Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
G7 sets end date for coal
CUTTING COAL: The US, UK, Germany and other Group of Seven (G7) countries committed to phase out coal power by 2035, the Associated Press reported, noting that it “puts a timeline” on global pledges to “phase down” coal. G7 countries agreed two years ago to decarbonise their power sectors by 2035 and Climate Home News noted that most nations in the group already have coal phase-out plans.
LEEWAY: However, the G7 pact also included an “alternative goal” to phase out coal power “in a timeline consistent with keeping a limit of a 1.5C temperature rise within reach”, Reuters said. Sources told the outlet that this would “grant room for manoeuvre to Germany and Japan”, two coal-reliant countries. The Financial Times said the deal also leaves open the possibility of “continued investment in gas”.
FUELLING THE FIRE: A study found that global banks lent $470bn (£374bn) to coal industry companies between January 2021 and December 2023, Der Spiegel reported. Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is expected to permit fossil fuel companies to explore for oil and gas under offshore wind sites for the first time, the Guardian reported, with experts saying this will likely do little to increase production.
Deadly floods hit globe
COUNTRYWIDE IMPACT: Heavy rainfall and flooding have hit many parts of Kenya in recent weeks, killing more than 180 people, Reuters reported. At least 48 people were killed after a dam burst its banks near a town in the south of the country, according to the Standard newspaper. A river also overflowed into the famous Masai Mara wildlife reserve and flooded tourist camps, the New York Times said.
CLIMATE LINK: Context News reported that scientists blame a “deadly cocktail” of climate change and the El Niño weather pattern for floods in Kenya and other neighbouring countries. In the Conversation, a hydrology consultant said that the floods also “expose decades of poor urban planning and bad land management”.
HIGHWAY HIT: Meanwhile, heavy rainfall persisted in China’s Guangdong province. At least 24 people died after a highway collapsed due to the “torrential rain”, the Independent said. There is no formal “attribution” study on whether global warming worsened the Guangdong floods, but one rapid analysis found that the “somewhat uncommon event” was “exacerbated” by both human-caused climate change and natural variability.
BURST DAM: In Brazil, more than 30 people following heavy rains and flooding and a hydroelectric dam burst, BBC News reported. The “extreme weather” across the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul was caused by a “rare combination of hotter than average temperatures, high humidity and strong winds”, the outlet said.
Around the world
- CARBON BUDGETS: For the second time in two years, the High Court in London has ruled that the UK’s climate action plan is unlawful, Reuters reported, in a legal challenge put forward by environmental groups.
- UP, UP AND AWAY: Airlines lobbied the EU to “weaken” its plans to make the sector monitor and report non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from flights, according to the Financial Times.
- SNP SWITCH: Humza Yousaf resigned as Scotland’s first minister days after he ended a power-sharing deal with the country’s Green party, the Scotsman reported. Yousaf “cut ties” with the Greens after a “bitter row” over his party’s recent decision to abandon 2030 climate targets, Sky News said.
- PLASTIC PITCH: Rwanda and Peru put forward a proposal to reduce global plastic production by 40% by 2040 at UN treaty talks, the Guardian reported. The target should “align” with aims under the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5C, the two countries said.
- BIG OIL: Large oil companies “misled Americans for decades” on climate change and knew the “consequences of their emissions” for at least 60 years, according to a new Democrat report and Congressional hearing covered by NBC News.
195
The number of countries expected to submit new biodiversity pledges ahead of the UN summit COP16 in October.
7
Countries that have done so, Carbon Brief analysis showed.
Latest climate research
- Methane emissions from China’s abandoned coal mines have been underestimated, Nature Climate Change research found.
- Plans to draw down CO2 from the atmosphere “fall short” of the measures needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, new research covered by Carbon Brief warned.
- A study in Nature Geoscience said that losing tropical forest has a greater effect on increasing land surface temperatures than gaining forest does on cooling them.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Recent Carbon Brief analysis showed that fossil fuels supplied a record-low 2.4% of electricity in Britain, for one hour on Monday 15 April. This new chart paints a more complete picture of how British electricity supplies are shifting decisively away from fossil fuels. The figure shows the distribution of half-hours in each year since 2009, arranged according to the share of fossil fuels during each time period. Periods when the grid was more than 50% reliant on fossil fuels are shaded red and, reading from top to bottom, these have become increasingly rare over the past 15 years. Periods with less than 50% fossil fuel, shaded blue, are becoming more common.
Spotlight
Brazil’s pitch to tax the ultra-rich
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to a policy expert about how Brazil’s plan to tax billionaires could help to address climate change.
Earlier this year, Brazil proposed a global tax on the ultra-wealthy, an idea recently supported by other Group of 20 (G20) countries.
The funds could be used to tackle inequality and climate change, ministers from Brazil, South Africa, Germany and Spain wrote in the Guardian last week.
The tax would raise up to $250bn (£200bn) each year from around 2,700 billionaires, according to a report from the EU Tax Observatory.
Quentin Parrinello, a senior policy advisor at the think-tank, tells Carbon Brief about the proposal and how it could help to tackle climate change. This interview was edited for length.
Carbon Brief: Can you explain how a 2% billionaire wealth tax would work?
Quentin Parrinello: We’re looking at all of the taxes paid by the super-rich, adding all of them and, if they do not add up to a minimum amount [of] 2% of their wealth, then there’s a top-up tax to reach that 2%…Back in February, there was a meeting of finance ministers from the G20 in São Paulo. Gabriel Zucman [director of the EU Tax Observatory] was invited to present that idea of a minimum tax on the super-rich…There was a wide recognition in response that tax progressivity is indeed a topic that needs to be tackled and also a lot of demands for technical details, which is why the Brazil [G20] presidency commissioned us to do a report that is due to look at the feasibility of the technical implications of that tax.
CB: With climate change already intensifying each year, should these discussions have been pursued decades ago?
QP: Billionaires derive their wealth from global assets that have access to global markets and that emit carbon all over the globe. So they have a very clear responsibility in heightening climate change and carbon emissions…I think that, sadly, the conversation might be slightly easier now than it was 10 or 15 years ago because we’re seeing in many more countries today the effect of climate change. It’s not rhetoric about potential future impacts, we’re seeing the impact now. We’re seeing an increasing number of floodings and heatwaves everywhere.
CB: The proposal is due to be discussed at the G20 summit in July. What are the next steps?
QP: We’re releasing our report with all the technical details around June. Our understanding is that the [Brazilian G20] presidency wants to use that report to convince a large number of countries to endorse the need for a discussion to happen around the summer. As more countries endorse it, perhaps we’ll have enough countries to start an international negotiation. Those things, unfortunately, take time. So we’re not looking at something that will deliver a tax up and running in six months. That might take a few months more, perhaps a few years more. I think what we need to have is clear commitment from G20 presidencies, from an increasing number of countries to actually talk about this to go towards a negotiation framework that enables us to deliver on that tax.
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE SOLUTIONS: Data scientist Hannah Ritchie spoke to the New York Times podcast the Ezra Klein Show about the feasibility of “sustainability without sacrifice”.
WOODLAND WOES: The Financial Times looked at how deforestation can be a “driving factor” in diseases spreading from animals to humans.
GREEN PUSHBACK: The Guardian examined how climate policies have become a “focal point for far-right attacks” in Germany in a short video documentary.
Coming up
- 5 May: Panama general election
- 6-10 May: 19th session of the UN Forum on Forests, New York City
- 8-10 May: AIM for Climate summit, Washington DC
Pick of the jobs
- Carbon Brief, journalist internship | Salary: £13.50 per hour and £100 travel expenses. Location: London
- Carbon Pulse, Asia-Pacific environmental markets correspondent | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote in Asia, Australia or New Zealand
- Pulitzer Centre, ocean reporting network fellowship | Salary: Covers current salary for one year. Location: Anywhere
- Forest Data Partnership, monitoring, evaluation and learning internship | Salary: $20-24 per hour. Location: Washington DC/hybrid
- Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, senior policy officer – protected areas and nature recovery | Salary: £38,389-£41,212. Location: Edinburgh
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 3 May 2024: G7 sets end date for coal; Deadly floods around globe; Brazil’s pitch to tax ultra-rich appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks close
‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn have ended in “gridlock”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet reported on the failure to balance developing countries’ need for climate-adaptation finance with “richer nations’ desire to move forward” on emissions cuts. It added that both topics were subject to “rule 16”, meaning no agreement could be reached and work will be pushed to the COP31 summit in Turkey. Inside Climate News quoted UN climate executive secretary Simon Stiell, who said the talks had seen “side-stepping and stalling”.
JUST TRANSITION: One “glimmer of hope” came from negotiations on achieving a “just transition”, reported Euronews. The news outlet said negotiators “made headway on operationalising the Belém-Antalya mechanism”, intended to support people in the shift to a low-carbon economy. However, Politico concluded that much of the focus in Bonn had “shift[ed] to efforts outside diplomatic talks – raising questions about the future of global climate negotiations”.
‘ATTACKING SCIENCE’: Agence France-Presse reported on the EU, Switzerland and “dozens of developing nations” warning of “attacks on science” by a “small group of fossil-fuels interests” in Bonn. Table Briefings explained that “the 1.5C target is increasingly being challenged” and the role of the UN climate-science panel – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – in an upcoming assessment of global climate progress “remains controversial”. See Carbon Brief’s full write-up of the talks for more detail.
US-Iran deal
PRICE DROP: The US and Iran announced that they have reached an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the strait of Hormuz, reported Bloomberg. Oil prices have fallen, as the “long-awaited deal” began the process of “eas[ing]” the global energy crisis triggered by the conflict, according to the New York Times. The Associated Press noted that high fuel prices will “likely outlast the Iran war”.
‘OIL GLUT’: The Financial Times reported that the International Energy Agency (IEA) has forecast a “glut of oil” emerging next year, if the peace deal holds. The IEA said this would allow countries to build new strategic reserves, as they “review their energy strategies and policies in response to the crisis”, according to Reuters.
‘NEW ERA’: Agence France-Presse reported that oil and gas companies have “few illusions about a return to normal for the Gulf energy industry after more than three months of blockage”. One analyst told the newswire that the war “showed the oil and gas industry that Hormuz risk is no longer just a geopolitical headline”.
Around the world
- OCEAN MONITOR: The Trump administration is “abandoning its plan” to dismantle a $368m ocean monitoring system key for tracking climate change after a “bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill”, reported the New York Times.
- CORAL HAVEN: The New York Times covered preliminary research, presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, suggesting there could be three times as many “coral refugia” – where corals are relatively safe from climate change – than previously thought.
- BAD CREDIT: Down to Earth reported that the first carbon credits issued under the Paris Agreement’s new Article 6.4 mechanism are “facing scrutiny over alleged links to institutions controlled by Myanmar’s military junta”.
- OIL BACKTRACK: Reuters reported that oil-and-gas company Equinor has dropped a renewable-energy target and scaled back clean investments, while another Reuters story noted that Shell is selling off its offshore wind assets.
1.1 billion
The number of children facing “at least three overlapping climate hazards”, according to a new Unicef report covered by Agence France-Presse.
Latest climate research
- Including the “permafrost carbon-climate feedback” in climate models increases the chance of exceeding “tipping elements” – such as the Greenland ice sheets, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or Amazon rainforest – by up to 50% | Environmental Research Letters
- The intensity of influenza outbreaks could decline in temperate regions, but increase in tropical areas over the next century, as the climate warms | PNAS Nexus
- European snow cover has declined by 20% for December and January since the start of the industrial era, revealing an “unprecedented ongoing shrinkage of European winters” | Communications Earth & Environment
(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 more than 2m battery electric vehicles (BEVs), 1m “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs) and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are already saving drivers a total of around £3bn a year, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This amounts to savings of more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs for each BEV driver in the UK. The analysis comes amid reports in UK media this week that the government is considering “watering down” its EV sales targets.
Spotlight
Oceans rising at UN climate talks
The state of the world’s oceans is inextricably linked to the changing climate – and many delegates at UN climate talks want to see more focus on this issue, reports Carbon Brief.
Oceans are often described as the world’s “greatest ally” against climate change – absorbing 30% of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and most of the heat generated by those emissions.
They are also the site of important climate solutions, such as huge offshore windfarms and the shipping industry’s transition to cleaner fuels.
At the same time, the oceans themselves present a growing danger to coastal communities and sea life due to sea level rise, marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.
These diverse issues have led to growing calls within the UN climate process for more focus on oceans. During climate negotiations this week in Bonn – known as SB64 – nations and civil society had a chance to air these views during an “ocean and climate change dialogue”.
‘Elevate action’
Oceans first entered UN climate outcomes in 2019, when the final COP25 negotiated text requested a new “dialogue” on “the ocean and climate change to consider how to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action”.
The following years saw this dialogue established as an annual event. However, the political weight of these discussions has been limited.
COP31 is being co-led by Turkey and Australia, but with Pacific islands playing a supporting role. These small islands sometimes self-identify as “large ocean states”, stressing the ocean’s centrality in their societies.
In Bonn, figures from across the presidency threw their weight behind this issue. Chris Bowen, an Australian minister and incoming COP31 “president of negotiations”, told attendees:
“Australia, Turkey and the Pacific see an important opportunity to elevate ocean-based climate action.”
Strategies and finance
The two-day dialogue in Bonn involved a series of panels, statements and breakout groups.
One of the main topics was how oceans are integrated into national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
Three-quarters of the latest round of NDCs mention oceans, with conservation of “blue carbon” ecosystems the most frequently described action. (Landscapes such as mangroves can both absorb CO2 and protect coastal areas.)
Delegates also discussed alignment with the UN biodiversity process, as well as ocean finance, which currently makes up less than 1% of all climate finance.
(As discussions were taking place in Bonn, country officials also gathered in Mombasa, Kenya for the 11th Our Ocean Conference. Carbon Brief’s associate editor Giuliana Viglione attended the conference and will publish a full summary shortly.)
Developing countries were clear that many of the ocean-related actions in their NDCs would depend on receiving more financial support.
‘Political momentum’
With the backing of the COP31 presidency, delegates were hopeful about where this year’s dialogue could lead.
Charles Hamilton, an advisor for the Bahamas who spoke for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) in the dialogue, told Carbon Brief that island representatives “are not traveling thousands of miles to just talk and pat ourselves on the back”. He added:
“A dialogue that just remains a dialogue is just more talk – no action.”
Given that, he said “discussions in the dialogue must move into COP decisions and the decisions must be actioned”, noting the importance of finance.
Marina Corrêa, oceans lead at WWF-Brazil, pointed to an upcoming UN climate change Standing Committee on Finance forum as a space to ramp up pressure on ocean finance.
More broadly, she wanted to see the presidencies translate their support into a “leader-level ocean initiative” that could “mainstream” oceans across negotiations.
“We have a really interesting opportunity, in terms of political momentum,” Corrêa told Carbon Brief.
Watch, read, listen
‘HOTTER THAN HELL’: An episode of the BBC’s Rare Earth podcast titled “hotter than hell” considered the issue of extreme heat, with input from experts and “people facing up to the hottest temperatures on the planet”.
NOT BROKEN?: John Drake, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, wrote an essay for Aeon – also re-published as a Guardian “long read” – questioning the framing of ecosystems and climate systems “breaking down”.
ON COURSE: On his Volts podcast, US climate journalist David Roberts interviewed UK climate minister Katie White, quizzing her about whether the UK will “stay the course with its climate plans”.
Coming up
- 20-28 June: London climate action week
- 21 June: Colombia presidential runoff
- 24 June: UK Climate Change Committee progress in reducing emissions 2026 report to parliament
Pick of the jobs
- Mongabay, managing editor – Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Global
- Contexte, environment reporter – Brussels | Salary: €45,000-€60,000. Location: Brussels
- Climate 200, communications director | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Energy Tracker Asia, energy transition correspondent | Salary: $3,000-$4,000 per month. Location: South-east Asia (remote)
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 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in ‘gridlock’ | Energy’s ‘new era’ | Oceans in climate negotiations appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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