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A decline in the number of diesel cars would not jeopardise CO2 targets – in fact it would make them cheaper to achieve

The UK Society of Motor Manufacturers blamed February’s rise in the average new-car CO2 emissions on an “anti-diesel agenda [that] has set back progress on climate change”. Petrol v diesel cars is often presented as a trade-off between health-harming air pollution and climate-harmful CO2. Diesel cars do more miles to the litre than petrol, but this exaggerates the difference in CO2 emissions since one litre of diesel contains more energy and more carbon than one litre of petrol. If fuel were taxed on energy and carbon, rather than volume, then the tax on diesel would be 10 to 14% greater than that on petrol.

The International Council on Clean Transportation points out that petrol engines and petrol-hybrids have improved faster than diesel and will continue to do so. They conclude that a decline in diesel cars from around 56% to 15% would not jeopardise EU CO2 targets. Instead, it would make the targets cheaper to achieve since petrol engines cost less to make and have simpler exhaust clean-up. The future might be electric cars (or better yet for public health: cycling, walking and public transport), but in the short term new petrol cars, instead of diesel, might help both climate change and air pollution.

Ultimately the only thing that matters: we need to cut carbon pollution as much as possible, as fast as possible

In September 2017, a team led by the University of Exeter’s Richard Millar published a paper in Nature Geoscience, which was widely reported as suggesting that the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures is still technically within our reach. Many other climate scientists were skeptical of this result, and the journal recently published a critique from a team led by the University of Edinburgh’s Andrew Schurer.

The debate lies in exactly how the Paris climate target is defined and measured, which has not been precisely established. Millar’s team used the UK Met Office and Hadley Centre global surface temperature dataset called HadCRUT4, which begins in 1850 and estimates global surface temperatures have warmed about 0.9°C since that time. The team thus calculated the remaining carbon budget that will lead to an additional 0.6°C warming.

Thanks Chris. Policy implications not so big, imho. Whoever is right, in either case we need to hit the brakes on CO2 emissions as fast as we can. If the optimist study is right we might stop warming at 1.5 °C, if not the best we can hope for is ~2 °C, and coral reefs are gone.

50% of Coalition voters and 67% of Labor voters want to phase out coal, and majority also support striving to cut greenhouse gas emissions

A majority of Australians would support phasing out coal power by 2030, including half the people in a sample identifying as Coalition voters, according to a survey by a progressive thinktank.

The research funded by the Australia Institute says 60% of a sample of 1,417 Australians surveyed by online market research firm Research Now supported Australia joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance to phase out coal power by 2030.

Related: Matt Canavan castigates fossil fuel opponents for using 'highly objectionable' term 'just transition'

Related: 'Extreme' fossil fuel investments have surged under Donald Trump, report reveals

Sharp rise globally in the dirtiest fossil fuel investments reverses progress made after the Paris agreement, with tar sands holdings more than doubling in Trump’s first year in office

Bank holdings in “extreme” fossil fuels skyrocketed globally to $115bn during Donald Trump’s first year as US president, with holdings in tar sands oil more than doubling, a new report has found.

A sharp flight from fossil fuels investments after the Paris agreement was reversed last year with a return to energy sources dubbed “extreme” because of their contribution to global emissions. This included an 11% hike in funding for carbon-heavy tar sands, as well as Arctic and ultra-deepwater oil and coal.