Barack Obama put himself firmly behind the effort to get a climate change bill through Congress last night – but said it must include a new generation of nuclear power.

The brief passage on energy and climate in Obama’s state of the union address did deliver the signal Congress and much of the world had been seeking that the White House is ready to throw itself into the effort to pass legislation.

The unwillingness of scientists at the University of East Anglia to release climate data to people who choose not to believe in climate change was a mistake. Science advances through openness, through the ability of others to replicate the same findings or demonstrate error in discovery and interpretation. Reluctance to disclose – revealed last week in the wake of the release of private email exchanges between climate researchers – invites suspicion. The hacked email exchanges were an embarrassment, and the refusal to disclose data was a bad call, but neither episode casts much doubt upon the science of global warming. The ­evidence for climate change driven by man-made discharges of greenhouse gases is now decades old, has been independently confirmed by researchers all over the world, and is – as the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said yesterday – overwhelming.

An offshore wind farm near Prestatyn, north Wales. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The government will tomorrow publish the long-awaited levels of remuneration it will offer for renewable energy generated by households and communities and fed back into the national grid.

It hopes the new tariff will boost the growth of “micro-generation” by small-scale wind turbines, solar panels or hydro power. But there are fears in the renewable energy industry that the Department of Energy and Climate Change will make little or no upward adjustment to the tariff levels for clean electricity it proposed last year.