On the outskirts of New Delhi, the four-month brick-making season is ending, and migrant worker Munna Majnu is preparing for the arduous 1,560-km journey home to Cooch Behar, in far northeastern West Bengal.
Majnu, 40, started labouring at the brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddha Nagar district this year, when the previous one he worked at shut down after the government rolled out new rules – including a coal ban – to reduce heavy air pollution from the sector.
The green switch has been unaffordable for many kiln owners and has had a domino effect, with kilns closing one after the other in districts around the Indian capital.
“The kiln we were working at shut down and the owner sold his land to a builder,’’ said Majnu, adding that a house will be constructed there instead.
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Majnu had originally found work in the now closed kiln in the Ghaziabad district of Uttar Pradesh through a network of thekedars (contractors) back home, which helped him get his current job too.
“We did not lose a season of work when the kiln shut,” Majnu said. But there are concerns that things may become harder, with many labourers lacking access to social welfare.
Brick-making stops during the monsoon rains – when workers head home to their villages to work on the land, either on their own plots or as farmhands – and restarts at the end of the year.
Measures to ease air pollution
Brick kilns account for 6-7% of Delhi’s emissions of particulate matter, which contains black carbon (soot), according to government officials and researchers with India’s Centre for Science and Environment.
Since 2016, measures have been imposed on the kilns in stages, to cut pollution and help combat the capital’s toxic air. They include shifting the location of some kilns, mandating new, more energy-efficient technology, and last year banning the use of coal to fire the kilns.
Farm fields now line roads that cut through Ghaziabad district, in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, where brick kilns stood even until a few years ago, before many shut down due to new measures to cut air pollution. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)
The effort is showing results alongside a range of other measures, with the air quality in Delhi having improved considerably. According to government data, the daily average air quality index in the capital fell from 225 in 2018 to 204 in 2023, showing lower levels of pollution.
But with no proper plans to help brick kiln owners and workers adjust to the changes in how they operate, the sector – which is among the country’s biggest employers, covering some 10 million workers – is floundering, labour rights experts and bosses said.
Unregistered workers
Saniya Anwar of non-profit The Climate Agenda, which advocates for a socially fair shift to clean energy, said most of the brick workers are unskilled, landless and change their phone numbers regularly, making it hard to register them.
“This in turn, means that they often fall outside the safety net of welfare schemes provided by the government for migrant workers,’’ Anwar added.
Like Majnu, Salam Hak, 29, also moved to Gautam Buddha Nagar when the kiln where he worked in Ghaziabad closed.
“We don’t have job cards (for work under the national rural employment guarantee scheme), so while we do daily wage (work) back home, it is not often easy to find,” Hak said.
“It’s the income from the kilns that sustains us through the year. There have been many kilns shutting, and we don’t know what will happen in the future – but we feel that there is no point worrying about it for now,’’ he said.
Hari Chand, 27 (first from left) and Shivam Rai 18 (second from left), hail from Chattarpur in Madhya Pradesh and work at a kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat. While kiln owners in Baghpat said the sector is struggling with the new green norms, in this region, kilns have not shut down yet nor has labour been laid off. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)
The 22 districts of the Delhi-National Capital Region are home to more than 3,800 brick kilns. Among these, Uttar Pradesh (UP) has the highest concentration of kilns at 2,062.
A state official working on pollution control said Ghaziabad is among the areas most affected by the green transition, with the number of kilns halving in the past six years, but there is no count of, or plan to support the workers who lose their jobs.
Another UP official in the labour department noted that brick kiln workers are seasonal rather than permanent and as such are not entitled to alternative government employment schemes that kick in when a factory shuts down, for example.
Excluded from state benefits
Living off agriculture alone would be tough for workers like Majnu and his family, who cultivate fields belonging to landlords and keep a portion of the crop, mostly rice paddy, as income.
“We are bhag chashis (landless farmers) back home, and we never make enough,’’ said Majnu, stacking the last lot of bricks next to mountains of agricultural waste being used to fire the Dankaur kilns.
“The earnings here (at kilns) are more than what we make back home, where we only get part of the crop to either consume or sell – whereas here, we make 600 rupees (around $7) per 1,000 bricks made and can make up to 1,200 rupees a day,’’ he said.
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The Building and Other Construction Workers (BoCW) Act of 1996 does include social security and welfare benefits for brick kiln workers, including scholarships, maternity benefits, marriage assistance, pensions, financial help for funeral services and food rations.
But labour experts say most brick kiln workers are not registered and therefore cannot access the benefits – neither have they been part of the energy transition conversation so far.
“The isolated nature of seasonal migrant workers at brick kilns is a major factor in preventing access to services, and makes them entirely dependent on the kiln owners,” said Ravi Srivastava, director of the Centre for Employment Studies at the Institute for Human Development.
The cost of going green
In Ghaziabad, a congested, booming industrial township 36 km from the capital, Ravinder Kumar Tewatia, former general secretary of the All India Bricks and Tile Manufacturers Federation, said 200 of 430 brick kilns have shut since 2018.
He closed the last of the four kilns he owned two years ago as norms got stricter and the business less profitable.
In 2016, the Environment Pollution (Prevention & Control) Authority gave all kilns in Ghaziabad a two-year period to switch to “zig zag” technology – an energy-efficient kiln design allowing chimneys to retain heat for longer.
Then, between 2022-2023, the Supreme Court ordered the annual period for manufacturing bricks to be cut from seven to four months and imposed the mandatory use of agricultural waste instead of coal to heat the kilns.
“Now you can’t get coal even if you want to,” Tewatia said, explaining that the main issue with farm waste – mainly wheat and mustard husks – is lower temperatures in the kilns where the clay bricks are hardened.
“As a result of this, the bricks that are being produced are of lower quality and more fragile,” he said.
Workers stack bricks at a kiln in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, as their shift comes to an end. (Photo: Esha Roy/The Migration Story)
Kiln owners said the shortened brick-baking season has impacted production volumes, hitting overall earnings. At the same time, falling brick quality has led to prices plunging by around half.
“We have been demanding that the government allow us to use a mix of coal and agricultural waste,’’ said Tewatia.
Pollution control board officials said the central government did provide alternatives, including biomass briquettes and compressed natural gas, but these also suffer from lower heat generation and gas is not suitable for use in most traditional kilns.
Farming fails to pay
The kilns have been a second home for Nidesh Kuma, 27, since he was a toddler, accompanying his parents to mould and shape bricks near Delhi, as frequent floods on the Ganges River prevents farming in their village.
For the past five years, Kumar has been “supplying” migrant workers from his Sambhal area of Uttar Pradesh to the Delhi region. This year, he placed 40 families in three kilns there, noting that his network is strong and extensive.
But with more brick kilns closing, the seasonal migration pattern has started to lose its appeal – and could be a sign of things to come, say labour rights campaigners.
“What can we do?” asked 55-year-old Laturi Singh, a brick-maker and labour contractor also from Sambhal.
“When the kilns shut down, most (workers) were absorbed at other kilns, but some have gone back to the villages and are working as daily wage workers earning 300 rupees a day, which is much less.”
(Reporting by Esha Roy; editing by Megan Rowling)
This article was first published by The Migration Story, India’s first newsroom to focus on the country’s vast internal migrant population.
Esha Roy is an independent journalist writing on issues of climate change, social development and government policy. Reporting for this story was supported by Buniyaad, a movement for a just transition in the brick kiln sector.
The post Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pollution clampdown on Delhi kilns threatens brick workers’ future
Climate Change
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
The country’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas benefited from what critics say is a questionable IRS interpretation of tax credits.
Cheniere Energy, the largest producer and exporter of U.S. liquefied natural gas, received $370 million from the IRS in the first quarter of 2026, a payout that shipping experts, tax specialists and a U.S. senator say the company never should have received.
Cheniere Energy Received $370 Million IRS Windfall for Using LNG as ‘Alternative’ Fuel
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
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