Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of the industry group Energy UK, is set to take over as head of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the UK government on its climate policies, the Times reports. It notes that, in her role as chief executive, Pinchbeck would be in charge of supplying evidence on how to best meet the legal target of net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as the interim goals in the intervening years. The newspaper says that it understands the position has yet to be signed off by Ed Miliband, the energy security and net-zero secretary. It explains that news of the potential appointment comes as “post-election rows [are] already starting over new pylons and solar farm approvals”, noting that Pinchbeck has warned in the past that the country is facing an “age of trade-offs” between emissions goals and protecting nature. 

The Daily Telegraph reports that Octopus Energy is “poised to build hundreds of onshore wind turbines across the countryside”, which would contribute to Labour’s manifesto pledge to double onshore wind generation. The newspaper says the company plans to submit multiple planning applications for sites across the country, led by “where there is strong demand from local people who have signed up to its fan club scheme” – which can cut electricity bills when it is windy. Nevertheless, the article emphasises that Labour’s plans to expand renewables – notably with large solar farms – have been “met by fierce opposition”. BBC News reports on comments by Nick Timothy – newly elected Conservative MP for west Suffolk and former chief of staff to prime minister Theresa May – who says Labour’s approval of the Sunnica solar project in his constituency was “disgraceful”. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, focuses on Labour’s plans for the UK’s oil and gas industry. It says the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce has warned that 100,000 jobs, largely in north-east Scotland, are at risk if the government presses on with its plans to increase the windfall tax on the fossil-fuel sector and end new licences in the North Sea. A separate Daily Mail “special report” describes Aberdeen as a “city that could be killed by net-zero”.

Meanwhile, various UK news outlets, including BBC News, report on the start of the high court case against the proposed coalmine near Whitehaven in Cumbria. The previous Conservative government was due to defend its decision to grant planning permission for the site in 2022, but the new Labour government has withdrawn its case, the article explains. However, the developer West Cumbria Mining is still defending the case launched by climate campaigners. The company argued in court that the site would be a “unique net-zero” mine, according to the Guardian. The climate campaigners, meanwhile, argue that the decision to set up the first new deep coal mine in the UK for 30 years was unlawful because ministers did not consider the “adverse international signal”, Reuters reports.

In more UK policy news, trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds has indicated that he would not follow the EU’s lead in imposing strict tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports, the Financial Times reports. Meanwhile, another Financial Times article says the UK’s used EV market is “booming after a collapse in prices has left them as affordable as traditional petrol cars”.

The Republican party’s new vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, has various investments in “green” technologies, despite being an avowed critic of climate action and ESG investing, according to E&E News. Vance, who will be running alongside former president and climate sceptic Donald Trump, has invested in companies that provide mobile electric-vehicle charging services, energy storage for microgrids and organic gardening kits, the article states. This is in spite of Vance referring to ESG investing as a “massive racket” and rejecting climate policies in general, despite expressing concern about climate change earlier in his career, it continues. Bloomberg says that Vance’s turn against climate policy in recent years has come as the state where he serves as senator, Ohio, has become a top installer of solar power. The article notes that while Vance has argued against climate action on the basis of job losses for fossil-fuel workers, “new electric vehicle and battery manufacturing plants are helping offset jobs Ohio lost in its production of conventional gas-burning cars”. The Independent notes that Vance’s scepticism about climate change began when he was seeking the support of Trump for his senate race. 

Meanwhile, CNN has an article about billionaire and Tesla chief executive Tesla Elon Musk supporting Trump. “One wants to move away from fossil fuels and convert all car sales worldwide to electric vehicles. The other believes EVs will be an economic disaster for America and that the nation should produce and burn more oil,” it says. The article points to a Wall Street Journal “exclusive” that says Musk plans to commit around $45m a month in support of Trump’s presidential run.

Elsewhere, a piece in the New York Times is titled “what Trump 2.0 could mean for the environment”. It says that if the Republican challenger re-takes the White House, he “would be in a far better position to dismantle environmental and climate rules, aided by more sympathetic judges and conservative allies who are already mapping out ways to bend federal agencies to the president’s will”. Bloomberg publishes an interview with Trump – conducted on 25 June – in which he says renewables such as wind power are “too expensive”. The newswire provides a full transcript of the interview, which it factchecks in places – although some of Trump’s misleading claims about the high costs of renewables are not scrutinised.

China has “placed 15 provinces on full emergency alert” as the country enters the year’s “peak rainy season”, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports. It adds that “deadly downpours that devastated the south [of the country] have moved northwards to affect the previously drought-hit central province of Henan as well as northern Hubei province”. China is deploying flood prevention and disaster relief work as the country “entered the most critical period of flood prevention”, according to economic newspaper Jiemian. State news agency Xinhua reports that Henan province issued the second-highest level of alert for rainstorms on Tuesday morning. Another Reuters article covers rainfall in a small town in Henan, which received “almost a year’s worth of rain in one day”. The overseas version of the Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily carries an article in its print edition quoting Li Qiang, director of the Institute of Global Climate Governance at Tianjin Foreign Studies University, saying that, as “global warming is continuing to intensify, leading to frequent occurrences of extreme weather event”, it is “a common endeavour for all humankind to address global climate change”.

Meanwhile, Science and Technology Daily reports that China’s electricity consumption by manufacturing solar equipment increased 76% year-on-year, while consumption by new energy vehicle (NEV) manufacturing and charging services increased by 39% and 78% respectively. State broadcaster CCTV reports that in the first six months of 2024, China’s NEV production increased by 34% year-on-year, adding that the proportion of non-fossil energy consumption in total energy consumption increased by 1.9 percentage points. Bloomberg says that China’s ‘new three types’ industries (solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and NEVs) will grow to account for “23% of GDP by 2026”. Economic newspaper Nikkei Asia reports that China’s largest rare-earth companies are facing declining prices as “the government tightens its grip on the resources and supply chain”.

In other news, Jiemian reports that China’s national carbon market, which has now been operating for over three years, has played “a significant role in the country’s emission reductions”. The Communist party-backed China Youth Daily publishes an article in its print edition quoting Chinese president Xi Jinping saying that “a good ecological environment is the most beneficial to people’s well-being”. The print edition of the People’s Daily carries a commentary by Peking University Prof Huan Qingzhi saying that it is “an important task” for China to “construct an independent Chinese ecological philosophical knowledge system”.

France’s Socialists, backed by the Greens and the Communists, are proposing veteran climate negotiator Laurence Tubiana as their prime ministerial candidate to lead the next government, Bloomberg reports. Tubiana, who is currently chief executive officer at the European Climate Foundation [which funds Carbon Brief], helped to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and was one of the “architects” of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the article explains. According to the article, Socialist leader Olivier Faure said the parties picked Tubiana “because of her reputation as an economist focusing on green and social issues, and her work on taxing corporate profits in Europe to finance the climate transition”. The move is an attempt to break the stalemate currently gripping French politics following the recent parliamentary election, with three of the four parties in the “fractious left-wing alliance” that won the most seats backing Tubiana, according to the Times. The alliance, known as the New Popular Front, remains far short of a majority, meaning cross-party agreements with groups including president Emmanuel Macron’s centrists “will be crucial for the next government to pass legislation”, the newspaper explains. It says most of the left-wing groups supported Tubiana on this basis, noting that she “has a reputation as a dealmaker”. However, the fourth left-wing party, France Unbowed, has rejected the proposal, arguing that the prime minister should be chosen from “its own ranks”, the Times explains. Le Monde reports that France Unbowed has pointed to an article penned by Tubiana for the newspaper last week, which they say calls for “forming a coalition with Macronism”. 

In more French news, DeSmog has an article about the “pervasive presence of polluting sponsors” at the upcoming Paris Olympic games. Research by campaigners at Badvertising finds that “just three of the sponsorship deals, those with Air France, Toyota and steelmaker ArcelorMittal, will produce more pollution than eight coal plants running for an entire year”.

The EU will not achieve its “unrealistic” targets for expanding hydrogen as a clean fuel, despite €18.8bn in funding, according to a new report by the European Court of Auditors, the Financial Times reports. The newspaper says the “damning” report from the EU’s official audit body concludes that the European Commission “did not undertake robust analyses” before setting production and import targets that each amounted to 10m tonnes of renewable “green” hydrogen by 2030. This is in spite of hydrogen being viewed as “key to decarbonising energy-intensive industries such as the steel and fertiliser sectors”, and an essential part of the EU’s plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, the article continues. The EU adopted one of the world’s first hydrogen strategies in 2020 and then ramped up its ambition further in 2022, banking on hydrogen to help replace some of the gas flowing into Europe from Russia, EurActiv reports. The news website says the auditors described the EU’s excessive targets as being “driven by political will” rather than a realistic assessment. Bloomberg says the report also concludes that available EU funding through to 2027 is “scattered among different programs, making it difficult for companies to access”. It adds that “the report compounds doubts over the EU’s hydrogen plans…and whether the fuel is a realistic solution to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the short term”.

A landmark review of London’s climate resilience has warned the government that preparing the capital for climate change is “non-negotiable”, the Evening Standard reports. The London Climate Resilience Review, carried out by former Environment Agency chair Emma Howard Boyd, concludes that government and businesses “have not adequately planned” for the disruption caused by severe weather. According to the Financial Times, Boyd said that preparation for these risks should include measures for the built environment, such as the river Thames’s defences, but also an understanding of the “costs of downtime” – with “the impact of heat and humidity on labour productivity in London was already valued at £577m a year”. The Guardian says the review also mentions the need for a city “heat plan”, a new reservoir and measures to incentivise the removal of paving.

Negative commentary on the new Labour government’s climate plans continues in the UK’s right-wing press, with Daily Telegraph columnist and farmer Jamie Blackett writing that the party’s large majority risks turning into a “parliamentary dictatorship”. He takes particular aim at Ed Miliband, Labour’s energy security and net-zero secretary, who he says has “ridden roughshod over local democracy” by approving large solar developments across Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Lincolnshire. “And this is likely to be just the start of Labour’s assault on the countryside as other solar industrial complexes, battery ‘farms’ and their connecting scars of pylons wait in the wings, as well as onshore wind,” he writes. Blackett describe’s Labour’s net-zero targets as “unrealistic” and says Labour is orchestrating a transfer of wealth from the British people to “landowners, Chinese panel manufacturers and renewable investment firms”. Moreover, he compares Labour’s net-zero plans to the “go it alone” policies of the communist dictatorship that ruled Albania until the 1980s.

A Sun editorial also aims a specific attack at Miliband, who it refers to as a “stumbling block” in Keir Starmer’s cabinet. (The Sun backed Labour at the last minute in the recent general election.) “Ed Miliband is not the secretary of state for Just Stop Oil. But in pushing Labour into banning all new North Sea drilling licences he might as well be,” it says. The editorial concludes: “Miliband’s claims that his net-zero zealotry will conjure a green boom and lower our bills are total fantasy. To be serious about growth, Sir Keir must pull the plug on Ed’s delusions.” A Daily Mail editorial looks ahead to Labour’s first king’s speech later today, stating that “laws to extend workers’ rights, give the unions more power, pile red tape on to firms, and ban new oil and gas drilling will cause nothing but economic harm”. It says that UK prosperity “could be sacrificed on the altar of Labour’s socialist, statist instincts and net-zero zealotry”.

New research explores the potential impact of climate change on “fire weather” – the meteorological conditions favourable for the ignition and spread of wildfires – in Europe. The researchers use high-resolution simulations from six CMIP6 models for 1950-2080 under four different emissions scenarios. The findings show that, irrespective of scenario, Europe’s fire weather “will become more severe, but the increase is much stronger under high greenhouse gas emissions”. They conclude that only the low-emission SSP1-2.6 pathway – consistent with limiting global warming to 2C – “can prevent strong increases in fire weather beyond the 2050s”.

A new review paper examines the evidence for climate change-related health consequences in the Sahel – a region “projected to be highly impacted by the more frequent hazards associated with climate change”. Identifying 81 relevant research papers, the findings suggest that “mosquito distribution will shift under different climate scenarios, but this relationship will not be linear with temperature, as there are other variables to consider”. In addition, the researchers say, “food insecurity, stunting (chronic malnutrition) and heat-related mortality are likely to increase if no action is taken owing to the projected impact of climate change on environmental factors and agriculture”. The authors note that 71% of the papers reviewed had first authors from institutions in North America or Europe, with 40% including co-authors from African institutions.

A new perspective paper explores the concept of an “adaptation gap” in flood protection, whereby adaptation efforts fall short relative to a desired level due to a combination of constraints, such as “cost, limitations on institutional capacity and societal inertia”. The authors argue that “without overcoming these constraints, adaptation gaps will widen under climate change, exposing increasing populations to heightened flood risk”. This “may then require more radical actions including relocation, as risks become intolerable”, they write. The paper concludes that “quantitative flood risk assessments must consider constraints and adaptation gaps systematically, especially where they may lead to flood adaptation limits”.