UN Secretary-General: COP30 must deliver global response plan
UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged world leaders to deliver climate plans that go “much further, much faster” as he kicked off today’s climate summit at UN headquarters.
Hinting at an expected shortfall in the ambition needed to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement 1.5C temperature limit, he said November’s COP30 must end with a “credible global response plan” to get world efforts back on track.
Guterres, who convened the gathering, outlined five areas for priority action, putting energy at the top. Despite clean energy’s competitiveness, fossil fuels still dominate, he said, calling on countries to “supercharge” the energy transition by investing in grids and storage, lowering investment costs for developing countries and shifting subsidies away from fossil fuels.
“Drastic cuts” in methane emissions are essential and can be achieved quickly and cheaply, Guterres added. A potent gas with a shorter lifespan than carbon dioxide, methane is widely considered a low-hanging fruit to slow global warming.
The International Energy Agency reckons around 40% of methane emissions from fossil fuels could be cut at no net cost. That’s because interventions like identifying and repairing leaky infrastructure cost less than the market value of the additional gas fossil fuel operators would be able to capture and sell, the watchdog said.
The UN chief then highlighted the need to end the destruction of forests, which he described as “nature’s greatest carbon sinks”. At COP28 two years ago, countries committed to ending and reversing deforestation by 2030. Guterres said that could deliver a fifth of the needed emission reductions by the end of this decade. At the moment, that goal remains way off track as forest loss keeps rising.
Guterres also called for governments to urgently deploy new technologies that can cut emissions from steel and cement production, as well as heavy transport. Those sectors are generally considered harder to decarbonise because they require substantial amounts of energy, and efforts to make them greener rely on less mature, or more expensive, solutions like hydrogen or alternative fuels.
Finally, Guterres made an appeal for climate justice. The finance gaps preventing investment in climate resilience across the developing world should be plugged, he said. That means reforming the international financial architecture, offering “effective” debt relief, raising contributions to the loss and damage fund, and boosting adaptation finance.
Brazil’s president: Submitting NDCs is “not an option”
Opening the summit together with the UN chief, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva urged countries to submit their new climate plans (Nationally Determined Contributions – NDCs) before COP30, which is happening in the Brazilian state of Pará this November.
“The submissions of NDCs is not an option. As it was made clear by the International Court of Justice, it is an obligation,” he said referring to its advisory opinion on climate change and human rights handed down in July.
He added that only by having all countries respect their commitments and submit their NDCs, will the world know where it stands in the battle against climate change. No one is safe from the effects of it, he said, not even the countries that are part of what he called “multilateral denialism”.
As he spoke, only 47 countries had presented their plans.
Brazil was the second country to present its NDC, last November. It aims to reduce emissions of all greenhouse gases by between 59% and 67% across all sectors of the economy and end deforestation by 2030.
Lula championed multilateralism in multiple parts of his speech, saying that COP30 can be “the stage for a decisive moment in” its history. “I call on the countries that have not yet submitted their NDCs. The success of COP30 in Belém depends on you.”
He also said that if the world doesn’t come together and take decisions that respect what science says, civil society will stop trusting its leaders, “and instead of strengthening the struggle against global warming, we are going to help discredit multilateralism policies and in democracy. And all of us will lose because denialism may actually win.”
China unveils 2035 emissions-cutting goal of 7-10%
China announced a much-anticipated new target to reduce its emissions at the summit. It said it will aim for a 7-10% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 compared to “peak” levels, without specifying which year that would be. Experts said that pledge is not enough to align with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
In a video message, Chinese President Xi Jinping told world leaders that the “green and low carbon transition is the trend of our time”, despite “some countries acting against it”.
“China will by 2035 reduce economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions by 7-10% from peak levels, striving to do better,” the Chinese leader announced.
The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) has warned that only emissions cuts of around 30% by 2035 by China would be consistent with the 1.5C limit.
A range, such as the one delivered by Xi at the New York summit, could be interpreted as “the lower bound is effectively the guarantee, while the upper bound represents potential ambition”.
The baseline year for the target – a key measure for how ambitious the target is – was not clarified in Xi’s announcement. The country will take as reference the “peak” in its emissions, with some experts saying that could be as early as last year or this year.
China’s rapid renewable energy rollout has kept the country on track to meet its existing goal of peaking carbon pollution before the end of the decade. It plans to reach net zero by 2060.
The world’s largest carbon polluter, China is responsible for about a third of global emissions. As countries are expected to deliver new climate plans at the climate summit, China’s new nationally determined contribution (NDC) has been one of the most anticipated and is viewed as an indicator of global climate ambition.
The Chinese president also announced a target to “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in total energy consumption to over 30%”, and “expand the installed capacity of wind and solar power to over six times the 2020 levels, striving to bring the total to 3,600 GW”.
He also pledged to “scale up the total forest stock volume to over 24 billion cubic metres”, make EVs the “mainstream in the sale of new vehicles”, and expand China’s emissions trading market to cover “major emitting sectors”.
European Union promises to submit formal NDC before COP30
To no-one’s surprise, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the bloc’s 2035 target would “range between 66% and 72%” below 1990 levels and promised to formally submit it before COP30.
“The clean transition is moving on and let me assure you that Europe will stay the course on our climate ambition,” she said.
She also plugged the EU’s support for clean cooking and other climate finance projects overseas. “No mother, no child should die because [of] simply cooking dinner under abhorrent circumstances”, she said.
Von der Leyen could only give an emissions-reduction range – known as a “statement of intent” – because the European Union has not yet been able to agree exact targets for 2035 or 2040, on the road to meeting its overarching goal of net zero by 2050.
In July, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, proposed a goal to cut emissions 90% on 1990 levels by 2040. That would have formed the basis for the 2035 target.
But the 2040 goal still needs approval from the EU’s other two arms – the European Parliament and the European Council, which represents member states.
At a meeting last week in Brussels, environment ministers from the bloc’s 27 member states said they had been unable to agree on the targets, asking heads of state to give them a steer at a European Council meeting in October.
The post At climate summit, UN chief urges countries to go “much further, much faster” on NDCs appeared first on Climate Home News.
At climate summit, UN chief urges countries to go “much further, much faster” on NDCs
The annual World Economic Forum got underway on Tuesday in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, providing a snowy stage for government and business leaders to opine on international affairs. With attention focused on the latest crisis – a potential US-European trade war over Greenland – climate change has slid down the agenda.
Despite this, a number of panels are addressing issues like electric vehicles, energy security and climate science. Keep up with top takeaways from those discussions and other climate news from Davos in our bulletin, which we’ll update throughout the day.
From oil to electrons – energy security enters a new era
Energy crises spurred by geopolitical tensions are nothing new – remember the 1970s oil shock spurred by the embargo Arab producers slapped on countries that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, leading to rocketing inflation and huge economic pain.
But, a Davos panel on energy security heard, the situation has since changed. Oil now accounts for less than 30% of the world’s energy supply, down from more than 50% in 1973. This shift, combined with a supply glut, means oil is taking more of a back seat, according to International Energy Agency boss Fatih Birol.
Instead, in an “age of electricity” driven by transport and technology, energy diplomacy is more focused on key elements of that supply chain, in the form of critical minerals, natural gas and the security buffer renewables can provide. That requires new thinking, Birol added.
“Energy and geopolitics were always interwoven but I have never ever seen that the energy security risks are so multiplied,” he said. “Energy security, in my view, should be elevated to the level of national security today.”
In this context, he noted how many countries are now seeking to generate their own energy as far as possible, including from nuclear and renewables, and when doing energy deals, they are considering not only costs but also whether they can rely on partners in the long-term.
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In the case of Europe – which saw energy prices jump after sanctions on Russian gas imports in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine – energy security rooted in homegrown supply is a top priority, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Davos on Tuesday.
Outlining the bloc’s “affordable energy action plan” in a keynote speech at the World Economic Forum, she emphasised that Europe is “massively investing in our energy security and independence” with interconnectors and grids based on domestically produced sources of power.
The EU, she said, is trying to promote nuclear and renewables as much as possible “to bring down prices and cut dependencies; to put an end to price volatility, manipulation and supply shocks,” calling for a faster transition to clean energy.
“Because homegrown, reliable, resilient and cheaper energy will drive our economic growth and deliver for Europeans and secure our independence,” she added.
Comment – Power play: Can a defensive Europe stick with decarbonisation in Davos?
AES boss calls for “more technical talk” on supply chains
Earlier, the energy security panel tackled the risks related to supply chains for clean energy and electrification, which are being partly fuelled by rising demand from data centres and electric vehicles.
The minerals and metals that are required for batteries, cables and other components are largely under the control of China, which has invested massively in extracting and processing those materials both at home and overseas. Efforts to boost energy security by breaking dependence on China will continue shaping diplomacy now and in the future, the experts noted.
Copper – a key raw material for the energy transition – is set for a 70% increase in demand over the next 25 years, said Mike Henry, CEO of mining giant BHP, with remaining deposits now harder to exploit. Prices are on an upward trend, and this offers opportunities for Latin America, a region rich in the metal, he added.
At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals
Andrés Gluski, CEO of AES – which describes itself as “the largest US-based global power company”, generating and selling all kinds of energy to companies – said there is a lack of discussion about supply chains compared with ideological positioning on energy sources.
Instead he called for “more technical talk” about boosting battery storage to smooth out electricity supply and using existing infrastructure “smarter”. While new nuclear technologies such as small modular reactors are promising, it will be at least a decade before they can be deployed effectively, he noted.
In the meantime, with electricity demand rising rapidly, the politicisation of the debate around renewables as an energy source “makes no sense whatsoever”, he added.
The post Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat
Climate Change
A Record Wildfire Season Inspires Wyoming to Prepare for an Increasingly Fiery Future
As the Cowboy State faces larger and costlier blazes, scientists warn that the flames could make many of its iconic landscapes unrecognizable within decades.
In six generations, Jake Christian’s family had never seen a fire like the one that blazed toward his ranch near Buffalo, Wyoming, late in the summer of 2024. Its flames towered a dozen feet in the air, consuming grassland at a terrifying speed and jumping a four-lane highway on its race northward.
A Record Wildfire Season Inspires Wyoming to Prepare for an Increasingly Fiery Future
Climate Change
Analysis: UK newspaper editorial opposition to climate action overtakes support for first time
Nearly 100 UK newspaper editorials opposed climate action in 2025, a record figure that reveals the scale of the backlash against net-zero in the right-leaning press.
Carbon Brief has analysed editorials – articles considered the newspaper’s formal “voice” – since 2011 and this is the first year opposition to climate action has exceeded support.
Criticism of net-zero policies, including renewable-energy expansion, came entirely from right-leaning newspapers, particularly the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
In addition, there were 112 editorials – more than two a week – that included attacks on Ed Miliband, continuing a highly personal campaign by some newspapers against the Labour energy secretary.
These editorials, nearly all of which were in right-leaning titles, typically characterised him as a “zealot”, driving through a “costly” net-zero “agenda”.
Taken together, the newspaper editorials mirror a significant shift on the UK political right in 2025, as the opposition Conservative party mimicked the hard-right populist Reform UK party by definitively rejecting the net-zero target that it had legislated for and the policies that it had previously championed.
Record climate opposition
Nearly 100 UK newspaper editorials voiced opposition to climate action in 2025 – more than double the number of editorials that backed climate action.
As the chart below shows, 2025 marked the fourth record-breaking year in a row for criticism of climate action in newspaper editorials.
This also marks the first time that editorials opposing climate action have overtaken those supporting it, during the 15 years that Carbon Brief has analysed.
This trend demonstrates the rapid shift away from a long-standing political consensus on climate change by those on the UK’s political right.
Over the past year, the Conservative party has rejected both the “net-zero by 2050” target that it legislated for in 2019 and the underpinning Climate Change Act that it had a major role in creating. Meanwhile, the Reform UK party has been rising in the polls, while pledging to “ditch net-zero”.
These views are reinforced and reflected in the pages of the UK’s right-leaning newspapers, which tend to support these parties and influence their politics.
All of the 98 editorials opposing climate action were in right-leaning titles, including the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Daily Express.
Conversely, nearly all of the 46 editorials pushing for more climate action were in the left-leaning and centrist publications the Guardian and the Financial Times. These newspapers have far lower circulations than some of the right-leaning titles.
In total, 81% of the climate-related editorials published by right-leaning newspapers in 2025 rejected climate action. As the chart below shows, this is a marked difference from just a few years ago, when the same newspapers showed a surge in enthusiasm for climate action.
That trend had coincided with Conservative governments led by Theresa May and Boris Johnson, which introduced the net-zero goal and were broadly supportive of climate policies.
Notably, none of the editorials opposing climate action in 2025 took a climate-sceptic position by questioning the existence of climate change or the science behind it. Instead, they voiced “response scepticism”, meaning they criticised policies that seek to address climate change.
(The current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has described herself as “a net-zero sceptic, not a climate change sceptic”. This is illogical as reaching net-zero is, according to scientists, the only way to stop climate change from getting worse.)
In particular, newspapers took aim at “net-zero” as a catch-all term for policies that they deemed harmful. Most editorials that rejected climate action did not even mention the word “climate”, often using “net-zero” instead.
This supports recent analysis by Dr James Painter, a research associate at the University of Oxford, which concluded that UK newspaper coverage has been “decoupling net-zero from climate change”.
This is significant, given strong and broad UK public support for many of the individual climate policies that underpin net-zero. Notably, there is also majority support for the “net-zero by 2050” target itself.
Much of the negative framing by politicians and media outlets paints “net-zero” as something that is too expensive for people in the UK.
In total, 87% of the editorials that opposed climate action cited economic factors as a reason, making this by far the most common justification. Net-zero goals were described as “ruinous” and “costly”, as well as being blamed – falsely – for “driving up energy costs”.
The Sunday Telegraph summarised the view of many politicians and commentators on the right by stating simply that said “net-zero should be scrapped”.
While some criticism of net-zero policies is made in good faith, the notion that climate change can be stopped without reducing emissions to net-zero is incorrect. Alternative policies for tackling climate change are rarely presented by critical editorials.
Moreover, numerous assessments have concluded that the transition to net-zero can be both “affordable” and far cheaper than previously thought.
This transition can also provide significant economic benefits, even before considering the evidence that the cost of unmitigated warming will significantly outweigh the cost of action.
Miliband attacks intensify
Meanwhile, UK newspapers published 112 editorials over the course of 2025 taking personal aim at energy security and net-zero secretary Ed Miliband.
Nearly all of these articles were in right-leaning newspapers, with the Sun alone publishing 51. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Times published most of the remainder.
This trend of relentlessly criticising Miliband personally began last year in the run up to Labour’s election victory. However, it ramped up significantly in 2025, as the chart below shows.
Around 58% of the editorials that opposed climate action used criticism of climate advocates as a justification – and nearly all of these articles mentioned Miliband, specifically.
Editorials denounced Miliband as a “loon” and a “zealot”, suffering from “eco insanity” and “quasi-religious delusions”. Nicknames given to him include “His Greenness”, the “high priest of net-zero” and “air miles Miliband”.
Many of these attacks were highly personal. The Daily Mail, for example, called Miliband “pompous and patronising”, with an “air of moral and intellectual superiority”.
Frequently, newspapers refer to “Ed Miliband’s net-zero agenda”, “Ed Miliband’s swivel-eyed targets” and “Mr Miliband’s green taxes”.
These formulations frame climate policies as harmful measures that are being imposed on people by the energy secretary.
In fact, the Labour government decisively won an election in 2024 with a manifesto that prioritised net-zero policies. Often, the “targets” and “taxes” in question are long-standing policies that were introduced by the previous Conservative government, with cross-party support.
Moreover, the government’s climate policy not only continues to rely on many of the same tools created by previous administrations, it is also very much in line with expert evidence and advice. This is to prioritise the expansion of clean power and to fuel an economy that relies on increasing levels of electrification, including through electric cars and heat pumps.
Despite newspaper editorials regularly calling for Miliband to be “sacked”, prime minister Keir Starmer has voiced his support both for the energy secretary and the government’s prioritisation of net-zero.
In an interview with podcast The Rest is Politics last year, Miliband was asked about the previous Carbon Brief analysis that showed the criticism aimed at him by right-leaning newspapers.
Podcast host Alastair Campbell asked if Miliband thought the attacks were the legacy of his strong stance, while Labour leader, during the Leveson inquiry into the practices of the UK press. Miliband replied:
“Some of these institutions don’t like net-zero and some of them don’t like me – and maybe quite a lot of them don’t like either.”
Renewable backlash
As well as editorial attitudes to climate action in general, Carbon Brief analysed newspapers’ views on three energy technologies – renewables, nuclear power and fracking.
There were 42 newspaper editorials criticising renewable energy in 2025. This meant that, for the first time since 2014, there were more anti-renewables editorials than pro-renewables editorials, as the chart below shows.
As with climate action more broadly, this was a highly partisan issue. The Times was the only right-leaning newspaper that published any editorials supporting renewables.
By far the most common stated reason for opposing renewable energy was that it is “expensive”, with 86% of critical editorials using economic arguments as a justification.
The Sun referred to “chucking billions at unreliable renewables” while the Daily Telegraph warned of an “expensive and intermittent renewables grid”.
At the same time, editorials in supportive publications also used economic arguments in favour of renewables. The Guardian, for example, stressed the importance of building an “affordable clean-energy system” that is “built on renewables”.
There was continued support in right-leaning publications for nuclear power, despite the high costs associated with the technology. In total, there were 20 editorials supporting nuclear power in 2025 – nearly all in right-leaning newspapers – and none that opposed it.
Fracking was barely mentioned by newspapers in 2023 and 2024, after a failed push by the Conservatives under prime minister Liz Truss to overturn a ban on the practice in 2022. This attempt had been accompanied by a surge in supportive right-leaning newspaper editorials.
There was a small uptick of 15 editorials supporting fracking in 2025, as right-leaning newspapers once again argued that it would be economically beneficial.
The Sun urged current Conservative leader Badenoch to make room for this “cheap, safe solution” in her future energy policy. The government plans to ban fracking “permanently”.
North Sea oil and gas remained the main fossil-fuel policy focus, with 30 editorials – all in right-leaning newspapers – that mentioned the topic. Most of the editorials arguing for more extraction from the North Sea also argued for less climate action or opposed renewable energy.
None of these editorials noted that the UK is expected to be significantly less reliant on fossil-fuel imports if it pursues net-zero, than if it rolls back on climate action and attempts to squeeze more out of the remaining deposits in the North Sea.
Methodology
This is a 2025 update of previous analysis conducted for the period 2011-2021 by Carbon Brief in association with Dr Sylvia Hayes, a research fellow at the University of Exeter. Previous updates were published in 2022, 2023 and 2024.
The count of editorials criticising Ed Miliband was not conducted in the original analysis.
The full methodology can be found in the original article, including the coding schema used to assess the language and themes used in editorials concerning climate change and energy technologies.
The analysis is based on Carbon Brief’s editorial database, which is regularly updated with leading articles from the UK’s major newspapers.
The post Analysis: UK newspaper editorial opposition to climate action overtakes support for first time appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK newspaper editorial opposition to climate action overtakes support for first time
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