminates the influential, little-known role that tax-exempt public charities play in modern campaigns to sway lawmakers”, O’Harrow Jr writes.

Bloomberg Businessweek profiles Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher, two Swiss engineers who “turned a college project into a world-changing machine”. The pair’s firm, Climeworks, is removing CO2 from the atmosphere and selling it to a local vegetable greenhouse. Carbon Brief explained the firm’s plans when it opened its first plant back in June.

Methane emissions from the world’s wetlands may be play a larger role in global warming than once thought, new research suggests. Wetland methane emissions are the largest natural source in the global methane budget, contributing to roughly one third of total natural and anthropogenic emissions. Using statistical modelling, the researchers find that an increase in boreal wetland cover due to climate change could account for 56% of all methane emissions by 2100. “We highlight that climate-change and wetland methane feedbacks to radiative forcing are an important component of climate change and should be represented in policies aiming to mitigate global warming below 2°C,” the researchers say.