Axios

Seventeen House Republicans are freelancing a bit with a new resolution about how dangerous climate change is and the need to do something about it (though it's super-vague on that score).

Why it matters: It creates at least a small GOP contrast with President Trump on the heels of his EPA chief breaking sharply with the scientific community on global warming. Look for environmentalists to cite the resolution as they try and paint the administration as extreme. They might even use this comment from GOP Rep. Mark Sanford in The Atlantic:

"[I]t's like with Alcoholics Anonymous, if you don't even recognize the fact that you have a problem, you're never going to address the problem."

To be sure: Don't look for these House Republicans to counter attacks on some of Obama's biggest policies. Most of the Republicans sponsoring the measure—including leaders Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik—have actually voted to try and kill Obama's sweeping regulations to cut carbon from power plants.

Russia "appears to have deployed" special forces to an airbase in Egypt 60 miles from the border with Libya in the past few days, according to U.S., Egyptian, and diplomatic sources, per a Reuters report.

Last week the U.S. military commander who oversees U.S. operations in Africa, Marine General Thomas Waldhauser, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia is trying to once again "exert influence" in the country, which used to be its client state. Waldhauser said a good way to characterize what appears to be happening between Russia and Libya is how Russia has been trying to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Why it matters: Russia might be planning to prop up Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar, which would not be in the best interests of the U.S., according to Waldhauser. That's because Haftar is in a deadlock with the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli.

The Russian defense ministry and the U.S. military did not provide comment for Reuters. Egyptian army spokesman Tamer al-Rifai said "There is no foreign soldier from any foreign country on Egyptian soil. This is a matter of sovereignty."

The latest podcast from Columbia University's energy think tank has an interesting chat with Eirik Wærness, the chief economist at Norwegian oil giant Statoil. But if you don't have 34 minutes to spare...

A big takeaway: Even if carbon emissions are controlled enough to hold the global temperature rise to 2 degrees celsius above preindustrial levels (that's the difficult goal of the Paris accord), oil companies will still need to find lots of crude to meet global demand.

"Even in a world where demand is declining significantly some decades from now towards a 2 degree scenario . . . we need the equivalent of three to six new Saudi Arabias, or three to six United States', if you like, in new oil production by 2040 … to offset decline from existing fields if we were to stop investing today," Wærness said on the Center on Global Energy's latest podcast.

Why it matters: We're hearing a string of warnings from industry officials and experts that even with the U.S. production surge, global investments in new production could lag behind what's needed. The world's oil thirst isn't peaking anytime soon despite better efficiency and new technologies, according to forecasts from the International Energy Agency and big companies.