The UK’s largest undeveloped oil-and-gas field, known as Rosebank, is “highly unlikely” to be approved in time for parliamentary recess, according to City AM. It says this comes after the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) regulator wrote to oil-and-gas companies operating in the North Sea “warning them of the importance of electrification for new offshore platforms across future projects”. The article alludes to “growing concerns from regulators over electrification and net-zero compatibility across the industry”. Sky News also reports that a verdict on the project, which has been a focus for many climate campaigners and was expected to be decided imminently, is not expected before parliament goes into recess on 20 July. The Herald says “reports suggest a delay to determine the development could be down to concerns Rosebank would be at odds with legally-binding climate targets”.

Elsewhere, the Times reports that British Gas owner Centrica has struck a major $8bn deal to import more gas from the US, in a move it says would boost the UK’s energy security. It says the million tonnes of liquified natural gas (LNG) per year imported from a floating production facility in the Gulf of Mexico “would be enough to heat 5% of UK homes”. The Financial Times says “the US has become an increasingly important supplier of gas to Europe after cuts in supplies last year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. The newspaper also states that gas “may still form a significant part of the UK’s energy mix as the country attempts to decarbonise, as it can be converted into low-emission hydrogen if combined with carbon capture and storage”.

Meanwhile, another Times story reports that plans to use hydrogen for heating and cooking in up to 2,000 homes in Cheshire “have been scrapped after opposition from residents”. It says the change of plan on the “hydrogen village” project marks “the latest setback for proponents of hydrogen for home heating amid signs that the government is cooling on the idea”. The Financial Times says residents objected to the “upheaval” caused by the installation of hydrogen boilers and the potential costs once the trial was over. It notes that the use of hydrogen in heating is “fiercely contested”, with critics saying that it is an “expensive distraction whose use should be limited to industrial applications”. (Carbon Brief has previously reported on the evidence of high costs involved when relying on hydrogen to heat homes, as opposed to electric heat pumps.) The Daily Telegraph says in its headline that the hydrogen trial being scrapped is a “setback for net-zero”. Its article says the trial was dropped “after locals pushed back in favour of gas boilers and heat pumps”.

Finally, in more UK news, the Times reports that electric-car manufacturer Tesla is “preparing to shake up the British energy market by launching a retail provider and selling electricity to households”.

The death toll from rain-related accidents, landslides and floods in northern India rose to 91 on Tuesday, with landslides claiming eight lives in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand on Tuesday, the Times of India reports. While rains have paused in some northern states, allowing relief and rescue efforts to step up, authorities “warned of the possibility of moderate to high flash floods in districts in Himachal Pradesh”, the story adds.

In both mountain states, authorities have asked “people not to venture out of their homes unless necessary”, the Daily Telegraph reports, while rivers in north India “including the Yamuna in New Delhi, surged beyond their banks”, submerging villages, towns and farm land. “This is a clear climate change signal…[m]onsoon patterns have changed in response to global warming,” climate scientist Dr Roxy Koll tells the paper, while Dr Aditi Mukherji is quoted saying that “[w]hat we are seeing in Himachal Pradesh is partly a result of development models that did not factor in the caution while building in ecologically fragile zones…We need coherent planning that puts climate resilience at the heart of infrastructure development, something we are lacking now.” Bloomberg reports that several hydropower plants in Himachal Pradesh “have suspended operations due to flooding and high silt levels”. Climate experts “emphasise[d] the need to identify vulnerable areas to develop customised disaster management strategies”, strengthen early warning systems and invest in resilient infrastructure, says the Times of India, which adds that others pointed to extensive “damage to farmland and the alarming increase in climate-related risks”.

Across the border in Pakistan, “cloudbursts and flash floods in multiple cities” have killed at least 80 people, with up to a million people affected, according to the country’s national disaster authority, Nikkei Asia reports. While Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rahman issued alerts for urban flooding “with risks of landslides”, many “fear a repeat” of last year’s devastating floods that were attributed to global warming, it adds. A state water resources engineer told the outlet that “due to climate change”, less water was reaching reservoirs and “that’s why we need more dams in Pakistan to use floodwater for our benefit”. Meanwhile, environmental campaigner Ali Tauqueer Sheikh is quoted saying that “given the problems the monsoon rains are causing in both India and Pakistan, the bitter rivals have a good starting point to collaborate on early warning systems for floods, a step that would benefit both countries”. A video story on the Guardian captures extreme flooding seen across the world in July.

“A week of dangerous weather” continues in the US, with flash floods striking parts of Vermont and “hotter heatwaves set to boil much of the southern and western US”, the Guardian reports. “This week follows early July record global temperatures in what is predicted to be the hottest month in the US ever recorded, accelerated by the El Niño pattern, as the climate crisis continues to spiral,” the piece says. The Daily Telegraph reports that a heatwave brought temperatures exceeding 100F (38C) and excessive heat warnings to Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Southern California this week, “and the usual monsoon activity, which can help offset the blazing temperatures, is missing”. Axios says the extreme heat has prompted the National Weather Service to issue heat alerts for more than 86 million people. The New York Times has an article considering the various extreme weather events playing out across the country titled: “Climate disasters daily? Welcome to the ‘new normal’.”

The prolonged rain and floods in Vermont are “historic and catastrophic”, said governor Phil Scott, according to the Wall Street Journal. He added that floodwaters were still rising in some areas, surpassing levels seen during 2011’s Hurricane Irene. BBC News notes that president Joe Biden declared a state of emergency on Monday in the state. It adds that parts of the north-eastern US, including New York state, “saw some of the most severe flooding in more than a decade in recent days”. According to NBC News, millions of people in New England are under flood watches and more than 100 rescues had been made in Vermont as of Tuesday evening. CBS News reports that on Tuesday night the Wrightsville Dam, which officials had been worried was going to spill over, was “beginning to recede”. New York Times climate correspondent David Gelles has a dispatch on the floods from his home in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City.

Amid all this, the Hill reports the White House announced that it will invest $5m to “manage and improve resilience to extreme heat” across the US this summer. This will be done through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the outlet says, which will establish two virtual research centres, funded through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). At the same time, Inside Climate News says Republicans are “kicking off their return to Congress this week with a slew of bills and amendments that would block key funding pools established under the IRA”. In more IRA news, Bloomberg reports that after the act “supercharged” the US Loan Programs Office, the department is seeking to use its $400bn pot of funding to support public transportation projects across the country. The Financial Times has a long read on Biden’s “rewrit[ing]” of “the rules of economic policy”, giving the large subsidies handed out by the IRA as a key example.

A new International Energy Agency (IEA) report finds that supplies of critical minerals could move close to levels needed to support government climate pledges by 2030, following a surge in investment, says Reuters. It adds that this is only “provided all projects go as planned”. IEA executive director Fatih Birol is quoted by the newswire describing this as “good news” and saying “this is testimony that the markets are buying into the fact that the clean energy transition is moving very fast”. Energy Monitor states that as a result of “unprecedented” market growth, investment in critical mineral development rose 30% last year, up 10% from 2021. Nikkei Asia reports that the IEA saying that due to its “dominance” in the refining and processing of raw materials, China is a “strong competitor” in the worldwide competition for mining assets.

The Daily Telegraph reports under the headline: “Net-zero targets under threat unless mining is stepped up, warns IEA.” It says the IEA warned that more mines for minerals needed in the energy transition, such as lithium, copper and nickel, must be opened rapidly if the world wants to hit its net-zero goals. It quotes a new report from the IEA, which says that “more projects would in any case be needed by 2030 in a scenario that limits global warming to [the Paris Agreement target of] 1.5C”. The newspaper says that the influential agency specifically calls for more investment to help diversify supply chains and end reliance on China and Australia, which are the two biggest sources of critical minerals. 

Meanwhile, Politico covers a separate report produced by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which concludes that the world’s supply of critical minerals is vulnerable to disruptions that could slow the energy transition because their mining and refining are “concentrated in the hands of a few companies and countries”.

Financiers and philanthropists have pledged more than $2bn to help developing countries decarbonise their energy systems and adapt to climate impacts at talks jointly hosted by the UK and US in Windsor, UK, yesterday, according to BusinessGreen. This includes “roughly $1bn” committed to nature-based solutions projects in emerging markets, it adds. A statement published by the White House said the “climate finance mobilisation forum”, hosted by US climate envoy John Kerry and UK energy security and net-zero secretary Grant Shapps, had yielded fresh private sector commitments. This comes as “both the US and UK governments continue to face criticism from developing countries and green groups for failing to provide promised direct funding in line with previous climate finance pledges”, the article notes.

Meanwhile, Climate Homes News reports that after lengthy negotiations, government negotiators on the Green Climate Fund’s (GCF) board have finally approved a new strategy for 2024 to 2027. Developed country governments pushed for the flagship UN climate fund to attract more private finance, rather than money from their taxpayers, and developing country governments called for wealthy governments to provide more public money, according to the outlet. The article states that “African negotiators raised concerns that the GCF is planning based on an assumption that there will not be a major increase in its funding, despite the worsening climate crisis across the world”. A separate story in the same outlet reports that the GCF is giving nearly $190m to an investment programme that finances some of the world’s biggest farm companies that have been “accused of destroying forests”.

Former Conservative cabinet minister and COP26 president Alok Sharma, speaking at Windsor Castle after formally receiving his knighthood for services to tackling climate change, said the UK and other countries should be doing “a lot more” if they are serious about containing global warming, according to the Press Association.

Power plants in China have “ramped up efforts” to ensure electricity supply, including boosting output at coal plants, in response to the “surging demand” due to a “prolonged heatwave”, writes the Global Times. In the first week of July, China Huadian, a state-owned power supplier, says the coal consumption reached 4.75m tonnes, a year-on-year growth of nearly 14%, the newspaper adds. Reuters reports that China Southern Power Grid, a state-owned power supplier, saw power demand reached a record 226 gigawatts (GW) on Monday. The company adds that the demand on its grid, which “serves five southern provinces including economic powerhouse Guangdong”, is “expected to peak at 245GW this summer, a year-on-year increase of 10%”.

Meanwhile, the state-run newspaper China Daily has an editorial, which focuses on the visit of John Kerry, US special envoy for climate change, to China next week. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday that “China and the US had good cooperation in the climate area and hoped both sides would meet half way to create beneficial conditions”, in response to a question on Kerry’s proposed visit to China, reports ZAWYA, a business news site. A New York Times article says that the US president Joe Biden is “betting that high-level dialogue” this summer can “cool fiery relations with China”. 

Separately, the South China Morning Post quotes Zhou Chengjun, from China’s central bank, saying that the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) functions as a “new tariff barrier” that violates economic principles. Bloomberg writes that “small-scale solar projects and afforestation are being considered as sectors to generate new emissions reduction credits” since the issuance of new China Certified Emissions Reduction credits (CCERs), according to people familiar with the details. Another South China Morning Post article says that, according to a BloombergNEF report, China “ranked third among 10 markets assessed on their readiness to boost the supply of metals essential to the global clean energy transition and the fight against climate change”. A third article by the South China Morning Post writes that German diplomats have called for increased agricultural cooperation with China amid “worsening climate change issues and global supply chain disruption”. 

Elsewhere, People’s Daily, a newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, quotes Deng Boqing from China International Development Cooperation Agency, saying that “China has continuously promoted international exchanges and cooperation on green development within the framework of South-South cooperation.” Finally, Mining Technology carries an article by data journalist Isabeau van Halm, who writes on “how will China’s coal investment affect its energy mix”.

Geologists have chosen a lake in Canada as the best site to mark the start of the Anthropocene, a new epoch dominated by humanity’s influence on Earth, New Scientist reports. “For the past few years, a team of researchers called the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been trying to pinpoint the place on Earth that offers the best geological evidence for the Anthropocene,” the website reports. It notes that there are three more votes before the site can be formally ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The Times explains that the term “Anthropocene” is used to describe “how humans have changed the Earth so much that their impact, from climate change to wildlife losses, will be visible in geological records, such as sediment and fossils, for millennia”. It says geologists have spent five years scouring the globe for signs of this impact, “from sardine fish scales in a Japanese bay to fingerprints of climate change in the stalagmites of an Italian cave”.

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has a piece in the Daily Telegraph bemoaning the struggles facing “centre-right politics” and “the neo-Marxism that permeates vast swathes of our institutions and makes good government more difficult than ever”. Abbott – who is on the board of the UK climate-sceptic thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation and has a long history of climate scepticism dating back to his time in power – picks out climate action as a key example. He says: “Australia and Britain, in particular, have seen the centre-Right’s usual scepticism about utopian schemes degenerate into ruinously expensive and technically dubious measures to reach net-zero emissions targets.” Abbott says it is difficult to argue that “less government” is the solution when “voters’ concerns are less about insufficient family income than a supposedly imminent climate catastrophe”. A key theme of the article is that climate action and other policies such as measures to address racism in society are infringing on people’s freedoms, according to Abbott. He writes that while the “Marxist left” has failed to “destroy liberal-capitalism”, it has instead tried to “subvert the culture via a long march through the institutions”. He continues: “Indeed, the neo-Marxist left has turned out to be much better at persuading people that the planet needs to be saved than that the economy needs to be nationalised. So it’s now not socialism, but environmentalism, that requires vast government controls: over how our electricity is produced, how we warm our houses, and soon how we feed ourselves, and how we move around, in order to combat climate change.” Abbott concludes that the centre-right must “counter the climate and identity obsessions that are weakening our economies and sapping our societies”.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Guardian about the departure of Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, says: “Post-pandemic, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, the challenges of the cost of living and energy crisis, rising global migration and the green transition have proved a boon for the radical right, whose influence is seeping into the mainstream.”

A new study examines the extent to which forests around the world are being divided up into smaller, isolated patches separated by roads or infrastructure – known as fragmentation. The authors compare a “forest fragmentation index” representing the main characteristics of forest fragmentation – including edge, isolation, and patch size – in 2000 and 2020. The findings suggest that while forested areas might appear relatively intact in the Amazon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Borneo, and New Guinea, these areas have experienced the most severe forest fragmentation. Conversely, the study suggests that forests in Europe and South China are highly fragmented but recovering as a result of efforts to protect them.