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Andreas Sieber is the Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns at 350.org.

Trump has such a passion for tariffs he even imposed them on Antarctic islands – home only to penguins, who presumably pose a grave threat to American industry.

Now that the dust is settling – with global stock markets down and US dollar inflation up – two things are clear: the US president’s enthusiasm far outstrips his economic competence; and his shiny new tariffs won’t stop the global energy transition, no matter how hard he tries.

Donald Trump’s tariffs will harm the US economy and working families. But different from what some might fear, the tariffs won’t stop wind and solar energy. The United States’ share in the global cleantech trade is simply too marginal to dictate its terms in this sector. Other than Antarctic penguins, the global energy transition is safe from Trump’s tariffs.

Emerging economies set to dominate

A decade ago, Trump’s tariffs could have delivered a significant blow to the global energy transition: developed economies dominated solar and wind installations – accounting for roughly 70% of solar and 50% of wind capacity additions between 2010 and 2015.

Since then, two major developments must be taken into account. First, emerging economies’ share in renewable installations and the cleantech trade have boomed while the share of installations in advanced economies, including the US, has shrunk significantly. In 2009, about one in four solar panels was installed in the United States. In 2024, less than one in 12 renewable projects globally were added in the US.

According to the International Energy Agency, emerging and developing economies are set to dominate clean energy markets by 2030 – claiming 70% of solar PV, 60% of wind, and 60% of battery storage capacity.

Fossil fuel nations to see value of their economies shrink under new UN-agreed measure

Additionally, the US has not only isolated itself on cleantech in the last week, it has increasingly done so over the past 10 years. Today, China is by far the world’s largest producer and exporter of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles – yet only 4% of those products go to the US, compared to 15% of China’s overall exports. In a market with growth dynamics like the green tech market has, tariffs on a 4% share of this market are a mere footnote.

China exported 235.93 gigawatts (GW) of solar modules in 2024, a market it dominates in an unparalleled manner, marking a 13% year-on-year increase from 207.99 GW in 2023. While impressive, the 13% of solar panel exports are small compared to other cleantech: China’s exports of wind turbines surged by over 70% last year. In the global cleantech race, the US is becoming a shrinking, isolated player.

Too poor to buy American luxury goods

None of this suggests Trump’s tariffs are harmless. Far from it – they will hit working families and poorer nations hardest. The former president insists he understands economic policy, but reality paints a different picture. Not only has he repeatedly conflated trade deficits with tariffs – a confusion that would earn a failing grade in any Economics 101 course – but analysts now expect U.S. inflation to rise faster than in almost any other major economy, surpassing even Canada, the EU, and many of the very countries targeted by his trade measures.

It’s the working people he claims to defend who will bear the brunt of these price hikes. Ironically, if the revenue from tariffs is used for anything by the Trump administration, it will be to pay for massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Meanwhile, markets are stumbling, and the erratic choreography of tariff threats, reversals, and ultimatums has spooked investors, in particular in the US. No one really knows what’s next. Should they swallow the cost of more expensive imports, or gamble on domestic production in uncertainty? With investor confidence sliding to levels unseen since the COVID-19 shock, “America First” increasingly resembles “Economics Last”.

Comment: Finance for renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa is defying the odds

The persistent conflation of trade deficits with tariffs does more than reveal economic illiteracy – it inflicts real harm, particularly on poorer nations. The notion that all countries must maintain perfectly balanced trade is, at best, a fantasy. Consider Madagascar, where GDP per capita hovers just above $500. The US imports vanilla and critical minerals from the country. Yet the United States imposes trade penalties on Madagascar and many similar countries as if it were a competitive threat – despite the obvious reality that no one in Antananarivo, Cambodia, or Botswana is lining up to buy a Tesla.

Free trade is no silver bullet, and forcing developing economies in particular to open up their markets has historically done harm. But now, Trump is punishing people for being too poor to buy American luxury goods.

Protectionism or co-operation by the rest of the world?

The more urgent question now is how the rest of the world might recalibrate trade relations with each other – not just in retaliation against the United States. Will Trump’s tariffs trigger a broader shift toward protectionism, prompting countries to erect new trade barriers among themselves under the guise of “strategic autonomy”? This could indeed threaten the pace of transition efforts.

The US is drifting into economic isolation. Canada and Mexico have previously aligned their tariff responses; China, Japan and South Korea, though not formally coordinated, seem to be synchronising their strategies with more or less quiet efficiency.

Climate and the energy transition remain textbook examples of why Trump’s zero-sum instincts are wholly unfit for purpose. Global cooperation on climate is not optional. Even countries locked in geopolitical tension must find ways to collaborate on decarbonization – unless, of course, the plan is to compete all the way to climate collapse.

COP30 chief calls for global unity on climate action as cooperation falters

For too long, European leaders have indulged in the futile art of appeasing Donald Trump – among various avenues, by pledging to absorb vast surpluses of American liquefied natural gas. The irony, of course, is that this LNG isn’t needed; worse still, it risks locking Europe into years of inflated energy costs for consumers.

The strategy of placation has plainly failed. Doubling down on dependency through new US LNG deals is short-sighted on multiple levels – not just for those concerned about climate, but for anyone with even a passing interest in economic sovereignty.

Trump may have shocked the world, but he has equally exposed himself as a bully – one whose policies are not only reckless and unreliable but, frankly, embarrassingly misguided. The good news is the US cannot dictate the terms of cleantech trade and the energy transition. The world should move forward without him and keep climate and renewables as a critical area of cooperation and prosperity.

The post Trump’s tariff tantrum won’t stop the global energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Trump’s tariff tantrum won’t stop the global energy transition

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Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement

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October 4, 2025

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Colombia wants countries to discuss options for a global agreement to ensure that the extraction, processing and recycling of minerals – including those needed for the clean energy transition – don’t harm the environment and human wellbeing.

The mineral-rich nation is proposing to create an expert group to “identify options for international instruments, including global and legally-binding instruments, for coordinated global action on the environmentally sound management of minerals and metals through [their] full lifecyle”.

Colombia hopes this will eventually lead to an agreement on the need for an international treaty to define mandatory rules and standards that would make mineral value chains more transparent and accountable.

The proposal was set out in a draft resolution submitted to the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) earlier this week and seen by Climate Home News. UNEA, which is constituted of all UN member states, is the world’s top decision-making body for matters relating to the environment. The assembly’s seventh session will meet in Kenya in December to vote on countries’ proposals.

    Soaring demand for the minerals used to manufacture clean energy technologies and electric vehicles, as well as in the digital, construction and defence industries have led to growing environmental destruction, human rights violations and social conflict.

    Colombia argues there is an “urgent need” to strengthen global cooperation and governance to reduce the risks to people and the planet.

    Options for a global minerals agreement

    The proposal is among a flurry of initiatives to strength global mineral governance at a time when booming demand is putting pressure on new mining projects.

    Colombia, which produces emeralds, gold, platinum and silver for exports, first proposed the idea for a binding international agreement on minerals traceability and accountability on the sidelines of the UN biodiversity talks it hosted in October 2024.

    Since then, the South American nation has been quietly trying to drum up support for the idea, especially among African and European nations.

    Its draft resolution to UNEA7 contains very few details, leaving it open for countries to discuss what kind of global instrument would be best suited to make mineral supply chains more transparent and sustainable.

    Does the world need a global treaty on energy transition minerals?

    Colombia says it wants the expert group to build on other UN initiatives, including a UN Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, which set out seven principles to ensure the mining, processing and recycling of energy transition minerals are done responsibly and benefit everyone.

    The group would include technical experts and representatives from international and regional conventions, major country groupings as well as relevant stakeholders.

    It would examine the feasibility and effectiveness of different options for a global agreement, consider their costs and identify measures to support countries to implement what is agreed.

    The resolution also calls for one or two meetings for member states to discuss the idea before the UNEA8 session planned in late 2027, when countries would decide on a way forward.

    No time to lose for treaty negotiations

    Colombia’s efforts to advance global talks on mineral supply chains have been welcomed by resource experts and campaigners. But not everyone agrees on the best strategy to move the discussion forward at a time when multilateralism is coming under attack.

    Johanna Sydow, a resource policy expert who heads the international environmental policy division of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, said she had hoped that the resolution would explicitly call for negotiations to begin on an international minerals treaty.

    “Treaty negotiations take a long time. If you don’t even start with it now, it will take even longer. I don’t see how in two or three years it will be easier to come to an agreement,” she told Climate Home.

      Despite the geopolitical challenges, “we need joint rules to prevent a huge race to the bottom for [mineral] standards”. That could start with a group of countries coming together and starting to enforce joint standards for mining, processing and recycling minerals, she said.

      But any meaningful global agreement on mineral supply chains would require backing from China, the world’s largest processor of minerals, which dominates most of the supply chains. And with Colombia heading for an election in May, it will need all the support it can get to move its proposal forward.

      ‘Voluntary initiative won’t cut it’

      Juliana Peña Niño, Colombia country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, is more optimistic. “Colombia’s leadership towards fairer mineral value chains is a welcome step,” she told Climate Home News.

      “At UNEA7, we need an ambitious debate that gives the proposed expert group a clear mandate to advance concrete next steps — not delay decisions — and that puts the voices of those most affected at the centre. One thing is clear: the path forward must ultimately deliver a binding instrument, as yet another voluntary initiative simply won’t cut it,” she said.

      More than 50 civil society groups spanning Latin America, Africa and Europe previously described Colombia’s work on the issue as “a chance to build a new global paradigm rooted in environmental integrity, human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, justice and equity”.

      “As the energy transition and digitalisation drive demand for minerals, we cannot afford to repeat old extractive models built on asymmetry – we must redefine them,” they wrote in a statement.

      Main image: The UN Environment Assembly is hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. (Natalia Mroz/ UN Environment)

      The post Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement appeared first on Climate Home News.

      Colombia proposes expert group to advance talks on minerals agreement

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      California Sanctions Stark Disparities in Pesticide Exposure During Pregnancy

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      October 3, 2025

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      If you’re young, pregnant and Latina, chances are you live near agricultural fields sprayed with higher levels of brain-damaging organophosphate pesticides.

      By Liza Gross

      A baby in the womb has few defenses against industrial petrochemicals designed to kill.

      California Sanctions Stark Disparities in Pesticide Exposure During Pregnancy

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      DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns

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      October 3, 2025

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

      This week

      Shattered climate consensus

      FRACKING BAN: UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has announced that the government will bring forward its plans to permanently ban fracking, in a move designed to counter a promise from the hard-right Reform party to restart efforts to introduce the practice, the Guardian said. In the same speech, Miliband said Reform’s plans to scrap clean-energy projects would “betray” young people and future generations, the Press Association reported.

      ACT AXE?: Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservatives, pledged to scrap the 2008 Climate Change Act if elected, Bloomberg reported. It noted that the legislation was passed with cross-party support and strengthened by the Conservatives.
      ‘INSANE’: Badenoch faced a backlash from senior Tory figures, including ex-prime minister Theresa May, who called her pledge a “catastrophic mistake”, said the Financial Times. The newspaper added that the Conservatives were “trailing third in opinion polls”. A wide range of climate scientists also condemned the idea, describing it as “insane”, an “insult” and a “serious regression”.

      Around the world

      • CLIMATE CRACKDOWN: The US Department of Energy has told employees in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to avoid using the term “climate change”, according to the Guardian.
      • FOREST DELAY: Plans for Brazil’s COP30 flagship initiative, the tropical forests forever fund, are “suffer[ing] delays” as officials remain split on key details, Bloomberg said.
      • COP MAY BE ‘SPLIT’: Australia could “split” the hosting of the COP31 climate summit in 2026 under a potential compromise with Turkey, reported the Guardian.
      • DIVINE INTERVENTION: Pope Leo XIV has criticised those who minimise the “increasingly evident” impact of global warming in his first major climate speech, BBC News reported.

      €44.5 billion

      The  cost of extreme weather and climate change in the EU in the last four years – two-and-a-half times higher than in the decade to 2019, according to a European Environment Agency report covered by the Financial Times.

      Latest climate research

      (For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

      Captured

      Bar chart showing that Great Britain has been fully powered by clean energy for a record 87 hours in 2025 to date

      Clean energy has met 100% of Great Britain’s electricity demand for a record 87 hours this year so far, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. This is up from just 2.5 hours in 2021 and 64.5 hours in all of 2024. The longest stretch of time where 100% of electricity demand was met by clean energy stands at 15 hours, from midnight on 25 May 2025 through to 3pm on 26 May, according to the analysis.

      Spotlight

      ‘Overshoot’ unknowns

      As the chances of limiting global warming to 1.5C dwindle, there is increasing focus on the prospects for “overshooting” the Paris Agreement target and then bringing temperatures back down by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

      At the first-ever Overshoot Conference in Laxenburg, Austria, Carbon Brief asks experts about the key unknowns around warming “overshoot”.

      Sir Prof Jim Skea

      Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and emeritus professor at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy

      So there are huge knowledge gaps around overshoot and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). As it’s very clear from the themes of this conference, we don’t altogether understand how the Earth would react in taking CO2 out of the atmosphere.

      We don’t understand the nature of the irreversibilities and we don’t understand the effectiveness of CDR techniques, which might themselves be influenced by the level of global warming, plus all the equity and sustainability issues surrounding using CDR techniques.

      Prof Kristie Ebi

      Professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment

      There are all kinds of questions about adaptation and how to approach effective adaptation. At the moment, adaptation is primarily assuming a continual increase in global mean surface temperature. If there is going to be a peak – and of course, we don’t know what that peak is – then how do you start planning? Do you change your planning?

      There are places, for instance when thinking about hard infrastructure, [where overshoot] may result in a change in your plan – because as you come down the backside, maybe the need would be less. For example, when building a bridge taller. And when implementing early warning systems, how do you take into account that there will be a peak and ultimately a decline? There is almost no work in that. I would say that’s one of the critical unknowns.

      Dr James Fletcher

      Former minister for public service, sustainable development, energy, science and technology for Saint Lucia and negotiator at COP21 in Paris.

      The key unknown is where we’re going to land. At what point will we peak [temperatures] before we start going down and how long will we stay in that overshoot period? That is a scary thing. Yes, there will be overshoot, but at what point will that overshoot peak? Are we peaking at 1.6C, 1.7C, 2.1C?

      All of these are scary scenarios for small island developing states – anything above 1.5C is scary. Every fraction of a degree matters to us. Where we peak is very important and how long we stay in this overshoot period is equally important. That’s when you start getting into very serious, irreversible impacts and tipping points.

      Prof Oliver Geden

      Senior fellow and head of the climate policy and politics research cluster at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and vice-chair of IPCC Working Group III

      [A key unknown] is whether countries are really willing to commit to net-negative trajectories. We are assuming, in science, global pathways going net-negative, with hardly any country saying they want to go there. So maybe it is just an academic thought experiment. So we don’t know yet if [overshoot] is even relevant. It is relevant in the sense that if we do, [the] 1.5C [target] stays on the table. But I think the next phase needs to be that countries – or the UNFCCC as a whole – needs to decide what they want to do.

      Prof Lavanya Rajamani

      Professor of international environmental law at the University of Oxford

      I think there are several scientific unknowns, but I would like to focus on the governance unknowns with respect to overshoot. To me, a key governance unknown is the extent to which our current legal and regulatory architecture – across levels of governance, so domestic, regional and international – will actually be responsive to the needs of an overshoot world and the consequences of actually not having regulatory and governance architectures in place to address overshoot.

      Watch, read, listen

      FUTURE GAZING: The Financial Times examined a “future where China wins the green race”.

      ‘JUNK CREDITS’: Climate Home News reported on a “forest carbon megaproject” in Zimbabwe that has allegedly “generated millions of junk credits”.
      ‘SINK OR SWIM’: An extract from a new book on how the world needs to adapt to climate change, by Dr Susannah Fisher, featured in Backchannel.

      Coming up

      Pick of the jobs

      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.

      DeBriefed 26 September 2025: China leads new climate pledges; Trump calls warming a ‘con job’; What comes next

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      26.09.25

      DeBriefed 19 September 2025: EU ducks UN climate target; Australia delivers; Tracing beef’s impact on the Amazon

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      19.09.25

      Debriefed 12 September 2025: Africa calls for promised finance; Deadly heat linked to big oil; How to tackle net-zero backlash

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      12.09.25

      DeBriefed 5 September 2025: Pakistan floods hit 1.8m people; UK ‘eco-populism’; How warming threatens a man-made lake

      DeBriefed

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      05.09.25

      The post DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns appeared first on Carbon Brief.

      DeBriefed 3 October 2025: UK political gap on climate widens; Fossil-fuelled Typhoon Ragasa; ‘Overshoot’ unknowns

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