Greg Jackson is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, a global energy and technology company headquartered in London.
Set up in 2016, it now has 7.2 million customers across 18 countries, as well as a portfolio of £6bn worth of renewable energy assets. The group’s proprietary technology platform, Kraken, is now used to run more than 40m customer accounts across the globe.
The company’s energy supplier arm recently became the largest in Great Britain, surpassing legacy giant British Gas when it added 1.3 million customers after buying Shell Energy in late 2023.
Jackson is a “serial tech entrepreneur”, having built and sold a number of start-ups before Octopus Energy.
Carbon Brief sat down with him for an hour, to discuss the UK’s energy transition, the upcoming general election, misinformation in the media and much more.
- On the energy transition: “The reality is that it just boils down to electrification.”
- On technology neutrality: “This isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers.”
- On Labour’s “zero-carbon power by 2030” pledge: “It’s totally achievable.”
- On using hydrogen for heating: “It’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical.”
- On renewable forecasts being revised upwards: “It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised [solar and wind] forecasts.”
- On misinformation in the media: “I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural…EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger.”
- On the psychology of climate change: “I think hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.”
- On stopping “burning stuff”: “Look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies…Honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.”
- On the cost of renewables: “Our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.”
- On investment: “The demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.”
- On the demand flexibility service: “It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.”
- On concerns over digital exclusion: “People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers, and we should not have much patience for that.”
Carbon Brief: What do you think should be the key priorities when it comes to energy and climate policy for the next [UK] government over its first six months or so?
Greg Jackson: I think the energy transition used to sound like quite a complicated process. The reality is that it just boils down to electrification. We need to electrify everything we can and then be generating as much electricity as we can from renewable resources.
Now, underneath that, there may be a whole lot of policy priorities. But electrification has got to be the one word.
CB: So, when the next government comes in, whenever the election is, are there specific things you really need to see, or that you’d like to see, to really ramp up this decarbonisation process?
GJ: So, again, I’m going to talk about, for me [its] electrification. Because even when we talk about decarbonisation you’re kind of weighing up loads of different things. If we talk about electrification, primarily, then we can say, OK, what does that take?
And I think the first thing we need to do is recognise that, even today, the electricity markets we’ve got are not fit for purpose. We spend billions a year balancing and curtailing renewables – that’s turning windfarms off when it’s windy. And we need a market that means that, at the times when we’re generating a lot of electricity, it’s super cheap for people. And we need to do that on a regional basis, or even more locally than that.
So that, for example, if today we had regional pricing, every region would be cheaper than it is because we’ve been reducing waste. But, more than that, Scotland would be the cheapest electricity in Europe. These are important because as soon as people can see that renewables can lead to cheaper energy, we get public support for renewables – as we should – and it becomes a much more efficient system. We’re not putting a cost on everyone’s bills to pay for waste, which is what happens today.
I think, alongside market reform, you then get the right investment signals. So we are going to be investing in the places that need the infrastructure. And that’s not just generation, it can be things like batteries.
It’s kind of mad at the moment that a lot of people think we should put batteries next to windfarms. But, if you do that, then before anybody’s had a chance to make the most of cheap electricity, you’ve already eliminated the price signal. So the best places for batteries, for example, might be close to population centres.
Take somewhere like the southeast [of England], where, obviously, it’s hard to build new generation. But we can build infrastructure that will make electricity cheaper by, for example, deploying batteries in places that have got peak time constraints [to] enable us to reduce peak issues and benefit more from the times it’s off peak and we can store that electricity.
So I think market reform is absolutely number one. And that means the most dynamic pricing possible.
By the way, it doesn’t mean that consumers will necessarily face dynamic prices, just to be really clear. Companies will be able to wrap-up that dynamic pricing in any number of tariffs. So, for those who want it, you’ll still have flat tariffs – and they’ll probably be cheaper than they are today, because the system is more efficient. But, for those who can shift demand, or want more dynamic stuff, it will enable them to benefit by using electricity more efficiently and that makes for a more efficient system for everyone.
Obviously, we need reform of two sets of regulations. We critically need grid reform, so that you can actually connect stuff to the grid. We’ve spent years talking about this publicly because of the frustration that we’ve got enormous amounts of capital to build new generation. But you can’t. You literally have no way of connecting to the grid. I mean, there’s a project we’ve got to build a solar farm in County Durham, where I think there’s a 14-year wait to connect it.
CB: So is that just planning reform?
GJ: That is grid reform. So, basically in the UK – and, by the way, this applies in many other countries as well – you’ve got a national monopoly grid and you can only build new generation if you can connect it to the grid. You haven’t got any alternative. So, if the grid tells you you’re going have to wait 14 years, you’re going to wait 14 years.
And I contrast this with what has happened in gas. During the energy crisis, Germany alone built five liquified natural gas terminals in one year. Meanwhile, because of these grid connection issues, we can’t build new renewables. And I think that the reform for that is largely bureaucratic; the government and grid need to agree on a process to enable stuff to be connected faster.
The second thing, of course, is planning. And I think, at the moment, I mean, famously, England built two onshore wind turbines in the time that Ukraine during a war built hundreds, because you can’t get planning permission. And that doesn’t just apply for wind turbines, there’s a real challenge building the infrastructure to transmit electricity around the country.
And I think the reality with this is we need to find ways to enable communities to benefit when we build new infrastructure. Wherever you build it, you get NIMBYs [“not in my back yard”]. But we need to have IMBYs as well, people who will directly benefit and can see the direct benefit of building infrastructure. And so we need reform that enables us to deploy new electricity infrastructure, but in a way which embraces, to the maximum extent possible, local communities.
Between those two priorities – i.e. market reform, planning and grid reform – we can unleash the forces that actually will mean that throughout most of the country – everywhere, in fact – consumers will be benefiting from clean energy. And the moment people are benefiting – it’s like when the new iPhone launched. The sudden demand for data meant that the mobile networks just had to build masts, because it had to meet consumer demand. And we can do that with energy, with clean energy, which is the more we enable people to benefit, the more demand there will be for rapid transition. And that’s what we need.
CB: So, moving on to Labour’s now kind of quite high-profile pledge to get net-zero power by 2030…is that broadly achievable? Is that doable if what you laid out there gets implemented? Or are there extra things that, to hit that 2030 target, would need to happen?
GJ: It’s totally achievable. And, by the way, I mean, the government’s pledge [for 2035] is not that different, right? Everyone’s pledging net-zero carbon electricity by roughly then, I can’t remember all the details, but they’re all quite similar.
But the reality is, what it does need is commitment. I was recently at a meeting of governments. Lots of industries were lobbying governments to say: we need to be technology neutral, everyone’s got to be given a chance to be part of this future. Which is all lovely, but this isn’t primary school, there are going to be winners and losers. And we need the commitments from governments that enable investors to invest in the stuff that’s going to be part of the future.
So a really good example would be, there is still this kind of crazy suggestion that hydrogen might be used to heat homes. I mean, it might just be physically possible, but it’s like flushing our toilets with champagne. It might work, but it’s inordinately expensive and impractical. It’s just a delaying tactic from the companies who own the gas infrastructure.
Now, of course, a transition that means that the gas infrastructure, over time, won’t be so valuable, or may even become entirely redundant, is not the future that they [the gas industry] want. But it’s not like we’re still running stuff down the canals. The technology changes already made [mean] that renewable electricity is the cheapest form of power we’ve ever had and is getting cheaper every year. Of course, there are minor blips like recent inflation in offshore wind, but even that was driven by the inflation and interest rates, which largely came from our addiction to fossil fuels.
So, the path should be clear, and what we need from policymakers are those brave decisions that say: “Hey, look, there are going to be some losers in this process.” But…the quicker we’re clear about that, the more we can embrace, for example, the workers in those sectors and make sure that they’ve got a bright future, as we transition, and the more we can manage the transition in a way which will be good. Good for the people who were affected by it.
CB: Can the market do all of this? Or Labour’s talking of GB Energy, and you hear about nationalisation or quasi-nationalisation of the railways. What do you make of the ideas like GB Energy?
GJ: Yeah. I don’t think there’s any read-across from railways. It’s an entirely different sector. And the reality when you look at energy, I mean, first of all, GB Energy isn’t the sort of nationalised energy supplier, which is good, by the way. I mean, energy retail is one of the most competitive sectors in the UK. Margins are 2%, if energy companies are lucky.
The big problem in energy is the rest of the cost stack. It’s largely those kinds of very regulated, often monopoly parts of the system, which need reform. And so I think if GB Energy is about, for example, helping pioneer stuff that isn’t yet ready for market risk…I mean, take tidal as an example. Maybe we should have tidal power, maybe GB Energy would be a great way of kick-starting that, in the same way as government subsidies kick-started a lot of wind and solar. But, increasingly, we could run wind and solar on a merchant basis, i.e. an unsubsidised basis in many energy systems if you’ve had the market reform I talked about. So, if GB energy is helping kickstart stuff we need, that would be incredible.
If GB Energy helps get government backing for projects to enable them to, for example, overcome some of the planning and connections issues that I’ve described, that could be great. So it really depends on the role GB Energy is playing.
CB: Before we started speaking, I was looking at this Ladybird book from 1981, which I picked up from a charity shop, talking about energy conservation. Obviously, whatever that is, 40-odd years ago [and we’re now] talking about 2050 [for net-zero emissions]. What, in your view, does the UK energy system, EVs and all the rest of it look like then? What does the UK look like in 2050? And what does it need to look like?
GJ: So, first of all, I guess the question here is, if this [book] was roughly 30 years ago and 2050 is roughly 30 years away…how well did this predict where we are today? Or how dated does it look, right?
Look, I think a real challenge with targets like 2050 is that almost everyone who sets those targets will be retired by then. They’re not responsible for it. Indeed, almost everyone who’s working for them will be retired by then. It’s incredibly easy to set a target that you’re not going to be around for.
So, I’m much more of a believer in setting much shorter term targets. And given that we have the technologies we have available today, we can set really challenging targets. If you are talking about 2030, for example, net-zero electricity, that’s a much more tangible time. Because it tells us about the decisions we need to make right now.
I think one of the interesting things about predicting the future, is how wrong we get it, especially in sectors like energy, where you’ve got very powerful incumbents who have very strong views about what the future will be, but are often wrong. I mean, Kodak’s view of the future was wrong, Nokia’s view of the future was wrong, Blockbusters’ view. They were all wrong. But they didn’t get to lobby for their view of the future, they just had to compete. And the market and technology made the decision for them.
So I think if I look at energy, wind and solar, [they] have repeatedly beaten every target. They get cheaper, faster than anyone’s ever estimated. And it keeps on happening. It’s like Groundhog Day when you look at the revised forecasts, because every forecast that comes out, kind of looks back and goes: “Whoops, we underestimated how well solar would do or how well wind would do.” And then they make an estimate, and then they have to go and do the exact same process again because it keeps beating it.
It’s been the same, by the way, with batteries. Battery prices keep on plummeting way ahead of expectation. And EV adoption has kept on accelerating ahead of expectation. So, all the clean-energy technologies beat the forecasts.
By the way, the only ones that don’t are the dirty-energy technologies. No one forecast the horrific gas crisis we’ve just lived through. Nuclear keeps getting – and I’m not anti nuclear – but it keeps getting more expensive and slower than expected. And so I think the challenge with setting things like 2050 is, if we start building infrastructure based around our best guesses now, it’ll almost certainly under-deliver and it will cost too much. We’re far better off with the kind of things I talked about at the beginning, which were market reforms, so we can rapidly deploy the technologies we’ve already got.
An incredible thing that happens in technology is, each time you deploy something, it teaches you about what is possible. When the iPhone launched, no one foresaw that QR codes would get you out of a pandemic, or that Uber would change the global cab industry.
In the same way, for example, we are already discovering that if we give people, if we integrate our technologies directly with people’s electric cars, we can charge them at three or four times less than grid cost, because we’re able to grab the electricity when it’s most abundant. That means that, today, for some of our customers, they can drive electric cars for £2.30 for 100 miles, whereas with a diesel car it would be £18.
Now, no one forecast that kind of thing. It’s just what we discover, when we build out new technology. And that’s why, you know, I really believe we need the reforms to let us build the technology. And we will discover it gets cheaper, faster, easier and better for consumers, far more quickly than anyone realised.
CB: What do you make of the current mood in certain sections of the media, which is very negative, relentlessly attacking EVs, electrification, solar? What’s your view on that? It’s almost like organised misinformation, it sometimes feels like.
GJ: I think there are two layers to it. I think some of it is organised and some of it is cultural.
Let’s talk about the cultural first. Let’s look at EVs. EVs are not just an electric version of petrol cars, they are a fundamentally different creation. So, the assumption that, for example, the long-standing car makers, the manufacturers of Europe and elsewhere, were going to be able to just start making EVs, is kind of wrong. Right? They spent 100 years becoming unbelievably good at complex transmission and drive shafts and all of the engineering required to take what is actually a remarkably complex thing, a petrol or diesel engine, and turn it into a consumer device.
Meanwhile, for the last 20 years a bunch of Chinese companies that just set out to build EVs from the beginning, or Tesla, which has only ever done EVs, have re-engineered cars, built around the fundamentals of an EV, in which things like transmission becomes much simpler, but your ability to build really smart battery management, really smart software is actually a competitive edge.
Now, what we’re seeing at the moment is EVs emerging that traditional automakers find very, very difficult to compete with. And, so, their answer is: “Hang on, we can’t make money in EVs. Therefore, something’s wrong with EVs.” Because no company ever says there’s something wrong with us.
Now, that means that everyone in those companies, there’s huge numbers of people there, good people, but that are genuinely thinking EVs are too hard, they are too challenging, they’re not going to work. And they’re the people that have a 20-year relationship with motoring journalists. Their lobbyists have had the 20-year relationships with the political correspondents, their CEOs are the ones that have the relationships with the business journalists and with the editors. So, this isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just that those companies are facing existential threat from something that is really challenging for them. And that means that all the conversations these people have are about the problems with EVs, right?
Now, actually, I have lived with an EV for seven years. There are very, very few problems with an EV. And, you know, for example, the latest generation of EVs are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, as all the technology scales up. And we get these great cost curves as batteries come down. But those automakers are not seeing it, in fact, this is a threat to them.
So, I think the primary layer here is simply that the influential people in the motoring industry, simply don’t get EVs.
I think the second thing is, of course, there is a backlash from the fossil fuel industry, including some car companies, because, even today, I think EVs have taken 1.8m barrels of oil off the road per day. Right? That’s enough that the global oil industry is suddenly seeing what used to look like a minor inconvenience in the future is suddenly a real and present danger. Now, we saw the ability of the tobacco industry to lobby against tobacco restrictions. The oil industry is vastly more powerful than tobacco ever was. And so, on top of the sort of cultural thing that I’ve described, you have then got a genuine concern and lobbying efforts.
And I guess the last part of that is cultural wars. There are organisations who deny climate change, who are combining anti-climate change with anti-EV, with anti-renewables and a whole load of other social topics to try and create political divides. That’s why when I talk about the market reforms that will make, for example, clean energy cheaper, it’s so critical, because if we can show people this transition is good for them, we kind of undermine that attempt at a culture war.
I spend a lot of time talking to, for example, people on the political right, because they are free marketers. They believe in entrepreneurship, they believe in efficiency and talking to them about the way in which renewables and EVs can lead to a more efficient competitive world. Actually, we make the culture war go away and we talk about the economics instead. And then we can align people’s self-interest with that industry, with that of the climate.
CB: Talking about a culture war, we obviously got an election here in the UK looming, but we’ve obviously got a US election looming too and a very, very stark choice between a Biden versus Trump presidency. In that context, given what the Trump 1.0 presidency did, what do you make of the Paris Agreement? Obviously, Trump tried to pull, or did pull the US out of it and then Biden reinstated it. Do you think the Paris Agreement has achieved things to date? Is it the international framework system that we need, or not?
GJ: I’m generally impressed that most governments really do take the commitments they’ve made seriously. And, even, while on a political level, I’ll often hear these kind of culture-war discussions, underneath that, you see the real actions.
Now, the US has obviously swung massively because you had the Trump rowbacks, but then you had, under Biden, the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act], which, by the way, is a very bipartisan programme. I speak to people from the US administration and, just yesterday, [we talked] about the kind of risk of a rowback depending on what happens in November and their view is, of course, there is a very real risk.
But a lot of what the IRA has done has been in red [Republican] states. The Biden officials talk about touring America and meeting all these mayors, Republican mayors and governors in red states, who have seen the benefits of jobs and the industrial regeneration created by it. And so you hope that a lot of that will mean that the underlying programmes survive any political change.
I think in terms of the global picture, we’ve also got to be a bit honest about this. Paris was about 1.5C. I think last year we exceeded 1.5C. Now, climate comes and goes, it’s very important we all recognise that, but, we’ve got to accept that we’re facing an accelerating challenge and we’ve got all the tools to solve it.
I think the place that we really need political leadership now is to be able to look at industries and say: “Look, some industries are going to be the future. And their success is not only going to benefit the climate, it’s going to create more economic opportunity than we lose as we allow some industries to start declining.” And they’ve just got to be brave about this.
I saw that G7 has just agreed to phase-out coal by 2035. [Laughs] I mean, you can be proud to be British on this one, because this is our last coal year, and even then it’s miniscule. The idea that we somehow need these forms of energy for another 11 years is mad. And, so, I’m simultaneously pleased that governments really do take these commitments seriously. But I’m also worried that they fail to grasp the opportunity that a far more rapid change could deliver greater economic growth, greater outcomes for their citizens, than in their current shape.
CB: Obviously, looking at this [Ladybird] book, and looking back over previous decades, I’m interested in your own personal epiphany, if you like, on climate change. What was the thing, that moment…was it a book, TV programme, film, a lecture, a conversation with a colleague or family member, where the penny really dropped and you thought: “OK, climate change is a thing and it’s pretty damn serious”?
GJ: I was a child in the 70s and I joined Greenpeace when I was 15. And the thing that first got me into it was actually local air pollution more than climate. Because back then you could literally see the diesel fumes belching out the back of buses, out of car exhausts, often very visible, and you could really smell and feel it in the air. And I thought it was completely unacceptable, that one person’s choice to drive a car that did that created this huge negative impact on the people behind them.
And you remember that when leaded petrol was banned, which was done almost overnight, it was because of the impact on kids’ brains in dense urban areas with a lot of vehicles. It’s just unconscionable. And I think back then what you could see was that there were clean alternatives. This wasn’t about sackcloth and ashes. It wasn’t asking people to give up the huge benefits of industrial progress. It was just we needed ways to enable people to choose better solutions at the same or lower cost.
And so that was always my philosophy and I think, as I became more and more aware of climate change, exactly the same applied.
Now, I think the real two points of epiphany for me on climate were, first of all, realising there’s a solution. I think for a long time, you kind of feel like, how can we power our society without burning stuff? And then you look at the cost curves for solar and wind and all the other technologies. And, honestly, it’s going to be cheaper to stop burning stuff. That was an amazing moment, when I realised that we didn’t have to arrange the forces for saving the planet against the force of economics, because they actually lined up.
I think the second thing was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Sequel. We’d actually started this company, we started the company in 2015-16. In 2018, it looked like we were doing quite well. And we went away for a couple of days for a management off-site. And, after a hard day slaving over clipboards or whatever you do, I arranged for everyone to watch a movie and they all came in and I think they thought that we’re going to get something fun. And when An Inconvenient Sequel opened up, all the people in the room, you could see their faces drop, because I was forcing them to watch something worthy.
But you know what, five minutes in, everyone’s WhatsApp messages start pinging, and it was like, “wow, we have to do more”. Because it was showing the very real effects of climate change, which, by the way, are only worse now. And then at the end of the movie it had hope, it ended with a deal on solar for India. And, of course, it was for dramatic effect, but the reality of this is that we do have hope.
After the movie finished, we all just sat down and said how can we accelerate the ability our company has to do something about this? And so, I think, hope is as important, knowing there is a solution, is as important as knowing there’s a problem.
CB: You have talked very confidently about the cost benefits of wind and solar and you mentioned earlier how, a couple of years ago, government auctions made offshore wind look incredibly appealing. And then we had a failed auction and now it looks like quite a different picture. Heat pump installations in the UK are still very slow, costs are high. The cost of electricity versus gas makes them probably cheaper to run, but not definitely. How would you respond to lots of people saying: “Is it actually cheaper? It’s going to be more expensive, we need to consider perhaps using boilers?” How do you respond to those very serious concerns?
GJ: The first thing we’re going to do is recognise that today’s markets don’t reflect the underlying physics and economics, which is why I talk about market reform all the time. The second thing we need to do is recognise that there’s always going be short-term blips, those auction failures were driven simply by short-term inflation and interest rates, both of which were largely the consequence of the gas crisis, i.e, our addiction to fossil fuel is so damaging, it even makes the solutions to fossil fuels more expensive.
And then we talk about things like adoption of heat pumps and so on. A year ago, two years ago, no one had heard of a heat pump. Now, the climate change denying parts of the media have made heat pumps famous. Thank you very much. We’ve got to remember that we’ve got long-term transitions and almost everything we talked about there are short-term issues.
So, if we break it down a bit, we can generate electricity from renewable sources in the UK, for between 4p and 8p a kilowatt hour (kWh). New generation in solar and wind can do that.
Consumers traditionally in the UK have paid 17p/kWh. During the energy crisis our bills were paid for by the government, but they went to 40p/kWh or 50p/kWh, right? I.e. the generating cost, the cost to generate electricity, is way below what people pay. We’ve just got a crazily inefficient system for getting it from generation to consumption. We need to fix that. Which is why that was literally the first set of policies that I talked to you about.
Just by way of example, electricity roughly trebles in price in the UK between the point it’s generated and the point you consume it. Milk, which is much harder to transmit, gets schlepped about in diesel lorries, it has to be bottled and pasteurised, is stored on refrigerated shelves in supermarkets with really expensive real estate. I think milk goes up by 50% between the farm and the point you buy it. Our electricity system is just fundamentally far too inefficient. And we have to fix that. And that’s the market reforms.
But then in terms of, for example, running costs of heat pumps…on a smart tariff they’re almost certainly cheaper for the vast majority of homes than a gas boiler to run. And that’s in today’s crazy world where all of the climate and social levies are sitting on electricity. If you take away that distortion, running heat pumps on electricity is dramatically cheaper than a gas boiler.
We’ve still got to make heat pumps cheaper to buy and install. That’s why, again, going back to first principles, I was inspired here by Michael Dell, of Dell Computers. When he was doing his MBA, he sat in his dorm room and he read an article that said that a $3,000 IBM PC only had $1,000 of components. But, you know, you had an inefficient supply chain, loads of wholesalers and, when you look at heat pumps, it’s just the same. So we’ve started making our own, so we can be a bit like Dell, by going direct to make them cheaper. And already we’re seeing a big cost benefit. But the more we invest, the more we scale up, the more we’ll see that, and other companies are doing the same.
So what we’ve got is a situation where we’re at the beginning of a technology change. And if you look at the first iPhones, they cost £435 and today you would feel like you’re holding a brick that barely performed. But they were enough to kick start the smartphone revolution and that’s just the process we’re going through with the heat pumps.
The UK has very specific needs for heating, not only do we have poorly insulated homes, but we’ve got a very temperate climate. We also heat our homes with wet radiators, whereas most countries that use heat pumps have used air to heat the home. And so we’ve needed to make heat pumps that are UK specific. All of this is happening at the moment and it just gives me huge optimism.
And if I compare this to the alternative, by the way – the idea of, for example, piping hydrogen into people’s homes – I don’t know where to start.
We can start with engineering. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe. When a rocket launch is delayed by a fuel leak, which they are, that’s hydrogen. Rocket scientists can’t keep it in a very closed and carefully designed system. You know, there are bits of our gas network that are unmapped, that are 100 years old, I think there are bits of the piping that have got wood in them! Anywhere you’ve got a leak, hydrogen can get out. And so, before you can pipe hydrogen [into homes], you’ve got to make sure that every single home, every single inch of every pipe in every home, every valve and every joint, every appliance is going to be able to keep the hydrogen in. And this is unbelievably complex.
I saw the other day a hydrogen cooking hob, with an invisible flame, literally invisible flame. I don’t know why you’d want one of those in your kitchen, so you’ve got an explosive leaky substance with an invisible flame, or you could have an electric induction hob for roughly the same amount. The same cost to run, wipe clean, totally safe, incredibly controllable and you don’t need all this stuff piped into your home.
And that’s just looking at the piping, nevermind where’s the hydrogen coming from! 97% of the hydrogen in the world at the moment is unabated carbon emitting hydrogen. And this is years after we were told we’d be starting to get green hydrogen available. And then, if you’re going to use hydrogen to heat a home, if it’s green hydrogen, you’ve got to create renewable electricity, you then use that to power electrolysers, you then have to compress the hydrogen, pump it into the home and burn it. End-to-end, 40% efficient at turning the electricity you started with into heat. And, meanwhile, the heat pump is end-to-end 250% to 400% efficient.
There we go. I’m very optimistic because all you ever have to do is go back to the physics of this stuff.
Oh sorry, the other thing you mentioned, you know…is electricity more expensive than gas? Well, of course electricity is about three times more expensive per unit, maybe four times with the distorting taxes that need to be taken away. But electricity is so much more efficient. An EV turns 80% of the energy and electricity into motion, a petrol engine is 25%. A heat pump, you get 300% efficiency efficiency, a gas boiler gives you 85%. So electricity is so much more efficient.
And then the real magic with electricity is that it’s fungible. If you’ve got an EV, it can store the electricity at the cheapest times, you can’t do that kind of thing with gas. In fact, increasingly, some EVs can put that energy back into your house at peak times, reducing your energy costs.
Fundamentally, I think there is one thing here which is that electricity puts consumers far more in control. If they choose to, they can get solar panels and largely eliminate their dependence on anyone else. But with fossil fuels, we’re totally dependent on the countries and, to a degree, corporations that provide that molecule. One reason they don’t want to let go is that control gives them power and it gives them money. And we saw that during the gas crisis.
Any comparison of gas costs versus electricity costs has to remember that, from time to time, we experience these fossil fuel crises, because we’re dependent on people in control. And during the worst of the gas crisis, the price of gas went up to 30-fold. There was a very real chance that Europe was not going to have enough gas. In fact, it is potentially the case that we were saved from a gas crisis by a mild winter.
So we should never allow anyone to get away with this idea that electricity is more expensive than gas, because they cherry-pick the times that gas is cheap and they forget about the times that gas or other fossil fuels brutalise our economies. I think it cost the UK £100bn, the government paid two-thirds of our energy bills during the crisis. That’s how bad fossil fuels are.
CB: You’ve talked already about market reform and how important you think it is. One of the key arguments from people who are in favour of this transition that the economy is going through, is that dramatic reform of the electricity markets puts at risk the investments we need to get 2030, 2035 or whatever our targets are, which currently relies on the system as it is today. How do you respond to that?
GJ: It’s just not true. Of course, investors quite rightly, when investors write a large cheque, they are making a huge commitment and they need to know it’s got a good chance of delivering a return. And, so, whenever investors have got comfortable with one way of doing things, they of course want to see that carry on.
But, first of all, there are plenty of other investors available. Whilst in electricity, investors have long had these kind of guaranteed returns through different mechanisms, oil and gas investors make their colossal investments against enormous technology risk, enormous political risk and enormous market risk. When they decide to start extracting or to buy the licences for an oil or gas field and then make a huge investment required to extract the stuff. And then huge investments in LNG tankers and terminals. They have no idea what the future price of oil or gas will be. And they can still make those investments. So you can make massive investments against degrees of uncertainty.
And what we’ve seen already in electricity in the past was, for example, when we moved to the CfD [contracts for difference] regime, from the RO [renewable obligations] or FiTs [feed in tariffs] or whatever. A lot of investors said: “Well, that will kill investment.” It all [still] happened.
Similarly, when we’ve seen, for example, a number of states in the US have introduced dynamic zonal pricing, the investments carried on unaffected. So, at the end of the day, people need electricity. In fact, the demand for electricity is only going to go up. And when there’s demand for a product, you can invest in producing it.
CB: One of the things that Octopus has been quite involved in is the demand flexibility service being run by the electricity system operator. And that’s obviously encouraging customers to cut their use at peak times. How much importance do you put on that kind of system as we transition to a net-zero power system?
GJ: First of all I’d say Octopus was pioneering that for four years before the ESO brilliantly introduced it. Because the sort of legacy energy system said: “Customers won’t do this stuff.” Everything we’d invested in, in trials and experiments with customers showed that they loved that.
It was brilliant the way the ESO introduced it. And Octopus Saving Sessions accounts for 50% of all of the participation. Because we’d nurtured relationships with customers.
These are not energy geeks, by the way. Energy geeks were already on dynamic tariffs and smart tariffs, which meant, actually, it was kind of hard for them to participate in the Saving Sessions, because they were already fully optimised. This was one and a half million for us, one and a half million ordinary households that finally had the opportunity to shop for bargain electricity the way that they already do with supermarkets.
And giving people the opportunity to cut costs, especially in a crisis, but also to have agency, to be able to make decisions, is so critically important. And I think that this isn’t about renewables, this is just about the way the energy system has treated customers as dumb offtakers, rather than them being the very reason we exist. And as soon as we truly embraced customers, we discover all these ways in which we simultaneously provide them with better service and better value through a more efficient system. It’s just the equivalent of supermarkets pricing goods to clear, rather than letting them go off.
I think the big challenge for the energy sector now – and there’s a real risk that legacy thinking kills this – but the real opportunity and challenge is to make this the norm. It shouldn’t be a weird add-on in one winter in a crisis. It’s like every day, there are a bunch of people, turning electric generation on and off. There’s a whole bunch of companies investing heavily in things like batteries. And the ability to shift demand around is just as big, a potential contributor to an efficient system. In fact, it’s better because you don’t have to buy any assets. And so I think we shouldn’t be thinking this has been an add-on system, it is the system.
It’s insanely popular, too, just be really clear. We got 100,000 customers asking for smart meters during that programme just to participate.
CB: The last question neatly segues into this. Technology is a key part of being able to do that, but also your broader pitch to customers. A big part of this transition to EVs requires integrating very well with your technology. But how do you deal with customers that aren’t up to date? Who don’t necessarily have smartphones, who aren’t digitally savvy? How do you ensure that they’re not left behind?
GJ: I tell you what, those customers were being brutalised in the old energy industry. If they’re calling a legacy energy company that has got a 45-minute wait on the phones and then you get through to someone and they can’t help you, because it’s got to be a different department, so they promise to call you back and they don’t call me back, and then they hand me through to another department, and you just do all of the security questions, just as they’re closing the line, that was the experience those people had in energy.
So the first thing is great technology enables you to provide everybody with a better service. Octopus’s magic is that when you phone us up, 95% of the time, the person you are speaking to can sort out your problem there and then, because of technology [which is known as Kraken]. Fewer things go wrong, because of technology.
Second thing is, I’m so sorry, I can’t remember the number, but, actually, there are relatively few people in the UK that don’t have access to a smartphone. And if we think about things like everything from universal credit to the ability to buy an enormous range of products and services, it requires a smartphone. And the most important thing is making sure that wherever someone has got the access, we enable them to become part of an efficient system.
For the very small number of people that don’t have those technologies, it’s very unlikely you’d have an EV and not have a smartphone. And so a lot of the technologies we really need to optimise to make the system efficient for everyone, like EVs, naturally you are going to find the people that have the kit.
So I think the most important thing is you look at everybody, regardless of where they are, but you don’t get held back by saying that everything’s universal, right? After all, Aldi and Lidl, great supermarkets, but we don’t prevent them from rolling out because some people might not be able to get there. In fact, the more they’ve rolled out, the more they’ve been able to become closer to being universally accessible anyway.
You know, things like when the iPhone launched it was £435 plus I think about minimum £35 a month. It was a super premium product. But, within five years, it paved the way to the $50 Android, $20 Android, the ubiquitous Android that has transformed not only the lives of people in wealthy countries, but many developing countries, too.
People who try to hold new technology to the bar of universality are typically protecting some sort of legacy against the technology improvements that benefit consumers and we should not have much patience for that.
For example, someone recently wrote to me because their 700-year old house had a heat pump that didn’t always work efficiently – by the way, I think it was badly installed and we can fix that – but there’s not that many 700-year old houses, and I’d love to serve them. But 20% of households don’t have gas in the UK, so heat pumps are held to this idea that they have got to work for everyone in all situations, which, by the way, they are better than gas because every house has got electricity and only 80% have got gas. So even when we talk about universality, we are usually using it for a false comparison anyway.
CB: Thank you.
GJ: Thank you.
The post The Carbon Brief Interview: Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
With June’s UN climate talks inching towards gridlock, a group of diplomats calling themselves “Friends of Science” issued a stark warning: climate science was under attack in Bonn.
The coalition, spanning the world’s richest to its most vulnerable nations, pointed the finger primarily at those who think “science threatens their economic prospects” – a thinly-veiled reference to fossil fuel-dependent states accused of casting doubt on long-held scientific tenets in the UN climate process.
Fiji’s lead negotiator, Sivendra Michael, went still further. He denounced what he called “a very polluted narrative” taking hold outside the negotiating rooms and singled out ECO, a daily newsletter on the talks produced by Climate Action Network (CAN) International, for overlooking the issue.
“They are representing developing countries, but they are not representing us,” Michael said. His words hinted at how a rift between governments over the science of global warming has created tensions inside the climate movement.
Watchers of the UN climate talks have told Climate Home News there is growing unease over where the world’s most influential coalition of climate NGOs stands in an increasingly heated debate about how scientific messages produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are crafted and turned into global climate policy.
UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot
CAN’s international leadership has publicly backed a line of argument, championed by some big emerging economies including India, that questions how fair and equitable the models underpinning the work of the IPCC – the UN’s climate science body – are because they are dominated by research from the Global North.
But some climate activists, including from nations on the frontline of the climate crisis in the Pacific, are increasingly disappointed by CAN’s silence in a connected row over whether the IPCC’s forthcoming assessment report should be finished in time to inform the next UN scorecard of global climate action.
Over the last two years, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and Kenya have pushed back against attempts by a large coalition of nations to align the IPCC’s AR7 report timeline with the second stocktake of national climate plans under the UN climate process. They claim this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and restrict their ability to provide scientific input into the process.
India flags bias in IPCC assumptions
CAN International Executive Director Tasneem Essop spoke at an online event last month in which panelists challenged the “Friends of Science” campaign launched at the Bonn talks.
During the webinar, an Indian scientist and government negotiator set out her view that the IPCC’s way of working and scientific assumptions perpetuate inequity between developed and developing countries – and yet its reports have come to be treated as “scripture” that cannot be questioned.
In her intervention, Essop did not comment directly on the Bonn science campaign nor on the IPCC timeline issue. But the participation of CAN’s leadership in an event where such criticism of the IPCC was aired has sparked concern in some parts of the NGO community.
“The way in which CAN International is playing into what could be the destruction of the IPCC inputs into the climate process is very concerning,” said Bill Hare, who was involved in CAN’s establishment nearly four decades ago and now runs think-tank Climate Analytics.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
He added that it was a mistake for CAN International to align itself with arguments made by India and Saudi Arabia, when those countries are blocking the conclusion of the IPCC’s next key report on cutting emissions in time for it to feed into the next global stocktake, which is due to conclude in 2028.
Like other insiders Climate Home News spoke to, the veteran Australian climate scientist fears these tensions could hamper CAN’s widely recognised power to influence the talks.
“The CAN International voice has been very, very important in the process. That voice doesn’t need to be diluted at this moment in history – that would be a really bad move,” Hare said.
Dialogue to reconcile differing views
Over the last decade, CAN has been working to transform itself into an organisation that is more representative of, and responsive to, voices and needs in the Global South. In 2019, it appointed Essop – a South African expert on climate, energy, poverty and social justice – as executive director, shifting further away from its European and North American roots.
CAN International, which functions as the broader network’s secretariat, says it is discussing how to reconcile varying views on the IPCC and the science and equity question among its hundreds of member groups spread across 130 countries.
“We acknowledge that there are different perspectives within a global network of over 2,000 members on these issues,” CAN International’s Essop said in response to questions from Climate Home News. “Given this diversity, we have democratic processes to build internal agreements.”
“Science and equity are both fundamental principles for effective climate action and are firmly embedded in CAN’s work,” she added in a written statement. “Putting these principles into practice in a painfully unjust world is not always straightforward, which is why we need continued dialogue across the network.”
Calls for “fair share” approach
The webinar in late August – which aimed to untangle what organisers described as “a growing narrative” that “treats science and equity as opposing priorities” – opened with a presentation by Tejal Kanitkar, a prominent Indian climate scientist who also serves on her government’s delegations at the IPCC and UN climate talks.
Outlining the findings of a paper she co-authored, Kanitkar argued that the IPCC had used scenarios for future emission reduction trajectories based primarily on assumptions put forward by Global North researchers that are skewed against the world’s poorest nations. These, she noted, were then incorporated into the first UN review of global climate action in 2023 and turned into widely cited emissions-cutting targets for limiting warming to 1.5C – a goal the UN has now conceded will be breached, at least temporarily.
Kanitkar said the “Friends of Science” group included “some of the people who have over-consumed the carbon budget and now use science as a slogan”. When Climate Home News raised the participation of diplomats from vulnerable countries, she said they should be asked why they “accept outcomes that burden the poorest the most”.
Commenting on Kanitkar’s presentation, CAN’s Essop said everyone knows that “imbalances of power dictate who sits at the table, who designs the models and who determines the assumptions underlying them”.
Her wider intervention focused more generally on the need to ensure that emissions-reduction pathways follow an equitable approach and account for the “fair share” of action countries need to take based on their historical responsibilities for climate change.
IPCC working to update models
Hare later acknowledged that most of the IPCC models used for 1.5C scenarios fail to account for the higher cost of capital and transition financing faced by developing countries. But as this is a “well-known” limitation, the IPCC gives a nuanced reading of the scenarios, and the next generation of models it uses is expected to include more consideration of equity, he added.
Echoing this, a climate scientist from a developing country currently involved in the IPCC process, who did not want to be identified, told Climate Home News that economic models inevitably contain biases and IPCC authors are already working to identify and correct them.
-
UN sets out narrow path back to 1.5C warming after inevitable overshoot
Leading scientists say warming must peak at 1.8C to be able to reverse course this century, but current government climate policies are way off track -
Keeping to 1.5C of warming is no longer possible – but we must still limit the overshoot
We need a strategy for navigating the huge risks to ecosystems and societies
Despite criticisms of how IPCC scientific reports have been produced, all governments must sign off on every line of a key “summary for policy-makers” at a dedicated meeting. In 2023, the approved summary included the emissions reduction figures in question that informed the UN’s first global stocktake.
Irrespective of this wider debate, Hare said the “Friends of Science” campaign, which he supports, is focused on the timing of the IPCC’s next assessment cycle rather than the equity of its models.
Unresolved row over IPCC report timeline
A political battle over that time-frame has dragged on for more than two years at successive meetings of the science panel, with governments repeatedly failing to find a solution.
A large majority of nations have been pushing for a timeline that would ensure the next round of AR7 reports can feed into the UN’s global stocktake. But a group of countries, including Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia and Kenya, have said at previous IPCC meetings that this would put a burden on developing countries with limited resources and have lobbied for a longer process.
In Bonn this summer, the coalition that wants to align AR7 with the 2028 stocktake – which includes diplomats from Fiji, Nepal, the European Union, Switzerland, Sierra Leone and Panama – vowed to ensure that decision-making in the UN climate process remains based on the “best available science”, including the IPCC assessment reports.
They pointed the finger at “the usual suspects” but stopped short of singling out any countries at the public press conference. Discussions in the previous week had seen Saudi Arabia and India play down the centrality of IPCC reports in the UN stocktake and oppose calls in draft texts to encourage scientific work on scenarios to limit an overshoot of the 1.5C warming goal.
Bonn upset fuels further tension
A campaigner with knowledge of internal discussions told Climate Home News that many civil society groups from some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Pacific islands, had expected CAN International to back calls in Bonn defending the centrality of the IPCC in UN climate policy-making.
Despite this, a day before the “Friends of Science” press conference, CAN published an ECO newsletter that did not mention the issue. Instead, it voiced surprise over the claims of an attack on science happening in the negotiations and accused some of the IPCC’s loudest-defending governments of hypocrisy for continuing to expand fossil fuels and not delivering “fair shares” of emissions cuts and finance to the developing world.
“We were really shocked we could not find a common position and then this jarring narrative was being pushed,” the campaigner added.
After divisions hardened in Bonn, Hare said his organisation was approached by “very upset” CAN members from various regions about the stance taken by the network’s international leadership on the issue.
Industry and NGOs lobby to weaken UN carbon credit rules in “coordinated” push
While Climate Home News understands that internal discussions have continued during the summer, including at a CAN leadership meeting in Nairobi in recent days, the campaigner said that CAN International’s endorsement of the recent webinar that directly challenged the “Friends of Science” coalition did not send a reassuring signal.
Some observers said they feared it would inflame tensions over how climate science is defined and utilised for policy purposes, with consequences reaching well beyond Bonn.
In a statement to Climate Home News, Essop said that “at a time when communities are experiencing the most horrific impacts of climate chaos, our collective energy must turn to solutions such as filling the Loss and Damage Fund, the phasing out of fossil fuels led by the Global North, and justice for people who are least responsible for this climate emergency”.
The post As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond appeared first on Climate Home News.
As science comes under attack at UN talks, climate movement splits over how to respond
Climate Change
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
On the morning of 26 August, flash floods surged through a Himalayan border region of Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, killing more than 1,300 people, with thousands still missing.
In the days since the floods, scientists have examined satellite imagery, drone footage and seismic data in order to understand and explain the forces behind the event.
While initial theories pinned the flood on a glacial collapse, scientists now understand the event as a “multi-hazard cascade”, which began with a bedrock collapse.
Some climate sceptics have tried to use this to falsely claim that human-caused climate change had no impact on the event.
Yet, scientists have noted that, while no formal attribution study has been carried out thus far, warming is making such ice-rock avalanches in the region more likely.
Researchers have highlighted how rapid warming is dramatically reshaping Asia’s high-mountain region – and identified rising temperatures, glacier retreat and permafrost thaw as factors that may have all contributed to the disaster.
Balendra Shah, Nepal’s prime minister, has called the floods a “serious signal that…the risks we must bear in the Himalayan region are increasing” due to climate change.
Here, Carbon Brief unpacks what scientists currently know about the causes of the catastrophic event and what they can – and cannot – say about the role of climate change.
What happened?
A report published on 28 August by the HiRisk scientific consortium of high mountain experts detailed the events that led to the flash floods.
It said that events were set in motion on 26 August when a mass of bedrock, as well as the glacier ice on top of it, broke off a slope of Langtang-Lirung mountain in the Nepalese Himalaya, plunging from approximately 5,200 metres above sea level to the valley floor at 3,000 metres.
The landslide shook the ground hard enough that, at 8:37am Nepal local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) initially reported a magnitude 4.4 earthquake. Later that day, it clarified the shaking was caused by glacier collapse and debris flow, equivalent to a magnitude 5.2 earthquake.
On the valley floor, the melting ice, water and debris slammed into the Lhende Khola river, a high-altitude river that runs along Nepal’s border with China.
Known downstream as the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal and the Poiqu or Poqu in China, the Lhende Khole feeds a network of rivers across Nepal and the Chinese region of Tibet, including the Trishuli river. (In China, the Lhende Khola is known as the Donglin Tsangpo.)
A large “debris” lake was briefly formed on the valley floor. When this lake burst, a wall of water and rock travelled downstream, killing more than a thousand people and destroying settlements, roads, bridges, hydropower plants and border posts across Nepal and Tibet.
HiRisk said that the floodwave travelled down rivers as fast as 30km an hour (around 19 miles per hour) and reached Mugling – a Nepalese town more than 130km downstream – at around 1pm local time.
A separate report from the Center for Land Surface Hazards in the US noted that the flood moved “exceptionally fast, was sediment-laden and extreme in scale”. For example, in the Nepalese municipality of Galchhi, the Trishuli river rose by nine metres in 30 minutes, it said.
Writing in the Conversation, Dr Umesh Haritashya, a glaciologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, explained that the disaster “wasn’t finished when the first wall of water passed [on 26 August]”.
He continued that a new “barrier lake” – estimated to hold a few million cubic metres of water – had developed in a location where two rivers meet in Tibet before crossing into Nepal. This lake burst on 28 August and the river rose again, he said.
On 4 September, the chief of Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority, told Reuters that property and infrastructure worth “at least” $2.5bn (£1.9bn) had been lost. Dharma Raj Upreti estimated the cost to build roads and temporary shelters, provide drinking water and restore power would be around $53m (£39m).
How did bedrock collapse trigger the flash floods?
In the immediate aftermath of the floods, initial reports suggested that the trigger was a collapsing glacier or earthquake in the high mountains of Nepal.
After confirming that a seismic tremor was as a result of falling rock and ice, the USGS said the trigger was likely a “glacial collapse and debris flow”. This was widely picked up by the media.
Subsequently, satellite imagery revealed that an “enormous chunk of the mountainous bedrock” beneath the glacier had also given way, reported the New York Times.
Dr Kristen Cook, a geomorphologist at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, told the newspaper:
“The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed…It was a much larger collapse than we were initially able to see in the satellite imagery.”
The result was a “deluge of rock and ice, which pulverized into mud and water as it surged down the mountainside”, the newspaper said.
Dr Jakob Steiner a geoscientist at the University of Graz in Austria, tells Carbon Brief:
“It was not a glacier that collapsed. It was the mountain below the glacier that collapsed and the glacier had no other chance but to go with it because it was sitting on top of it.
“The trigger for that is something that we are not 100% certain about, but, in the end, it very much looks like simply a mechanical failure of the rock material because of stressors that have built up over a long period of time.”
Failures of “bedrock” – the hard, solid rock that sits below looser rocks and soil – are an “increasingly common occurrence”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These massive landslides occur in mountain regions, commonly following rapid deglacierisation [the melting away of a glacier]. Similar events happened in the Chamoli event in 2021 [in the Indian Himalaya] and in the Blatten landslide last year in Switzerland. They’ve also occurred recently in Alaska.”
With a shift in focus from the failure of a glacier to the bedrock underneath, some climate sceptics seized on the development to falsely claim that climate change had not played any role in the disaster.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program, on Twitter, as well as former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley in the Spectator.
However, scientists have highlighted the likely contribution of rapid warming in the region. These factors include the thawing of permafrost and glacier retreat. (For more, see sections below).
Fundamentally, “this would have been a much less significant tragedy if it had been just a rock-slope failure”, notes Davies.
The initial landslide took a mixture of rock and ice into a valley that “contains buried ice” as well, she says, providing the water that “resulted in the hyperconcentrated flow, which took so many lives”.
How have temperatures risen in the affected region?
Global temperatures have risen by roughly 1.4C since the pre-industrial period. However, this increase is not uniform across the planet, with some regions warming faster than others.
A study published in Global and Planetary Change in June 2026 investigated changes in the Langtang catchment – a river basin in central Nepal, in which the Langtang-Lirung mountain is located, which eventually drains into the Ganges. Around one-quarter of the area is made up of glaciers.
The paper found that glacial areas of the catchment – found at 4,000 metres above sea level – warmed at 0.31C per decade over 1960-2023. This was “more than three times” the rate observed at a lower elevation weather station, the authors said.
Looking in more detail at the site of the glacial collapse, Dr Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, used ERA5 reanalysis data to show how temperature has changed at the 5,200-metre elevation site where the mass of ice and rock broke loose.
Rohde’s analysis found that June-to-August temperatures have been rising at the site of the glacier collapse since the year 1940, with 2026’s summer the fourth warmest on record, behind 2024, 2025 and 2022. This is shown in the graph below.
Rohde also found that the days leading up to the disaster recorded the hottest August temperatures ever experienced at the site. This is shown in the graph below.
On social media, Rohde stated:
“Given the warming trend, this Nepali glacier had probably been thinning and weakening for years, or even decades. But it ultimately failed during the warmest week in one of its warmest years on record. It would be a hell of a coincidence if global warming wasn’t at least partially to blame.”
How have rising temperatures affected mountain stability?
Many experts have linked warming temperatures in the region to thawing permafrost – ground that has been frozen for at least two consecutive years, whose thickness ranges from less than one metre to more than a kilometre.
Steiner is part of a research team that has been using sensors to monitor permafrost in the region since 2014. He tells Carbon Brief that it is “pretty clear” the permafrost has been thawing “very actively” at elevations as high as 5,200 metres above sea level “for many years”. He adds:
“This means that the ground has, over the last decades, moved from being in a solid state into – at least, periodically during the warm season – patchy ground where some is frozen and some isn’t…
“If you have frozen ground next to non-frozen ground, you have dynamics happening between that because there are different densities and there’s movement happening, which is conducive to interventional failure – and that we know from many other cases.”
Davies also points to the “degradation” of perennially frozen ground as a factor in the disaster:
“This permafrost acts as a glue to hold together the rocks and, as it melts, the rock can become weakened.”
Permafrost thaw can also result in saturated ground, says Davies, which adds “pressure in the joints” of rock and can “facilitate” failure. She continues:
“Sources of the water include melting permafrost and meltwater from the overlying glacier. We know that this event happened during a period of warmth, but in the absence of heavy precipitation, pointing to ice melt as the source of water.”
A 2025 study of rock and ice avalanches in High Mountain Asia found that more than two-thirds started in areas “where permafrost is probable”.
How have glaciers retreated in the affected region?
Glaciers – frozen rivers of ice holding three-quarters of the global freshwater supply – are extremely vulnerable to climate change.
In the Himalaya, the rate of glacier retreat has doubled since the late 20th century, according to a 2019 study in Science Advances.
The Global and Planetary Change study found that glacier area loss rates in the Langtang catchment increased more than fourfold from 1964 to 2023 – with melting accelerating after 2000.
It added that glaciers in the region also experienced “fragmentation” and “widespread thinning” over this period.
The study noted that this loss “coincided with elevation dependent warming”.
The figure below provides an overview of glacier loss in the Langtang catchment over 1964-2023, with orange, red and dark red indicating areas of retreat.
In addition, green dots note points of glacier fragmentation, while blue dots show separation and pink show disconnection.
In comments released by the University of Reading, Prof Maria Shahgedanova, a climate scientist researching climate impacts on mountain glaciers, said that the glacier involved in the floods had “retreated by approximately 450 metres between 1990 and 2020”.
She adds that this “potentially reduce[d] the mechanical support provided by the glacier to the underlying rock slope”.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Davies reiterates that the retreat of the glacier is “potentially a contributing factor” to the bedrock collapse and subsequent disaster.
This is because the removal of the glacier from the lower slopes leaves the “upper rock slopes less stable”, she says.
The most recent assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development said that glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region are “rapidly shrinking” as a result of climate change. (This region extends 3,500km over Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan.)
It said this loss is threatening the safety of the nearly two billion people, including by increasing the risk of “glacial lake outburst floods” (GLOFs). A GLOF is a sudden and catastrophic release of meltwater from a glacial lake.
Although this disaster was not caused by a GLOF, it is known that climate change is making such events more likely.
Can the event be attributed to climate change?
In the wake of the flash floods, climate campaigners, media outlets and Nepalese politicians have linked them to human-caused climate change.
However, many climate scientists have cautioned that it is too early to say precisely how climate change impacted the disaster.
Davies tells Carbon Brief:
“These events happen so quickly that the exact causes and drivers can take a little time to uncover, especially if the event was a surprise and there had been no monitoring system in place.”
When trying to determine the role human-caused climate change played in the intensity or likelihood of extreme weather, scientists turn to the field of “attribution science”.
To date, no formal rapid attribution study has been produced that attempts to quantify whether – and how – climate change contributed to the event.
Scientists have noted that climate attribution of ice-rock avalanches – which are typically driven by a variety of factors – remains limited, in part because of the lack of a long-term observational record of previous collapses in high mountain areas.
Meanwhile, the studies that do exist stop short of directly linking such disasters to climate change. For example, the authors of a 2021 study into the Chamoli ice-rock avalanche concluded that “we cannot attribute this individual disaster specifically to climate change”.
However, they added, the “possibly increasing frequency of high-mountain slope instabilities can likely be related to observed atmospheric warming and corresponding long-term changes in cryospheric conditions (glaciers and permafrost)”.
In the aftermath of the disaster, many researchers have similarly highlighted that climate change could not be singled out as the cause of the disaster, even if warming likely increased the probability of its occurrence.
On the Climate Brink substack, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted that a “definitive single-event attribution” of the more recent disaster “may never be possible” due to the “messy causality of rock-ice avalanches”.
However, he added that both the existing scientific literature and “essentially every scientist working on these hazards point in the same direction” – namely, that warming is making such events more likely in the Himalaya.
Steiner tells Carbon Brief it might be possible to attribute different factors that played a role in the disasters to climate change – for instance, the recession of the glacier – but it would be more difficult to do so for the event as a whole.
Part of the reason for this, he says, is that rock failures in this region of the Himalaya have occurred for millennia, well before humans started altering the climate.
However, he continues:
“The physics of it is not something that has been made possible by climate change. This could have happened without it. But the chance of it happening – and the likelihood of it happening five years after a previous, similar event [in Chamoli] – we, as the scientific community, can be pretty confident about that [being increased because of a changing climate].
“This is because so many of the changes that we know are related to climate change can potentially drive the build-up to eventual failure.”
Ultimately, says Davies, a “careful attribution study is needed, but it is hard to argue that the rapidly warming climate is not having an effect in these regions”. She adds:
“A single event may have multiple drivers, but we are seeing an increase in these events and are likely to see more as the permafrost and glacier melt continues.”
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The post Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: What can – and cannot – be said about global warming’s role in the 2026 Himalayan floods
Chinese industry is beginning to shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, with wind, solar and batteries progressively displacing coal, oil and gas across the industrial sectors that made the country the world’s factory and largest carbon emitter, a new analysis shows.
Clean electricity met all of China’s demand growth in 2025 and coal generation fell for the first time in a decade, even as electricity demand rose by 5%, the report found.
Despite a rebound in coal power generation in the first half of 2026, the analysis by global energy think-tank Ember found the growth in clean electricity illustrates a longer-term shift: a massive build-out of wind, solar energy and battery storage and deepening electrification of the economy are starting to make a dent in the fossil-fuel energy system supporting China’s industrial base.
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The research identifies early signs that a structural transformation of China’s industrial economy from coal, oil and gas to clean electricity is underway, even if changes on the ground are not yet reflected in national data.
“The energy foundation of the Chinese industrial economy is shifting,” Muyi Yang, a senior energy analyst at Ember and the report’s lead author, told Climate Home News.
“Fossil fuels are progressively being replaced in the many functions they have historically assumed. Because of that, fossil fuel peaking is increasingly coming into view,” he said.
Electrifying industry
Coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 provinces and regions analysed by Ember between 2021 and 2025. This includes industrial centres such as Hunan in southern China and Shandong – home to energy-intensive industries like cement production. Together, these regions are home to more than half of China’s thermal power capacity.
A greater share of the Chinese economy is now running on electricity than in other major economies, accounting for 29% of final energy consumption in 2024, compared with about 23% in Europe and 21% in the US. Less than half of China’s electricity was generated from coal in the first half of the year.
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Meanwhile, fossil fuel use has fallen in eight of 11 tracked industrial sectors, declining between 26% and 71% from peak consumption levels across fossil fuel extraction, manufacturing industries such as textiles, machinery and food and beverages, transport equipment and chemical materials.
Earlier this year, German company BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer, opened a new facility in southern China, which is fully supplied by renewable energy. The company said emissions from the site could be 50% lower than conventional petrochemical facilities.
In easier-to-electrify sectors such as machinery, electronics and textiles, electricity now supplies about three-quarters of final energy consumption, Ember found.
Fossil fuel use is also showing signs of flattening in the metals smelting and processing sector – one of the most fossil-intensive parts of the economy – offering “encouraging signs” that the transformation is starting to take hold in harder-to-abate sectors, said Yang.
“If that is happening in more and more provinces, and more and more economic sectors that means that fossil fuels are progressively being squeezed out of the energy system,” he said.
“Growing by greening”
China’s vast cleantech manufacturing power has become an engine for growth in its own right, spurring investment, creating jobs and generating export revenues.
Yang described this “growing-by-greening” dynamic as “turning each step of the transition into a source of strength for the next”.
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For Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this is part of what makes China’s lead in manufacturing clean energy equipment “irreversible”, comparing its growth with that of a rainforest, where different parts of the ecosystem thrive by reinforcing one another.
The early success of deploying wind and solar helped drive down electricity costs, which created favourable conditions for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and in turn boosted demand for batteries that are now critical to balance the grid.
An oversupply of renewable energy incentivised industrial players to benefit from cheap and readily available clean power generation, encouraging innovative solutions to electrify other parts of the economy. In the transport sector, for example, electrification is moving from passenger vehicles to harder-to-electrify trucks.
This abundance of cheap green energy is also making China competitive in what has long been seen as the anchor of Western competitiveness, Li said.
Stalling fossil fuel use
At the same time, China’s huge legacy fossil fuel generation capacity is still expanding, even as coal power plants are being used less intensively.
China brought 30 GW of new coal power capacity into operation in the first six months of the year and coal-fired generation rose 3% over the same period after local governments fast-tracked coal projects to prevent a repeat of severe power shortages in 2021.
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A further 274 GW of coal capacity is either under construction or has permits to be built while vast amounts of solar and wind power that could not be absorbed by the grid have gone to waste in the first half of the year.
“This doesn’t mean that the transition is losing steam,” said Yang, arguing that China is now grappling with some of the more complex aspects of the transition.
A recent analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for Carbon Brief found that China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement have plateaued for more than two years following a peak in March 2024. Ember found that on a 12-month moving average, coal generation has been stalling since then, following years of continuous expansion.
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In the second quarter of the year, CO2 emissions fell by 1% after China’s oil consumption plummeted 9% as the US-Iran war prevented the transport of oil cargoes from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
The electrification of the transport sector, particularly electric trucks, was the biggest driver in displacing oil demand as the conflict in the Middle East accelerated the transition.
A lesson in sequencing
China’s bumpy transition offers a useful lesson for other countries at an earlier stage of their transition, said Xunpeng Shi, president of the Sydney-based International Society of Energy Transition Studies (ISETS), a global network of professionals that shares research and fosters collaborations.
“Build quickly enough so that clean electricity can start taking over and prepare for the pressure on the fossil system before it arrives, because that is the part nobody has done easily,” he said.
For countries that are heavily reliant on revenue from fossil fuel exports, a peak in Chinese fossil fuel use weakens the assumption of rising demand on which investments have long been made.
“For them, the time to plan for that is now, while the revenues are still there,” he said.
The post China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit appeared first on Climate Home News.
China’s industrial engine starts to break its fossil fuel habit
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