Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
US climate credentials and consequences
CLIMATE VEEP: US vice president Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate is being heralded by climate advocates, Inside Climate News wrote. The Star Tribune summarised Walz’s environmental record, saying that the current Minnesota governor has “passed ambitious climate policy” while in office – but “also clashed with environmental advocates” on other issues, including the Line 3 oil pipeline.
RAINFALL WRECKAGE: Tropical Storm Debby has wreaked havoc across the south-eastern US, with slow wind speeds contributing to the historic rainfall levels, NPR said. The Post and Courier documented some of the storm’s impacts, including flooding and downed trees and powerlines. Meanwhile, fire- and flood-prone areas of the US are seeing a net influx of residents, the Washington Post reported.
Around the world
- CARBON CAP: China’s State Council announced a new “dual control” plan for its emissions that will put a cap on carbon for the first time, Carbon Brief’s China Briefing said. Analysis published by Carbon Brief also revealed that China’s emissions have seen their first quarterly fall since the nation’s Covid lockdowns.
- CLIMATE COLLAB: Brazilian president Lula da Silva stressed the need for regional cooperation against climate change at a meeting with Chilean president Gabriel Boric that saw the two countries sign 19 bilateral agreements, Agencia Brasil reported.
- HEAT STRESSED: The Korea Times reported that five Koreans died of heat-related causes over the weekend, bringing the year’s total to 13. Meanwhile, heatstroke claimed more than 120 lives in Tokyo during July, according to the Associated Press.
- IPCC UNCERTAINTY: Governments failed to agree upon the timeline for producing the next set of climate change assessment reports amid “deep divergences” at the meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Home News reported. (See Carbon Brief’s detailed summary.)
- KEEPING THE COAL: Global commodity company Glencore walked back on its plan to split its business in two, deciding instead to retain its coal division – a “major profit engine”, the Financial Times wrote. The newspaper explained that most shareholders had opposed the proposed restructure.
- REQUESTING RELIEF: Bloomberg reported that the UN World Food Programme “is seeking 290,000 tonnes of corn from as far afield as Mexico and Ukraine” in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the El Niño-driven drought that decimated harvests across southern Africa.
$52,071,133
The amount of “lifetime campaign contributions” that the 123 climate-sceptic members of the current US Congress have together received from the fossil-fuel sector, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.
Latest climate research
- Ocean temperatures around Australia are the hottest they have been in 400 years, imperilling the Great Barrier Reef’s iconic corals, a Nature study found.
- According to research published in Earth’s Future, sea-level rise, land subsidence and other factors may cause increasingly saline groundwater in coastal areas by the end of the century.
- A study in Nature Cities concluded that urbanisation increases local drought severity, while a majority of urban areas will “consistently suffer exacerbated drought severity” by mid-century.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Many of the world’s largest emitting countries also stand atop the Olympic medal table, with the US and China securing the most medals so far, with Japan, France and South Korea all in the top 10 across both categories. In contrast, the world’s most populous country and third-highest annual emitter – India – has received four medals, while Dominica is the lowest-emitting country to win a medal at these games. (One notable omission from the chart is Russia, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of CO2. Russia is officially excluded from the Paris games following its invasion of Ukraine.)
Spotlight
What will sport look like in a warming world?
This week, Carbon Brief looks at the impact of climate change-driven warming on global sport.
Amy Steel was an Australia-based professional netball player, in peak physical condition, when she collapsed following a pre-season match on a 39C day in 2016.
At the time, she was not aware that heat could have such devastating long-term consequences. “It was sort of like, ‘All right, well, off you go and get better then,’” she said. But she “just really never got better after that day”.
Today, Steel shares her experience in order to raise awareness of the risks that heat poses to athletes and to advocate for change. She told Carbon Brief:
“As an athlete, you do feel a little bit invincible. You do feel like – you’re at your peak fitness; nothing can really touch you.”
Feeling the heat
Exertional heat illness – that which arises from intense exercise – is “not the same thing as the heat stroke that would kill your grandma sitting in her apartment without AC”, Dr Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, told Carbon Brief.
Exertional heat stress occurs when the body accumulates heat during exercise and – whether due to protective gear or environmental factors – is unable to dispel it. “You can experience exertional heat illness in almost any condition,” Orr said.
However, climate change is making dangerous conditions more likely – as well as expanding the range over which they occur. By 2050, 60% of urban areas around the world will be unsuitable for holding an Olympic Games in late July and early August, according to a recent analysis published by Axios.
Dr Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Carbon Brief:
“These things are happening frequently. They’re severe. They’re happening to men and women, boys and girls.”
Murfree added that heat-related illness is “not going to necessarily discriminate” in terms of who it affects. But, she stressed, the reality of who is most affected by heat is influenced by myriad other factors, including socioeconomic status and historical discrimination.
Rethinking sport
According to Orr, there are four actions that can help mitigate the dangers of heat in sport: educating people on what heat illness looks like; providing safety equipment, such as shade and ice baths; creating and enforcing policies around heat; and rearranging the sporting calendar.
These changes do not occur without resistance, Orr said:
“The challenge again, always, is that sport is very traditional…The way things are is the way they should be. And that’s not necessarily an equation that works.”
Heat policies, when in place, are not always enforced. And particularly at the grassroots level, Steel said, there is “not a great amount of understanding of the policy and what [are] the actual risks”.
Steel told Carbon Brief she worries about the future of grassroots sport and the “ability to rock up on a weekend and know that there’s going to be sport”. Whereas professional leagues can afford to build high-tech facilities to protect their athletes, most communities do not have that luxury.
At the same time, Murfree said, those organisations have the advantage of being “ingrained in their immediate community” and, thus, being able to advocate most directly for the solutions that will work for them. That gives her hope, she told Carbon Brief:
“No one knows the realities of climate change in a community more than the people who are in it every single day.”
Watch, read, listen
ISLAND IN THE SUN: Channel News Asia documented Kiribati’s efforts to fortify its land – and its geopolitical alliances – to keep the island nation from being swallowed by the sea.
HIDDEN HISTORY: A historian of science has uncovered documents revealing that US politicians have known the dangers of climate change since at least the 1960s, Grist reported.
DEADLY HOT: The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast looked at the dangers of extreme heat – and how society can mitigate them.
Coming up
- 12-16 August: Meeting of the working group on benefit-sharing from digital sequence information, Montreal
- 14 August: Kiribati parliamentary election
- 26-30 August: Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, Tonga
Pick of the jobs
- EarthRights International, Mekong campaign director | Salary: ฿110,000-160,000 per month. Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand
- University of Helsinki, doctoral researcher in biodiversity change science | Salary: €2,400-2,600 per month. Location: Helsinki
- Alliance Bioversity & CIAT, system agronomist | Salary: unknown. Location: Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Carbon Brief, section editor (science) | Salary: £47,000. Location: UK/hybrid
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 9 August 2024: China’s first quarterly emissions fall since Covid; Harris chooses ‘climate vice president’; Athletes feel the heat appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The case shows that climate change is a fundamental human rights violation—and the victory of Bonaire, a Dutch territory, could open the door for similar lawsuits globally.
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Greenpeace Netherlands campaigner Eefje de Kroon.
A Tiny Caribbean Island Sued the Netherlands Over Climate Change, and Won
Climate Change
Greenpeace organisations to appeal USD $345 million court judgment in Energy Transfer’s intimidation lawsuit
SYDNEY, Saturday 28 February 2026 — Greenpeace International and Greenpeace organisations in the US announce they will seek a new trial and, if necessary, appeal the decision with the North Dakota Supreme Court following a North Dakota District Court judgment today awarding Energy Transfer (ET) USD $345 million.
ET’s SLAPP suit remains a blatant attempt to silence free speech, erase Indigenous leadership of the Standing Rock movement, and punish solidarity with peaceful resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace International will also continue to seek damages for ET’s bullying lawsuits under EU anti-SLAPP legislation in the Netherlands.
Mads Christensen, Greenpeace International Executive Director said: “Energy Transfer’s attempts to silence us are failing. Greenpeace International will continue to resist intimidation tactics. We will not be silenced. We will only get louder, joining our voices to those of our allies all around the world against the corporate polluters and billionaire oligarchs who prioritise profits over people and the planet.
“With hard-won freedoms under threat and the climate crisis accelerating, the stakes of this legal fight couldn’t be higher. Through appeals in the US and Greenpeace International’s groundbreaking anti-SLAPP case in the Netherlands, we are exploring every option to hold Energy Transfer accountable for multiple abusive lawsuits and show all power-hungry bullies that their attacks will only result in a stronger people-powered movement.”
The Court’s final judgment today rejects some of the jury verdict delivered in March 2025, but still awards hundreds of millions of dollars to ET without a sound basis in law. The Greenpeace defendants will continue to press their arguments that the US Constitution does not allow liability here, that ET did not present evidence to support its claims, that the Court admitted inflammatory and irrelevant evidence at trial and excluded other evidence supporting the defense, and that the jury pool in Mandan could not be impartial.[1][2]
ET’s back-to-back lawsuits against Greenpeace International and the US organisations Greenpeace USA (Greenpeace Inc.) and Greenpeace Fund are clear-cut examples of SLAPPs — lawsuits attempting to bury nonprofits and activists in legal fees, push them towards bankruptcy and ultimately silence dissent.[3] Greenpeace International, which is based in the Netherlands, is pursuing justice in Europe, with a suit against ET under Dutch law and the European Union’s new anti-SLAPP directive, a landmark test of the new legislation which could help set a powerful precedent against corporate bullying.[4]
Kate Smolski, Program Director at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “This is part of a worrying trend globally: fossil fuel corporations are increasingly using litigation to attack and silence ordinary people and groups using the law to challenge their polluting operations — and we’re not immune to these tactics here in Australia.
“Rulings like this have a chilling effect on democracy and public interest litigation — we must unite against these silencing tactics as bad for Australians and bad for our democracy. Our movement is stronger than any corporate bully, and grows even stronger when under attack.”
Energy Transfer’s SLAPPs are part of a wave of abusive lawsuits filed by Big Oil companies like Shell, Total, and ENI against Greenpeace entities in recent years.[3] A couple of these cases have been successfully stopped in their tracks. This includes Greenpeace France successfully defeating TotalEnergies’ SLAPP on 28 March 2024, and Greenpeace UK and Greenpeace International forcing Shell to back down from its SLAPP on 10 December 2024.
-ENDS-
Images available in Greenpeace Media Library
Notes:
[1] The judgment entered by North Dakota District Court Judge Gion follows a jury verdict finding Greenpeace entities liable for more than US$660 million on March 19, 2025. Judge Gion subsequently threw out several items from the jury’s verdict, reducing the total damages to approximately US$345 million.
[2] Public statements from the independent Trial Monitoring Committee
[3] Energy Transfer’s first lawsuit was filed in federal court in 2017 under the RICO Act – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a US federal statute designed to prosecute mob activity. The case was dismissed in 2019, with the judge stating the evidence fell “far short” of what was needed to establish a RICO enterprise. The federal court did not decide on Energy Transfer’s claims based on state law, so Energy Transfer promptly filed a new case in a North Dakota state court with these and other state law claims.
[4] Greenpeace International sent a Notice of Liability to Energy Transfer on 23 July 2024, informing the pipeline giant of Greenpeace International’s intention to bring an anti-SLAPP lawsuit against the company in a Dutch Court. After Energy Transfer declined to accept liability on multiple occasions (September 2024, December 2024), Greenpeace International initiated the first test of the European Union’s anti-SLAPP Directive on 11 February 2025 by filing a lawsuit in Dutch court against Energy Transfer. The case was officially registered in the docket of the Court of Amsterdam on 2 July, 2025. Greenpeace International seeks to recover all damages and costs it has suffered as a result of Energy Transfers’s back-to-back, abusive lawsuits demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from Greenpeace International and the Greenpeace organisations in the US. The next hearing in the Court of Amsterdam is scheduled for 16 April, 2026.
Media contact:
Kate O’Callaghan on 0406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
The Trump administration’s relentless rollback of public health and environmental protections has allowed widespread toxic exposures to flourish, warn experts who helped implement safeguards now under assault.
In a new report that outlines a dozen high-risk pollutants given new life thanks to weakened, delayed or rescinded regulations, the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group of hundreds of former Environmental Protection Agency staff, warns that the EPA under President Donald Trump has abandoned the agency’s core mission of protecting people and the environment from preventable toxic exposures.
Former EPA Staff Detail Expanding Pollution Risks Under Trump
A Tiny Caribbean Island Sued the Netherlands Over Climate Change, and Won
Greenpeace organisations to appeal USD $345 million court judgment in Energy Transfer’s intimidation lawsuit
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