The attacks on climate science by the Trump administration means the US is now “part of the problem” on global warming and “not part of the solution”, says Prof Ben Santer.
Santer – a leading climate scientist and early pioneer in establishing the human “fingerprint” on warming – has played a central role in major climate change reports during his career spanning four decades.
In a wide-ranging interview with Carbon Brief, Santer says the Trump administration is “engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science”.
The “insane” cuts to major scientific institutions, satellite monitoring and climate research funding amounts to “institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate”, he says.
He adds that “we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor”.
It is “heartbreaking” that “many of the best and the brightest [scientists] will leave the country”, says Santer, and go to work in Europe, China, Japan or Australia.
Now semi-retired, Santer himself is relocating to the UK in order to continue his research in the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia as it has become “difficult” to do so in the US.
He has been granted a five-year visa under the UK’s “Global Talent” programme.
He says he worries about the US influence on European politics as there “have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance” over to the UK.
The interview was conducted shortly before the Trump administration announced that it was withdrawing from more than 60 international bodies and treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
- On why he is relocating to the UK: “The notion of not being able to do [my] work anymore in the US is unacceptable to me.”
- On his experiences during Trump’s first term: “In the end, the Trump administration did cut the funding for my research and my group’s research in climate change detection and attribution.”
- On managing to continue his work: “I was able to continue my research by cutting down the amount of time that I was actually paid by the Department of Energy.”
- On the reported cuts to US climate science: “It’s unthinkable to actually kill those kinds of critically important measurements, but yet, that’s where we are. It’s heartbreaking.”
- On whether other countries can step into the void: “If the US no longer is willing to lead, is no longer willing to invest in basic monitoring of weather and climate, other countries have to try and fill the gap.”
- On the risks of an “eddy of ignorance” in the US: “We’re part of the problem now in the US, not part of the solution to the problem of climate change.”
- On the Department of Energy climate review: “What did surprise me was just how brazen and blatantly wrong bits of it were.”
- On attacks on climate science: “What’s different today is that it’s an entire administration. This is institutionalised, willful ignorance on the part of the administration.”
- On engaging with science communication: “If you don’t, if you remain silent, then really bad stuff happens.”
- On advice to other scientists: “Only when you push back quickly and forcefully in a united way do you have some hope of avoiding the worst outcomes.”
- On lessons for Europe from US politics: “It’s one I worry about a lot, because there have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance.”
- On the next move for the Trump administration: “I think there will be continued efforts to go after modelling capability, which is – again – heartbreaking.”
- On the EPA’s “endangerment finding”: “I think the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has, right from the beginning, intended to rescind the endangerment finding.”
- On his reflections on Climategate: “When you go after the integrity of individuals and the[ir] decency and honesty – in the public arena – in such a vicious and nasty way, it has consequences.”
- On public trust in scientists: “When there’s this drum beat of incendiary language – “con job”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” – again and again and again, it erodes public trust in science and scientists.”
- On media coverage of climate change: “I do think that there’s more effort to hold the [Trump] administration accountable…for making incorrect claims.”
- On geopolitics affecting the IPCC: “I do worry about this fractured landscape, with powerful forces out there seeking to undermine the work of the IPCC.”
Carbon Brief: Ben, thank you very much for joining us. So, after a long career in the US, you’re now relocating to the UK, where you studied for your degrees. What has prompted your return?
BS: It’s really difficult for me to continue doing work in attribution science in the US in 2026. I’m a scientist – working on identification of human fingerprints on climate is in my life blood. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what I’ve done for the last 40 years. The notion of not being able to do that work anymore in the US is unacceptable to me, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m moving to the UK to continue to do work in trying to disentangle human and natural effects on climate. I’m also coming to the UK because my partner lives here and I want to be with her.
CB: In Trump’s first term [as US president], you were at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I wonder, what impacts did you experience of the Trump administration when you were there?
BS: A number of impacts and those impacts started right at the beginning of the first Trump administration. So Trump’s nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, when he was nominated, had to go through Senate confirmation hearings. During those confirmation hearings, he was asked about the reality and seriousness of climate change. He responded that there had been no significant global warming since 1998. 1998 was a big natural El Nino, natural warming event. And Mr Pruitt was cherrypicking. He was saying [in effect], “when I look at satellite temperature records, the temperature of the lower atmosphere – the troposphere – and only go back to 1998 and then march forward in time, I believe there’s been no significant warming”. That was wrong, demonstrably so.
My colleagues and I at Lawrence Livermore National Lab were asked to investigate Mr Pruitt’s claim. We did. We published a paper in 2017 in the Journal of Climate [it was actually in Scientific Reports], showing that that claim was wrong. Even if one did the cherrypicking and forgot about the pre-1998 portion of the satellite temperature record. The LA Times [it was actually the Washington Post] reported on our Journal of Climate paper and I think it’s fair to say that the Trump administration did not like that we had factchecked Mr Pruitt. And did not like that we had shown that his on-the-record statement to the US Senate was wrong.
That incident led to a complaint by the Trump Department of Energy – the funder, primary funder, of Lawrence Livermore National Lab – to the director of Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The director asked for a meeting with me and, during that meeting, told me that the Trump administration was in a position to cut my funding for detection and attribution research at Livermore – and, indeed, to cut funding for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. In the end, the Trump administration did cut the funding for my research and my group’s research in climate change detection and attribution. In my opinion, that was a direct result of doing science [by] factchecking Mr Pruitt. The administration didn’t like that and they didn’t like the result of the factchecking.
CB: So, how were you able to continue your research at the time?
BS: I was able to continue my research by cutting down the amount of time that I was actually paid by the Department of Energy. So, essentially, I reduced my time at Livermore in order to allow my younger colleagues to continue to do this critically important work. At the time of these cuts, I had been in my position at Livermore for nearly three decades. I was at the tail end of my career. They were not – my younger colleagues were not – and I wanted them to continue to have sufficient funding to do this work.
CB: Fast forward to the Trump second term and there have been reported cuts to climate science and related programmes at the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency], NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research], NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and NASA. I wonder which of these concerns you the most?
BS: They are all of deep concern to me. I would say the administration – the second Trump Administration – has engaged in a systematic attempt to dismantle climate science and not only climate science in the US, but I know the climate science piece of things reasonably well. They’ve gone after monitoring. They’ve gone after computer modelling. They’ve gone after people who do the kind of attribution science work that I do; people who look at extreme events and human contribution to the changes in the properties of extreme events – droughts, flooding, all of that – they’ve fired thousands of employees.
And when you break the evidentiary chain, when you no longer monitor, say, changes in Arctic sea ice extent or carbon emissions or atmospheric temperature, you make it difficult for people like me to get at the causes of climate change. That’s a deep, deep concern that we may no longer be able to continuously monitor stuff that we urgently need to monitor, not only for climate, but also for basic weather prediction. For example, if you stop monitoring atmospheric moisture, then you degrade the quality of weather forecasts that give you early warning of severe storms, of atmospheric rivers – it’s unthinkable to actually kill those kinds of critically important measurements, but yet, that’s where we are. It’s heartbreaking.
I have hundreds of colleagues at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab at the [NASA] Goddard Institute for Space Studies – women and men who have devoted their entire scientific careers to trying to model the climate system, understand the climatic shape of things to come. Many of them, particularly probationary employees, are gone. And you can’t flip a switch under a more enlightened administration, which we hope we get in three years from now, and bring all of that back. Science doesn’t work that way. Many of the best and the brightest will leave the country and will go to Europe or go to China or go to Japan or Australia. They will leave the US. They will see no future for themselves there. Or they won’t even come to the country to study, to do degrees – and that loss of talented, dedicated researchers is heartbreaking. That’s the only word for it.
CB: You mentioned a lot of programmes that have been cut – for example, monitoring. Do you think other countries can step into the void? And, if so, who and how?
BS: I hope so. I hope the Europeans and the Chinese and the Australians and the Japanese are making serious contingency plans – and recognising that this is a real thing. The Trump administration is going to turn off satellites. They’ve announced their intent to severely cut NASA and go after things like the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other remote sensing systems that make measurements that they don’t like. So hopefully other space agencies recognise the danger to this evidentiary chain.
But, again, that’s not like flipping a switch that you can suddenly launch a satellite – developing sensors, deploying sensors in space – all of that is the stuff of years, not the stuff of a couple of months. But I hope that these kinds of discussions are going on at the highest level in countries that recognise the value of information – again, not only for climate, but for basic weather forecasting. If the US no longer is willing to lead, is no longer willing to invest in basic monitoring of weather and climate, other countries have to try and fill the gap.
CB: Shortly before Trump won his second term, you wrote that his election risks trapping the US and the planet in an “eddy of ignorance”. I wonder what your reflections are now that Trump is in power?
BS: We are in that “eddy of ignorance” in the US. Clearly, this administration seeks to redefine reality itself; seeks in its public-facing websites – say NASA, EPA – to generate a picture of a world where climate isn’t changing, or if it is, the changes are purely natural – they’re due to the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations; humans have no agency, have no discernible influence on climate. So, they’re creating an alternative universe in which human caused fossil fuel burning has no impact on climate. And what do you even call that? “Eddy of ignorance” is too weak a term to describe that willful misrepresentation of the world we actually live in – of the climate we actually live in – how it’s changed, how it’s likely to change it. It’s – again – heartbreaking when you think of the destruction of information on websites, the destruction of libraries – like, as has recently been reported, the Goddard Space Flight Centre library of volumes about atmospheric science, ocean science – the thought of that stuff going away, of not being there anymore. I don’t know what to do with that, I guess.
The only thing I can do with it – and have tried to do with that kind of willful ignorance – is shine a light on it and say “this is wrong”. No matter what differences in political positions we have, we all lose if we embrace ignorance with open arms and claim that the real world is what the president believes it to be, not what we actually measure and monitor. That’s where we are in the US – president Trump is defining reality and we risk – as many have written – going back to the Soviet Lysenkoism, where any science that conflicts with the prevailing political views of the leader is dismissed and denied. And that has serious negative consequences – of course, not only for the US, but for the entire world. We’re part of the problem now in the US, not part of the solution to the problem of climate change.
CB: You mentioned the Department of Energy (DoE) earlier and its involvement in the Lawrence Livermore Lab. And I wonder what your reaction was to their “critical review” on climate change that they published last year?
BS: So they published this review in July of 2025. It involved five noted climate change sceptics. I had dealt with all of them over the course of my time at Livermore. It was not a surprise that the administration was going to try and come up with some counter narrative to IPCC and national climate assessments. But what did surprise me was just how brazen and blatantly wrong bits of it were.
So, I’ll give you an example. Chapter 5.5 of this Department of Energy climate working group review dealt with temperature changes in the stratosphere. And it touched on work that my colleagues and I had had done and published most recently in 2023 in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the DoE report cited our 2023 paper and said that we had not found a human fingerprint on climate. We had. We had found the most convincing evidence yet of a human fingerprint on the structure of atmospheric temperature. This predicted fingerprint of warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the upper atmosphere – predicted by Suki Manabe back in 1967 – we had found it in satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature change. And we had found that this signal was particularly clear where Manabi had predicted back in ‘67 – that it would be clear right in the upper stratosphere. The Department of Energy, in saying “you didn’t find a fingerprint”, was essentially doing the equivalent of something like this: The walls here in this room were white. They’re essentially telling you, “no, they’re not white, they’re black”. What do you do with something like that? When someone mischaracterises your own work and the work of your colleagues – sober, mature science that you’ve spent decades doing – and fundamentally turns it on his head in an official government report for a specific political purpose.
You know, the report was released on the same day as EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced his intent to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding – the finding that emissions of greenhouse gases, through their effect on temperature and through temperature effects on air pollution, materially harm human health. So, this report fed into that political goal of wanting to repeal the endangerment finding. And our science is being misrepresented to support that political goal. That was pretty shocking to me – that it would be so blatant. There was no pretence, really, of trying to get the science right. And the example that I just mentioned – with our vertical fingerprint work with atmospheric temperature – is only one example of many dozens that the Dessler report takedown – and Carbon Brief’s own takedown of the many errors in the DoE report – showed. This was a pattern of behaviour. My job is about pattern analysis and there was a pattern in the DoE report of trying to misrepresent well-understood science.
CB: Your career has spanned periods where climate science has been attacked quite fiercely – back to the time of Kyoto in the 90s or Climategate at the end of the 2000s. What parallels or differences do you see today?
BS: So, back in the mid-90s, the attacks focused on the IPCC second assessment report. That report came out in early 1996 and its headline finding was the infamous 12-word statement: “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” And that was significant because it was the first time that the international scientific community said formally: “We see a signal of human activity.” Other individual scientists had made such claims in the past – notably, Jim Hansen in 1988 in a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. But this was the international community, the IPCC, saying: “Hey, humans are no longer innocent bystanders in the climate system. We formally identified a climate change signal due to our actions. It’s not the sun, it’s not volcanoes, it’s not natural internal variability, it’s on us.”
And as the play Kyoto, which you just mentioned, clearly notes, that was threatening – that discernible human influence finding – to very powerful, moneyed interests. To, for example, the Global Climate Coalition – a consortium of energy interests – they recognised that this was bad for business, that this finding might have downstream implications for their business models, for their ability to continue burning fossil fuels without considering the negative externalities of their actions. So the Global Climate Coalition and other fossil-fuel funded organisations – Western Fuels [Association], the Petroleum Association [the American Petroleum Institute] – went after the IPCC and went after me. No personal animus, but I was the lead author of the chapter in which this finding was situated. And individual folks in Congress, too, like Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman, wanted to make names for themselves and felt that they could do so by casting doubt on the integrity of the IPCC process – the scientific integrity of people like me. So there was some attempt back then to politicise the science too. It wasn’t just fossil-fuel interests that went after the IPCC. It was also folks like Rohrabacher who wanted to make a name for themselves.
What’s different today is that it’s an entire administration. This is institutionalised, willful ignorance on the part of the administration – institutionalised efforts to destroy the US capability to monitor, measure and understand changes in Earth’s climate. That’s qualitatively different from anything I encountered in the mid-90s at the time of the IPCC second assessment report.
CB: If you were in the earlier stages of your career now, as you were then, do you think you would be just as involved in communication and public engagement on climate change?
BS: Absolutely. The lesson I learned 30 years ago – back at the time of the discernible human influence finding in 1996 – was, sometimes, you don’t have the luxury of sitting on the fence and just waiting to see how things develop. Back then, I was a representative of an entire scientific community. My job had been to – with my peers – assess the then-available science and come up with our best representation of what the science, back then – 30 years told us – and we did and we were right. The cautious, even wimpy, “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” [statement] was justified by the then-available science. And, in the next 30 years, the science progressed – better models, longer data records, better fingerprint techniques for disentangling human and natural effects on climate, more scientists involved in this kind of work all over the world – leading to the word “unequivocal”.
It is now unequivocal, as the IPCC judged in its 2021 sixth assessment report [on climate science], that there are human fingerprints all over Earth’s climate system – atmosphere, oceans, land surface. Back then, in 1995-96, we were primarily looking at surface thermometer records, surface temperature records. Now, folks have interrogated literally dozens of variables – Arctic sea ice extent, atmospheric moisture, specific humidity, sea level pressure, ocean heat content, clouds, circulation patterns, extreme event properties – you name it, they’ve looked at it. They’ve kicked the tires. They’ve used pattern recognition methods to assess whether purely natural influences can explain the changes in each of those independently measured variables – natural causes can’t.
And that’s the frustration, I would say – this disconnect between this much more mature understanding of causes now in 2021 and this willful ignorance that we see in the Trump administration. Where the president of your own country refers to all of the work that you’ve done and your colleagues have done as a “con job”. So not only wrong, but criminal – as if there’s intent, on your part and your colleagues’ part, to mislead the global public about the reality and seriousness of climate change. The only response, in my opinion, is you have to, as a scientist, push back against that. If you don’t, if you remain silent, then really bad stuff happens. And I think that’s true for our democracy as well. If good people remain silent when there are serious challenges facing science and democracy, we all lose.
CB: What would be your advice to climate scientists in the US today, particularly those leading the organisations under attack?
BS: “Hang together or hang separately,” as Benjamin Franklin, I believe, famously said. You have to provide some kind of united front to these systematic efforts to dismantle US science. If you don’t, if you leave that to individuals or let the administration attack individual universities, you’re not going to prevail in preventing really serious harms. And I would say it’s taken the scientific community a long time to recognise that. In the US, certain institutions that should have led right from the beginning and said, “no, this is wrong”. Going after the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and going after vaccine schedules harms public health. People will die. Those kinds of messages needed to be made public very early, very forcefully – and they weren’t.
Same with climate science – starting to fire probationary employees, starting to go after climate modelling and to argue that modellers were scaring America’s children by making projections of the climatic shape of things to come. All of that demanded a firm, clear response, which was late in coming. And unfortunately, again, many of the harms that happened in those first few months – the firings, the withholding of grant money that will affect research at universities, climate research, medical research labs, the continuity of whole departments – those harms can’t be easily reversed. I think, for me, the personal lesson learned from the first administration is only when you push back quickly and forcefully in a united way do you have some hope of avoiding the worst outcomes.
CB: We’ve seen how quickly US federal climate science policy has changed under a new government. I wonder what lessons can European governments and institutions and scientists take from that on protecting climate science, regardless of political change?
BS: That’s a great question and it’s one I worry about a lot, because there have been some efforts to export our willful ignorance, say, to this country [the UK]. Steve Koonin, one of the five authors of the DoE climate working group report, has tried to persuade British colleagues that the science – the climate science done, say, at the Hadley Centre and other research centres and universities isn’t credible, that they shouldn’t make policy based on IPCC or internal climate assessments. And I think we’ll see more of that. I think the Royal Society needs to be very clear that it has to push back against those efforts to try and export our willful ignorance to this country and to Europe.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Those efforts are only just starting to ramp up in the US. We hear that the same five folks who worked on the DoE report are going to be in charge of the next [US] national climate assessment. And I would not be surprised to see folks like Koonin and others make more appearances over here and it’s in the [Trump] administration’s interests to undermine climate science internationally. Why? Because then they can say, well, “buy our oil – there are no consequences, no climate consequences. And the people who have told you that there are climate consequences are not real, credible scientists – believe our five hand-picked experts who wrote this DoE report and are now rewriting national climate assessments.”
I think you need here, in the UK, to observe what happened and the institutional failures to push back against this kind of willful ignorance and to learn from those failures. It really is critically important to support science and leading institutions can’t be silent. They can’t say, oh, we don’t want to offend president Trump, or we don’t want to offend Elon Musk, who is one of our members in the Royal Society. No, you will suffer serious, long-lasting reputational harm if you don’t defend science. That’s my lesson learned.
CB: Where do you see things going next in the US? What’s the next move for the Trump administration on climate change?
BS: Well, what I’ve mentioned already is that the five individuals who wrote the DoE’s climate working group report in July 2025 have apparently been tasked with leading the next national climate assessment, which is a congressionally mandated report to Congress. And it’s likely that that will be the same stuff we saw in the DoE report in July 2025 – a counter narrative, if you will, to mature scientific understanding encoded in 30+ years of IPCC reports. So, on the science side of things, it’s about presenting that counter narrative. It’s also, I think, about continuing to dismantle websites and continuing to present the public on EPA and NASA and NOAA websites with a very, very different understanding of the causes of climate change.
It’s – if Congress doesn’t do anything to stop it – going to involve continued cuts to NASA. The Trump administration has made it very clear that they don’t care about observing changes in Earth’s climate from space and they’re going to go after missions that they don’t like that provide basics – atmospheric temperature and atmospheric moisture and, again, pollutants, CO2 emissions, methane emissions, all of those kind of things I would say are imperilled, which is insane. That’s the only word for it. Removing our ability to measure and monitor how the world around us is changing, makes no sense whatsoever. But, yet, that’s where we are, because the data is inconvenient and doesn’t comport with the narrative of the president, that nothing is happening, nothing is changing, or if it is, it’s all natural.
I think there will be continued efforts to go after modelling capability, which is – again – heartbreaking. Some of the institutions I mentioned – like the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, Goddard Institute for Space Studies [GISS] – they’re already under attack. Their funding is under attack. Their leases, in the case of GISS, have been rescinded or cancelled. There are efforts to break up these groups of very, very talented women and men and scatter them to the wind. I think that’s going to continue. And what will be important will be to see whether Congress pushes back against these things or is fearful of incurring Trump’s wrath and allows this sort of stuff to continue internationally.
I think the US is not going to engage with IPCC or UN Framework Convention [on Climate Change] or COPs. [The Trump administration has now withdrawn the US from the IPCC and UNFCCC.] They don’t care. All they care about is exporting US and now Venezuelan oil, presumably. And they don’t care about advancing climate science or any kind of science, really, which is an unbelievable thing to say, coming from a country where science has, since the end of the second world war, been an integral part of the country, of its development, of its economy, of its of its future. Now we’re turning away from science in the US. It’s like we’re handing the baton of leadership to you and saying, “here, we’re done leading in climate science, medical science – you lead now, rest of the world, we’re going to go back and try and make the horse and buggy great again”.
CB: What do you see happening to the [EPA’s] “endangerment finding”?
BS: I think the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has, right from the beginning, intended to rescind the endangerment finding – following Trump’s lead and following the guidance of Project 2025 [A blueprint to reshape the US federal government under a Republican president, published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organisations.] There are powerful interests in the US that, right from the beginning, have argued, “the endangerment finding is bad for business, so get rid of it. This should be an important thrust of the second Trump administration.” And it has been, right from the beginning of the administration. And part of the job has been to come up with this scientific counter narrative – in the DoE report and, I believe, now in the planned next national climate assessment – to argue that, “the science isn’t credible. We don’t need an endangerment finding because human actions aren’t endangering the climate. It’s all natural, folks. Nothing to see here.” That’s going to continue.
But, as I mentioned, that faces challenges, that counter narrative now, because it was so badly done. The DoE report was so sloppy, so riddled with mistakes – some of which were really transparent, not shades of grey differences between experts, but really badly wrong stuff. That’s the DoE report. The factchecking on that report has been done. It’s out there, [it] got widespread publicity – thank you Carbon Brief; thank you, Andy Dessler. The fast track study of the US National Academy of Sciences – done partly in response to the DoE report – has affirmed and confirmed the science is credible. Humans are influencing global climate through burning fossil fuels, through particulate pollution, and we need to do something about it. This is a serious danger to human health.
So, Mr Zeldin’s challenge is a difficult one. I would say he’s got powerful scientific – well, decades of mature science – that he’s going against, that he’s tilting against. And that’s going to be a tough sell. But, that said, it’ll wind up before the US supreme court and the supreme court has a conservative majority. How they adjudicate, given that they already decided back in 2009 [it was actually 2007] that climate change constitutes a danger to human health, will they reverse their decision? There’s a lot of uncertainty. But one thing that is very certain is that Trump wants the endangerment finding rescinded and everything flows from that.
CB: I want to look back now a little bit more. We’re now 15+ years on since Climategate [when thousands of emails between climate scientists were stolen from a university server and selectively released online in an attempt to undermine COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009]. And I wondered how you feel about that whole experience now?
BS: Pretty bad about the whole experience. I did my PhD at the Climatic Research Unit at UEA [the University of East Anglia]. I got my PhD in 1987 and I then went to Hamburg to do a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute [for Meteorology]. Then, after Max Planck, I went to Livermore in 1992 and I continued to work together with people at the Climatic Research Unit. They weren’t only colleagues. They were friends. We published a boatload of papers together. Watching what happened, what unfolded in 2009 and thereafter was terrible. The human cost hasn’t really been revealed – to good people who spent their lives trying to compile surface temperature data sets.
The case of Phil Jones, in the case of Keith Briffa – to do dendrochronology and advance understanding of century timescale changes in climate from looking at tree rings – all of that good work was dragged through the mud by these forces of unreason, by folks who had no real understanding of the science of the integrity of the work. It was sickening and disgusting to witness bad things happen to such good people. I spent a fair bit of time back then in 2009 and 2010 providing input to various investigations, speaking publicly about the individuals involved, and I remain deeply concerned at that human cost. This isn’t a game. When you go after the integrity of individuals and the[ir] decency and honesty – in the public arena – in such a vicious and nasty way, it has consequences.
Some of those consequences aren’t visible to people on the outside, who don’t know folks like Phil Jones and folks like Keith Briffa and others deeply involved in Climategate – folks like Michael Mann. But those consequences, those personal consequences, are very real and I’m concerned that that’s where we’re going again. The way forward, say, for the Trump administration is to challenge the integrity and decency and honesty and motives of climate scientists – as is occurring with use of incendiary language like “con job”. That’s where we’re going again.
CB: How do you think that public trust in climate science – and scientists – compares now to back then?
BS: Well, language matters. Words matter. That’s been a lesson of mine – a lesson I learned back in 1995 with those 12 words with the “discernible human influence” finding. So when there’s this drum beat of incendiary language – “con job”, “hoax”, “conspiracy” – again and again and again, it erodes public trust in science and scientists: “Well, the President surely wouldn’t be saying these things if there weren’t something behind them.” These folks have huge megaphones that they can exploit on a daily basis.
They are in control of the levers of power now – websites at NASA, NOAA, EPA. The president can address the UN General Assembly and use this kind of “con job” language, “you’re all fools if you believe scientists”. I have to believe that that has impact – cumulative impact. If you keep on doing it again and again and again, you can erode public confidence in science. And that’s why part of my job, as I see it, is to be a public figure – to speak and to write about evidence: “How do we know? How have we reached this time in history when we know that we’re not innocent bystanders in the climate system. What’s the nature of the evidence? Who gained it? How did they gain it? Do scientists look at alternate hypotheses? Could it all be the sun, volcanoes, orbital perturbations, intrinsic variability?” We have to do a better job explaining how we know and why it matters to what’s at stake here.
This [year] is likely – 2025 – to be the second- or third-warmest year ever. [This has now been confirmed.] And, over my lifetime, I’ve seen the signal of human-caused warming emerge from the noise of natural variability. We know it’s real. We know that if we do nothing to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, that signal is going to manifest more clearly every year. So it’s critically, just critically, important to speak science to power and continue to push back against this narrative of “con job” and “hoax” and “conspiracy”. But it’s an uphill struggle. Again, given that I can have an interview with you, I can write stuff in Scientific American, but the president can reach tens of millions of people every day.
CB: Just thinking about the media, how do you think the media’s coverage of climate science has changed over time?
BS: I think it’s gotten better. Certainly back in the 90s, it was much more this binary, “he says, she says” type things: “Here’s Expert A, here’s Expert B, giving you some completely different view of a scientific question.” I would say that the reporting is now much more focused on trying to understand the science and rather than having duelling experts out there. Even in the US, we don’t get [prominent climate-sceptic scientists] Dick Lindzen or John Christy now, as we used to on every story about warming and changes in sea ice. You don’t get the counter narrative out there. And that’s good and that’s really positive.
Much of the reporting is now more in depth about what’s going on with the Thwaites great glacier, or what’s going on with sea level and what are the drivers of sea level rise? And all of that is good and positive. And I do think that there’s more effort to hold the administration accountable – the Trump administration accountable – for making incorrect claims. We were unwilling to use the word “lie” at the beginning of the first Trump administration. People are more willing now to say, “this is untrue, there’s no scientific basis for this statement or that statement”, and that’s good, too.
What I think is necessary, as I said before, is for more voices to enter the fray – for the leadership of powerful professional organisations to say, “this claim by the administration that climate science is a ‘con job’ is wrong. It’s not. And here are three decades of reports that we published that show that it’s a thing and we need to worry about it.” It can’t be just individual voices there of a few climate scientists speaking about the reality and seriousness of climate change.
CB: So, you have, obviously, been heavily involved in all IPCC reports throughout the years. We’re now at the early stages of the seventh assessment and countries are still yet to agree on a timeline for publication of the assessment reports. And I wonder what you thought that says about the state of climate politics today?
BS: Well, I’ve been involved in every IPCC assessment since the first one in 1990. I think they’re unique. They’re an invaluable way of providing the collective understanding of an entire community and showing how that understanding has evolved over time. I hope the IPCC continues. I think there’s a continuing need for an authoritative international organisation to say: “This is our best understanding of the science and this is our best understanding of likely outcomes if we do nothing to address the problem, or we follow this emission scenario, or this overshoot scenario.” We need that and it’s clearly good to be able to put error bars on these projections, to have the entire global scientific community involved – and be able to say: “This is what we know with confidence, this is what we don’t know with confidence. Here are our levels of confidence.”
All of that is extraordinary when you think about it, how a community has come together to make these authoritative assessments of the state of our understanding. Which is why it’s been so threatening, I think, to the Trump administration and why they pulled out of IPCC [in 2025] and why they don’t like it.
[The following part of Santer’s answer is missing from the video recording because of a technical issue.]
Because it doesn’t support the president’s narrative that this is a “con job” and that history is valuable to see how, over time, things have firmed up, how the “balance of evidence” finding was transformed into “unequivocal” human fingerprints on climate. Capturing that arc of history, that arc of scientific understanding.
But the IPCC has challenges. The US is backing out now. There are some efforts on the part of the philanthropic community to allow individual US scientists to participate. I hope that that continues. I hope that the US, in some way or other, continues to make scientific contributions to the IPCC. But I do worry about this fractured landscape, with powerful forces out there seeking to undermine the work of the IPCC. We’re going to see the rise of those forces – not only in the US, but elsewhere – to silence or diminish the effectiveness of voices like IPCC. So we need to be prepared for that and we need to have very clear communications about the richness of the evidence.
I think the scientific community and the IPCC maybe haven’t been that good in terms of explaining just how compelling the evidence is for human effects on climate – just how multivariate it is: atmosphere, ocean, land, temperature, moisture, circulation, ice. It’s everywhere. It’s in our backyards. It’s not just evidence of human effects on climate in the far flung Arctic or a few Pacific islands, we need to communicate that better.
CB: Thank you so much for your time.
The post Prof Ben Santer: Trump administration is ‘embracing ignorance’ on climate science appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Prof Ben Santer: Trump administration is ‘embracing ignorance’ on climate science
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 February 2026: US secret climate panel ‘unlawful’ | China’s clean energy boon | Can humans reverse nature loss?
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Secrets and layoffs
UNLAWFUL PANEL: A federal judge ruled that the US energy department “violated the law when secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who rejected the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper explained that a 1972 law “does not allow agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups for the purposes of policymaking”. A Carbon Brief factcheck found more than 100 false or misleading claims in the report.
DARKNESS DESCENDS: The Washington Post reportedly sent layoff notices to “at least 14” of its climate journalists, as part of a wider move from the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, to eliminate 300 jobs at the publication, claimed Climate Colored Goggles. After the layoffs, the newspaper will have five journalists left on its award-winning climate desk, according to the substack run by a former climate reporter at the Los Angeles Times. It comes after CBS News laid off most of its climate team in October, it added.
WIND UNBLOCKED: Elsewhere, a separate federal ruling said that a wind project off the coast of New York state can continue, which now means that “all five offshore wind projects halted by the Trump administration in December can resume construction”, said Reuters. Bloomberg added that “Ørsted said it has spent $7bn on the development, which is 45% complete”.
Around the world
- CHANGING TIDES: The EU is “mulling a new strategy” in climate diplomacy after struggling to gather support for “faster, more ambitious action to cut planet-heating emissions” at last year’s UN climate summit COP30, reported Reuters.
- FINANCE ‘CUT’: The UK government is planning to cut climate finance by more than a fifth, from £11.6bn over the past five years to £9bn in the next five, according to the Guardian.
- BIG PLANS: India’s 2026 budget included a new $2.2bn funding push for carbon capture technologies, reported Carbon Brief. The budget also outlined support for renewables and the mining and processing of critical minerals.
- MOROCCO FLOODS: More than 140,000 people have been evacuated in Morocco as “heavy rainfall and water releases from overfilled dams led to flooding”, reported the Associated Press.
- CASHFLOW: “Flawed” economic models used by governments and financial bodies “ignor[e] shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points”, posing the risk of a “global financial crash”, according to a Carbon Tracker report covered by the Guardian.
- HEATING UP: The International Olympic Committee is discussing options to hold future winter games earlier in the year “because of the effects of warmer temperatures”, said the Associated Press.
54%
The increase in new solar capacity installed in Africa over 2024-25 – the continent’s fastest growth on record, according to a Global Solar Council report covered by Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
- Arctic warming significantly postpones the retreat of the Afro-Asian summer monsoon, worsening autumn rainfall | Environmental Research Letters
- “Positive” images of heatwaves reduce the impact of messages about extreme heat, according to a survey of 4,000 US adults | Environmental Communication
- Greenland’s “peripheral” glaciers are projected to lose nearly one-fifth of their total area and almost one-third of their total volume by 2100 under a low-emissions scenario | The Cryosphere
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Solar power, electric vehicles and other clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy in 2025 – and more than 90% of the rise in investment, according to new analysis for Carbon Brief (shown in blue above). Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada, the analysis said.
Spotlight
Can humans reverse nature decline?
This week, Carbon Brief travelled to a UN event in Manchester, UK to speak to biodiversity scientists about the chances of reversing nature loss.
Officials from more than 150 countries arrived in Manchester this week to approve a new UN report on how nature underpins economic prosperity.
The meeting comes just four years before nations are due to meet a global target to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, agreed in 2022 under the landmark “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF).
At the sidelines of the meeting, Carbon Brief spoke to a range of scientists about humanity’s chances of meeting the 2030 goal. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Dr David Obura, ecologist and chair of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
We can’t halt and reverse the decline of every ecosystem. But we can try to “bend the curve” or halt and reverse the drivers of decline. That’s the economic drivers, the indirect drivers and the values shifts we need to have. What the GBF aspires to do, in terms of halting and reversing biodiversity loss, we can put in place the enabling drivers for that by 2030, but we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point to halt [the loss] of all ecosystems.
Dr Luthando Dziba, executive secretary of IPBES
Countries are due to report on progress by the end of February this year on their national strategies to the Convention on Biological Diversity [CBD]. Once we get that, coupled with a process that is ongoing within the CBD, which is called the global stocktake, I think that’s going to give insights on progress as to whether this is possible to achieve by 2030…Are we on the right trajectory? I think we are and hopefully we will continue to move towards the final destination of having halted biodiversity loss, but also of living in harmony with nature.
Prof Laura Pereira, scientist at the Global Change Institute at Wits University, South Africa
At the global level, I think it’s very unlikely that we’re going to achieve the overall goal of halting biodiversity loss by 2030. That being said, I think we will make substantial inroads towards achieving our longer term targets. There is a lot of hope, but we’ve also got to be very aware that we have not necessarily seen the transformative changes that are going to be needed to really reverse the impacts on biodiversity.
Dr David Cooper, chair of the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee and former executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity
It’s important to look at the GBF as a whole…I think it is possible to achieve those targets, or at least most of them, and to make substantial progress towards them. It is possible, still, to take action to put nature on a path to recovery. We’ll have to increasingly look at the drivers.
Prof Andrew Gonzalez, McGill University professor and co-chair of an IPBES biodiversity monitoring assessment
I think for many of the 23 targets across the GBF, it’s going to be challenging to hit those by 2030. I think we’re looking at a process that’s starting now in earnest as countries [implement steps and measure progress]…You have to align efforts for conserving nature, the economics of protecting nature [and] the social dimensions of that, and who benefits, whose rights are preserved and protected.
Neville Ash, director of the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre
The ambitions in the 2030 targets are very high, so it’s going to be a stretch for many governments to make the actions necessary to achieve those targets, but even if we make all the actions in the next four years, it doesn’t mean we halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. It means we put the action in place to enable that to happen in the future…The important thing at this stage is the urgent action to address the loss of biodiversity, with the result of that finding its way through by the ambition of 2050 of living in harmony with nature.
Prof Pam McElwee, Rutgers University professor and co-chair of an IPBES “nexus assessment” report
If you look at all of the available evidence, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to keep experiencing biodiversity decline. I mean, it’s fairly similar to the 1.5C climate target. We are not going to meet that either. But that doesn’t mean that you slow down the ambition…even though you recognise that we probably won’t meet that specific timebound target, that’s all the more reason to continue to do what we’re doing and, in fact, accelerate action.
Watch, read, listen
OIL IMPACTS: Gas flaring has risen in the Niger Delta since oil and gas major Shell sold its assets in the Nigerian “oil hub”, a Climate Home News investigation found.
LOW SNOW: The Washington Post explored how “climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host”.
CULTURE WARS: A Media Confidential podcast examined when climate coverage in the UK became “part of the culture wars”.
Coming up
- 2-8 February: 12th session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Manchester, UK
- 8 February: Japanese general election
- 8 February: Portugal presidential election
- 11 February: Barbados general election
- 11-12 February: UN climate chief Simon Stiell due to speak in Istanbul, Turkey
Pick of the jobs
- UK Met Office, senior climate science communicator | Salary: £43,081-£46,728. Location: Exeter, UK
- Canadian Red Cross, programme officer, Indigenous operations – disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation | Salary: $56,520-$60,053. Location: Manitoba, Canada
- Aldersgate Group, policy officer | Salary: £33,949-£39,253. Location: London (hybrid)
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 6 February 2026: US secret climate panel ‘unlawful’ | China’s clean energy boon | Can humans reverse nature loss? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Greenhouse Gases
China Briefing 5 February 2026: Clean energy’s share of economy | Record renewables | Thawing relations with UK
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing.
China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Solar and wind eclipsed coal
‘FIRST TIME IN HISTORY’: China’s total power capacity reached 3,890 gigawatts (GW) in 2025, according to a National Energy Administration (NEA) data release covered by industry news outlet International Energy Net. Of this, it said, solar capacity rose 35% to 1,200GW and wind capacity was up 23% to 640GW, while thermal capacity – which is mostly coal – grew 6% to just over 1,500GW. This marks the “first time in history” that wind and solar capacity has outranked coal capacity in China’s power mix, reported the state-run newspaper China Daily. China’s grid-related energy storage capacity exceeded 213GW in 2025, said state news agency Xinhua. Meanwhile, clean-energy industries “drove more than 90%” of investment growth and more than half of GDP growth last year, said the Guardian in its coverage of new analysis for Carbon Brief. (See more in the spotlight below.)
DAWN FOR SOLAR: Solar power capacity alone may outpace coal in 2026, according to projections by the China Electricity Council (CEC), reported business news outlet 21st Century Business Herald. It added that non-fossil sources could account for 63% of the power mix this year, with coal falling to 31%. Separately, the China Renewable Energy Society said that annual wind-power additions could grow by between 600-980GW over the next five years, with annual additions of 120GW expected until 2028, said industry news outlet China Energy Net. China Energy Net also published the full CEC report.
STATE MEDIA VOICE: Xinhua published several energy- and climate-related articles in a series on the 15th five-year plan. One said that becoming a low-carbon energy “powerhouse” will support decarbonisation efforts, strengthen industrial innovation and improve China’s “global competitive edge and standing”. Another stated that coal consumption is “expected” to peak around 2027, with continued “growth” in the power and chemicals sector, while oil has already peaked. A third noted that distributed energy systems better matched the “characteristics of renewable energy” than centralised ones, but warned against “blind” expansion and insufficient supporting infrastructure. Others in the series discussed biodiversity and environmental protection and recycling of clean-energy technology. Meanwhile, the communist party-affiliated People’s Daily said that oil will continue to play a “vital role” in China, even after demand peaks.
Starmer and Xi endorsed clean-energy cooperation
CLIMATE PARTNERSHIP: UK prime minister Keir Starmer and Chinese president Xi Jinping pledged in Beijing to deepen cooperation on “green energy”, reported finance news outlet Caixin. They also agreed to establish a “China-UK high-level climate and nature partnership”, said China Daily. Xi told Starmer that the two countries should “carry out joint research and industrial transformation” in new energy and low-carbon technologies, according to Xinhua. It also cited Xi as saying China “hopes” the UK will provide a “fair” business environment for Chinese companies.
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OCTOPUS OVERSEAS: During the visit, UK power-trading company Octopus Energy and Chinese energy services firm PCG Power announced they would be starting a new joint venture in China, named Bitong Energy, reported industry news outlet PV Magazine. The move “marks a notable direct entry” of a foreign company into China’s “tightly regulated electricity market”, said Caixin.
PUSH AND PULL: UK policymakers also visited Chinese clean-energy technology manufacturer Envision in Shanghai, reported finance news outlet Yicai. It quoted UK business secretary Peter Kyle emphasising that partnering with companies “like Envision” on sustainability is a “really important part of our future”, particularly in terms of job creation in the UK. Trade minister Chris Bryant told Radio Scotland Breakfast that the government will decide on Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Mingyang’s plans for a Scotland factory “soon”. Researchers at the thinktank Oxford Institute for Energy Studies wrote in a guest post for Carbon Brief that greater Chinese competition in Europe’s wind market could “help spur competition in Europe”, if localisation rules and “other guardrails” are applied.
More China news
- LIFE SUPPORT: China will update its coal capacity payment mechanism, which will raise thresholds for coal-fired power plants and expand to cover gas-fired power and pumped and new-energy storage, reported current affairs outlet China News.
- FRONTIER TECH: The world’s “largest compressed-air power storage plant” has begun operating in China, said Bloomberg.
- PARTNERSHIP A ‘MISTAKE’: The EU launched a “foreign subsidies” probe into Chinese wind turbine company Goldwind, said the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said the bloc must resist China’s pull in clean technologies, according to Bloomberg.
- TRADE SPAT: The World Trade Organization “backed a complaint by China” that the US Inflation Reduction Act “discriminated against” Chinese cleantech exports, said Reuters.
- NEW RULES: China has set “new regulations” for the Waliguan Baseline Observatory, which provides “key scientific references for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”, said the People’s Daily.
Captured
New or reactivated proposals for coal-fired power plants in China totalled 161GW in 2025, according to a new report covered by Carbon Brief.
Spotlight
Clean energy drove China’s economic growth in 2025
New analysis for Carbon Brief finds that clean-energy sectors contributed the equivalent of $2.1tn to China’s economy last year, making it a key driver of growth. However, headwinds in 2026 could restrict growth going forward – especially for the solar sector.
Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be read in full on Carbon Brief’s website.
Solar power, electric vehicles (EVs) and other clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy in 2025 – and more than 90% of the rise in investment.
Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP)
Analysis shows that China’s clean-energy sectors nearly doubled in real value between 2022-25 and – if they were a country – would now be the 8th-largest economy in the world.
These investments in clean-energy manufacturing represent a large bet on the energy transition in China and overseas, creating an incentive for the government and enterprises to keep the boom going.
However, there is uncertainty about what will happen this year and beyond, particularly due to a new pricing system, worsening industrial “overcapacity” and trade tensions.
Outperforming the wider economy
China’s clean-energy economy continues to grow far more quickly than the wider economy, making an outsized contribution to annual growth.
Without these sectors, China’s GDP would have expanded by 3.5% in 2025 instead of the reported 5.0%, missing the target of “around 5%” growth by a wide margin.
Clean energy made a crucial contribution during a challenging year, when promoting economic growth was the foremost aim for policymakers.
In 2024, EVs and solar had been the largest growth drivers. In 2025, it was EVs and batteries, which delivered 44% of the economic impact and more than half of the growth of the clean-energy industries.
The next largest subsector was clean-power generation, transmission and storage, which made up 40% of the contribution to GDP and 30% of the growth in 2025.
Within the electricity sector, the largest drivers were growth in investment in wind and solar power generation capacity, along with growth in power output from solar and wind, followed by the exports of solar-power equipment and materials.
But investment in solar-panel supply chains, a major growth driver in 2022-23, continued to fall for the second year, as the government made efforts to rein in overcapacity and “irrational” price competition.
Headwinds for solar
Ongoing investment of hundreds of billions of dollars represents a gigantic bet on a continuing global energy transition.
However, developments next year and beyond are unclear, particularly for solar. A new pricing system for renewable power is creating uncertainty, while central government targets have been set far below current rates of clean-electricity additions.
Investment in solar-power generation and solar manufacturing declined in the second half of the year.
The reduction in the prices of clean-energy technology has been so dramatic that when the prices for GDP statistics are updated, the sectors’ contribution to real GDP – adjusted for inflation or, in this case deflation – will be revised down.
Nevertheless, the key economic role of the industry creates a strong motivation to keep the clean-energy boom going. A slowdown in the domestic market could also undermine efforts to stem overcapacity and inflame trade tensions by increasing pressure on exports to absorb supply.
Local governments and state-owned enterprises will also influence the outlook for the sector.
Provincial governments have a lot of leeway in implementing the new electricity markets and contracting systems for renewable power generation. The new five-year plans, to be published this year, will, therefore, be of major importance.
This spotlight was written for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), and Belinda Schaepe, China policy analyst at CREA. CREA China analysts Qi Qin and Chengcheng Qiu contributed research.
Watch, read, listen
PROVINCE INFLUENCE: The Institute for Global Decarbonization Progress, a Beijing-based thinktank, published a report examining the climate-related statements in provincial recommendations for the 15th five-year plan.
‘PIVOT’?: The Outrage + Optimism podcast spoke with the University of Bath’s Dr Yixian Sun about whether China sees itself as a climate leader and what its role in climate negotiations could be going forward.
COOKING FOR CLEAN-TECH: Caixin covered rising demand for China’s “gutter oil” as companies “scramble” to decarbonise.
DON’T GO IT ALONE: China News broadcast the Chinese foreign ministry’s response to the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, with spokeswoman Mao Ning saying “no country can remain unaffected” by climate change.
$6.8tn
The current size of China’s green-finance economy, including loans, bonds and equity, according to Dr Ma Jun, the Institute of Finance and Sustainability’s president,in a report launch event attended by Carbon Brief. Dr Ma added that “green loans” make up 16% of all loans in China, with some areas seeing them take a 34% share.
New science
- China’s official emissions inventories have overestimated its hydrofluorocarbon emissions by an average of 117m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (mtCO2e) every year since 2017 | Nature Geoscience
- “Intensified forest management efforts” in China from 2010 onwards have been linked to an acceleration in carbon absorption by plants and soils | Communications Earth and Environment
Recently published on WeChat
China Briefing is written by Anika Patel and edited by Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
The post China Briefing 5 February 2026: Clean energy’s share of economy | Record renewables | Thawing relations with UK appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Solar power, electric vehicles (EVs) and other clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy in 2025 – and more than 90% of the rise in investment.
Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures, industry data and analyst reports, shows that China’s clean-energy sectors nearly doubled in real value between 2022-25 and – if they were a country – would now be the 8th-largest economy in the world.
Other key findings from the analysis include:
- Without clean-energy sectors, China would have missed its target for GDP growth of “around 5%”, expanding by 3.5% in 2025 instead of the reported 5.0%.
- Clean-energy industries are expanding much more quickly than China’s economy overall, with their annual growth rate accelerating from 12% in 2024 to 18% in 2025.
- The “new three” of EVs, batteries and solar continue to dominate the economic contribution of clean energy in China, generating two-thirds of the value added and attracting more than half of all investment in the sectors.
- China’s investments in clean energy reached 7.2tn yuan ($1.0tn) in 2025, roughly four times the still sizable $260bn put into fossil-fuel extraction and coal power.
- Exports of clean-energy technologies grew rapidly in 2025, but China’s domestic market still far exceeds the export market in value for Chinese firms.
These investments in clean-energy manufacturing represent a large bet on the energy transition in China and overseas, creating an incentive for the government and enterprises to keep the boom going.
However, there is uncertainty about what will happen this year and beyond, particularly for solar power, where growth has slowed in response to a new pricing system and where central government targets have been set far below the recent rate of expansion.
An ongoing slowdown could turn the sectors into a drag on GDP, while worsening industrial “overcapacity” and exacerbating trade tensions.
Yet, even if central government targets in the next five-year plan are modest, those from local governments and state-owned enterprises could still drive significant growth in clean energy.
This article updates analysis previously reported for 2023 and 2024.
Clean-energy sectors outperform wider economy
China’s clean-energy economy continues to grow far more quickly than the wider economy. This means that it is making an outsize contribution to annual economic growth.
The figure below shows that clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy overall in 2025 and more than 90% of the net rise in investment.
In 2022, China’s clean-energy economy was worth an estimated 8.4tn yuan ($1.2tn). By 2025, the sectors had nearly doubled in value to 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn).
This is comparable to the entire output of Brazil or Canada and positions the Chinese clean-energy industry as the 8th-largest economy in the world. Its value is roughly half the size of the economy of India – the world’s fourth largest – or of the US state of California.
The outperformance of the clean-energy sectors means that they are also claiming a rising share of China’s economy overall, as shown in the figure below.
This share has risen from 7.3% of China’s GDP in 2022 to 11.4% in 2025.
Without clean-energy sectors, China’s GDP would have expanded by 3.5% in 2025 instead of the reported 5.0%, missing the target of “around 5%” growth by a wide margin.
Clean energy thus made a crucial contribution during a challenging year, when promoting economic growth was the foremost aim for policymakers.
The table below includes a detailed breakdown by sector and activity.
| Sector | Activity | Value in 2025, CNY bln | Value in 2025, USD bln | Year-on-year growth | Growth contribution | Value contribution | Value in 2025, CNY trn | Value in 2024, CNY trn | Value in 2023, CNY trn | Value in 2022, CNY trn |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EVs | Investment: manufacturing capacity | 1,643 | 228 | 18% | 10.4% | 10.7% | 1.6 | 1.4 | 1.2 | 0.9 |
| EVs | Investment: charging infrastructure | 192 | 27 | 58% | 2.9% | 1.2% | 0.192 | 0.122 | 0.1 | 0.08 |
| EVs | Production of vehicles | 3,940 | 548 | 29% | 36.4% | 25.6% | 3.94 | 3.065 | 2.26 | 1.65 |
| Batteries | Investment: battery manufacturing | 277 | 38 | 35% | 3.0% | 1.8% | 0.277 | 0.205 | 0.32 | 0.15 |
| Batteries | Exports: batteries | 724 | 101 | 51% | 10.1% | 4.7% | 0.724 | 0.48 | 0.46 | 0.34 |
| Solar power | Investment: power generation capacity | 1,182 | 164 | 15% | 6.3% | 7.7% | 1.182 | 1.031 | 0.808 | 0.34 |
| Solar power | Investment: manufacturing capacity | 506 | 70 | -23% | -6.5% | 3.3% | 0.506 | 0.662 | 0.95 | 0.51 |
| Solar power | Electricity generation | 491 | 68 | 33% | 5.1% | 3.2% | 0.491 | 0.369 | 0.26 | 0.19 |
| Solar power | Exports of components | 681 | 95 | 21% | 4.9% | 4.4% | 0.681 | 0.562 | 0.5 | 0.35 |
| Wind power | Investment: power generation capacity, onshore | 612 | 85 | 47% | 8.1% | 4.0% | 0.612 | 0.417 | 0.397 | 0.21 |
| Wind power | Investment: power generation capacity, offshore | 96 | 13 | 98% | 2.0% | 0.6% | 0.096 | 0.048 | 0.086 | 0.06 |
| Wind power | Electricity generation | 510 | 71 | 13% | 2.4% | 3.3% | 0.51 | 0.453 | 0.4 | 0.34 |
| Nuclear power | Investment: power generation capacity | 173 | 24 | 18% | 1.1% | 1.1% | 0.17 | 0.15 | 0.09 | 0.07 |
| Nuclear power | Electricity generation | 216 | 30 | 8% | 0.7% | 1.4% | 0.216 | 0.2 | 0.19 | 0.19 |
| Hydropower | Investment: power generation capacity | 54 | 7 | -7% | -0.2% | 0.3% | 0.05 | 0.06 | 0.06 | 0.06 |
| Hydropower | Electricity generation | 582 | 81 | 3% | 0.6% | 3.8% | 0.582 | 0.567 | 0.51 | 0.51 |
| Rail transportation | Investment | 902 | 125 | 6% | 2.1% | 5.8% | 0.902 | 0.851 | 0.764 | 0.714 |
| Rail transportation | Transport of passengers and goods | 1,020 | 142 | 3% | 1.3% | 6.6% | 1.02 | 0.99 | 0.964 | 0.694 |
| Electricity transmission | Investment: transmission capacity | 644 | 90 | 6% | 1.5% | 4.2% | 0.64 | 0.61 | 0.53 | 0.5 |
| Electricity transmission | Transmission of clean power | 52 | 7 | 14% | 0.3% | 0.3% | 0.052 | 0.046 | 0.04 | 0.04 |
| Energy storage | Investment: Pumped hydro | 53 | 7 | 5% | 0.1% | 0.3% | 0.05 | 0.05 | 0.04 | 0.03 |
| Energy storage | Investment: Grid-connected batteries | 232 | 32 | 52% | 3.3% | 1.5% | 0.232 | 0.152 | 0.08 | 0.02 |
| Energy storage | Investment: Electrolysers | 11 | 2 | 29% | 0.1% | 0.1% | 0.011 | 0.009 | 0 | 0 |
| Energy efficiency | Revenue: Energy service companies | 620 | 86 | 17% | 3.8% | 4.0% | 0.62 | 0.528003 | 0.52 | 0.45 |
| Total | Investments | 7,198 | 1001 | 15% | 38.2% | 46.7% | 7.20 | 6.28 | 6.00 | 4.11 |
| Total | Production of goods and services | 8,216 | 1,143 | 22% | 61.8% | 53.3% | 8.22 | 6.73 | 5.58 | 4.32 |
| Total | Total GDP contribution | 15,414 | 2144 | 18% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 15.41 | 13.01 | 11.58 | 8.42 |
EVs and batteries were the largest drivers of GDP growth
In 2024, EVs and solar had been the largest growth drivers. In 2025, it was EVs and batteries, which delivered 44% of the economic impact and more than half of the growth of the clean-energy industries. This was due to strong growth in both output and investment.
The contribution to nominal GDP growth – unadjusted for inflation – was even larger, as EV prices held up year-on-year while the economy as a whole suffered from deflation. Investment in battery manufacturing rebounded after a fall in 2024.
The major contribution of EVs and batteries is illustrated in the figure below, which shows both the overall size of the clean-energy economy and the sectors that added the most to the rise from year to year.
The next largest subsector was clean-power generation, transmission and storage, which made up 40% of the contribution to GDP and 30% of the growth in 2025.
Within the electricity sector, the largest drivers were growth in investment in wind and solar power generation capacity, along with growth in power output from solar and wind, followed by the exports of solar-power equipment and materials.
Investment in solar-panel supply chains, a major growth driver in 2022-23, continued to fall for the second year. This was in line with the government’s efforts to rein in overcapacity and “irrational” price competition in the sector.
Finally, rail transportation was responsible for 12% of the total economic output of the clean-energy sectors, but saw relatively muted growth year-on-year, with revenue up 3% and investment by 6%.
Note that the International Energy Agency (IEA) world energy investment report projected that China invested $627bn in clean energy in 2025, against $257bn in fossil fuels.
For the same sectors as the IEA report, this analysis puts the value of clean-energy investment in 2025 at a significantly more conservative $430bn. The higher figures in this analysis overall are therefore the result of wider sectoral coverage.
Electric vehicles and batteries
EVs and vehicle batteries were again the largest contributors to China’s clean-energy economy in 2025, making up an estimated 44% of value overall.
Of this total, the largest share of both total value and growth came from the production of battery EVs and plug-in hybrids, which expanded 29% year-on-year. This was followed by investment into EV manufacturing, which grew 18%, after slower growth rates in 2024.
Investment in battery manufacturing also rebounded after a drop in 2024, driven by new battery technology and strong demand from both domestic and international markets. Battery manufacturing investment grew by 35% year-on-year to 277bn yuan.
The share of electric vehicles (EVs) will have reached 12% of all vehicles on the road by the end of 2025, up from 9% a year earlier and less than 2% just five years ago.
The share of EVs in the sales of all new vehicles increased to 48%, from 41% in 2024, with passenger cars crossing the 50% threshold. In November, EV sales crossed the 60% mark in total sales and they continue to drive overall automotive sales growth, as shown below.
Electric trucks experienced a breakthrough as their market share rose from 8% in the first nine months of 2024 to 23% in the same period in 2025.
Policy support for EVs continues, for example, with a new policy aiming to nearly double charging infrastructure in the next three years.
Exports grew even faster than the domestic market, but the vast majority of EVs continue to be sold domestically. In 2025, China produced 16.6m EVs, rising 29% year-on-year. While exports accounted for only 21% or 3.4m EVs, they grew by 86% year-on-year. Top export destinations for Chinese EVs were western Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
The value of batteries exported also grew rapidly by 41% year-on-year, becoming the third largest growth driver of the GDP. Battery exports largely went to western Europe, north America and south-east Asia.
In contrast with deflationary trends in the price of many clean-energy technologies, average EV prices have held up in 2025, with a slight increase in average price of new models, after discounts. This also means that the contribution of the EV industry to nominal GDP growth was even more significant, given that overall producer prices across the economy fell by 2.6%. Battery prices continued to drop.
Clean-power generation
The solar power sector generated 19% of the total value of the clean-energy industries in 2025, adding 2.9tn yuan ($41bn) to the national economy.
Within this, investment in new solar power plants, at 1.2tn yuan ($160bn), was the largest driver, followed by the value of solar technology exports and by the value of the power generated from solar. Investment in manufacturing continued to fall after the wave of capacity additions in 2023, reaching 0.5tn yuan ($72bn), down 23% year-on-year.
In 2025, China achieved another new record of wind and solar capacity additions. The country installed a total of 315GW solar and 119GW wind capacity, adding more solar and two times as much wind as the rest of the world combined.
Clean energy accounted for 90% of investment in power generation, with solar alone covering 50% of that. As a result, non-fossil power made up 42% of total power generation, up from 39% in 2024.
However, a new pricing policy for new solar and wind projects and modest targets for capacity growth have created uncertainty about whether the boom will continue.
Under the new policy, new clean-power generation has to compete on price against existing coal power in markets that place it at a disadvantage in some key ways.
At the same time, the electricity markets themselves are still being introduced and developed, creating investment uncertainty.
Investment in solar power generation increased year-on-year by 15%, but experienced a strong stop-and-go cycle. Developers rushed to finish projects ahead of the new pricing policy coming into force in June and then again towards the end of the year to finalise projects ahead of the end of the current 14th five-year plan.
Investment in the solar sector as a whole was stable year-on-year, with the decline in manufacturing capacity investment balanced by continued growth in power generation capacity additions. This helped shore up the utilisation of manufacturing plants, in line with the government’s aim to reduce “disorderly” price competition.
By late 2025, China’s solar manufacturing capacity reached an estimated 1,200GW per year, well ahead of the global capacity additions of around 650GW in 2025. Manufacturers can now produce far more solar panels than the global market can absorb, with fierce competition leading to historically low profitability.
China’s policymakers have sought to address the issue since mid-2024, warning against “involution”, passing regulations and convening a sector-wide meeting to put pressure on the industry. This is starting to yield results, with losses narrowing in the third quarter of 2025.
The volume of exports of solar panels and components reached a record high in 2025, growing 19% year-on-year. In particular, exports of cells and wafers increased rapidly by 94% and 52%, while panel exports grew only by 4%.
This reflects the growing diversification of solar-supply chains in the face of tariffs and with more countries around the world building out solar panel manufacturing capacity. The nominal value of exports fell 8%, however, due to a fall in average prices and a shift to exporting upstream intermediate products instead of finished panels.
Hydropower, wind and nuclear were responsible for 15% of the total value of the clean-energy sectors in 2025, adding some 2.2tn yuan ($310bn) to China’s GDP in 2025.
Nearly two-thirds of this (1.3tn yuan, $180bn) came from the value of power generation from hydropower, wind and nuclear, with investment in new power generation projects contributing the rest.
Power generation grew 33% from solar, 13% from wind, 3% from hydropower and 8% from nuclear.
Within power generation investment, solar remained the largest segment by value – as shown in the figure below – but wind-power generation projects were the largest contributor to growth, overtaking solar for the first time since 2020.
In particular, offshore wind power capacity investment rebounded as expected, doubling in 2025 after a sharp drop in 2024.
Investment in nuclear projects continued to grow but remains smaller in total terms, at 17bn yuan. Investment in conventional hydropower continued to decline by 7%.
Electricity storage and grids
Electricity transmission and storage were responsible for 6% of the total value of the clean-energy sectors in 2025, accounting for 1.0 tn yuan ($140bn).
The most valuable sub-segment was investment in power grids, growing 6% in 2025 and reaching $90bn. This was followed by investment in energy storage, including pumped hydropower, grid-connected battery storage and hydrogen production.
Investment in grid-connected batteries saw the largest year-on-year growth, increasing by 50%, while investments in electrolysers also grew by 30%. The transmission of clean power increased an estimated 13%, due to rapid growth in clean-power generation.
China’s total electricity storage capacity reached more than 213GW, with battery storage capacity crossing 145GW and pumped hydro storage at 69GW. Some 66GW of battery storage capacity was added in 2025, up 52% year-on-year and accounting for more than 40% of global capacity additions.
Notably, capacity additions accelerated in the second half of the year, with 43GW added, compared with the first half, which saw 23GW of new capacity.
The battery storage market initially slowed after the renewable power pricing policy, which banned storage mandates after May, but this was quickly replaced by a “market-driven boom”. Provincial electricity spot markets, time-of-day tariffs and increasing curtailment of solar power all improved the economics of adding storage.
By the end of 2025, China’s top five solar manufacturers had all entered the battery storage market, making a shift in industry strategy.
Investment in pumped hydropower continued to increase, with 15GW of new capacity permitted in the first half of 2025 alone and 3GW entering operation.
Railways
Rail transportation made up 12% of the GDP contribution of the clean-energy sectors, with revenue from passenger and goods rail transportation the largest source of value. Most growth came from investment in rail infrastructure, which increased 6% year-on-year
The electrification of transport is not limited to EVs, as rail passenger, freight and investment volumes saw continued growth. The total length of China’s high-speed railway network reached 50,000km in 2025, making up more than 70% of the global high-speed total.
Energy efficiency
Investment in energy efficiency rebounded strongly in 2025. Measured by the aggregate turnover of large energy service companies (ESCOs), the market expanded by 17% year-on-year, returning to growth rates last seen during 2016-2020.
Total industry turnover has also recovered to its previous peak in 2021, signalling a clear turnaround after three years of weakness.
Industry projections now anticipate annual turnover reaching 1tn yuan in annual turnover by 2030, a target that had previously been expected to be met by 2025.
China’s ESCO market has evolved into the world’s largest. Investment within China’s ESCO market remains heavily concentrated in the buildings sector, which accounts for around 50% of total activity. Industrial applications make up a further 21%, while energy supply, demand-side flexibility and energy storage together account for approximately 16%.
Implications of China’s clean-energy bet
Ongoing investment of hundreds of billions of dollars into clean-energy manufacturing represents a gigantic economic and financial bet on a continuing global energy transition.
In addition to the domestic investment covered in this article, Chinese firms are making major investments in overseas manufacturing.
The clean-energy industries have played a crucial role in meeting China’s economic targets during the five-year period ending this year, delivering an estimated 40%, 25% and 37% of all GDP growth in 2023, 2024 and 2025, respectively.
However, the developments next year and beyond are unclear, particularly for solar power generation, with the new pricing system for renewable power generation leading to a short-term slowdown and creating major uncertainty, while central government targets have been set far below current rates of clean-electricity additions.
Investment in solar-power generation and solar manufacturing declined in the second half of the year, while investment in generation clocked growth for the full year, showing the risk to the industries under the current power market set-ups that favour coal-fired power.
The reduction in the prices of clean-energy technology has been so dramatic that when the prices for GDP statistics are updated, the sectors’ contribution to real GDP – adjusted for inflation or, in this case deflation – will be revised down.
Nevertheless, the key economic role of the industry creates a strong motivation to keep the clean-energy boom going. A slowdown in the domestic market could also undermine efforts to stem overcapacity and inflame trade tensions by increasing pressure on exports to absorb supply.
A recent CREA survey of experts working on climate and energy issues in China found that the majority believe that economic and geopolitical challenges will make the “dual carbon” goals – and with that, clean-energy industries – only more important.
Local governments and state-owned enterprises will also influence the outlook for the sector. Their previous five-year plans played a key role in creating the gigantic wind and solar power “bases” that substantially exceeded the central government’s level of ambition.
Provincial governments also have a lot of leeway in implementing the new electricity markets and contracting systems for renewable power generation. The new five-year plans, to be published this year, will therefore be of major importance.
About the data
Reported investment expenditure and sales revenue has been used where available. When this is not available, estimates are based on physical volumes – gigawatts of capacity installed, number of vehicles sold – and unit costs or prices.
The contribution to real growth is tracked by adjusting for inflation using 2022-2023 prices.
All calculations and data sources are given in a worksheet.
Estimates include the contribution of clean-energy technologies to the demand for upstream inputs such as metals and chemicals.
This approach shows the contribution of the clean-energy sectors to driving economic activity, also outside the sectors themselves, and is appropriate for estimating how much lower economic growth would have been without growth in these sectors.
Double counting is avoided by only including non-overlapping points in value chains. For example, the value of EV production and investment in battery storage of electricity is included, but not the value of battery production for the domestic market, which is predominantly an input to these activities.
Similarly, the value of solar panels produced for the domestic market is not included, as it makes up a part of the value of solar power generating capacity installed in China. However, the value of solar panel and battery exports is included.
In 2025, there was a major divergence between two different measures of investment. The first, fixed asset investment, reportedly fell by 3.8%, the first drop in 35 years. In contrast, gross capital formation saw the slowest growth in that period but still inched up by 2%.
This analysis uses gross capital formation as the measure of investment, as it is the data point used for GDP accounting. However, the analysis is unable to account for changes in inventories, so the estimate of clean-energy investment is for fixed asset investment in the sectors.
The analysis does not explicitly account for the small and declining role of imports in producing clean-energy goods and services. This means that the results slightly overstate the contribution to GDP but understate the contribution to growth.
For example, one of the most important import dependencies that China has is for advanced computing chips for EVs. The value of the chips in a typical EV is $1,000 and China’s import dependency for these chips is 90%, which suggests that imported chips represent less than 3% of the value of EV production.
The estimates are likely to be conservative in some key respects. For example, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates “investment in the energy transition” in China in 2024 at $800bn. This estimate covers a nearly identical list of sectors to ours, but excludes manufacturing – the comparable number from our data is $600bn.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics says that the total value generated by automobile production and sales in 2023 was 11tn yuan. The estimate in this analysis for the value of EV sales in 2023 is 2.3tn yuan, or 20% of the total value of the industry, when EVs already made up 31% of vehicle production and the average selling prices for EVs was slightly higher than for internal combustion engine vehicles.
The post Analysis: Clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025
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