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Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

This week

Loss-and-damage fund agreement

LOSS AND DAMAGE: Global climate negotiators have agreed a draft framework for the loss-and-damage fund, Bloomberg reported, but the breakthrough was “marred by sparring over exactly how the programme would be funded”. Delegates agreed at a meeting in Abu Dhabi that the World Bank will host the fund on an interim basis for four years, along with the basic guideposts for funding.

COMPROMISE: The Times of India noted that the framework includes a compromise that the “fund will be based on ‘voluntary’ instead of ‘mandatory’ contribution from the rich nations as part of their historical responsibility”. However, the US objected to the wording within the final text, with the state department noting it does not reflect consensus concerning, the Financial Times reported. Carbon Brief covered the final draft in a detailed Q&A, including the questions around consensus.

‘FRAGILE AGREEMENT’: The “fragile agreement” came after hours of “acrimonious haggling”, Politico stated. It quoted Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law, who said: “That the US finally could not even agree with the massively watered down text after cornering developing countries into accepting it, is a testimony to its lack of good faith effort to actually deliver an effective fund.”

Petrostates plan carbon budget-busting projects

CARBON BUDGETS: According to a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, fossil fuel-producing nations are planning expansions of coal, oil and gas that would “blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over”, reported the Guardian. Existing plans would lead to 460% more coal production, 83% more gas and 29% more oil in 2030 than it is possible to burn if global temperature rises are to be kept at 1.5C.

NET-ZERO PLEDGES: The report analysed more than 20 major fossil fuel producers, finding they plan to produce around 110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with 1.5C, and 69% more than would be consistent with 2C, reported Reuters. Of these, 17 of the countries have pledged to reach net-zero.

‘INSANITY’: Experts called the plans “insanity” that will “throw humanity’s future into question”, the Guardian article noted. It quoted Inger Andersen, the executive director of UNEP, who said “the addiction to fossil fuels still has its claws deep in many nations”.

Around the world

  • CHINESE METHANE: China has unveiled a “long-awaited” plan to tackle methane emissions, as it reached the end of a four-day meeting with the US, Reuters reported. However, the plan includes no firm targets for cutting those emissions, “only goals for re-using them as fuel”, the article noted.
  • KING’S SPEECH: The UK government has used the king’s speech before the next election to set out plans that would mandate the North Sea Transition Authority to run annual oil-and-gas licensing rounds, BusinessGreen reported.
  • DEFORESTATION DROPS: Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research has announced that deforestation has fallen to a five-year low within the nation’s Amazon rainforest, reports the New York Times. This is a “sign” that Brazil is making progress on its pledge to halt all deforestation by the end of the decade, it noted.
  • CANADIAN EMISSIONS: Canada is set to miss its 2030 target to reduce emissions by at least 40% below 2005 levels, according to a new government audit, the Globe and Mail reported. The country has never met an emissions-reduction goal despite devising more than 10 separate plans to do so since 1990, it said.
  • WARMEST ON RECORD: It is “virtually certain” that 2023 will be the warmest year on record, after global average air temperatures last month were 0.4C warmer than the previous October high in 2019, BBC News reported. This is according to new data released by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which confirms what Carbon Brief first revealed last month.

85%

Wind and solar generated enough electricity in 2022 to power about 85% of all households in the EU, according to the International Energy Agency.

Latest climate research

  • A new meta-analysis of 400 studies published in Nature Ecology & Evolution found native species are more vulnerable to extreme weather events than non-native species.
  • “Artisanal” gold mining in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has a “major environmental impact”, according to new research published in Nature Sustainability that looked at energy consumption and the release of mercury.
  • Reducing carbon emissions so atmospheric levels of CO2 remain constant – rather than reaching net-zero, where atmospheric CO2 would fall – could see major tipping points crossed in the Earth system, research published in Earth’s Future has warned.

(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 UK's North Sea gas production is set to drop 97% by 2050 – and even with new licensing rounds it would fall by 95%. Chart shows annual has production in terawatt hours. As of 2022, UK gas production had already fallen by two-thirds since 2000. From today, production is expected to fall by another 97% by 2050 – or by 95% if new licenses are issued.

Ahead of the king’s speech, the UK government announced that the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is to invite applications for new production licences on an annual basis, to “support the UK’s transition to net-zero in a pragmatic, proportionate and realistic way”. Analysis of NSTA figures by Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans found that the UK’s North Sea gas production is set to drop 97% by 2050 and, even with new licensing rounds, this will still fall by 95%.

Spotlight

Q&A: Did a 1910 kidnap change the history of solar energy?

This week, Carbon Brief takes a look at Dr Sugandha Srivastav’s thought experiment, which asks how far solar energy could have come had it not been for the kidnapping of George Cove.

Who was George Cove?

Cove was a Canadian inventor, who moved to the US in the early 1900s and filed numerous patents, including for a technology that harnessed solar power around which he created his company Sun Electric.

He had purportedly created a new semiconductor and a battery energy storage solution, which were gaining significant attention.

George Cove (1910)
Image: Cove next to the third iteration of his solar technology during a demonstration in New York. Source: Generating electricity by the sun’s rays (1910), Popular Electricity, Volume 2.

However, in October 1909, Cove was kidnapped by two men. According to the New York Herald at the time, the kidnappers asked Cove to give up the rights to his solar patent and close down his business.

There have been various theories around who the kidnappers were, including questions as to whether companies with vested interests – such as Standard Oil or Edison Electric – played a part.

A smear campaign was launched against Cove, with claims that – despite its patent – the solar technology did not work, or simply drew electricity from the grid.

His kidnap and the repeated attack on Sun Electric meant Cove’s technology was not able to develop – and Sun Electric failed.

Dr Sugandha Srivastav, British Academy postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Environmental Economics at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, who has been researching Cove, told Carbon Brief:

“I really think that we would have had a very interesting tranche of early solar innovation, but instead what we had was entrepreneurs and investors getting spooked because here’s a man who was kidnapped on the grounds of his solar innovation.”

How might solar have developed in the 20th century?

Following Cove’s kidnapping, it was more than 40 years until the invention of the silicon solar cell.

Dr Srivastav conducted an experiment to explore the impact of Cove’s kidnapping, using Wright’s Law, to model what solar development could have looked like had it been developed in 1910.

She used data on cost and cumulative installed capacity – which found that for every doubling of solar PV capacity there is a 20% decline in cost – to “hindcast” costs within two scenarios: one that assumed Cove’s solar had a capacity of 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh); and one that assumed 5,000kWh.

The analysis assumes solar PV growth is slow to begin with during the experimental phase, then picks up pace, before tapering as the market saturates.

When could solar PV have become cheaper than coal?

While there are limitations and uncertainties inherent in any hindcasting exercise, this experiment provides a view of what the development of solar PV could have looked like in the 20th century.

Depending on the scenario, solar PV would have become cheaper than coal in 2007 or even 2002. In reality, solar PV only became cheaper than coal in 2016, according to Our World in Data.

In the Cove counterfactual, the 2016 cost of electricity from solar PV is US$24-40 per megawatt hours, which is between two and four times cheaper than the actual costs that year.

Following the recent publication of Srivastav’s report on Cove’s kidnapping, she said:

“An earlier transition to renewables would have spared the world huge amounts of carbon emissions, and far fewer deaths from air pollution and other climate related disasters. We cannot say for certain how solar PV’s trajectory would have panned out if George Cove was not kidnapped. But we can say with greater clarity that in 1909 a vision of a solar-powered world was lost, and it is only being revived now, over 100 years later.”

Watch, read, listen

MONSTERS OF THE ROAD: SUVs “have higher emissions, hog roadspace and are more dangerous for other road users, yet are more popular than ever”, said an article in the Guardian, which explores what can be done in the UK about the surge in SUVs.

CHINA’S CARBON PRICING: Chen Ji, executive director at the China International Capital Corporation Global Institute, and Yan Qin, lead carbon analyst at Refinitiv, discuss the topics of finance and carbon- pricing on the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies’ China Programme podcast.

MOMENT OF TRUTH: The Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations runs through what to expect from the upcoming COP28 summit, looking at the global stocktake, energy transition, global goal on Adaptation and more.

Coming up

Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org

The post DeBriefed 10 November: Loss-and-damage fund; UNEP warns of petrostate plans; Solar’s forgotten kidnapping appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 10 November: Loss-and-damage fund; UNEP warns of petrostate plans; Solar’s forgotten kidnapping

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Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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March 19, 2026

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The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

By Dylan Baddour

City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

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March 19, 2026

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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed ​into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia. 

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

    Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

    Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

    Agroecology as an alternative

    There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency. 

    In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

    In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

    New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

    Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

    These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

    Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

    We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

    As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

    This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

    The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.

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    Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

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    March 19, 2026

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    Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.

    By Kiley Price

    It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.

    Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

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