Published

2 years ago

March 15, 2024

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

This week

Methane on the rise

NEAR-RECORD LEVELS: Methane emissions from the fossil-fuel industry rose to near-record levels of 120m tonnes last year, “despite technology available to curb this pollution at virtually no cost”, according to Agence France-Presse. Reuters added that the high levels of methane emissions were produced despite commitments by companies and governments to plug leaking fossil-fuel infrastructure, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) annual methane tracker report.
MORE METHANE: Separately, a new study in Nature concluded that US oil-and-gas infrastructure emits three times as much methane into the atmosphere as government estimates suggest, the Associated Press reported. According to New Scientist, the study was based on nearly one million aerial surveys of methane leaks, creating what one of the scientists described as “the largest such dataset that has ever been assembled”.

Europe’s climate risks

MAJOR SHOCKS: The European Environment Agency (EEA) has issued its first assessment of the “urgent” climate risks facing Europe, the Guardian reported. More action is needed to address half of the 36 significant climate risks, such as wildfires and other climate disasters, according to the report, the Guardian said. The Financial Times noted that, according to the EEA, the EU is at “higher and higher” risk of major financial shocks from climate change.
DECIMATED FARMING: Meanwhile, Politico reported that the European Commission is working on legislative proposals that would “severely weaken” environmental requirements for agricultural workers in the EU, amid ongoing farmers’ protests across the continent. This is despite advice by top EU scientists that agriculture “must become more sustainable or it will be decimated by climate change”, the article added.

Around the world

ZAMBIA DROUGHT: More than one million people face food shortages and malnutrition in Zambia due to crop failures triggered by drought, according to an Oxfam report covered by Down To Earth. Much of southern Africa continued to face record temperatures.
TRANSITIONING AWAY?: The US Export-Import Bank, a federal institution that finances projects overseas, has voted to put $500m toward an oil-and-gas project in Bahrain, according to the New York Times. It noted that this was viewed by critics as “out of step” with US pledges to move away from fossil fuels.
SHELL BACKTRACKS: Oil giant Shell has weakened its emissions target for 2030 and dropped its goal for 2035 entirely, in an update to its “energy transition strategy”, Bloomberg reported. Carbon Brief explained the changes with charts.
YOUTH AT RISK: Young activists, including climate campaigners, must be better protected from online attacks, arrests and physical threats, according to a report by UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders Mary Lawlor, covered by the Guardian.
GAS BOOST: UK energy secretary Claire Coutinho announced plans to support new gas power plants, claiming that without them the country could face “blackouts”, the Press Association reported. Ministers later confirmed that unabated gas would still only meet around 1% of demand in 2035.
ELECTRIC SWAP: Mexico’s parliament has agreed to amend the nation’s General Law on Climate Change to support programmes that facilitate the replacement of combustion-engine cars with electric and hybrid vehicles, according to Excélsior.

$1 trillion

The amount that India has asked developed countries to provide in climate finance each year from 2025 as a minimum to help developing countries deal with climate change, according to the Times of India.

Latest climate research

New research in Nature estimated that global economic losses from heat stress could reach 0.6-4.6% by 2060. Major losses came from health impacts, lower labour productivity and disruptions to supply chains, the study found.
Fears about Covid-19 reinforced climate change concerns rather than providing a distraction from the crisis, according to a new survey of 28 European countries published in Climate Risk Management.
Newcastle University in the UK is asking members of the public to participate in a survey into “uncertainty distress” in relation to climate change.

Captured

UK emissions fell 5.7% in 2023 to lowest since 1879* outside the general strike in 1926

New Carbon Brief analysis based on provisional government data showed that UK emissions fell to just 383m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2023. This marked the first time emissions have fallen below 400MtCO2e since Victorian times. However, this drop was mostly unrelated to deliberate climate action by the government. Instead, much of it came about due to a drop in gas demand, driven by factors such as higher electricity imports from French nuclear plants and warmer temperatures. The analysis was covered by the Times and was the focus of an editorial.

Spotlight

‘Drill, baby, drill’: The history of Trump’s favourite slogan

Carbon Brief explores the history of a slogan claimed by Donald Trump, but with roots stretching back to Sarah Palin and, prior to this, the Black Panthers.

The senior Republican who first used the phrase tells Carbon Brief that he is critical of Trump and those who want to “drill with abandon” today.

In a recent interview with Fox News, former president Donald Trump summarised his plans for US fossil-fuel production if he wins the election this year, by saying:

“We are going to – I used this expression, now everyone else is using it so I hate to use it, but – drill, baby, drill.”

Despite Trump’s assertion, it was Michael Steele, the US politician who was the first African-American lieutenant governor of Maryland and chair of the Republican National Committee, who came up with the slogan

Addressing the 2008 Republican National Convention, he told the crowd:

“Let’s reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil, and promote oil-and-gas production at home. Let me make it very clear: Drill, baby, drill, and drill now.”

Speaking to Carbon Brief, Steele said that the slogan came to him late at night, after a fit of “writer’s block”.

“Donald Trump…his BS aside, had nothing to do with ‘drill, baby drill’,” stressed Steele, who today is a staunch critic of the Republican presidential candidate.

The phrase was used by supporters throughout the campaign of Republican John McCain in his unsuccessful presidential bid against Barack Obama.

It became particularly associated with Sarah Palin, the climate-sceptic Republican vice-presidential pick, who said in a debate with her Democratic challenger Joe Biden:

“The chant is ‘drill, baby, drill’. And that’s what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy.”

In the years that followed, the phrase was repeated endlessly by Republican politicians, as well as in comment articles and political analysis. (It did, however, see a dip in popularity following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.)

There was some bemusement at a slogan that appeared to have been derived from “burn, baby, burn”.

That phrase, which has since made its way into everything from disco songs to hot sauce, was originally associated with Black nationalist group the Black Panthers and particularly the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. It was chanted as buildings were set on fire, amid civil unrest sparked by police violence against an African-American man.

Writing shortly after the Republican National Convention in 2008, journalist Derrick Z Jackson alluded to this when he wrote in the Boston Globe:

“This 93% White gathering blithely stole from the race riots of the ’60s to lustily chant ‘drill, baby, drill’.”

For his part, Steele told Carbon Brief that his intention was to use a colloquial expression to “connect it to something that was very real” – namely, cutting US reliance on Middle Eastern oil. He said:

“Unfortunately, a lot of people use it…in a way that they don’t fully appreciate what the point was, and the point was the self-sufficiency of the American spirit.”

He added that “it’s not just ‘drill with abandon’, it’s also the idea of drilling responsibly”, noting that, with the growth of electric cars and other technologies in the US:

“‘Drill, baby, drill’ may at some point in the future change to…‘plug, baby, plug’.”

Nevertheless, Steele accepted that while he will “always be there to remind [Trump]” of where the slogan came from, it is out of his hands now:

“My only regret is that I didn’t copyright it and put it on a T-shirt.”

Watch, read, listen

‘OIL COLONIALISM’: The latest episode of the Drilled podcast explored how Nigerians are “resisting oil colonialism” after Shell announced at the end of 2023 that it was shutting down its onshore operations in the country.

CLIMATE PLOTTERS: An article in Sierra examined what it called a “conspiracy to take down wind and solar power” across the US, made up of “climate-science deniers, right-wing think tanks and fossil fuel shills”.
KYOTO ON STAGE: The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, is putting on a production of Kyoto, a play that dramatises the UN climate summit in 1997 that gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol.

Coming up

15-17 March: Russian presidential election
18-21 March: Global Methane Forum, Geneva, Switzerland
21-22 March: Copenhagen Climate Ministerial, Denmark

Pick of the jobs

International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, senior cryosphere specialist | Salary: $66,510. Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, climate science advisor | Salary: £31,120-37,260. Location: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, London or Salford, UK
Rewiring America, writer and editor (newsletters, website) | Salary: $75,000-100,000, Location: Remote

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org

The post DeBriefed: Global methane surge; Europe faces ‘urgent’ climate risks; Surprising origin of Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed: Global methane surge; Europe faces ‘urgent’ climate risks; Surprising origin of Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’

Climate Change

Western Lawmakers Move To Weaken Clean Air Act and Shield Fossil Fuel Companies From Climate Lawsuits

Published

5 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Alice Rush

Members of Congress in Wyoming and Texas tout the bills as protecting energy security, but opponents say they amount to a corporate handout that will cost taxpayers billions and harm human and environmental health.

By Jake Bolster

Members of Congress from Texas and Wyoming introduced bills recently that would grant fossil fuel companies sweeping legal immunity and shield energy producers from stricter compliance with the Clean Air Act.

Western Lawmakers Move To Weaken Clean Air Act and Shield Fossil Fuel Companies From Climate Lawsuits

Climate Change

Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans

Published

6 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Alice Rush

At least fifty countries have yet to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) climate plan to the United Nations, even though the latest set of plans was due in 2025 – and among them, around half have failed to provide information on why they have not met the deadline.

More than a year past an initial deadline of February 2025, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) met this March and said 55 countries had yet to communicate an NDC to the UN climate body. According to the UN’s registry, two have since submitted their plans.

A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.

The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.

After India’s recent submission, the countries yet to publish their new NDCs are mostly poorer and smaller nations, with few emissions. The biggest emitters in the group are Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Philippines. The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.

Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.

No information from some nations

But others have failed to communicate with the PAICC, which is tasked with encouraging governments to respect their commitments under the Paris Agreement.

In a report on its March 27 meeting, the PAICC board said it “noted with concern” that 28 countries have not provided information about either their NDCs or their biennial transparency reports on the climate action they are taking, or both. This was “despite several reminders”, it said.

Despite a push from some board members, the committee did not agree at this meeting to name these 28 countries. But it may do so at a meeting in September.

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One source who has seen the list of countries told Climate Home News it was a “mixed crowd” of developing nations, including least developed countries, small island developing states, emerging economies and at least one government with a representative on the PAICC board.

The PAICC decided to send individual letters to these governments requesting that they engage with the committee and “reminding them that it shall take appropriate measures with a view to facilitating implementation and promoting compliance” with the Paris Agreement.

Non-punitive system

The PAICC’s rules of procedure state that it should be “non-adversarial and non-punitive” and the strongest measure it can take is to issue a public finding naming a government that has breached the Paris Agreement rules. It has done this once before in 2023, rebuking the Vatican for not filing an NDC and Iceland for not telling the UN how much climate finance it plans to provide.

Joanna Depledge, a historian of the UN climate process and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said that “any measures stronger than naming and shaming would have been unacceptable” to some governments when they were negotiating the Paris Agreement.

She added that “naming and shaming in the international arena is not trivial” because governments do not like to be exposed as non-compliant. “But if the PAICC cannot even name, then that is a serious problem,” she warned.

Avoiding Kyoto’s mistakes?

Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge, said the architects of the Paris Agreement made it less enforceable so as to try and prevent countries leaving or staying out of the agreement as happened with its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol.

While the Paris Agreement asks all governments to set their own emissions-reduction targets, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol set specific targets for developed countries.

When in 2011 it became clear that Canada was not going to meet those targets, it quit the agreement rather than face formal non-compliance proceedings and a multibillion-dollar obligation to buy carbon credits to cover the shortfall, Rao said.

Japan and Russia also declined to endorse some of their emissions reduction targets and the US never ratified the Kyoto agreement. “Enforcement proceedings became politically toxic,” exposing “the limits of punitive compliance regimes”, Rao said.

The idea of the Paris Agreement’s less stringent compliance system is to engage with governments and keep them within the system rather than threaten them with sanctions and potentially push them out, he added.

Rao said this was “the right trade-off” because governments comply when they feel they have chosen to sign up to the rules rather than having them imposed. He noted that back in April 2025, 171 governments had yet to submit their NDCs and this figure is now down to just over 50.

“We’ve got countries that are at least reporting NDCs,” he said, adding that PAICC is “working as it was designed to”. “It is issuing findings of fact and non-compliance, it’s initiating discussions with parties and, as a result of those discussions, the non-compliance figures are coming down every time.”

The post Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.

Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans

Climate Change

As Energy, War and Climate Collide, A Climate Summit in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels

Published

7 hours ago

May 12, 2026

Alice Rush

Participants broke a long-standing taboo by openly linking oil and gas not just to emissions, but to war, displacement and economic instability.

By Bob Berwyn

While some major fossil fuel producers keep pushing for expanded oil and gas use, which is linked to warfare, economic shocks and ecological damage, more than 50 countries at the first Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels began developing plans to shift toward renewable energy systems designed for stability and abundance rather than scarcity and conflict.