A vote on proposed UK legislation that would “maximise North Sea oil and gas production” has been delayed, the Times reports. According to the paper, the bill was due to receive its second reading last night. However, it reports that previous business overran, and the government’s deputy chief whip, Marcus Jones, said it “would not be right to give MPs little more than 45 minutes to debate the plan”. Jones expects the vote to take place within the next two weeks, the newspaper says. BBC News reports that Sir Alok Sharma, the Conservative MP, former minister and COP26 president, said he would not vote in support of the bill, warning that plans to guarantee annual oil and gas licensing rounds are “a total distraction” which reinforce the idea the UK is “not serious” about tackling climate change. The Daily Telegraph says Sharma “has vowed to rebel against the government” on the vote. The Independent reports that Conservative MP and former minister Chris Skidmore has submitted his resignation in protest over the bill, triggering a byelection for his Kingswood seat in Gloucestershire. The Financial Times reports that “oil industry executives were leaned on by the UK government to voice support” for the legislation.

Elsewhere, the Guardian has published a factcheck on the UK government’s claims about North Sea oil and gas. It says the claim that more North Sea oil and gas would benefit households and lower bills is incorrect, noting that energy secretary Claire Coutinho has admitted the policy will not bring down bills. The claim that new extraction would help UK energy security is also incorrect, it says, noting that “the oil and gas produced in the North Sea is owned by private businesses – it will be sold on the international market and does not go directly to UK businesses”. The claims that “the Climate Change Committee allows for more oil and gas extraction” and “UK oil and gas is four times cleaner than that from abroad” are also incorrect, the paper says. Similarly, Big Issue reports that “scientific opposition [to the bill] is already overwhelming”. Separately, EnergyMonitor covers research which finds that at least 40% of North Sea oil and gas licences are owned by foreign investors. 

In other UK news, the Guardian reports that telecoms firm BT is launching a pilot programme in Scotland to “convert old street cabinets traditionally used for broadband and phone cables into electric vehicle charging points”. This comes as BBC News asks: “Where will all the electric cars be charged?” Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that sales of heat pumps “have soared” globally but “the technology is still misunderstood”. Elsewhere, the Daily Mail says: “Forget heat pumps – how ‘zero emission boilers’ could be the device of choice for homeowners who lack space or money for the more expensive alternatives”. BusinessGreen reports that “the government has announced a £300m investment to support the domestic production of next-generation nuclear fuels, in a bid to reduce the UK’s reliance on energy supplies from Russia”. Finally, BusinessGreen reports that Abu Dhabi’s National Oil Company has acquired a 10% stake in a UK-based carbon capture and hydrogen developer.

“Switzerland and Thailand have completed the transfer of Article 6.2 carbon credits, marking the first ever…deal for emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement,” S&P Global reports. The outlet continues: “Article 6.2 sets out a system of national accounting for greenhouse gas emissions, with common principles that countries can adopt to allow cross-border exchanges of credits. Countries can adopt cross-border exchanges of credits, known as Internationally Transferable Mitigation Outcomes, or ITMOs, under Article 6.2, which sets out a system of national accounting for greenhouse gas emissions. The Swiss-based KliK Foundation said on 8 January it purchased the first ITMOs from the Thai company Energy Absolute Public Co. Ltd. for the Bangkok E-Bus Program. The deal involves the purchase of 1,916 ITMOs which were credited to the KliK Foundation’s account in the Swiss Emissions Trading Registry on 15 December.” (See the 2019 Carbon Brief Q&A on Article 6 for background.)

Former Nasa scientist James Hansen has warned that global warming will cross the 1.5C threshold “for all practical purposes” this year, the Guardian reports. The paper continues: “Scientists say the 1.5C ceiling cannot be considered breached until a string of several years exceed this limit, with this moment considered most likely to happen at some point in the 2030s. But Hansen said that even after the waning of El Niño, which typically drives up average global heat, the span of subsequent years will, taken together, still average at the 1.5C limit.” The paper quotes Hansen saying: “Passing through the 1.5C world is a significant milestone because it shows that the story being told by the United Nations, with the acquiescence of its scientific advisory body, the IPCC, is a load of bull****…We are not moving into a 1.5C world, we are briefly passing through it in 2024. We will pass through the 2C (3.6F) world in the 2030s unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet’s energy balance.” However, Hansen’s assertion “has received a cautious response from other scientists contacted by the Guardian”, the paper says. It continues: “Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Stripe and Berkeley Earth [and Carbon Brief climate science contributor], said ‘I disagree a bit with Hansen’ that global temperatures will not be less than 1.4C above pre-industrial times once there is a countervailing La Niña, a reverse climatic condition to El Niño. ‘But longer term those sorts of temperatures will no longer be seen as the Earth continues to warm,’ Hausfather said, adding that he still expected the long-term average to fully pass 1.5C in the early 2030s.”

The European Union has approved €4bn (£3.4bn) of state aid for new factories to produce heat pumps, solar panels and batteries for electric cars, the Guardian reports. It continues: “The investments form part of the EU’s mission to be climate neutral with net-zero gas emissions by 2050 but are also designed to help insulate the bloc from the growing competition from Chinese car, solar panel and other green tech factories. It follows the approval of similar schemes in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, and Spain, worth in total €9.1bn, and with several others in the pipeline.” The Financial Times reports that €902m in state aid has been approved for battery-maker Northvolt to build a plant in Germany. It adds: “The Swedish company had threatened to pull plans for its plant in Heide in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, citing more generous subsidies available in the US through President Joe Biden’s $783bn Inflation Reduction Act. But it committed to the project in May after Berlin pledged funding under a new EU state aid regime that allows national governments to match subsidies on offer outside the EU if there is a risk that a project of ‘strategic importance’ is likely to be taken elsewhere.” Reuters says the plant will have an annual capacity of  60 gigawatt hours (GWh) – enough for between 800,000 and 1m electric vehicles per year. “Production will start in 2026 and will reach full capacity in 2029,” it adds. Forbes and Bloomberg also cover the news.

Elsewhere, the Financial Times says the EU’s decision to impose “the world’s first ever tax on emissions of carbon-intensive imports”, which will come into force in 2026, is causing a “predicament” for China. It continues: “The EU’s decision could set into motion a wave of countries enforcing similar measures, and on a wider variety of products, delivering a devastating collective blow to Chinese industry. In December, the UK announced the introduction of its own carbon import tax by 2027.” Shashank Pandey – a research fellow in the climate and ecosystem team at Vidhi Centre for legal policy – writes in the Hindu that the EU’s carbon border tax is “a concerning development for India”. Pandey adds: “There is a pressing need for India to formulate its own carbon taxation measures that align with the principles of the Paris Agreement while simultaneously safeguarding its industries’ interests.”

Chinese state-owned energy company Jinneng Holding Group has “broken ground on an enormous new 55bn yuan ($7.7bn) project in Shanxi province combining wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage”, which is based in an “abandoned coal mining area”, reports the Chinese financial outlet Caixin. The project plans to have a combined capacity of 6 gigawatts (GW) for wind and solar energy, with 3.4 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of energy storage, it adds. The Communist Party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily reports that about 16.3bn square metres of China’s “northern regions” had access to “clean” heating, which is equivalent to around 76% of the total heating needs, according to the national energy administration (NEA). Separately, Chinese financial outlet Yicai reports that in the first five days of January 2024, “16 energy storage projects were registered in China’s southern Guangdong province”. 

Meanwhile, China News Weekly publishes an interview with Su Wei, China’s chief climate negotiator. He tells the outlet that the agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” made at COP28 is “consistent” with China’s stance, which is “to ensure that new energy sources are available and then gradually replace traditional energy, rather than phasing out traditional energy before reliable alternatives are in place”. He also tells the publication that China and the US “cooperated” to align at COP28, “proposing wording for the draft text [and] helping to unlock challenging issues in the negotiations”. 

Separately, Chinese energy outlet BJX News reports that the NEA has issued a notice that says that “failure to prioritise the dispatch of renewable energy generation”, “failure to complete the acquisition of renewable energy power” and other behaviours related to renewable energy could result in administrative penalties. State news agency Xinhua reports that the ministry of ecology and environment (MEE) has recently issued the newly revised “Administrative Enforcement and Inspection Measures for Ecological Environment”, which  introduces a new type of “non on-site inspection”, which uses methods such as mobile enforcement systems to “directly provide feedback” about the results. 

A report linked to Tsinghua University finds that “China…still relies on foreign key technologies” to develop renewable energy technologies, reports another Yicai article. The newspaper says: “China needs to import almost all of its software involving wind turbine generator design and simulation, finite element analysis, computer-aided design, numerical computing and wind farm design.” Bloomberg reports that China is using the manufacturing of electric vehicles, batteries and renewable energy as drivers to spur economic growth. It quotes André Sapir, senior fellow at the thinktank Bruegel, saying that “much like Japan,…China’s rise into more sophisticated areas of manufacturing is now making it a head-to-head competitor with developed nations”. It quotes him continuing: “Japan was everything that China is today…[but] it was manageable because there were no differences [with the West] from a political perspective.” Finally, China Daily reports that case studies in Los Angeles, Beijing and Shenzhen show that “addressing climate change and air pollution simultaneously delivers significant public health benefits”, according to a new study by the California-China Climate Institute. 

Carsten Jung, a senior economist at thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research, argues in a comment for the Guardian that “the £28bn pledged for green projects [by the UK’s opposition Labour Party] would boost growth – [Labour leader] Keir Starmer shouldn’t just stick to it, he should go further”. Jung says there is “substantial evidence that higher public investment boosts economic growth”. He continues: “The UK’s Climate Change Committee finds that over time, the ‘capital investment needed to get to net-zero more than paid for itself through savings on fuel, healthcare, and other costs’. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has highlighted that ‘continued dependence on gas could be as expensive fiscally as completing the transition to net-zero’. Another way of looking at this is as follows: with every year that we delay investment, and remain fixated on distracting debates about inflation, we forgo the economic benefits of energy savings and new green jobs…The International Energy Agency finds that investing in energy efficiency can boost GDP because it saves families and businesses money that they would otherwise spend on energy, allowing them to spend this money on other goods and services instead. McKinsey estimates that the returns of investment in clean energy can be more than double the amount invested. It is a major omission that many macroeconomic institutions – such as the UK’s fiscal policy watchdog, the OBR – don’t factor in such returns across all of their forecasts.” He concludes: “Labour and the Conservatives should be debating how such investment should be spent, not whether it can be afforded.”

In other UK comment, Daily Telegraph columnist and leader writer Tim Stanley calls Conservative MP Chris Skidmore – who has just resigned over the government’s proposed North Sea oil and gas licensing bill – “everything that is wrong with the Tories”. Stanley adds: “The notion that Britain has some God-ordained mission to impoverish itself in order to make a tiny impact upon global emissions is mad, and very middle class, for it assumes consumers have the cash to splash on home renovations.”

Elsewhere, Lorenzo Marsili – director of the Berggruen Institute Europe – has penned a piece in the Guardian, asking: “If there is a Red Cross, founded to support people affected by armed violence, why can we not found a Green Cross for those affected by climate disasters?” He suggests that in the same way as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Green Cross could be “independent of any one country but draw its funding from both public and private sectors, working with professional national rescue teams and volunteers”. He adds that the European civil protection mechanism provides an early template of what the initiative could look like. Finally, the Financial Times Lex column says that “demand has been sluggish for oil”, warning that “Shell’s downstream weakness bodes ill for the global economy”.

A new research paper presents a “conceptual framework” for considering the role of justice within climate research. The authors say: “The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations.” The researchers apply their conceptual framework to scenarios for tackling climate change, arguing that this “enables a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice”.

The presence of urban green space is associated with “significantly lower rates of violent crime committed outside”, according to a modelling study conducted in Australia. The research uses modelling to explore the relationship between urban green spaces, “urban heat islands” and rates of violent crime inside and outside from 2013-2018 in greater Sydney. (Urban heat islands are areas where the high presence of concrete and buildings leads to more heat being absorbed, raising local temperatures.) The research finds that urban heat islands are associated with more violent crime committed outside, but not inside. It adds that urban green spaces are associated with less violent crime committed outside, but not inside – while higher temperatures overall are associated with more violent crime both inside and outside.