The world’s largest oil companies have spent decades pushing “denial, disinformation and doublespeak” on climate change, Democratic lawmakers testified at a US Congressional hearing held on Wednesday, the Financial Times reports. It reports: “The findings followed a three-year probe that unearthed internal documents from the major energy companies with evidence of concerted campaigns ‘to confuse and mislead the public while working unceasingly to lock down a fossil fuel future’, said Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight committee in the report.” According to the FT, Raskin said on Wednesday: “Big Oil’s denial, disinformation and doublespeak – all in service of their campaign to deceive the public about the enormous climate crisis we are in and the role that Big Oil has played in bringing it about.” The Guardian reports that Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat chairing the Senate budget committee, which held the hearing to review the new report, said: “Big Oil had to evolve from denial to duplicity.” According to the newspaper, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders added: “In my view, it should not be the state government or the federal government having to pick up the bill. I think it’s time to ask the people who caused that problem, who lied about that situation, to pick up the bill.” According to DeSmog, “both the hearing and the report capture what Whitehouse described as ‘climate denial lite’, in which the industry pivots ‘to pretending it is taking climate change seriously, while secretly undermining its own publicly stated goals’”. The American Petroleum Institute (API), a major oil and gas lobbying group, was repeatedly blamed in the report and hearing for helping oil and gas companies hide the truth about climate change, NBC News says.

Elsewhere, the Associated Press reports that a federal appeals court panel on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit brought by young people from Oregon who argued that the US government’s role in climate change violated their constitutional rights.

The death toll from flooding and landslides in Kenya has risen to at least 181 since March, the humanitarian charity the Red Cross announced on Wednesday, according to Reuters. The newswire reports: “In the central Kenyan town of Mai Mahiu, where at least 48 died in flash floods on Monday, two bodies were recovered from the debris on Wednesday, Kenya Red Cross South Rift regional manager Felix Maiyo said.” It adds that scores more people have been killed in floods in neighbouring Tanzania and Burundi. The New York Times is among publications noting that the floods have now reached parts of the Masai Mara, “one of Africa’s greatest wildlife national reserves”. It reports: “On Wednesday, the Telek river broke its banks and overflowed into parts of the natural reserve, flooding many tourist camps. A spokesman for the Kenya Red Cross, Munir Ahmed, said that more than 90 people have been evacuated, some by helicopter. Others fled through the water.” The Guardian adds that Wednesday also saw floods close three main roads in the capital, Nairobi. In the Conversation, a hydrology consultant says that the floods “expose decades of poor urban planning and bad land management”.

Chinese state-backed outlet China News reports that the country’s top economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), announced yesterday that “it will promote the development and growth of key new energy vehicle (NEV) companies, accelerate the exit of outdated automakers and production capacity, and promote the optimization and reorganisation of NEV companies”. The outlet adds that the announcement came when China has a “strong demand” for NEVs and the NDRC has previously pledged to “give more support” for the industry. State news agency Xinhua carries an interview with a “principle” from NDRC, who says a series of regulations to standardise the market and prevent “local protection, market segmentation” will come into force soon. 

Meanwhile, energy news outlet Chinese Power Enterprises Management has an analysis on China’s carbon market. It says the country’s “lack of decoupling between economic development and carbon emissions makes carbon reduction both urgent and difficult”, which has troubled the carbon market to develop, especially because, “unlike the naturally formed commodity market, (China’s) carbon market is an artificially formed market based on policies”. The Financial Times has published a “big read” arguing that, contradicting a “strongly held view” that China could see another round of “robust growth” if it were able to boost its domestic demand, Chinese president Xi Jinping has chosen to unleash “new quality productive forces”, investing more in “high-end manufacturing, such as EVs, green energy industries and AI”. The newspaper adds that the excess investment in manufacturing would hurt not only China’s but global growth by “worsening deflationary pressures in the country, discouraging private investors, and ultimately leading growth to grind lower”. 

Elsewhere, the state broadcaster CCTV reports that, according to the Chinese Ministry of Water Resource, from 1-5 May, there will be moderate to heavy rainfall in many parts of China, including Guangdong province, which has been battling floods for weeks, with various rivers experiencing flooding beyond the warning levels again, posing a “significant risk” of flash floods in mountainous areas. The South China Morning Post reports that at least 24 people have died after a section of a highway in China’s rain-hit southern province of Guangdong collapsed. 

Finally, economic news outlet Caixin reports that Chinese solar companies’ “indirect route” of exporting to the US, via investing in manufacturing plants in Southeast Asia, might be in trouble as the US “strongly supports local photovoltaic manufacturing” with new trade protection measures looming. State-run newspaper China News shares an interview the Financial Times conducted with Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel economics laureate, who says that “China’s competitive edge in the field of NEVs stems from the insufficient engineering and technological investment by the US” and that, rather than a trade violation by China, “it’s a strategic mistake (by the US)”.

Sky News reports on analysis finding the number of days over 30C in London is on the rise. It says: “In the last three decades, the capital has seen 116 days above 30C, but more than half of these (59) happened in the last 10 years. Days above a sweltering 35C are becoming more common too, as are consecutive days above 30C, the analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) found.” Elsewhere, Energy Monitor speaks to Greenpeace’s Dr Doug Parr about how tax reform could help the UK implement a just transition away from fossil fuels. In the Financial Times, chief political commentator and executive editor Robert Shrimsley says that shadow net-zero secretary Ed Miliband is likely to be a key figure if Labour wins the next general election, given his energy brief.

Elsewhere, in other UK news, the Daily Telegraph reports on comments by Toby Young, a climate sceptic commentator, who has criticised BBC News for using a colour scale to represent temperatures that shows lows of 11C in yellow and 41C in dark red. BBC News says in response: “The colours used now range from blue for the coldest temperatures through to red for the hottest temperatures as these colours are easier to see if you live with colour blindness.” It comes as the newspaper publishes a comment piece by assistant editor Jeremy Warner with the headline: “The net-zero leviathan is crushing the economy.” Elsewhere, the MailOnline, which has a history of promoting climate scepticism, speaks to Mike Hulme, a geography researcher, who argues “the ideology of climatism” is a dire threat to young people in his book titled, “Climate Change Isn’t Everything”.

For Climate Home News, Teresa Anderson, global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International, argues that “the climate crisis is really about money, and our choices to use it and make it in really stupid ways”. She continues: “ActionAid research last year showed that banks are financing an astonishing amount of fossil-fuel and industrial agriculture activities in the global south, causing land grabs, deforestation, water and soil pollution and loss of livelihoods – all compounding the injustice to communities also getting routinely hit by droughts, floods and cyclones thanks to climate change. The banks can actually turn off the taps. They can end the finance flows that are fuelling the climate crisis. So to avert catastrophic climate change, the fossil-financing banks must start saying no to the corporations destroying the planet.” She adds that “it’s not only private finance that is flawed – public funds are being misused as well”, saying: “Governments are using far more of their public funds to provide subsidies or tax breaks for fossil fuels and industrial agriculture corporations, than they are for climate action. This is ridiculous – it’s hurting the planet, and it’s hurting people.”

An editorial in New Scientist explores India’s changing political and economic landscape and its stance on climate change amid the country’s general election. It says: “While India’s approach to climate change is far from perfect, it is at least a relief that the basic science and need for mitigation aren’t up for political debate. The same can’t be said for elections taking place elsewhere.” It notes that US presidential candidate Donald Trump denies established climate science and cites Carbon Brief analysis showing that a victory for Trump could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030, compared with Joe Biden’s plans. Elsewhere, Bloomberg columnist David Fickling says that Japan “stands alone in the G7” for opening new coal plants. His article also cites recent Carbon Brief analysis showing that, “at one point last month, fossil power as a whole dipped as low as 2.4% of electricity generation in Britain”.

A new study examines the effect on local communities in New York state of power outages caused by extreme weather, with a particular focus on socioeconomic vulnerability. The authors pair hourly outage data between 2017-2020 with a measure of “urbanicity” and social vulnerability, as well as weather data such as temperature, precipitation and wind speed. Their findings include that across the state of New York, 39.9% of outages co-occurred with severe weather and that certain regions, including eastern Queens, upper Manhattan and the Bronx, the Hudson Valley and Adirondack regions were the most heavily affected. The paper concludes that knowing how power outages will differentially burden communities should help inform equitable grid management.

Losing tropical forest has a greater effect on local temperature than gaining forest, according to new research. Using a range of satellite remote sensing data sources to examine sensitivity to changes in tropical forest cover, the study finds that while forest loss warms the surface by 0.56C, forest gain cools the surface by just 0.10C. The authors attribute the weaker effect of gaining forest on local temperature to “contrasting changes of vegetation properties, such as leaf area and greenness” – a factor they say is not captured in current Earth system models. Improving model representation could avoid overestimating the cooling effect of afforestation in future, the paper adds.