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
West Antarctic melt ‘unavoidable’
LOCKED IN: New research by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), covered by Reuters, found that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet will continue, irrespective of any reductions in emissions. The decline of the ice sheet is “one of nine global climate ‘tipping points’…identified in 2009”, Reuters said. The study added that governments must “prepare for several metres of sea level rise over the coming centuries”, New Scientist said.
‘RECORD EXTREMES’: A separate study found that “20 of the 35 planetary vital signs [the authors] use to track the climate crisis are at record extremes”, the Guardian reported. Previous records for global air temperature, ocean temperature and Antarctic sea ice extent were all “broken by enormous margins in 2023”, the researchers said, adding that “by 2100…3-6 billion people may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions”.
CAUSE FOR HOPE: The BAS report authors wrote in the Conversation that “we are now committed to rapid ocean warming in the Amundsen Sea until at least 2100”. Nevertheless, they said: “The future will not end in 2100…Our simulations of the 1.5C scenario show ice-shelf melting starting to plateau by the end of the century, suggesting that further changes in the 22nd century and beyond may still be preventable.”
Global CO2 could peak in 2023
CO2 PIVOT: Global CO2 emissions from energy use and industry could peak as soon as this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2023 shows coal, oil and gas each peaking before 2030, the first time this has been expected under current policies – with fossil fuel use peaking in China next year and globally in 2025. The report once again boosted the outlook for solar (by 69% in 2050) and electric vehicles (by 20% in 2030) compared with last year’s edition, Carbon Brief’s in-depth coverage found.
RISING RENEWABLES: In its coverage of the World Energy Outlook, BBC News reported that the findings show that the global uptake of renewable energy is now “unstoppable”. The IEA expects that more than half of the world’s electricity in 2030 will come from renewable sources, it added. This may be “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era”, the Times quoted the report saying, with demand peaking before 2030.
Around the world
- FUNDING FRACAS: Talks in Egypt on how to develop a loss and damage fund for climate-vulnerable nations collapsed due to “discord over who should fund it, where it should be based and who would be eligible for support”, the Financial Times reported.
- HURRICANE OTIS: The “rapid” transformation of Hurricane Otis into a Category 5 storm before making landfall in Mexico “highlighted what climate change, combined with weather and climate variability, can do to a storm”, Axios reported.
- POLISH POLITICS: A coalition of “climate friendly” political parties won the general election in Poland beating the right-wing ruling party, but may “struggle to agree on policies”, the Guardian said.
- HUMAN IMPACT: TheCable in Nigeria reported on a Carbon Brief investigation that found up to 15,700 people in Africa have died in extreme weather events so far this year.
- FOREST LOSS: The 2023 Forest Declaration Assessment report found that the world is “moving too slowly” to meet deforestation targets, according to Reuters. Some 66,000 square kilometres (km2) of forest were destroyed in 2022.
- EV LAG: Bloomberg reported that there is only one electric vehicle charging connector per every 4,000 users in Japan, compared to one for every 500 people in Europe, 600 in the US and 1,800 in China.
21
The number of myths debunked in Dr Simon Evans’s epic factcheck for Carbon Brief of common misperceptions about electric vehicles.
Latest climate research
- New research in Science Advances identified how the impact of an ocean phenomenon known as the “Atlantic Niño” on the tropics remains high, despite having decreased in strength since the 1970s.
- A decline in groundwater recharge of around 3.8mm per year in Iran is primarily driven by “unsustainable water and environmental resources management” and is “exacerbated by decadal changes in climatic conditions”, according to a new analysis in Nature Communications.
- A new study in Nature Water found that the temperatures of surface waters in lakes across the world are generally increasing more slowly than global air temperatures, mainly due to an acceleration in evaporation rates.
(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 exports of solar panel cells grew five-fold between 2017 and 2022, and stood at 147 gigawatts between January and August 2023, according to data compiled by climate thinktank Ember. Earlier analysis noted that, between January and June 2023, China’s solar exports were “going through the roof” and had already exceeded the equivalent of total US installed solar panel capacity. Meanwhile, Cao Yue, a researcher at the thinktank Overseas Development Institute, told Caixin that the low cost of Chinese solar panels made it “no surprise that…exports have shot up”, adding that he expected growth to continue.
Spotlight
What does China’s uptick in Russian fossil-fuel use mean for its climate goals?
This week, Carbon Brief explores the implications of a recent uptick in China-Russia energy cooperation for China’s transition to carbon neutrality by 2060.
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2023 has lowered projections for gas consumption, particularly of Russian gas, and forecast declines in oil and gas consumption in China after 2030 and 2040, respectively.
This stands at odds with the fact that China imported record amounts of Russian oil in the first half of 2023 and that China’s president Xi Jinping recently called for “substantial progress” on the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline linking the two countries.
By increasing its imports of cheap Russian fossil fuels, the FT stated, China receives “a double benefit of cheap [fuel] for itself and the opportunity to boost exports”.
Concerns in Beijing around energy security make Russian fossil fuels attractive, as diversifying its energy suppliers mitigates “other vulnerabilities to its imports”, according to the Interpreter, a media outlet managed by the Lowy Institute. Trade with Russia also shores up the “stability” of a key political ally, wrote Sergey Vakulenko, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
However, China has concerns about the pipeline. This has slowed progress, Dr Michal Meidan, head of China energy research at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) told Carbon Brief. It could “bind the two countries” and create an outsized dependency on Russia, she explained.
Nevertheless, increased imports of Russian gas may support China’s decarbonisation efforts, Meidan wrote. This is because gas is “very much part of the country’s energy transition away from coal”.
Vakulenko added that “the high capacity of gas import pipelines would allow China to increase the share of wind and solar in its power system without investing too much in costly energy storage, using gas generation for balancing”.
Gas currently makes a “relatively small” direct contribution to China’s emissions, the IEA said, and using gas over coal has drastically improved air quality, which is a key metric for evaluation of local official’s efforts around environmental protection.
However, the IEA added, these benefits could be offset by methane released from burning gas. Russian production of gas is “highly methane-intensive”, which could exacerbate negative environmental impacts.
And how China then weans itself off gas to meet its 2060 target for carbon neutrality remains an open question, Meidan told Carbon Brief.
While oil is likely to peak soon, Meidan said, “we do not have solutions yet” for operating several key Chinese industries without fossil fuels. Developments of carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies could open pathways for continued use of fossil fuels after 2060, she said. “Certainly for the next 20-30 years China will need oil and gas”, she added.
Forecasts are also dependent on China’s economic performance, according to Vakulenko:
“If [it] beats expectations, that will accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources and gas consumption will decrease. If it performs worse than expected, cheaper coal will continue to account for a significant proportion of the energy balance.”
Nevertheless, in his view, “the gas trade between Russia and China is likely to end by about 2060 or even earlier as a result of the global energy transition…Within a few decades, Power of Siberia 2 will become obsolete.”
Watch, read, listen
BROKEN PROMISES: Project Syndicate featured a commentary from the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon calling for better regulation of carbon offsets to avoid “exaggerated emissions-reduction claims” and exploitation of Indigenous communities.
‘DINNER DIPLOMACY’: Politico recounted how US climate envoy John Kerry held an “exclusive dinner” in March for COP28 president-designate and oil boss Sultan Al Jaber.
NOT TOO LATE: Dr Jane Goodall spoke on CBC about habitat destruction, saying that she believes we “still have a window of time” to slow down climate change and loss of biodiversity.
Coming up
- 29 October: Oman parliamentary elections
- 30-31 October: Pre-COP28, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- 30 October-8 November: 28th annual session of the International Seabed Authority (3rd part), Kingston, Jamaica
Pick of the jobs
- Local Storytelling Exchange, storytellers – climate communication | Salary: £64,000. Location: Kent, Sussex and East Anglia, Scotland
- Greater London Authority, principal policy and programme officer | Salary: £60,394-£65,371. Location: London, UK
- The Lifescape Project, senior lawyer – climate and nature litigation | Salary: £40,000-£43,000. Location: Remote
- Coral Future, climate change associate | Salary: Unknown. Location: Malaysia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 27 October 2023: Antarctic ice melt ‘unavoidable’; EV factcheck; China-Russia fossil fuel trade appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
-
New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus
China and Australia drove global decline in new capacity additions in 2025, but planned production kept growing
To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
-
Climate Change1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy10 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits