Published

7 months ago

September 27, 2025

Alice Rush

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

This week

China’s new climate pledge

GUTERRES DEMANDS: UN secretary general António Guterres hosted a special climate action summit in New York on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, alongside the closing day of the UN general assembly. It added that at the “marathon session”, where 121 world leaders were scheduled to speak, Guterres said: “The science demands action. The law commands it. The economics compel it. And people are calling for it.”

CHINA CUTS: First billing went to President Xi Jinping, who unexpectedly appeared via video to announce a target of cutting emissions – from all greenhouse gases and across China’s entire economy – to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035, according to Bloomberg. This is a significant moment for global climate efforts, noted BBC News, as it is the first time that China has pledged to reduce its emissions in absolute terms.

CAUTIOUS RESPONSE: However, the pledge fell short of the “at least 30%” cut observers had said was needed, BBC News added. Carbon Brief has published a detailed Q&A on China’s new climate pledge and will host a free webinar on the topic. Sign up for free.

PLEDGE CONFUSION: The Guardian said “120 countries and the EU announced new goals” at the summit. However, Carbon Brief analysis of the speeches and official submissions found that only 11 countries offered new targets. Following the summit, countries representing half of global emissions have now announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges, according to analysis just published by Carbon Brief.

Trump’s new climate sledge

‘CLIMATE CON’: The day before the Guterres summit, Donald Trump had used a nearly hour-long speech to the UN general assembly to deliver what the Bloomberg Green newsletter called a “blizzard” of “climate misinformation”. He attracted blanket coverage – and multiple factchecks – for false claims including that climate change was the “greatest con job ever” and that warming predictions were “wrong”.

FACTCHECK: Contrary to Trump’s claims, human-induced warming is an “established fact”, according to the IPCC, as is an increase in the strength and frequency of extreme weather events. Regarding climate models, Carbon Brief climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather noted on Bluesky that projections of warming have been “pretty spot on”.

Around the world

RENEWABLE RECORD: Global investment in renewable energy grew 10% year-on-year to a record $386bn in the first half of 2025, the Guardian said.
CARBON CLUB: COP30 host Brazil is “trying to build a coalition of countries, including the EU and China, to unify carbon markets”, Bloomberg reported.
FOSSILS OUT?: Colombia will host the first-ever international conference on phasing out fossil fuels in 2026, according to Climate Home News. Meanwhile, E&E News covered the latest UN “production gap” report saying, despite a COP28 pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, “many are planning for even more production”.
SUPER TYPHOON: Ragasa, a category 5 “super typhoon” and the world’s most powerful tropical cyclone this year, killed 17 people in Taiwan, BBC News said. The storm, which was “intensified” by climate change according to the Hong Kong Free Press, caused nearly two million residents to be evacuated in China, added Xinhua,
DEFORESTATION DELAY: The EU has delayed the start of its anti-deforestation law “by another year”, Reuters said, blaming “IT system concerns”.
AIRPORT APPROVAL: The UK government approved a second runway at London’s Gatwick airport, said BBC News. The Sunday Times reported that it was also “poised to soften” its ban on new drilling in the North Sea.

62,700

The number of deaths in Europe linked to heat-related causes in 2024, the continent’s hottest year on record, according to new research covered by Reuters.

Latest climate research

Extreme and “unprecedented” global water-scarcity events – or “day-zero droughts” – could happen in the 2020s and 2030s | Nature Communications
The drying of the Ganga river, of great economic and cultural importance to millions of people in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, is “unprecedented in the last 1,300 years” | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The likelihood of “severe bushfires danger” in Australia driven by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole has increased by 16-32% due to climate change | Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

China’s new climate pledge, outlined by President Xi Jinping, includes a target to reduce “economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions” to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035. But, as Carbon Brief explained in a detailed Q&A, this falls short of what would have been needed to contribute to limiting warming to 1.5C, according to experts.

Spotlight

Can COP30 respond to the 1.5C challenge?

With hopes fading of keeping global warming below 1.5C, despite new pledges at a UN summit in New York, this spotlight looks at the road to COP30 in Brazil and how the climate talks might respond.

After 2024 marked the hottest year on record and the first above 1.5C, 2025 was supposed to offer a chance to “course correct” through new, more ambitious national climate plans.

Instead, many countries have missed repeated deadlines for updated “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, setting out their plans to 2035.

Despite some new pledges in New York this week – including from China – collective efforts still “fall short” of limiting warming to the Paris goals of “well-below” 2C while “pursuing efforts” towards 1.5C.

Drumbeat of ‘disappointment’

This message is likely to be reinforced by a UN “synthesis report”, compiling the impact of new NDCs and due to be published on 24 October.

It will likely be reiterated in early November by the UN’s annual “emissions gap” report. Last year’s report had called for a “quantum leap” in ambition, which has yet to materialise.

This is all despite an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in July, which said that 1.5C should be considered the “primary temperature goal” of global climate efforts – and that countries should make “adequate contributions” towards meeting it.

Meanwhile, amid oil and gas advocacy from the Trump administration, debate is raging over whether fossil fuels have peaked – and whether climate efforts need a “pragmatic” reset.

This is set to culminate with a battle to control the narrative around the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook for 2025, also due in early November.

Avantika Goswami, programme manager for climate change at India’s Centre for Science and Environment, told Carbon Brief that the global climate regime was at a “turning point”, where agreements had been signed and targets set, but action was “stalling”. She said:

“Implementation is weak, finance is undelivered and trust in the UN system is eroding, amid trade wars, militarism, debt crises and fractured multilateralism.”

Can COP30 respond?

Just days after the raft of new reports, on 6-7 November, heads of state and government will gather in the Brazilian city of Belém for a leaders summit ahead of the COP30 climate talks.

Views differ on how COP30 should respond to the current challenges.

The Brazilian presidency is pushing for a formal COP decision on any “disappoint[ment]” over NDCs falling short, collectively, of what is needed to avoid dangerous global warming.

During initial consultations, the EU said it wanted climate ambition to be added to the COP agenda, while the groups of least developed countries (LDCs), small island states and Latin American countries supported a formal COP decision on the matter. Others pushed back.

Catherine Abreu, director of the International Climate Politics Hub, told Carbon Brief that COP30 would need to respond in some way. She said:

“It’s clear that credibility at COP30 will require a response to the fact that countries’ climate pledges don’t add up to the level of ambition needed to tackle the crisis. The question after this week is, how will the COP outcomes enrich our definition of ambition beyond a headline emissions reduction goal?”

Abreu added that COP30 would need to address barriers, including “the equitable finance needed to implement goals and a lagging transition away from fossil fuels”.

Amid frustration over slow progress, calls for reform of the COP process are getting louder.

Goswami concluded: “The needs and ambitions of the global south must now shape the climate narrative – and COP30 must reckon with this new balance of power.”

Watch, read, listen

GAME OVER?: A feature in the Wall Street Journal said that, as Trump “doubles down on fossil fuels”, the US is “forfeiting the clean-energy race to China”.

POPULIST PUSHBACK: The Drilled podcast talked to a sociologist and a political scientist about “the intersection between the rise of rightwing populism and increasing resistance to acting on climate”.

ADULTS ONLY: For the New York Times, the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Li Shuo wrote that China was “the adult in the room on climate now”, despite its “modest” new pledge.

Coming up

22-26 September: Fifth world congress of biosphere reserves, Hangzhou, China
27 September: Seychelles elections
28 September: Moldova elections
30 September-1 October: 42nd UN water meeting, Geneva, Switzerland

Pick of the jobs

Indigenous Climate Action, research coordinator | Salary: $55,000-$68,000. Location: Remote
Greater London Authority, head of climate change | Salary: £91,268. Location: London
Stockholm Environment Institute, research fellow: climate impact and climate finance | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, Kenya

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 26 September 2025: China leads new climate pledges; Trump calls warming a ‘con job’; What comes next appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 26 September 2025: China leads new climate pledges; Trump calls warming a ‘con job’; What comes next

Climate Change

Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift

Published

8 hours ago

April 21, 2026

Alice Rush

A record surge in clean power met all global electricity demand growth in 2025, preventing any increase in fossil fuel generation, according to energy think tank Ember.

Solar led the expansion, recording its fastest growth rate in eight years and meeting around 75% of new electricity demand alone.

Together with wind, hydropower and other low-carbon sources, the solar surge drove clean generation to rise by 887 TWh, slightly exceeding demand growth of 849 TWh and pushing fossil generation down by 0.2%, Ember said in a report published on Tuesday.

Much of this shift was driven by China and India, where rapid clean energy expansion outpaced electricity demand growth, leading to declines in fossil generation in both countries for the first time this century.

IEA slashes pre-war oil demand forecast by nearly a million barrels per day

“We have firmly entered the era of clean growth,” said Aditya Lolla, Ember’s managing director.

“Clean energy is now scaling fast enough to absorb rising global electricity demand, keeping fossil generation flat before its inevitable decline,” Lolla added.

China and India lead the way

A key driver of the global shift was a “historic” reversal in China and India, the largest contributors to fossil power growth over the past two decades, Ember said.

For the first time this century, electricity generation from fossil fuels fell in both countries in the same year, tipping the global balance.

In China, fossil generation dropped by 0.9%, its first decline since 2015, as rapid additions of solar and wind outpaced rising demand. In India, fossil generation fell by 3.3%, driven by record increases in solar and wind, strong hydro production and relatively slower demand growth.

This shift helped push renewables to around 34% of global electricity generation in 2025, overtaking coal for the first time in the modern era.

Vivek Mundkur with portable solar pumping system in Pune in 2014 (Photo: Vivek M/Greenpeace)

“China’s rapid expansion of solar and wind is meeting rising electricity demand at home while influencing the global electricity transition,” said Xunpeng Shi, president of the International Society for Energy Transition Studies.

“As the world’s largest builder of clean power, China’s progress is showing how growing demand can increasingly be met with clean electricity rather than fossil fuels,” Shi added.

Solar leading global energy supply growth

Reinforcing Ember’s findings, new analysis from the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed on Monday that solar has become the single largest driver of global energy supply growth, beyond the electricity sector.

In its latest Global Energy Review, the IEA found that solar PV accounted for more than a quarter of the increase in global energy demand in 2025, making it the first time any modern renewable source has taken the top spot.

The agency also reported that solar recorded the largest annual increase ever seen for any electricity generation technology.

Q&A: Will subsidy cuts for Chinese clean-tech exports hurt Africa’s solar boom?

Ember’s Lolla said clean energy is “redefining the foundation of energy security in a volatile world,” adding that “it is already helping countries reduce exposure to fossil fuel imports and costs while meeting rising electricity demand”.

‘Antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos‘

As the war in the Middle East disrupts global oil and gas supplies, the head of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, said the current crisis underscores the risks of fossil fuel dependence and the need for more secure, domestic energy sources.

“Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits,” Stiell said.

Speaking at the opening of the Green Transformation Week conference in South Korea, Stiell encouraged countries to accelerate the transition to clean energy to regain control of their economies and national security.

Nigerians bet on solar as global oil shock hits wallets and power supplies

“War has once again revealed the soaring costs of fossil fuel dependency,” he said, warning that volatile energy markets are “holding economies around the world in a chokehold.”

“Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer and faster-to-market,” he added.

The post Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift appeared first on Climate Home News.

Solar surge kept fossil electricity flat in 2025 as China and India made ‘historic’ shift

Climate Change

Corpus Christi Projects Emergency Water Restrictions in September for Large Industrial Users and 500,000 Customers

Published

15 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Even hospitals are drilling wells as the region’s reservoirs reach disastrously low levels and ratings agencies downgrade the city’s outlook.

By Dylan Baddour

Without a shift in weather patterns, the City of Corpus Christi expects to enact emergency restrictions on water use in September, according to draft documents slated for release at a City Council meeting on Tuesday morning.