Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Africa energy summit
CLOSING THE GAP: More than 1,000 people, including heads of state, gathered at the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to agree on a road map for providing electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030, Nigeria’s Guardian reported. The Mission 300 initiative was launched by the World Bank and the African Development Bank last year, the newspaper said. About 600 million people in Africa “still lack access to reliable and affordable energy”, the Conversation noted.
SETTLING FINANCE: Reuters reported that the initiative aimed to “unlock” at least $90bn from multilateral development banks, development agencies, finance institutions, private businesses and philanthropies. According to Climate Home News, development banks have committed to collectively deliver $40bn under the initiative – a target that was raised this week to more than $50bn by contributions from other financial institutions.
Trump’s climate rollbacks
CONFUSION: Donald Trump’s administration introduced a widespread spending freeze this week, sparking “widespread confusion and frustration”, Politico reported. On Monday, the White House budget office ordered a pause to all grants and loans disbursed by the federal government, with climate mitigation and adaptation programmes likely affected, the outlet said. It added that a federal judge temporarily blocked the freeze on Tuesday, but this has done little to assuage concerns.
ENDANGERMENT: Trump is also making moves to call into question the “legality and applicability” of the “endangerment finding”, a rule that instructs the federal Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions because they pose a danger to human life, the New York Times reported. The New York Times also reported that Trump wants to deploy a rarely used “god-squad” panel to carve out exemptions in the Endangered Species Act.
ALIGNMENT: Meanwhile, La Nación reported that Argentina’s far-right president Javier Milei is still “mulling over” emulating Trump by removing his country from the Paris Agreement. Rumours that Argentina could be the first country to follow the US in leaving the Paris Agreement first began at COP29 in Azerbaijan after Milei withdrew his delegation from the talks. However, the newspaper noted, Argentina is still subject to agreements, such as the EU-Mercosur deal, that mandate it to meet environmental clauses.
UK’s climate plans
CLIMATE PLEDGE: The UK government has formally submitted its international climate pledge, known as a “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), BusinessGreen reported. The UK is one of a handful of countries to have submitted ahead of the 10 February deadline and is pledging to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 81% compared to 1990 levels by 2035, the publication said.
ROSEBANK RULING: The decision by the UK’s previous Conservative government to greenlight two new oilfields in the North Sea has been ruled unlawful by a court in Edinburgh, the Guardian reported, as it does not take into account emissions caused by burning the oil and gas produced. BusinessGreen reported that burning all the oil from the larger project, Rosebank, would emit as much CO2 as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.
LAY OF THE LAND: The Guardian reported that UK environment secretary Steve Reed is to announce a consultation for a long-awaited land-use framework for England. As part of the framework, the government hopes to map the areas of England with the best quality farmland and most potential for nature recovery, with ministers “discouraged from planning developments on the areas marked as best for farming and nature”, the Guardian said.
Around the world
- LA ATTRIBUTION: Human-caused climate change increased the likelihood of the wildfires in Los Angeles by 35% and the intensity by 6%, according to a rapid attribution study from World Weather Attribution.
- HACKING RING RULING: ExxonMobil has been linked to a legal case involving hacking attempts aimed at climate activists, after the man charged alleged that the oil giant was involved, E&E News reported. ExxonMobil denied involvement.
- AI DEMANDS LESS: The surprise breakthrough of Chinese start-up DeepSeek suggests that artificial intelligence may require less energy than previously thought, exposing the “guesswork” on AI power demand, the Financial Times reported.
- CHINA’S RECORD: Record amounts of wind and solar were added in China in 2024, the Associated Press reported. It cited new Carbon Brief analysis showing the clean energy surge halted the rise of China’s emissions in the last 10 months of the year.
46%
The share of Australia’s power supply derived from renewables in the final quarter of 2024 – a new record, according to the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- A Science study, covered by Carbon Brief, showed that climate change played a key role in the “catastrophic” 2023 floods in Sikkim in India, when a “glacial lake outburst flood” led to cascading floods that killed 55 people.
- A study in Nature Medicine found that there could be an extra 2.3 million deaths from extreme temperatures in Europe’s main cities by 2099, in a scenario with little action to curb climate change and adapt to its effects.
- The survival rates of certain bird species dropped during “increasingly severe” dry seasons seen in the Amazon rainforest over the past three decades, according to a new study in Science Advances, “challenging the notion that pristine rainforests can fully protect their biodiversity under increasingly severe climate conditions”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Analysis by Carbon Brief has found that a forest twice the size of Greater London would need to be planted to offset the additional CO2 emissions from the planned expansion of Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton airports announced by UK chancellor Rachel Reeves this week. Reeves confirmed the government’s support for a third runway at Heathrow airport in order to “unlock further growth” in a speech on Wednesday. Earlier in the week, UK energy security and net-zero secretary Ed Miliband said that any expansion “must be justified within carbon budgets and, if it can’t be justified, it won’t go ahead”. The analysis was twice cited in parliament by MPs and covered by a range of media outlets.
Spotlight
East Africa’s climate refugees
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to a young female journalist from Kenya’s Dadaab refugee complex who is documenting how more people are arriving in her community because of climate change-fuelled drought and famine.
Hosting more than 300,000 people and stretching over 50 square kilometres, Dadaab in eastern Kenya is one of the largest refugee camps in the world.
More than 96% of its residents arrived or are descended from neighbouring Somalia. It has make-shift shops, hospitals and schools, but permanent structures are banned by the Kenyan government.
Fardowsa Sirat Gele is a young female journalist who was born and raised in Dadaab. Her mother – like most of the first wave of residents to arrive in Dadaab – fled to the camp in 1991 due to Somalia’s civil war.
Like many in the camp, Fardowsa is stateless and unable to leave the complex. She explained:
“I can say I’m Somali because of my appearance, my language. But I don’t have the courage to say I have a country, because I’ve never lived there. And I can’t say I’m Kenyan, because Kenya will not allow me a birth certificate. So, that hurts me.”
With an interest in sharing the stories of her fellow refugees, Fardowsa works as a journalist at Radio Gargaar, the camp’s radio station.
“Radio Dadaab”, a new film produced by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), followed Fardowsa as she put together a radio programme exploring a new force driving growing numbers of people to arrive at the camp: climate change.
Drought injustice
In recent years, countries in the Horn of Africa have faced their driest conditions in four decades, with several consecutive rainy seasons failing. Then, when rain finally fell, it brought deadly floods that swept away homes and croplands.
In Radio Dadaab, Fardowsa travels to the outskirts of the Dadaab refugee camp to interview new arrivals, who tell her stories of their entire livestock being wiped out, their crops failing and ensuing starvation due to the drought.
A rapid “attribution” analysis found that this deadly drought was made at least 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
Despite facing steep climate impacts, East Africa is responsible for just 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Fardowsa found that, despite fleeing starvation and the impacts of climate change, when people arrived at Dadaab they continued to suffer, with no access to toilets, medical care or houses.
Political tensions have caused issues with new arrivals being able to register at the camp, which, in turn, has caused difficulty accessing resources and help, according to Fardowsa’s reporting.
This has resulted in “refugees that were already in the camps and the new arrivals [having to share] the little aid [available],” she told Carbon Brief.
The future
Fardowsa expressed concern about how global politics will affect Dadaab.
When asked about her hopes for her future, Fardowsa said “there is no hope because Trump has come back and the US was the main country helping with aid”.
The US provides more foreign aid globally than any other country and, last week, following several climate policy rollbacks, the Trump administration ordered a “sweeping freeze” on new funding for almost all US foreign assistance.
Yet, Fardowsa is committed to uplifting the voices of refugees for whom climate change is a threat multiplier.
“The main aim [of the film] was to show the world that there are human beings suffering because of environmental problems, like drought and displacement. To show empathy for refugees was the main focus.”
Radio Dadaab is available to watch on YouTube.
Watch, read, listen
RENEWABLE REVEAL: The Financial Times looked at how, despite abundant fossil-fuel reserves, several Middle East countries have huge plans for renewable energy, making the area the fastest growing renewables market outside China.
STORY TIME: Three climate change “storytellers” featured in this week’s BBC Sounds’ Start the Week podcast, discussing writing the new climate talks-themed play Kyoto, Shetland’s windfarms and the art of agreeing.
NET-ZERO DADS: The Economist published a tongue-in-cheek look at how middle-aged men in the UK are becoming the unlikely early adopters of net-zero solutions.
Coming up
- 3-8 February: 78th meeting of the CITES standing committee, Geneva, Switzerland
- 7 February:Turks and Caicos Islands general election
Pick of the jobs
- Green Climate Fund, project officer, private sector facility | Salary: $87,000-$96,200. Location: Incheon, South Korea
- Nattergal, rewilding ecologist | Salary: £30,000-£35,000. Location: Remote with UK travel
- Greenpeace Africa, pan-African political strategist and responsive campaigner | Salary: Unknown. Location: South Africa, Cameroon, Senegal, Kenya or remote in Africa
- City, University of London, research fellow, centre for food policy | Salary: £42,632-£60,321. Location: London
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 31 January 2025: Closing Africa’s power gap; UK needs forest ‘twice size of London’ to offset airport plans; Kenya’s climate refugees appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
DeBriefed 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Absolute State of the Union
‘DRILL, BABY’: US president Donald Trump “doubled down on his ‘drill, baby, drill’ agenda” in his State of the Union (SOTU) address, said the Los Angeles Times. He “tout[ed] his support of the fossil-fuel industry and renew[ed] his focus on electricity affordability”, reported the Financial Times. Trump also attacked the “green new scam”, noted Carbon Brief’s SOTU tracker.
COAL REPRIEVE: Earlier in the week, the Trump administration had watered down limits on mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants, reported the Financial Times. It remains “unclear” if this will be enough to prevent the decline of coal power, said Bloomberg, in the face of lower-cost gas and renewables. Reuters noted that US coal plants are “ageing”.
OIL STAY: The US Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments brought by the oil industry in a “major lawsuit”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper said the firms are attempting to head off dozens of other lawsuits at state level, relating to their role in global warming.
SHIP-SHILLING: The Trump administration is working to “kill” a global carbon levy on shipping “permanently”, reported Politico, after succeeding in delaying the measure late last year. The Guardian said US “bullying” could be “paying off”, after Panama signalled it was reversing its support for the levy in a proposal submitted to the UN shipping body.
Around the world
- RARE EARTHS: The governments of Brazil and India signed a deal on rare earths, said the Times of India, as well as agreeing to collaborate on renewable energy.
- HEAT ROLLBACK: German homes will be allowed to continue installing gas and oil heating, under watered-down government plans covered by Clean Energy Wire.
- BRAZIL FLOODS: At least 53 people died in floods in the state of Minas Gerais, after some areas saw 170mm of rain in a few hours, reported CNN Brasil.
- ITALY’S ATTACK: Italy is calling for the EU to “suspend” its emissions trading system (ETS) ahead of a review later this year, said Politico.
- COOKSTOVE CREDITS: The first-ever carbon credits under the Paris Agreement have been issued to a cookstove project in Myanmar, said Climate Home News.
- SAUDI SOLAR: Turkey has signed a “major” solar deal that will see Saudi firm ACWA building 2 gigawatts in the country, according to Agence France-Presse.
$467 billion
The profits made by five major oil firms since prices spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to a report by Global Witness covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- Claims about the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change, made in a recent US Department of Energy report, are “factually incorrect” | AGU Advances
- Large lakes in the Congo Basin are releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from “immense ancient stores” | Nature Geoscience
- Shared Socioeconomic Pathways – scenarios used regularly in climate modelling – underrepresent “narratives explicitly centring on democratic principles such as participation, accountability and justice” | npj Climate Action
(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 constituency of Richard Tice MP, the climate-sceptic deputy leader of Reform UK, is the second-largest recipient of flood defence spending in England, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Overall, the funding is disproportionately targeted at coastal and urban areas, many of which have Conservative or Liberal Democrat MPs.
Spotlight
Is there really a UK ‘greenlash’?
This week, after a historic Green Party byelection win, Carbon Brief looks at whether there really is a “greenlash” against climate policy in the UK.
Over the past year, the UK’s political consensus on climate change has been shattered.
Yet despite a sharp turn against climate action among right-wing politicians and right-leaning media outlets, UK public support for climate action remains strong.
Prof Federica Genovese, who studies climate politics at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief:
“The current ‘war’ on green policy is mostly driven by media and political elites, not by the public.”
Indeed, there is still a greater than two-to-one majority among the UK public in favour of the country’s legally binding target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, as shown below.
Steve Akehurst, director of public-opinion research initiative Persuasion UK, also noted the growing divide between the public and “elites”. He told Carbon Brief:
“The biggest movement is, without doubt, in media and elite opinion. There is a bit more polarisation and opposition [to climate action] among voters, but it’s typically no more than 20-25% and mostly confined within core Reform voters.”
Conservative gear shift
For decades, the UK had enjoyed strong, cross-party political support for climate action.
Lord Deben, the Conservative peer and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, told Carbon Brief that the UK’s landmark 2008 Climate Change Act had been born of this cross-party consensus, saying “all parties supported it”.
Since their landslide loss at the 2024 election, however, the Conservatives have turned against the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050, which they legislated for in 2019.
Curiously, while opposition to net-zero has surged among Conservative MPs, there is majority support for the target among those that plan to vote for the party, as shown below.
Dr Adam Corner, advisor to the Climate Barometer initiative that tracks public opinion on climate change, told Carbon Brief that those who currently plan to vote Reform are the only segment who “tend to be more opposed to net-zero goals”. He said:
“Despite the rise in hostile media coverage and the collapse of the political consensus, we find that public support for the net-zero by 2050 target is plateauing – not plummeting.”
Reform, which rejects the scientific evidence on global warming and campaigns against net-zero, has been leading the polls for a year. (However, it was comfortably beaten by the Greens in yesterday’s Gorton and Denton byelection.)
Corner acknowledged that “some of the anti-net zero noise…[is] showing up in our data”, adding:
“We see rising concerns about the near-term costs of policies and an uptick in people [falsely] attributing high energy bills to climate initiatives.”
But Akehurst said that, rather than a big fall in public support, there had been a drop in the “salience” of climate action:
“So many other issues [are] competing for their attention.”
UK newspapers published more editorials opposing climate action than supporting it for the first time on record in 2025, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Global ‘greenlash’?
All of this sits against a challenging global backdrop, in which US president Donald Trump has been repeating climate-sceptic talking points and rolling back related policy.
At the same time, prominent figures have been calling for a change in climate strategy, sold variously as a “reset”, a “pivot”, as “realism”, or as “pragmatism”.
Genovese said that “far-right leaders have succeeded in the past 10 years in capturing net-zero as a poster child of things they are ‘fighting against’”.
She added that “much of this is fodder for conservative media and this whole ecosystem is essentially driving what we call the ‘greenlash’”.
Corner said the “disconnect” between elite views and the wider public “can create problems” – for example, “MPs consistently underestimate support for renewables”. He added:
“There is clearly a risk that the public starts to disengage too, if not enough positive voices are countering the negative ones.”
Watch, read, listen
TRUMP’S ‘PETROSTATE’: The US is becoming a “petrostate” that will be “sicker and poorer”, wrote Financial Times associate editor Rana Forohaar.
RHETORIC VS REALITY: Despite a “political mood [that] has darkened”, there is “more green stuff being installed than ever”, said New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells.
CHINA’S ‘REVOLUTION’: The BBC’s Climate Question podcast reported from China on the “green energy revolution” taking place in the country.
Coming up
- 2-6 March: UN Food and Agriculture Organization regional conference for Latin America and Caribbean, Brasília
- 3 March: UK spring statement
- 4-11 March: China’s “two sessions”
- 5 March: Nepal elections
Pick of the jobs
- The Guardian, senior reporter, climate justice | Salary: $123,000-$135,000. Location: New York or Washington DC
- China-Global South Project, non-resident fellow, climate change | Salary: Up to $1,000 a month. Location: Remote
- University of East Anglia, PhD in mobilising community-based climate action through co-designed sports and wellbeing interventions | Salary: Stipend (unknown amount). Location: Norwich, UK
- TABLE and the University of São Paulo, Brazil, postdoctoral researcher in food system narratives | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pirassununga, Brazil
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 27 February 2026: Trump’s fossil-fuel talk | Modi-Lula rare-earth pact | Is there a UK ‘greenlash’? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Seven Pacific island nations say they will demand heftier levies on global shipping emissions if opponents of a green deal for the industry succeed in reopening negotiations on the stalled accord.
The United States and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to grant final approval to the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework (NZF) in October and they are now leading a drive for changes to the deal.
In a joint submission seen by Climate Home News, the seven climate-vulnerable Pacific countries said the framework was already a “fragile compromise”, and vowed to push for a universal levy on all ship emissions, as well as higher fees . The deal currently stipulates that fees will be charged when a vessel’s emissions exceed a certain level.
“For many countries, the NZF represents the absolute limit of what they can accept,” said the unpublished submission by Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands.
The countries said a universal levy and higher charges on shipping would raise more funds to enable a “just and equitable transition leaving no country behind”. They added, however, that “despite its many shortcomings”, the framework should be adopted later this year.
US allies want exemption for ‘transition fuels’
The previous attempt to adopt the framework failed after governments narrowly voted to postpone it by a year. Ahead of the vote, the US threatened governments and their officials with sanctions, tariffs and visa restrictions – and President Donald Trump called the framework a “Green New Scam Tax on Shipping”.
Since then, Liberia – an African nation with a major low-tax shipping registry headquartered in the US state of Virginia – has proposed a new measure under which, rather than staying fixed under the NZF, ships’ emissions intensity targets change depending on “demonstrated uptake” of both “low-carbon and zero-carbon fuels”.
The proposal places stringent conditions on what fuels are taken into consideration when setting these targets, stressing that the low- and zero-carbon fuels should be “scalable”, not cost more than 15% more than standard marine fuels and should be available at “sufficient ports worldwide”.
This proposal would not “penalise transitional fuels” like natural gas and biofuels, they said. In the last decade, the US has built a host of large liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, which the Trump administration is lobbying other countries to purchase from.
The draft motion, seen by Climate Home News, was co-sponsored by US ally Argentina and also by Panama, a shipping hub whose canal the US has threatened to annex. Both countries voted with the US to postpone the last vote on adopting the framework.
-
IMO head: Shipping decarbonisation “has started” despite green deal delay
Arsenio Dominguez said the shipping industry’s net zero emissions goal is not in dispute although countries have stalled on adopting a framework to reach it -
US-led alliance wins a year’s delay in adoption of green shipping deal
The IMO’s Net-Zero Framework will be up for approval again in October 2026, after the US and Saudi Arabia persuaded countries not to vote on it as planned
The IMO’s Panamanian head Arsenio Dominguez told reporters in January that changes to the framework were now possible.
“It is clear from what happened last year that we need to look into the concerns that have been expressed [and] … make sure that they are somehow addressed within the framework,” he said.
Patchwork of levies
While the European Union pushed firmly for the framework’s adoption, two of its shipping-reliant member states – Greece and Cyprus – abstained in October’s vote.
After a meeting between the Greek shipping minister and Saudi Arabia’s energy minister in January, Greece said a “common position” united Greece, Saudi Arabia and the US on the framework.
If the NZF or a similar instrument is not adopted, the IMO has warned that there will be a patchwork of differing regional levies on pollution – like the EU’s emissions trading system for ships visiting its ports – which will be complicated and expensive to comply with.
This would mean that only countries with their own levies and with lots of ships visiting their ports would raise funds, making it harder for other nations to fund green investments in their ports, seafarers and shipping companies. In contrast, under the NZF, revenues would be disbursed by the IMO to all nations based on set criteria.
Anais Rios, shipping policy officer from green campaign group Seas At Risk, told Climate Home News the proposal by the Pacific nations for a levy on all shipping emissions – not just those above a certain threshold – was “the most credible way to meet the IMO’s climate goals”.
“With geopolitics reframing climate policy, asking the IMO to reopen the discussion on the universal levy is the only way to decarbonise shipping whilst bringing revenue to manage impacts fairly,” Rios said.
“It is […] far stronger than the Net-Zero Framework that is currently on offer.”
The post Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific nations want higher emissions charges if shipping talks reopen
Doubts over whether governments will maintain ambitious targets on boosting the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) are a threat to the industry’s growth and play into the hands of fossil fuel companies, investors warned this week.
Several executives from airlines and oil firms have forecast recently that SAF requirements in the European Union, United Kingdom and elsewhere will be eased or scrapped altogether, potentially upending the aviation industry’s main policy to shrink air travel’s growing carbon footprint.
Such speculation poses a “fundamental threat” to the SAF industry, which mainly produces an alternative to traditional kerosene jet fuel using organic feedstocks such as used cooking oil (UCO), Thomas Engelmann, head of energy transition at German investment manager KGAL, told the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Investor conference in London.
He said fossil fuel firms would be the only winners from questions about compulsory SAF blending requirements.
The EU and the UK introduced the world’s first SAF mandates in January 2025, requiring fuel suppliers to blend at least 2% SAF with fossil fuel kerosene. The blending requirement will gradually increase to reach 32% in the EU and 22% in the UK by 2040.
Another case of diluted green rules?
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, CEO of French oil and gas company TotalEnergies Patrick Pouyanné said he would bet “that what happened to the car regulation will happen to the SAF regulation in Europe”.
The EU watered down green rules for car-makers in March 2025 after lobbying from car companies, Germany and Italy.
“You will see. Today all the airline companies are fighting [against the EU’s 2030 SAF target of 6%],” Pouyanne said, even though it’s “easy to reach to be honest”.
While most European airline lobbies publicly support the mandates, Ryanair Group CEO Michael O’Leary said last year that the SAF is “nonsense” and is “gradually dying a death, which is what it deserves to do”.
EU and UK stand by SAF targets
But the EU and the British government have disputed that. EU transport commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas said in November that the EU’s targets are “stable”, warning that “investment decisions and construction must start by 2027, or we will miss the 2030 targets”.
UK aviation minister Keir Mather told this week’s investor event that meeting the country’s SAF blending requirement of 10% by 2030 was “ambitious but, with the right investment, the right innovation and the right outlook, it is absolutely within our reach”.
“We need to go further and we need to go faster,” Mather said.
SAF investors and developers said such certainty on SAF mandates from policymakers was key to drawing the necessary investment to ramp up production of the greener fuel, which needs to scale up in order to bring down high production costs. Currently, SAF is between two and seven times more expensive than traditional jet fuel.
Urbano Perez, global clean molecules lead at Spanish bank Santander, said banks will not invest if there is a perceived regulatory risk.
David Scott, chair of Australian SAF producer Jet Zero Australia, said developing SAF was already challenging due to the risks of “pretty new” technology requiring high capital expenditure.
“That’s a scary model with a volatile political environment, so mandate questioning creates this problem on steroids”, Scott said.
Others played down the risk. Glenn Morgan, partner at investment and advisory firm SkiesFifty, said “policy is always a risk”, adding that traditional oil-based jet fuel could also lose subsidies.
Asian countries join SAF mandate adopters
In Asia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Japan have recently adopted SAF mandates, and Matti Lievonen, CEO of Asia-based SAF producer EcoCeres, predicted that China, Indonesia and Hong Kong would follow suit.
David Fisken, investment director at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, said the Australian government, which does not have a mandate, was watching to see how the EU and UK’s requirements played out.
The US does not have a SAF mandate and under President Donald Trump the government has slashed tax credits available for SAF producers from $1.75 a gallon to $1.
Is the world’s big idea for greener air travel a flight of fancy?
SAF and energy security
SAF’s potential role in boosting energy security was a major theme of this week’s discussions as geopolitical tensions push the issue to the fore.
Marcella Franchi, chief commercial officer for SAF at France’s Haffner Energy, said the Canadian government, which has “very unsettling neighbours at the moment”, was looking to produce SAF to protect its energy security, especially as it has ample supplies of biomass to use as potential feedstock.
Similarly, German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall said last year it was working on plans that would enable European armed forces to produce their own synthetic, carbon-neutral fuel “locally and independently of global fossil fuel supply chain”.
Scott said Australia needs SAF to improve its fuel security, as it imports almost 99% of its liquid fuels.
He added that support for Australian SAF production is bipartisan, in part because it appeals to those more concerned about energy security than tackling climate change.
The post Doubts over European SAF rules threaten cleaner aviation hopes, investors warn appeared first on Climate Home News.
Doubts over European SAF rules threaten cleaner aviation hopes, investors warn
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