Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
September heat record ‘shattered’
‘GOBSMACKINGLY BANANAS’: September has “shattered” its previous global heat record “by a record margin”, according to data covered by the Washington Post. BBC News reported that last month was 0.93C hotter than the 1991-2020 September average and 0.5C hotter than the previous record set in 2020. Several outlets, including the Guardian, have quoted the verdict of Carbon Brief’s science contributor, Dr Zeke Hausfather, who described the heat as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas”.
OCTOBER HEATS UP: The unusual heat has continued into October, with the New York Times publishing a map showing that parts of Europe, the Middle East, southern Africa, southeast Asia, Australia, North America and South America experienced temperatures up to 9C higher than average this week. CBC noted that “warm summer-like weather” has continued in the Canadian province of Ontario and the Australian Associated Press reported that more than 100 fires have been blazing across New South Wales amid a heatwave in the Australian state.
EU launches first carbon border tax
PHASE ONE: The EU has launched the initial phase of its carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), the world’s first system to impose emissions tariffs on imported goods, according to Reuters. For now, importers of steel, cement and other products only have to report the emissions “embodied” in their goods, but, from 2026, they will face border charges for high-emitting goods, the Economist explained.
GLOBAL PUSHBACK: Major EU trading partners, including Russia, the UK and US, are likely to feel CBAM’s effects the most, according to a recent report by Carnegie Europe. Brazil, South Africa and India have accused the CBAM of being “discriminatory” and China has called on the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to assess the measure, Politico stated. Writing in the Financial Times, EU economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni said non-European countries “need not fear” the tax and said it was “fully compatible” with WTO rules.
NEW CLIMATE CHIEFS: Meanwhile, European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič and former Dutch foreign minister Wopke Hoekstra have been approved by the European parliament as the EU “green deal” chief and climate commissioner, respectively, according to Politico.
Around the world
- ‘IRRESPONSIBLE’ LIFESTYLES: The Pope has pointed to an “irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model” as a key driver of climate change in a new “apostolic exhortation” titled Laudate Deum (Praise God), CNN reported.
- RUSSIA ROADBLOCK: Ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Russia has stated it will oppose a global deal to cut fossil-fuel use, according to the Financial Times. Another Financial Times article said the United Arab Emirates has proposed hosting COP for two years in a row as Russia continues to block eastern European states from hosting it next year.
- INDIA FLOODS: At least 14 people have been killed and 102 are missing after flash floods in North Sikkim, India, triggered by a glacial lake outburst, the Times of India reported.
- OIL LAWSUIT: Environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against French oil giant TotalEnergies and its major pipeline project in Tanzania and Uganda, alleging numerous criminal offences, according to Radio France Internationale.
- CLIMATE ARRESTS: Vietnamese state media has confirmed the arrest of energy expert Ngo Thi To Nhien, who worked on the G7-backed plan to wean the nation off fossil fuels, Agence France-Presse reported. Drilled has covered a string of arrests of Vietnamese climate advocates since 2021.
- ‘NET-ZERO ZEALOTS’: “Green politics” has been “under attack” at the UK’s Conservative party conference, the Guardian stated, with even the net-zero secretary, Claire Coutinho, taking aim at “zealots” who “view net-zero as a religion”.
$143bn
The annual “global cost” of extreme weather that can be attributed to human-caused climate change, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
Latest climate research
- The boom in commercial tree plantations for the purpose of carbon-offsetting threatens biodiversity in the tropics, a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution concluded.
- The second Global Amphibian Assessment, published in Nature, found that 41% of species are threatened with extinction – and climate change is a key factor in their decline.
- A paper in Nature Food explored how meat taxes in Europe could be designed to avoid overburdening low-income consumers.
(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 second “pledging conference” for the UN’s flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF) took place on Thursday in Bonn, Germany. The GCF, which is the world’s largest multilateral climate fund, was established in 2010 as part of the global effort to help developing countries cut emissions and prepare for climate change. The event brought the total pledged by wealthy nations to just $9.3bn, less than previous funding rounds and short of the GCF’s internal targets, according to Climate Home News. Notable absences included the US and Australia, both of which have failed to pledge anything since 2014. They, along with Italy, Sweden and Switzerland, said they will commit funds, but did not specify how much. The Natural Resources Defense Council’s Green Climate Fund Pledge Tracker has data on every country’s contributions.
Spotlight
Factcheck: Do large solar projects produce more CO2 than they save?
This week, Carbon Brief factchecks claims pushed by right-wing politicians and anti-solar campaigners that a major UK solar project would produce more greenhouse gases than it is able to save.
Matt Hancock, former UK minister turned TV reality show contestant – has urged the government to reject plans for a solar farm in his West Suffolk constituency. The proposed Sunnica scheme is on track to be one of the nation’s largest solar projects. When built, the developers say it would produce enough electricity to power up to 100,000 homes.
Hancock is not alone. At least 19 other UK MPs – all Conservatives – have come out against new solar farms, citing the concerns of people in their rural constituencies. The issue became a hot topic during the Conservative leadership contest last year, when both former prime minister Liz Truss and current prime minister Rishi Sunak vowed to stop farmland being used for solar power.
This is part of a wider trend of groups claiming to represent local communities pushing back against new renewable projects. Hundreds of new wind and solar projects are facing local opposition across the US, amid an organised effort by climate-sceptics. In the UK, a group called the Solar Campaign Alliance, which stresses it is “not against renewables”, supports a network of around 100 anti-solar protest groups, including the Say No To Sunnica campaign.
One of the central points made by many of these activists is that some new solar farms are “not carbon neutral” and will “do nothing to help” the UK meet its climate goals. This has been repeated on the campaign websites and materials distributed by those protesting the Sunnica project and other sites. Also repeating the claim, Hancock has written in the Daily Mail that Sunnica “would pump out more carbon…than it actually saved”.
These claims appear out of step with the central role solar power is expected to play in getting the UK – and the world – to net-zero.
They come from analysis commissioned by the Say No To Sunnica campaign and carried out by researchers at Cranfield University. The authors argue that the Sunnica scheme “during its lifetime would constitute a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions”, largely based on the developers underestimating its “lifecycle” emissions – including those associated with battery production and replacement.
Solar projects do not produce emissions when they generate electricity, but the manufacture of their components does as fossil fuels are used in these processes.
Despite this, experts tell Carbon Brief that the Cranfield study contains unusual methodological choices. Not least, it compares the Sunnica solar farm to a scenario in which the grid decarbonises, thanks in large part to solar power. Prof Edgar Hertwich, a researcher of resource efficiency and climate change at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says arguing that the new solar farm replaces renewable power is “conceptually not correct”.
A more relevant comparison would be contrasting Sunnica with a scenario in which fossil fuels continue to be used. Gas power produces more than eight times more carbon dioxide (CO2) per unit of energy throughout its lifetime than ground-mounted solar panels.
The Cranfield researchers tell Carbon Brief they agree that the comparison they make is problematic, but point out that they followed the same methodology as the one used by the Sunnica developers.
They also warn that solar developers are not sufficiently accounting for battery production emissions when making claims about their net-zero credentials, stating that Sunnica did not factor in the need to replace batteries. However, other research shows that when solar power displaces fossil fuels from the grid, its climate benefits are only “marginally affected” by adding batteries.
Ultimately, the researchers stress that their conclusions “apply to this particular scheme only”, adding that each project “needs to be assessed on its own merits”.
The Say No To Sunnica campaign did not respond to Carbon Brief’s request for comment.
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE SLEUTHING: Bloomberg has a feature on Itziar Irakulis Loitxate, a PhD student tasked with searching for global methane leaks at the UN Environment Programme. She is the “closest thing the world has to climate police”.
SOLUTIONS SEARCH: NPR has dedicated an entire week to stories and conversations about the search for climate solutions, from the Philippines to California.
WEAPONISING HEAT PUMPS: A long read in Politico explored how the far-right Alternative for Germany party has turned the issue of electric heat pumps into “electoral rocket fuel”.
Coming up
- 8 October: Luxembourg parliamentary election
- 8-12 October: Middle East and North Africa Climate Week, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 9-15 October: World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meeting, Marrakech, Morocco
- 10 October: Liberia presidential, senate and house of representatives election
Pick of the jobs
- International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), senior researcher | Salary: £52,244-64,944. Location: Hybrid (within or outside of UK) with occasional travel to the UK offices
- University of Wisconsin-Madison, assistant professor trained in geographical and related social science approaches to critical development | Salary: Unknown. Location: Madison, Wisconsin, US
- China Global South Project (CGSP), freelance copy editor (Africa climate) | Salary: Unknown. Location: Africa, (remote)
DeBriefed is written in rotation by Carbon Brief’s team and edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 6 October 2023: ‘Gobsmackingly bananas’ global heat; EU’s carbon border tax; UK solar claims factchecked 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?
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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
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