Published

1 year ago

February 21, 2025

Alice Rush

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

This week

Brazil’s oil ‘evolution’

OIL BE FRIENDS: Brazil’s government has approved an invitation to join OPEC+, a group representing the interests of oil-exporting nations, just months ahead of hosting the COP30 climate summit, the Associated Press reported. The move signals the “country’s evolution into a major oil state”, the newswire said. Brazil’s energy minister said the country’s participation will be limited to a “forum for discussing strategies” and that “we should not be ashamed of being oil producers”.

SHIPPING SHOWDOWN: Brazil was also among 15 countries that asked the UN to ditch plans for a new levy on CO2 emissions from global shipping, reported the Guardian. Ahead of an International Maritime Organisation (IMO) meeting this week, the group – which includes China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa – “argued a levy could reduce exports from the developing world, raise food prices and increase inequalities”, the newspaper said. It added that the levy “could still pass”, if the IMO takes a “firm stance”.

NO HOTEL, NO PROBLEM: During a visit to Belém, the host city for COP30 this November, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva responded to concerns that it does not have enough accommodation by saying delegates could “sleep [under the] star[s] in the sky…which will be wonderful”, Folha de São Paulo reported. And Reuters covered the latest raids as part of “Operation Maravalha” to curb illegal logging in the Amazon.

Trampling Trump

ACCESS DENIED: US state department officials have been denied permission to participate in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meeting in China next week, Axios reported. A contract for an IPCC working group technical support unit was also “recently terminated by NASA”, it added. Axios also reported that NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) are in line for a “10% reduction in staff”, which could “imperil” the work of the National Weather Service.

‘CHAOTIC’: In US president Donald Trump’s latest move to dismantle federal climate policies, the Department of Homeland Security has been ordered to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology”, Bloomberg reported. This includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which “has been responding to more disasters”, the newswire added, as “wildfires, storms and floods increase”.

‘LIQUID GOLD’: Trump has signed an executive order formally creating a “National Energy Dominance Council”, reported the Associated Press, and “directed it to drive up already record-setting domestic oil and gas production”. Trump said: “We’re going to make more money than anybody’s ever made with energy.” E&E News examined how his ambitions could hit “economic and geologic realities”.

Around the world

ABOUT TURN: In a “major policy shift”, Japan’s newly approved energy plan will aim to produce 20% of its electricity from nuclear power by 2040, reported BBC News.
RISING SEAS: The Pacific Ocean nation of Nauru is aiming to sell citizenships to help meet the cost of moving 10,000 residents from low-lying areas into the island’s “barren interior”, Bloomberg reported.
LANDSLIDE RISK: Heavy rainfall in Peru has killed at least 46 people and left more than 8,000 people homeless, reported El Comercio, which noted that the extreme weather was expected to continue in the coming days.
‘GREEN CORRIDOR’: Environmentalists warned that a new protected area – the size of France – in the Democratic Republic of Congo has so far failed to include Indigenous people and local communities in its design, Climate Home News said.
ICE IN DECLINE: According to BBC News analysis of satellite data, global sea ice extent dropped to a record low in mid-February.
‘FRAGILE GLOBAL EXISTENCE’: A G20 meeting of foreign ministers has started in Johannesburg, South Africa, with “stepping up the fight against global warming” on the agenda, reported Bloomberg. US secretary of state Marco Rubio has “snubbed” the event due, in part, to its climate focus, it added.

10%

The record proportion of China’s GDP coming from clean-energy technologies in 2024, according to analysis published by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Glaciers across the world collectively lost 273bn tonnes of ice every year between 2000 and 2023, a new Nature study found, with a 36% increase in ice loss from the first (2000-11) to the second (2012-23) half of the research period.
New research in a Royal Society journal used data collected from 600 green turtles over three decades to show that females are bringing forward their nesting dates by six days for every 1C of sea surface temperature rise.
The timing of plant flowering and insect flight in the US is “highly responsive” to extreme weather events, a Nature Climate Change study showed.

(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 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) forthcoming special report on climate change and cities has more women than men on its authorship team, for the first time in the organisation’s history, according to analysis by Carbon Brief. The analysis covers all assessment, special and methodology reports published over the IPCC’s 37-year history. It revealed how the representation of women in the IPCC has steadily risen over time, from just 8% of authors in its first report in 1990 to 53% in its cities report, due to be published in March 2027.

Spotlight

Cooling cities with ‘smart’ surfaces

Carbon Brief reports on how “smart” surfaces can be used to cool cities in the face of worsening extreme heat.

Last month, new research showed that increasing the reflectivity of surfaces at San Francisco International airport could cut the risk of heat stress in its outdoor workers and see fewer working hours lost at the height of summer.

At its heart, the idea is a simple one – making the ground surface and roofs of buildings more reflective means they absorb less of the sun’s energy. This, in turn, means they warm up less and radiate less heat back into the surroundings.

This helps offset the “urban heat island” effect, where temperatures in cities are consistently higher than in the surrounding countryside due to heat-trapping urban infrastructure.

Heat inequality

The airport study was conducted by the Smart Surfaces Coalition, a not-for-profit organisation that works with cities to use “smart” surfaces – including reflective, porous and green surfaces, solar panels and urban trees – to help manage the impacts of extreme heat and rainfall.

The coalition is working with 11 “partner cities” in the US – plus Bhopal in India – to drive adoption of smart surfaces through citywide policies and local implementation projects.

According to coalition founder Greg Kats, cities have typically followed “business as usual” for public construction projects – opting for “dark, impervious surfaces of tarmac” at the lowest cost, which “absorbs 90% of the incoming sunlight”.

As well as leaving cities at higher risk of getting “hotter and hotter and more prone to flooding”, these choices have contributed to urban inequality, Kats explained to Carbon Brief.

In the case of Baltimore on the US east coast, “at the same time of day in the summer afternoon” there will be a “14F [7.8C] temperature difference between wealthy, treed areas and low-income, dark, impervious areas”, he said.

This “structural inequality is a legacy of redlining” – long-abolished discriminatory lending practices in the US – and is a “hallmark of American cities”, Kats added.

Urban cooling

In partner cities, the coalition is conducting citywide surface mapping and heat modelling, developing cost-benefit tools and helping cities craft policies and building codes.

In Baltimore, for example, installing smart surfaces could bring more than 5F (2.8C) of citywide cooling, coalition analysis has shown, with benefits that outweigh the costs at a ratio of 10 to 1.

These measures also reduce the need for air conditioning, Kats explained:

“For 1F of ambient temperature reduction, it reduces an air conditioning electricity bill by 4-5%, so a 5F reduction is a 20-25% reduction in electricity bills.”

As a result, smart surfaces are a “really big deal” for climate mitigation, Kats said. And it taps into another aspect of the urban island effect – a key contribution comes from human activity, such as the use of cars and air conditioning.

Air conditioners cool the air inside buildings by pumping waste heat outside, so “you have this perverse effect of private cooling heating the city, which means more air conditioning”. Kats explained:

“So you’ve got two different pathways for a city: do you do citywide cooling, or do you keep relying on the private sector to buy more air conditioning?”

While cool surfaces do have their barriers and challenges, Kats argued that they offer the “only viable, scalable, cost-effective, urban-cooling strategy”, adding: “There really isn’t anything else.”

Watch, read, listen

‘TRAPPED IN EXPLOITATION’: Climate Home News reported on how “nearly all” Bangladeshi migrants who leave areas hit hard by climate change to seek work elsewhere end up “subject to forms of forced labour”.

RECORDS SMASHED: A Guardian interactive mapped the record heat experienced by two-thirds of the Earth’s surface in 2024.

PRESERVING WEBSITES: A research librarian and policy scholar in North America outlined in the Conversation how to “find climate data and science the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see”.

Coming up

23 February: Germany general election
24-28 February: 62nd session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hangzhou, China
25-27 February: Resumed session of the UN biodiversity summit COP16, Rome
26 February: UK Climate Change Committee seventh carbon budget advice published
26-28 February: Finance in common summit, Cape Town, South Africa

Pick of the jobs

The China Global South Company, critical minerals editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote (Africa preferred)
Dioceses of Leicester and Peterborough, net-zero carbon projects development officer | Salary: £30,000. Location: Peterborough, Leicester or Northampton, UK
Imperial War Museum, head of sustainability and environment | Salary: £65,000. Location: Duxford, London or Manchester, UK
Groundwork, goals for climate co-ordinator | Salary: £24,716. Location: Hybrid (Northern Ireland)
Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, consultant analyst – trade and net-zero | Salary: Unknown. Location: Flexible

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

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

The post DeBriefed 21 February 2025: Brazil joins oil bloc ahead of COP30; US ‘pulled’ from IPCC meeting; Cooling cities with ‘smart’ surfaces appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 21 February 2025: Brazil joins oil bloc ahead of COP30; US ‘pulled’ from IPCC meeting; Cooling cities with ‘smart’ surfaces

Climate Change

Hurricane Helene Is Headed for Georgians’ Electric Bills

Published

9 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Alice Rush

A new storm recovery charge could soon hit Georgia Power customers’ bills, as climate change drives more destructive weather across the state.

By Ryan Krugman

Hurricane Helene may be long over, but its costs are poised to land on Georgians’ electricity bills. After the storm killed 37 people in Georgia and caused billions in damage in September 2024, Georgia Power is seeking permission from state regulators to pass recovery costs on to customers.

Hurricane Helene Is Headed for Georgians’ Electric Bills

Climate Change

Amid Affordability Crisis, New Jersey Hands $250 Million Tax Break to Data Center

Published

9 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Alice Rush

Gov. Mikie Sherrill says she supports both AI and lowering her constituents’ bills.

By Rambo Talabong

With New Jersey’s cost-of-living “crisis” at the center of Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s agenda, her administration has inherited a program that approved a $250 million tax break for an artificial intelligence data center.

Amid Affordability Crisis, New Jersey Hands $250 Million Tax Break to Data Center

Climate Change

Curbing methane is the fastest way to slow warming – but we’re off the pace

Published

11 hours ago

February 26, 2026

Alice Rush

Gabrielle Dreyfus is chief scientist at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Thomas Röckmann is a professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University, and Lena Höglund Isaksson is a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

This March scientists and policy makers will gather near the site in Italy where methane was first identified 250 years ago to share the latest science on methane and the policy and technology steps needed to rapidly cut methane emissions. The timing is apt.

As new tools transform our understanding of methane emissions and their sources, the evidence they reveal points to a single conclusion: Human-caused methane emissions are still rising, and global action remains far too slow.

This is the central finding of the latest Global Methane Status Report. Four years into the Global Methane Pledge, which aims for a 30% cut in global emissions by 2030, the good news is that the pledge has increased mitigation ambition under national plans, which, if fully implemented, could result in the largest and most sustained decline in methane emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

The bad news is this is still short of the 30% target. The decisive question is whether governments will move quickly enough to turn that bend into the steep decline required to pump the brake on global warming.

What the data really show

Assessing progress requires comparing three benchmarks: the level of emissions today relative to 2020, the trajectory projected in 2021 before methane received significant policy focus, and the level required by 2030 to meet the pledge.

The latest data show that global methane emissions in 2025 are higher than in 2020 but not as high as previously expected. In 2021, emissions were projected to rise by about 9% between 2020 and 2030. Updated analysis places that increase closer to 5%. This change is driven by factors such as slower than expected growth in unconventional gas production between 2020 and 2024 and lower than expected waste emissions in several regions.

Gas flaring soars in Niger Delta post-Shell, afflicting communities

This updated trajectory still does not deliver the reductions required, but it does indicate that the curve is beginning to bend. More importantly, the commitments already outlined in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions and Methane Action Plans would, if fully implemented, produce an 8% reduction in global methane emissions between 2020 and 2030. This would turn the current increase into a sustained decline. While still insufficient to reach the Global Methane Pledge target of a 30% cut, it would represent historical progress.

Solutions are known and ready

Scientific assessments consistently show that the technical potential to meet the pledge exists. The gap lies not in technology, but in implementation.

The energy sector accounts for approximately 70% of total technical methane reduction potential between 2020 and 2030. Proven measures include recovering associated petroleum gas in oil production, regular leak detection and repair across oil and gas supply chains, and installing ventilation air oxidation technologies in underground coal mines. Many of these options are low cost or profitable. Yet current commitments would achieve only one third of the maximum technically feasible reductions in this sector.

Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes

Agriculture and waste also provide opportunities. Rice emissions can be reduced through improved water management, low-emission hybrids and soil amendments. While innovations in technology and practices hold promise in the longer term, near-term potential in livestock is more constrained and trends in global diets may counteract gains.

Waste sector emissions had been expected to increase more rapidly, but improvements in waste management in several regions over the past two decades have moderated this rise. Long-term mitigation in this sector requires immediate investment in improved landfills and circular waste systems, as emissions from waste already deposited will persist in the short term.

New measurement tools

Methane monitoring capacity has expanded significantly. Satellite-based systems can now identify methane super-emitters. Ground-based sensors are becoming more accessible and can provide real-time data. These developments improve national inventories and can strengthen accountability.

However, policy action does not need to wait for perfect measurement. Current scientific understanding of source magnitudes and mitigation effectiveness is sufficient to achieve a 30% reduction between 2020 and 2030. Many of the largest reductions in oil, gas and coal can be delivered through binding technology standards that do not require high precision quantification of emissions.

The decisive years ahead

The next 2 years will be critical for determining whether existing commitments translate into emissions reductions consistent with the Global Methane Pledge.

Governments should prioritise adoption of an effective international methane performance standard for oil and gas, including through the EU Methane Regulation, and expand the reach of such standards through voluntary buyers’ clubs. National and regional authorities should introduce binding technology standards for oil, gas and coal to ensure that voluntary agreements are backed by legal requirements.

One approach to promoting better progress on methane is to develop a binding methane agreement, starting with the oil and gas sector, as suggested by Barbados’ PM Mia Mottley and other leaders. Countries must also address the deeper challenge of political and economic dependence on fossil fuels, which continues to slow progress. Without a dual strategy of reducing methane and deep decarbonisation, it will not be possible to meet the Paris Agreement objectives.

Mottley’s “legally binding” methane pact faces barriers, but smaller steps possible

The next four years will determine whether available technologies, scientific evidence and political leadership align to deliver a rapid transition toward near-zero methane energy systems, holistic and equity-based lower emission agricultural systems and circular waste management strategies that eliminate methane release. These years will also determine whether the world captures the near-term climate benefits of methane abatement or locks in higher long-term costs and risks.

The Global Methane Status Report shows that the world is beginning to change course. Delivering the sharper downward trajectory now required is a test of political will. As scientists, we have laid out the evidence. Leaders must now act on it.

The post Curbing methane is the fastest way to slow warming – but we’re off the pace appeared first on Climate Home News.