Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
G7 sets end date for coal
CUTTING COAL: The US, UK, Germany and other Group of Seven (G7) countries committed to phase out coal power by 2035, the Associated Press reported, noting that it “puts a timeline” on global pledges to “phase down” coal. G7 countries agreed two years ago to decarbonise their power sectors by 2035 and Climate Home News noted that most nations in the group already have coal phase-out plans.
LEEWAY: However, the G7 pact also included an “alternative goal” to phase out coal power “in a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of a 1.5C temperature rise within reach”, Reuters said. Sources told the outlet that this would “grant room for manoeuvre to Germany and Japan”, two coal-reliant countries. The Financial Times said the deal also leaves open the possibility of “continued investment in gas”.
FUELLING THE FIRE: A study found that global banks lent $470bn (£374bn) to coal industry companies between January 2021 and December 2023, Der Spiegel reported. Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is expected to permit fossil fuel companies to explore for oil and gas under offshore wind sites for the first time, the Guardian reported, with experts saying this will likely do little to increase production.
Deadly floods hit globe
COUNTRYWIDE IMPACT: Heavy rainfall and flooding have hit many parts of Kenya in recent weeks, killing more than 180 people, Reuters reported. At least 48 people were killed after a dam burst its banks near a town in the south of the country, according to the Standard newspaper. A river also overflowed into the famous Masai Mara wildlife reserve and flooded tourist camps, the New York Times said.
CLIMATE LINK: Context News reported that scientists blame a “deadly cocktail” of climate change and the El Niño weather pattern for floods in Kenya and other neighbouring countries. In the Conversation, a hydrology consultant said that the floods also “expose decades of poor urban planning and bad land management”.
HIGHWAY HIT: Meanwhile, heavy rainfall persisted in China’s Guangdong province. At least 24 people died after a highway collapsed due to the “torrential rain”, the Independent said. There is no formal “attribution” study on whether global warming worsened the Guangdong floods, but one rapid analysis found that the “somewhat uncommon event” was “exacerbated” by both human-caused climate change and natural variability.
BURST DAM: In Brazil, more than 30 people following heavy rains and flooding and a hydroelectric dam burst, BBC News reported. The “extreme weather” across the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul was caused by a “rare combination of hotter than average temperatures, high humidity and strong winds”, the outlet said.
Around the world
- CARBON BUDGETS: For the second time in two years, the High Court in London has ruled that the UK’s climate action plan is unlawful, Reuters reported, in a legal challenge put forward by environmental groups.
- UP, UP AND AWAY: Airlines lobbied the EU to “weaken” its plans to make the sector monitor and report non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from flights, according to the Financial Times.
- SNP SWITCH: Humza Yousaf resigned as Scotland’s first minister days after he ended a power-sharing deal with the country’s Green party, the Scotsman reported. Yousaf “cut ties” with the Greens after a “bitter row” over his party’s recent decision to abandon 2030 climate targets, Sky News said.
- PLASTIC PITCH: Rwanda and Peru put forward a proposal to reduce global plastic production by 40% by 2040 at UN treaty talks, the Guardian reported. The target should “align” with aims under the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C, the two countries said.
- BIG OIL: Large oil companies “misled Americans for decades” on climate change and knew the “consequences of their emissions” for at least 60 years, according to a new Democrat report and Congressional hearing covered by NBC News.
195
The number of countries expected to submit new biodiversity pledges ahead of the UN summit COP16 in October.
7
Countries that have done so, Carbon Brief analysis showed.
Latest climate research
- Methane emissions from China’s abandoned coal mines have been underestimated, Nature Climate Change research found.
- Plans to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere “fall short” of the measures needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, new research covered by Carbon Brief warned.
- A study in Nature Geoscience said that losing tropical forest has a greater effect on increasing land surface temperatures than gaining forest does on cooling them.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Recent Carbon Brief analysis showed that fossil fuels supplied a record-low 2.4% of electricity in Britain, for one hour on Monday 15 April. This new chart paints a more complete picture of how British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels. The figure shows the distribution of half-hours in each year since 2009, arranged according to the share of fossil fuels during each time period. Periods when the grid was more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels are shaded red and, reading from top to bottom, these have become increasingly rare over the past 15 years. Periods with less than 50% fossil fuel, shaded blue, are becoming more common.
Spotlight
Brazil’s pitch to tax the ultra-rich
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to a policy expert about how Brazil’s plan to tax billionaires could help to address climate change.
Earlier this year, Brazil proposed a global tax on the ultra-wealthy, an idea recently supported by other Group of 20 (G20) countries.
The funds could be used to tackle inequality and climate change, ministers from Brazil, South Africa, Germany and Spain wrote in the Guardian last week.
The tax would raise up to $250bn (£200bn) each year from around 2,700 billionaires, according to a report from the EU Tax Observatory.
Quentin Parrinello, a senior policy advisor at the think-tank, tells Carbon Brief about the proposal and how it could help to tackle climate change. This interview was edited for length.
Carbon Brief: Can you explain how a 2% billionaire wealth tax would work?
Quentin Parrinello: We’re looking at all of the taxes paid by the super-rich, adding all of them and, if they do not add up to a minimum amount [of] 2% of their wealth, then there’s a top-up tax to reach that 2%…Back in February, there was a meeting of finance ministers from the G20 in São Paulo. Gabriel Zucman [director of the EU Tax Observatory] was invited to present that idea of a minimum tax on the super-rich…There was a wide recognition in response that tax progressivity is indeed a topic that needs to be tackled and also a lot of demands for technical details, which is why the Brazil [G20] presidency commissioned us to do a report that is due to look at the feasibility of the technical implications of that tax.
CB: With climate change already intensifying each year, should these discussions have been pursued decades ago?
QP: Billionaires derive their wealth from global assets that have access to global markets and that emit carbon all over the globe. So they have a very clear responsibility in heightening climate change and carbon emissions…I think that, sadly, the conversation might be slightly easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago because we’re seeing in many more countries today the effect of climate change. It’s not rhetoric about potential future impacts, we’re seeing the impact now. We’re seeing an increasing number of floodings and heatwaves everywhere.
CB: The proposal is due to be discussed at the G20 summit in July. What are the next steps?
QP: We’re releasing our report with all the technical details around June. Our understanding is that the [Brazilian G20] presidency wants to use that report to convince a large number of countries to endorse the need for a discussion to happen around the summer. As more countries endorse it, perhaps we’ll have enough countries to start an international negotiation. Those things, unfortunately, take time. So we’re not looking at something that will deliver a tax up and running in six months. That might take a few months more, perhaps a few years more. I think what we need to have is clear commitment from G20 presidencies, from an increasing number of countries to actually talk about this to go towards a negotiation framework that enables us to deliver on that tax.
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE SOLUTIONS: Data scientist Hannah Ritchie spoke to the New York Times podcast the Ezra Klein Show about the feasibility of “sustainability without sacrifice”.
WOODLAND WOES: The Financial Times looked at how deforestation can be a “driving factor” in diseases spreading from animals to humans.
GREEN PUSHBACK: The Guardian examined how climate policies have become a “focal point for far-right attacks” in Germany in a short video documentary.
Coming up
- 5 May: Panama general election
- 6-10 May: 19th session of the UN Forum on Forests, New York City
- 8-10 May: AIM for Climate summit, Washington DC
Pick of the jobs
- Carbon Brief, journalist internship | Salary: £13.50 per hour and £100 travel expenses. Location: London
- Carbon Pulse, Asia-Pacific environmental markets correspondent | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote in Asia, Australia or New Zealand
- Pulitzer Centre, ocean reporting network fellowship | Salary: Covers current salary for one year. Location: Anywhere
- Forest Data Partnership, monitoring, evaluation and learning internship | Salary: $20-24 per hour. Location: Washington DC/hybrid
- Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, senior policy officer – protected areas and nature recovery | Salary: £38,389-£41,212. Location: Edinburgh
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 3 May 2024: G7 sets end date for coal; Deadly floods around globe; Brazil’s pitch to tax ultra-rich appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Plans to build Africa’s second largest oil refinery in ecologically sensitive region criticised as “environmental recklessness” -
Tanzania pushed African nations to oppose fossil fuel transition at COP30
While chairing the African group at the summit, the gas-dependent nation advised the continent’s ministers to block language on transitioning away from fossil fuels
Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls
Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis
Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline
Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £47