Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
US budget bill ‘would kill IRA’
WAYS AND MEANS: The future of Joe Biden’s signature climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is in doubt after Republicans on two key Congressional committees passed budget proposals that “would effectively kill” it, reported Heatmap News. The proposals would end clean-energy tax credits and rebates for electric vehicle (EV) purchases, “claw back” climate grants and “slash” related spending, said Reuters.
DEFENCE DOUBTS: While a “small subset” of House Republicans have been trying to defend the IRA, it is unclear if they would block passage of the wider budget bill to get their way, according to E&E News. In the Senate, Politico said “some” Republicans are “pushing back” on the current proposals. A New York Times feature said Republican districts “have the most to lose” if all of the IRA tax credits are repealed. Semafor reported Republicans were “wrestling with possible failure” of the bill, in the face of opposition from Democrats and their own ranks. (Law firm Grant Thornton said policymakers were hoping to pass the bill by 4 July.)
SOCIAL COST: Meanwhile, a new White House memo directed US government agencies to disregard economic damages from climate change, reported E&E News. Under a headline asking, “What’s the cost of pollution? Trump says zero”, the New York Times explained that the “social cost of carbon” had been used for more than two decades to help weigh the costs and benefits of federal policies and regulations. It said the move could face legal challenges.
Around the world
- DOWNPOUR DEATHS: More than 100 people were killed by floods in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Agence-France Presse reported. Extreme rainfall also killed at least seven people in Somalia, the Associated Press said.
- PARIS PERIL: A UK opposition minister falsely attacked climate science and said his party could exit the Paris Agreement if elected, the Guardian said. The Guardian also reported on how Australia’s new opposition leader “could abandon net-zero”.
- GERMAN GAS: New economy minister Katharina Reiche wants more gas-fired power plants, according to Die Zeit. The country’s climate council warned the new government’s plans could breach climate goals, said Clean Energy Wire.
- DENGUE DANGER: Colombia’s El Espectador reported on rising climate-driven risks from dengue fever in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Panama.
- COP30 CREW: The Brazilian COP30 presidency has appointed 30 envoys, including “key liaisons” for strategic regions such as China’s Xie Zhenhua, Jonathan Pershing from the US and former UNFCCC chief Patricia Espinosa, Climate Home News said.
60%
The yearly rise in EV sales in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America in 2024, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.
Latest climate research
- Even passing 1.5C of global warming temporarily would trigger a “significant” risk of Amazon forest “dieback”, said research covered by Carbon Brief.
- Rapidly rising emissions from China’s agricultural machinery could “hinder” the country’s push towards net-zero, according to a study covered by Carbon Brief.
- Findings in Environmental Research Letters found that the benefits of CO2 “fertilisation” on forests are likely to be constrained by warming.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
For the first time on record, China’s CO2 emissions have fallen as a result of clean energy expansion rather than weak growth in electricity demand, according to new analysis for Carbon Brief. The analysis, which has been covered by outlets including AFP, Semafor and the New York Times, found that China’s emissions from fossil fuels and cement fell 1.6% in the first quarter of 2025 and are now 1% below the peak reached in March 2024. The months ahead will be critical for what comes next, as Beijing is working to finalise its next international climate pledge for 2035 and its five-year plan for 2026-2030.
Spotlight
How Poland started speeding away from coal power
This week, Carbon Brief reports on coal falling to barely half of Poland’s power supplies.
The first round of Poland’s presidential election is on Sunday and Rafał Trzaskowski, from prime minister Donald Tusk’s centre-right party Civic Platform, is favoured to win.
Long seen as one of the world’s most coal-reliant countries, Poland’s electricity system is in the midst of dramatic and increasingly rapid change.
When Poland joined the EU in 2004, coal-fired power stations supplied 93% of the country’s electricity. Coal accounted for more than three-quarters of the total as recently as 2018, the year the country hosted COP24 in Katowice.
Since then, a gradual shuffle away from coal has turned to a sprint.
In 2024, coal generated little more than half of Poland’s electricity, according to data from thinktank Ember – and a coal power phaseout by 2035 is now seen as a realistic prospect.
While the topic has not played a big role in the election campaign, there is now broad public acceptance that “coal is over in Poland”, said Joanna Maćkowiak-Pandera, president of Polish thinktank Forum Energii. She told Carbon Brief:
“The extreme rightwing tries to claim that coal is the future and there is coal for [another] 400 years…[But] even the coal-mining sector does not believe it.”
As of 2024, coal contributed just 53.5% of electricity generation in Poland, with wind and solar making up 23.5%, gas power 12.1% and other renewables another 6.3%.
Coal ‘death spiral’
The “death spiral” for coal power is due to the high cost of coal mining in Poland, the old age of coal power plants, pressure from climate policies such as the EU emissions trading system (EUETS) and a loss of market share to renewables, said Maćkowiak-Pandera:
“You can be pro-coal, but you will not change the economics, physics, geology and the reality of the financial market.”
Until 2023, the right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) had held the reins of government, having won the 2015 election after promising to protect the coal industry.
Following power cuts that summer, however, PiS increasingly accepted that renewbles – particularly solar power – could support energy security, explained Maćkowiak-Pandera.
(Renewables enjoy broad public support and are associated with energy security, she said.)
With backing from government policy, Poland’s solar capacity leapt from just 200 megawatts in 2015 to more than 20 gigawatts in 2024 – a 100-fold increase.
Still, PiS strongly resisted calls to phase out coal. In 2020, it struck a deal with unions to subsidise the Polish coal-mining industry until 2049. The subsidies remain in place.
After winning parliamentary elections in 2023, Tusk promised a “much faster energy transition” based on renewables and nuclear power, said Maćkowiak-Pandera.
While utility firms would “really love” to phase out coal plants within as little as three to five years, there is a growing consensus around 2035 as a more achievable end date, she said:
“It’s really not controversial any more…I speak with politicians, with utilities, with [electricity] transmission system operators, even with miners. Everybody is aware of the situation.”
Instead, there is a practical conversation around how best to replace coal at the lowest cost, explained Maćkowiak-Pandera.
This will mean more renewables, but also the flexible capacity needed to manage the grid – including some new gas-fired power plants – as well as energy storage and market reforms, she said.
Poland’s rapid transition may not have made many headlines, but other major coal-burning countries are starting to pay attention.
Maćkowiak-Pandera has welcomed delegations from China, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil, eager to learn about Poland’s experience. She added:
“For Chinese partners, it’s interesting because they like [our] pragmatic approach…they like that Poland [is] sometimes not mentioning climate, [but] is doing it anyhow.”
Watch, read, listen
CHINESE CROWING: A widely shared blog post on nationalist media outlet Guancha said China was taking climate action to “win the future energy revolution” and, among other things, to “save at least $600bn” on imported oil by shifting to EVs.
‘RUNNING BLIND’: For the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, climate scientist Peter Gleick said the Trump administration’s “purges” of climate research were “threats to national security”.
‘REALISM’ REJECTED: The Wicked Problems podcast discussed the “defeatism” behind a recent initiative calling for “climate realism”, as well as the “abundance agenda”.
Coming up
- 18 May: Poland presidential election
- 19 May: EU-UK summit, London
- 19-23 May: First UN climate week 2025, Panama City, Panama
- 19-27 May: World Health Assembly 2025, Geneva, Switzerland
Pick of the jobs
- European Commission, programme manager (climate change and sustainable energy) | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels, Belgium
- Dialogue Earth, southeast Asia editor | Salary: £43,370. Location: London
- Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, postdoctoral research associate in genomics and climate change | Salary: £43,751. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 16 May 2025: Has China’s CO2 peaked?; US bill ‘would kill IRA’; Poland’s coal collapse appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 16 May 2025: Has China’s CO2 peaked?; US bill ‘would kill IRA’; Poland’s coal collapse
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Campaigners oppose Dangote’s planned Kenya refinery over climate and ecological risks
Plans to build Africa’s second largest oil refinery in ecologically sensitive region criticised as “environmental recklessness” -
Tanzania pushed African nations to oppose fossil fuel transition at COP30
While chairing the African group at the summit, the gas-dependent nation advised the continent’s ministers to block language on transitioning away from fossil fuels
Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
Uganda may see lower oil revenues than expected as costs rise and demand falls
Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
Why the global electrification agenda misses the point on Africa’s energy crisis
Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
Ugandan farmers use British court to try to stop East Africa oil pipeline
Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.