The climate protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has begun two weeks of actions in London, Cardiff and Manchester as they take to the streets to demand government action on the climate emergency, the Guardian reports. This morning, “XR activists will march towards Parliament Square in London from four different locations, where they plan to sit in the streets until MPs agree to back the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill”, the paper explains, adding: “Similar disruption will be taking place in Cardiff, where rebels will march from City Hall, and in Manchester, where protesters will congregate around St Peter’s Square.” Security has been stepped up at the Scottish Parliament, reports the Press Association, after “police told staff at the parliament building in Holyrood there were plans to ‘disrupt access to legislatures across the UK’ this week”. XR said this week’s protest will be peaceful and socially distanced, but is likely to include the blocking of some roads, reports the i newspaper. Planned stunts include a ”carnival of corruption” outside the Treasury, a “walk of shame” near the Bank of England and a silent protest outside Buckingham Palace, reports the Independent. The paper notes that “the Metropolitan Police said that gatherings can only take place off the main roads at Parliament Square Gardens between 8am and 7pm” and “they have also told XR not to use boats, vehicles, trailers or other structures as part of their procession”. XR protesters staged demonstrations across the country over the weekend, including at a number of airports against proposed expansion plans, says the Press Association. It adds: “Three women were also arrested following a protest in Brighton on Saturday, with specialist officers called to escort down demonstrators who had scaled the West Beach cafe on the seafront.” The Guardian has additional reporting of the protests over the weekend, while BBC News reports that “thousands of people have marched through the Mauritian capital, Port Louis, in protest at the authorities’ handling of a massive oil spill”.

The Trump administration yesterday relaxed strict Obama-era standards for how coal-fired power plants dispose of wastewater, reports the New York Times, in a move that “environmental groups said would leave rivers and streams vulnerable to toxic contamination”. The paper continues: “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation scaled back the types of wastewater treatment technologies that utilities must install to protect rivers and other waterways. It also pushed back compliance dates and exempted some power plants from taking any action at all.” Coal plants generate wastewater when they rinse the filters they use to catch pollutants from smokestacks, explains the Guardian, adding that “wastewater is discharged into rivers and lakes and often ends up in drinking water.” The EPA argues that even with laxer standards, coal plants will achieve the same pollution reductions while saving $140m a year, the paper notes. EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said of the change: “Newer, more affordable pollution control technologies and flexibility on the regulation’s phase-in will reduce pollution and save jobs at the same time,” reports Reuters. However, Betsy Southerland, who served as the director of science and technology at the EPA’s Office of Water under the Obama administration, tells the Hill that this calculation is flawed because it assumes a certain number of facilities will voluntarily adopt more stringent standards. The decision is “the latest act by the Trump administration to bolster the US coal industry, which has flagged as power companies embrace cheaper and cleaner alternatives, says Bloomberg. It adds: “A coalition of utilities and industry trade groups, including the Edison Electric Institute, which represents Southern Company, Duke Energy Corp and Xcel Energy Inc, had lobbied for the relief.”

Elsewhere, the Hill reports that a coalition of 21 states have sued the Trump administration for rolling back the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires the government to weigh environmental and community concerns before approving pipelines, highways, drilling permits, new factories or any major action on federal lands. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on how the sports utility vehicle (SUV) “conquered America and the world to become a chief climate offender”.

Many publications report on ongoing extreme weather events around the world. The Guardian reports on data showing the CO2 released from Arctic wildfires this year is already 35% higher than the figure for the whole of 2019. The data, from the EU’s Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service, shows that up to 24 August 245 megatonnes of CO2 had been released from wildfires this year. The figure for the whole of last year was 181 megatonnes, the Guardian says. The story also appears in the i newspaper. Elsewhere, the Independent reports that Louisiana has been hit by a heatwave in the aftermath of Hurricane Laura. The Independent says: “The climate crisis is driving up global temperatures. In the US, the federal, National Climate Assessment estimates that there will be around 30 more days over 90F (32C) in most areas by 2050.” Meanwhile, InsideClimate News reports on why Laura’s impact was not as large as some expected despite warming’s intensifying impact. Separately, the Guardian speaks to victims of flooding in the UK six months on, while a second Guardian story reports on how many people are still missing after flash floods in Afghanistan in recent days. Additionally, Yale Climate Connections reports on how Typhoon Maysak could become one of South Korea’s strongest typhoons on record.

Carbon emissions from Britain’s electricity system dropped by more than a third during the coronavirus lockdown after renewable energy played its largest ever role helping to keep the lights on, reports the Guardian. A quarterly report, undertaken by Imperial College London for power firm Drax, shows that “lockdown measures caused Britain’s electricity demand to fall by 13% in the second quarter, compared with the same months last year, which helped the share of renewables to grow by a third to 40% of the energy mix”, the paper explains. The i newspaper adds: “Unusually good weather was one of the main drivers behind the Britain’s green power streak. Clear skies and strong breezes helped wind and solar generation to dominate, at one point meeting almost 70% of Britain’s power needs. Solar power also benefited from cleaner air during lockdown, with clear skies allowing more sunlight to make its way to the surface of panels.” At the same time, the Guardian also reports that official data shows that coronavirus restrictions have caused Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions to fall to their lowest level since 1998. It adds: “National emissions in the June quarter 2020 were estimated to be 8% – or about 10m tonnes of CO2 – lower than a year earlier.” In other UK news, the Times reports that “the sale of new petrol and diesel cars could be banned within a decade amid pressure from Conservative MPs to accelerate a transition to green vehicles”.

Elsewhere, there is a coverage of a new study in the journal Nature Energy that shows that “even as the world has added a record amount of new renewable power, utilities globally have moved too slowly to transition away from fossil fuels to generate electricity”, says Bloomberg. It continues: “Between 2001 and 2018, only about 10% of the more than 3,000 utilities studied prioritised renewable energy over fossil fuels. That accounted for 55 gigawatts of new energy-generating capacity, largely wind. Another 14% of the utilities put more emphasis on coal and natural gas over renewables. And the rest essentially maintained the status quo—they didn’t show a net change in their fossil-fuel generation or renewable power assets.” Of the companies prioritising renewable energy growth, “60% have not stopped concurrently expanding their fossil fuel portfolio and only 15% of these companies are actively reducing their gas and coal capacity”, notes the Guardian.

An industry group representing some of the largest chemical makers and fossil fuel companies is demanding a trade deal with Kenya that weakens its rules on plastics, including a ban on plastic bags and proposed limits on foreign waste imports, according to the New York Times. Documents seen by the newspaper indicate that the American Chemistry Council wants the nation to serve as “a hub for supplying US-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement”. The article notes that the proposals come as the oil industry faces the twin challenges of falling profits due to coronavirus and international action on climate change. It notes that “pivoting” to plastic production is one potential solution to “an oversupply of oil and gas”.

Meanwhile, Unearthed has also published a new investigation on this theme today.

The Guardian columnist John Harris argues that with the Extinction Rebellion protestors out on the streets again, “as usual, those involved will presumably be portrayed as eccentric and dangerous merchants of despair”. But, he says, “whatever the sense of millenarian doom that sometimes hangs over its actions, plenty of the people at the heart of the movement are admirably practical, and focused on overcoming the daunting political challenges that climate change still presents. And in among the protests, there will be an example of what this means in practice: the climate and ecological emergency bill, partly conceived by people with close links to XR, and due to be formally launched on Wednesday”. In particular, Harris heralds the idea of the citizen’s assembly: “the idea is yet another manifestation of one of the few sources of promise to be found among the polarisation and chaos of 21st-century politics”.

In other UK-related comment, the Sun carries an editorial today warning the UK government not to raise fuel duty for motorists: “There’s never a good time to raise fuel duty. But there’s never been a worse time than now. We know Rishi Sunak is desperate for new revenue. But slapping 5p extra tax on a litre is suicidal…About one in ten of all workers drives a van. It will hammer them when they are already fighting for survival. Truckers could be ruined. Hiking fuel duty always appeals to London-based Treasury officials with buses and the Tube to rely on. Outside the capital, where most people have to drive, it’s a disaster.” The Daily Mail’s Richard Littlejohn also attacks “the anti-car fanatics who clutter up the Department of Transport and our town halls have seized the opportunity provided by Covid to close roads and build thousands more bike lanes”.

And, in the Times, Libby Smith from the Coalition for Global Prosperity and Labour’s Lord McConnell argue that “if the hundreds of diplomats and other staff representing the UK around the world are to turn [today’s] controversial [merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with the Department for International Development] into a success, they need to know their mission”. They add: “British diplomacy needs to have conflict prevention, human rights and freedoms, poverty reduction, the climate emergency and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at its core…As we move to a post-Covid and post-Brexit world, with the vital Climate Summit due in Glasgow next year, the UK must choose internationalism, global solidarity and ethical intervention for the good of us all.”

The Sydney Morning Herald carries an extract of a new book by Marian Wilkinson which details how action on climate change was immediately undermined by the new Tony Abbott government in Australia when it came into power in 2013: “By the end of Abbott’s first year in office, the PM had made it clear he didn’t believe most climate scientists, even those who worked for his government.”

The Guardian also carries an extract of another new book published in Australia, this time by Ketan Joshi. In the book, entitled “Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-free Future”, Joshi says: “Renewable energy needs to earn broader and stronger support from the communities that host it, through better participation and more equitable benefit sharing. Other countries have seized on the task of rapid construction of new forms of electricity generation, but largely avoided the serious and long-lasting delays that stem from community backlash. Australia has so much to learn from their experiences.”

An editorial in the Los Angeles Times applauds the fact that “over the last few months, California has taken dramatic, landmark steps toward slashing emissions from heavy-duty diesel trucks that contribute heavily to smog, soot and planet-warming gases”.

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal agrees with Donald Trump’s (inaccurate) dismissal that climate change is intensifying hurricanes and wildfires: “Banishing fossil fuels won’t prevent powerful storms or wildfires.” In contrast, Jim Blackburn, co-director of the Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disaster Center at Rice University, writes in the New York Times: “This time, the Houston region was fortunate. [Hurricane] Laura went elsewhere, and although the damage to other parts of the Gulf Coast was terrible, it wasn’t the catastrophe I feared. I sincerely hope that this time the reality of what could have happened will cause us to rethink our concepts of acceptable risk, take our changing climate into consideration and protect our key ecological and economic resources.”

In her Axios column, Amy Harder lays out “seven feedback loops in science and beyond” that lets “climate change feed off itself and gets even worse”. These include air conditioning, geopolitics and permafrost. [See Carbon Brief’s week-long series of articles from earlier this year on climate tipping points.] On this same theme, Nature Climate Change has a comment about how “observed ice-sheet losses track the upper range of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report sea-level predictions, recently driven by ice dynamics in Antarctica and surface melting in Greenland”. The authors argue that ice-sheet models must now “account for short-term variability in the atmosphere, oceans and climate to accurately predict sea-level rise”.

Finally, in Bloomberg, Gernot Wagner says that “the pandemic has led to some obituaries for urban living, but metropolises are still the most desirable and climate-friendly places to reside”.

New research quantifies the transitions of over 3,000 power companies worldwide from fossil-fuel capacity to renewables over the past two decades. Using “a machine-learning-based clustering algorithm to a historical global asset-level dataset”, the researchers find that “three-quarters of the utilities did not expand their portfolios”. The study adds: “Strikingly, 60% of the renewables-prioritising utilities had not ceased concurrently expanding their fossil-fuel portfolio, compared to 15% reducing it.”

The probability of heatwaves in China has doubled over 1961-2012, a new study says, and human-caused warming is responsible for 73% of this increase. The researchers finds that warming of 1.5C or 2C, relative to pre-industrial levels, would increase heatwave probability by around four or six times, respectively. They add: “At the 3.5C warming, the average duration of heatwaves is projected to increase to 43.63 days/year, and the occurrence probability is expected to increase by 11.95 times, 91% of which is attributable to human‐induced warming.”

A new study shows how winter loss of Arctic sea ice over the subpolar North Atlantic boosts the transport of air pollution from South Asia towards the Tibetan Plateau. The process begins with low sea ice in February weakening the polar jet and ends with an enhanced subtropical westerly jet at the southern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, which ultimately sees strengthening winds “waft emissions over the Himalayas onto the Tibetan Plateau”. This occurs in April, the study notes, “when the aerosol loading is at its climatological maximum and preceding the Indian summer monsoon onset”.