Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
California burning
‘MOST DESTRUCTIVE’: At least 10 people have been killed and more than 9,000 buildings have been gutted in wildfires “scorching communities” across Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported in its latest update on Friday. There are multiple fires burning across LA county, including the 15,800-acre Palisades fire that CNN described as the “most destructive fire in LA history”.
INFERNAL LA: LA’s firefighters are struggling with water supplies and are “unaccustomed to fighting multiple blazes at once”, BBC News reported. “There are not enough firefighters in all of LA County to address four separate fires of this magnitude,” LA county fire chief Anthony Marrone told the outlet. The Los Angeles Times said the fires have already caused at least $50bn in losses, which could also threaten hundreds of thousands of Californians who already struggle to “find and keep affordable homeowners insurance”.
TINDERBOX CLIMATE: Many outlets examined the climate “drivers” of the wildfires. The Washington Post said the flames were fanned by a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm. BBC News said that California’s decade-long drought and a four-inch decline in LA’s annual rainfall had left the region dry and so “particularly vulnerable” to the spread of fires. The Guardian cited research finding that climate change has caused a 172% increase in California’s burned area since the 1970s.
Hello, goodbye
CAN’T TOUCH THIS: US president Joe Biden announced a “permanent stop” to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625m acres of US coastal waters, thus protecting 20% of the seabed, the New York Times reported. While Biden called the move a “climate imperative”, the Guardian pointed out that the law does not explicitly allow presidents to “unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress”. Alaska, meanwhile, sued the Biden administration over oil and gas drilling leases in the Arctic, Reuters said.
TILTING AT WINDMILLS: In a “lengthy tirade against windpower”, US president-elect Donald Trump pledged that no wind farms will be constructed during his second term, threatening billions of dollars in planned projects, Bloomberg reported. Earlier in the week, Trump criticised the UK government’s energy policy, with a call to “open up” North Sea oil and gas production and “get rid of windmills”, Reuters reported.
HYDROGEN BREAK: After “months of intense lobbying”, the Biden administration finalised rules that “offer billions of dollars in tax credits to companies that make hydrogen”, the New York Times reported. The rules include relaxed criteria for the “struggling sector” to claim tax credits, the Financial Times wrote.
Around the world
- RECORD HEAT: Multiple climate datasets have confirmed that 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record, with temperatures breaching 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, BBC News reported. Carbon Brief has all the details in its latest state of the climate” quarterly update.
- ADIEU, TRUDEAU: Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Canada’s prime minister on Monday, ending a near-decade “of [the country’s] most climate-conscious federal government”, but with a “physically enduring legacy” of oil pipeline expansions, the Narwhal reported.
- MECCA FLOODS: Torrential, unseasonal rain lashed cities in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, with the holy city of Mecca facing the “worst floods”, Down to Earth reported.
- WATER WOES: Last year, water-related disasters claimed more than 8,700 lives, drove 40 million people from their homes and caused $550bn in economic damage, according to the 2024 Global Water Monitor report covered by the Guardian.
- TAPS TURNED: Climate-induced sea level rise will “overwhelm” many of the world’s biggest oil ports, including Houston, Rotterdam and Ras Tanura, according to new analysis by cryosphere scientists who described the threat as “ironic”, the Guardian said.
- BANKS BOUNCED: Bloomberg reported that there are “zero” big Wall Street banks left in the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, after the biggest US bank JP Morgan quit the UN-backed climate coalition weeks before Trump assumed office.
10 days
The time it took for the world’s richest 1% to “burn through” their 2025 “share” of the global “carbon budget” for keeping warming under 1.5C, according to new Oxfam analysis.
Latest climate research
- Arctic marine heatwaves could intensify “on orders of magnitude” during the rest of this century under climate change, posing “major challenges for Arctic ecosystems”, according to new Nature Climate Change research using high-resolution climate models.
- A new study in Science estimated that building materials used in new construction could potentially store 16bn tonnes of CO2 every year.
- New research in Nature Cities found that high-income city dwellers in China were more likely to “order in” food during heatwaves, revealing the “transfer of heat exposure from consumers to delivery riders.”
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The map above uses squares to illustrate 1,682 studies where communities are taking on-ground measures to adapt to climate change, from the islands of Tuvalu to the high mountains of Nepal. These studies were collated as part of the most comprehensive assessment to date of the scientific literature on climate adaptation. Carbon Brief has produced an interactive article based on the database that pulls out some of the key findings and explores global trends.
Spotlight
What listening to crickets reveals about rainforest change
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to scientists studying what sounds from wildlife can reveal about change in an Indian rainforest.
On Christmas night in Coorg (Kodagu) – prime coffee country in India’s Western Ghats biosphere – the rainforest was anything but silent.
The night air – though drier than it should be this time of year – was charged with an electric score of cricks, chirps, trills, hisses, croaks, whoops and whistles.
The Western Ghats is one of the “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity on Earth, hosting 325 globally threatened species. Coorg, on its eastern slopes, is a micro hotspot that receives more than 4000mm of rainfall on average and is the source of the Kaveri river, whose waters are bitterly disputed among the south Indian states seeing increasingly hotter summers and devastating floods.
A short climb reveals physical scars of extreme weather: beyond thick canopies are hilltops bearing gashes from devastating landslides in 2018 that killed 20 people and displaced 18,000.
To understand the less-visible impacts of climate and land-use change on non-human species in Coorg’s dense forests and plantations, sound has emerged as an important tool.
Biodiversity symphony
Bio-acoustics is the science of sounds produced by biological systems and what they react to. Prof Rohini Balakrishnan at the Indian Institute of Science described her work as a “bridge between symphony, cacophony and silence” and said that there are “signatures” of land degradation in sound that photographs cannot capture. She told Carbon Brief:
“When we first came to the Western Ghats 20 years ago to try and actually figure out an entire acoustic community, most people thought we were completely crazy, because nobody had tried anything at that scale.”
Those first years, she said, were “very, very hard” on her team, involving months of fieldwork in forests “full of poisonous snakes, gaur (Indian bison) and some density” of elephants.
The “tech part”, however, has become significantly easier since, with machine learning and algorithmic approaches being trained to look at an entire soundscape and, possibly, to decide if a landscape is degrading. Balakrishnan said:
“When we started, all we had were those little Sony Walkmans and bat detectors. There were no recorders that you could programme and leave outdoors. So it was painful: follow an insect, get a recording. You had to be there doing the recording.”
For Dr Vijay Ramesh, a postdoctoral scientist at the K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University in New York state, an ongoing question is whether biodiversity can fully return to degraded landscapes that are being actively restored. Acoustics have played an essential role in helping answer that question, with soundscapes failing to detect insects in many restored sites.
“I don’t think we would have got that particular understanding of insects without using audio recorders, because these are all high frequencies we cannot hear,” Ramesh told Carbon Brief.
Cutting through noise
With so many species calling at the same time, isolating individual sounds in a complex noise environment can be a challenge. To Balakrishnan, the rainforest can sound like a Christmas party where “everybody’s screaming and you’re interested in one conversation, one person”.
Rohini and her team spent 15 years working on the “cocktail-party effect”, eventually finding that “what sounds to us like a cacophony actually can be close to silence for an insect”.
Anthropogenic sound often shows up in recordings: sirens still go off at dawn to signal the start of a morning shift for tea plantation workers. Pouring rain can serve as a major “masker” of sound.
While evidence of climate change’s impacts “still needs more long-term monitoring”, Rohini worries about humanity’s ability to “ignore planetary alarm bells”. She concluded:
“[M]echanised noise, traffic or construction…we sort of learn to filter them out, or we live in these artificial worlds we create by putting on headphones. And I feel, in the end, it takes away your ability to listen to your surroundings and to be influenced by it.
“Listening really is a survival skill for our species, but it also gives joy, and I think we are losing that ability to focus on sounds around us and think and ask: ‘What does that mean?’”
Watch, read, listen
BLACK MARKET: Context News interviewed Nigeria’s illegal oil refiners risking everything to meet their energy needs amid soaring fuel prices in the country.
POLYCRISIS NOW: Tim Sahay spoke to the Centre for Science and Environment about what to expect from climate policy in 2025 as the global “polycrisis” unfolds.
OFF THE CHARTS: A long read in the Atlantic examined how “extreme events are taking scientists by surprise” and “outpacing” the predictions of even the “best” climate models.
Coming up
- 14-15 January: UN “high-level retreat” on investing in ocean solutions, Incheon, South Korea
- 16 January: Vanuatu parliamentary elections
- 16-17 January: G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group Meeting, South Africa
Pick of the jobs
- Network of African National Human Rights Institutions, climate justice officer | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, with travel
- University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, postdoctoral fellows | Stipend: $66,300 with travel and relocation allowances. Location: Philadelphia
- Electrify Britain, director of policy and advocacy | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
- E3G, policy advisor, trade and climate | Salary: £40,500-£45,000. Location: London or Brussels
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 10 January 2025: Los Angeles burns; Trump tilts at ‘windmills’; What cricket chirps reveal about rainforest change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The moratorium is the first of its type to pass a legislative chamber, but about a dozen other states have pending proposals.
Maine is now the first state to pass a moratorium on the development of large data centers, and others may follow.
Maine Presses Pause on Large Data Centers. Will Other States Follow Its Lead?
The Trump EPA’s repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding revokes the agency’s authority to regulate climate pollution. Environmental activists are mourning the loss while vowing to resurrect it.
A procession of mourners representing sea level rise, melting permafrost, ecocide and other climate calamities grieved the demise of a groundbreaking climate rule outside the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 9 headquarters in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday.
Climate Activists Stage Mock Funeral for Landmark Climate Rule
Global oil demand is expected to be almost one million barrels per day less than was forecast before the Iran war, as shortages and soaring costs prompt drastic cutbacks by consumers and businesses, a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday.
With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz choking off supplies and keeping prices high, less oil is being used to make products such as jet fuel, LPG cooking gas and petrochemicals, the Paris-based IEA said in its monthly oil report, forecasting the biggest quarterly demand drop since the COVID pandemic.
The Iran war “upends our global outlook”, the government-backed agency said, adding that it now expects oil demand to shrink by 80,000 barrels per day in 2026 from last year.
Before the conflict began, the IEA said in February it expected oil demand to rise by 850,000 barrels per day this year, meaning the difference between the pre-war and current estimates is 930,000 barrels a day, or 340 million barrels a year.
That could have a significant impact on the outlook for planet-heating carbon emissions this year.
At an intensity of 434 kg of carbon dioxide per barrel of oil – the estimate used by the US Environmental Protection Agency – the annual reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from oil for 2026, compared with the pre-war forecast, is similar to the amount emitted by the Philippines each year.
Harry Benham, senior advisor at Carbon Tracker, told Climate Home News that he expects at least half of the reduction in oil demand to be permanent because of efficiency gains, behavioural change and faster electrification.
The oil shock is leading to oil being replaced, especially in transport, with electricity and other fuels, just as past oil shocks drove lasting reductions in consumption, he said. “The shock doesn’t delay the transition – it reinforces it,” he added.
Demand takes a hit
While demand for oil has fallen significantly, supplies have fallen even further. Supply in March was 10 million barrels a day less than February, the IEA said, calling it the “largest disruption in history”.
This forecast relies on the assumption that regular deliveries of oil and gas from the Middle East will resume by the middle of the year, the IEA said, although the prospects for this “remain unclear at this stage”.
-
Italy pushes coal exit back after gas prices rise
Analysts say the move sends a negative signal, but its impact will be limited given coal’s marginal role in Italy’s energy mix -
Charging worries, high prices put brakes on EV growth in Bangladesh
Sales of e-bikes and rickshaws are up amid queues at fuel stations, but a lack of charging infrastructure and high prices still deter many Bangladeshis from going electric -
Fossil Free Zones can be on-ramps to the clean energy transition
Oil and gas blocks overlap with a fifth of forests in the Amazon, Congo Basin and SE Asia – policies are needed to transition away from fossil fuels and halt deforestation together
Last month, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the CERAWeek oil industry conference that prices were not high enough to lead to permanent reductions in demand for oil, known as demand destruction.
But the IEA said on Wednesday that “demand destruction will spread as scarcity and higher prices persist”.
Industries contributing to weaker demand for oil include Asian petrochemical producers, who are cutting production as oil supplies dry up, the report said, while consumers are cutting back on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which is mainly used as a cooking gas in developing countries, the IEA said.
Flight cancellations caused by the war have dampened demand for oil-based jet fuel, the IEA said. As well as cancellations caused by risk from the conflict itself, airports have warned that fuel shortages could lead to disruption.
Across the world, governments, businesses and consumers have sought to reduce their oil use after the war. The government of Pakistan has cut the speed limit on its roads, so that people drive at a more fuel-efficient speed, and Laos has encouraged people to work from home to preserve scarce petrol and diesel.
Nepal’s EV revolution pays off as oil crisis causes pain at the pumps
Consumers in Bangladesh are seeking electric vehicles (EVs) to avoid fuel queues and, in Nigeria, more people are seeking to replace petrol and diesel generators with solar panels, Climate Home News has reported.
In the longer term, the European Union is considering cutting taxes on electricity to help it replace fossil fuels and France is promoting EVs and heat pumps.
IEA urged to help “future-proof” economies
Meanwhile, the IEA came under fire last week from energy security experts, including former military chiefs, who signed an open letter in which they accused the agency of offering “only a temporary response to turbulent markets”, calling for stronger structural action “to future-proof our economies”.
They said that besides releasing emergency oil stocks and offering advice on how to reduce oil demand in the short term, the IEA should show countries how to reduce their exposure to volatile oil and gas markets.
The IEA has also been under pressure from the Trump administration to talk less about the transition away from fossil fuels.
This article was amended on 15 April 2026 to correct the drop in 2026 forecast oil demand from “nearly a billion” to “nearly a million”
The post IEA slashes pre-war oil demand forecast by nearly a million barrels per day appeared first on Climate Home News.
IEA slashes pre-war oil demand forecast by nearly a million barrels per day
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