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Move by Emmanuel Macron’s government comes a day after Volvo said it would only make fully electric or hybrid cars from 2019

France will end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of an ambitious plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, Emmanuel Macron’s government has announced.

The announcement comes a day after Volvo said it would only make fully electric or hybrid cars from 2019 onwards, a decision hailed as the beginning of the end for the internal combustion engine’s dominance of motor transport after more than a century.

Related: All Volvo cars to be electric or hybrid from 2019

Exotic migrants to the UK have set up home in a quarry owned by a sand mining company – an industry that is destroying wildlife habitats worldwide

At the end of June some exotic migrants flew into the country who have been enthusiastically welcomed by the Daily Mail. Following a hazardous journey from southern Europe a gang of seven bee-eaters have set up home in a desolate quarry in Nottinghamshire.

But while their presence is an inspiring example of the benefits of free movement, their choice of a quarry owned by Mexican minerals multinational Cemex raises some difficult questions about the relationship conservation has with big business.

Exclusive: an agency inside the Obama administration poured billions into fossil fuel projects that will lead to global carbon emissions on a damaging scale

President Barack Obama has staked his legacy on the environment, positioning his administration as the most progressive on climate change in US history.

However, an obscure agency within his own administration has quietly spoiled his record by helping fund a steady outpouring of new overseas fossil fuel emissions – effectively erasing gains expected from his headline clean power plan or fuel efficiency standards.

The last thing we should be doing is providing corporate welfare to some of the biggest polluters on the planet

We thought the situation was going to improve under Obama. We had no idea it was going to be far worse

While Trump claims to be open-minded on climate, there are ominous signs that Republicans will try to slash climate research

Last week, Donald Trump’s space policy advisor Bob Walker made headlines by suggesting that the incoming administration might slash Nasa’s climate and earth science research to focus the agency on deep space exploration. This caused great concern in the scientific community, because Nasa does some of the best climate research in the world, and its Earth science program does much more. Walker suggested the earth science research could be shifted to other agencies, but climate scientist Michael Mann explained what would result:

It’s difficult enough for us to build and maintain the platforms that are necessary for measuring how the oceans are changing, how the atmosphere is changing, with the infrastructure that we have when we total up the contributions from all of the agencies ... we [could] lose forever the possibility of the continuous records that we need so that we can monitor this planet.

The fact that they have reported temperature that they said was the highest temperatures...in history...it turned out that they were only 39% sure of that figure. Well that’s a press release, not a scientific kind of statement. I’m interested in scientific integrity. I’m interested not in scientific analysis that goes to a politically correct outcome.

I don’t think it’s the vast majority of climatologists who believe that [global warming is happening and man-made] ... among climatologists there is still a debate about the causes of the global warming. And so I think that debate is healthy, and I am entirely concerned about the fact that some of the climatologists that do not buy into the orthodoxy are being prevented from even having their works published.

the number of skeptical qualified scientists has been growing steadily; I would guess it is about 40% now.

97% of working climate scientists say the temperature is rising, and human activity is a significant contributing factor.