“​​Countries are falling behind on almost every policy required to cut greenhouse gas emissions,” according to the “state of climate action 2023” report covered in the Guardian. The newspaper says that to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, coal must be phased out seven times faster than the current rate – equivalent to retiring about 240 average-sized coal-fired power plants a year, every year between now and 2030. Deforestation must also be reduced four times faster than the current pace and public transport around the world built out six times faster than the current pace, it says. It adds that the world must also “cut meat consumption from ruminants such as cows and sheep to about two servings a week in the US, Europe and other high-consuming countries by 2030” and “increase the rate of growth of solar and wind power from its current high of 14% a year to 24% a year”. The newspaper reports that electric vehicle sales – which have more than tripled since 2020 – is the only indicator of the 42 assessed that is progressing on track.

The European Union will make a “substantial” financial contribution to the new “loss and damage” fund that will be launched at COP28, Reuters reports. According to the newswire, EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra and the incoming COP28 president announced the news in a joint statement. “The EU did not specify the size of its planned contribution,” the newswire adds. Politico reports that the loss and damage fund will support developing countries hit by “climate disasters”, and a draft deal was agreed by a group of negotiators earlier this month. Separately, Bloomberg reports that last week’s offer from the US to put several million dollars into the fund has been “criticised” by activists for being too small.

Elsewhere, Energy Monitor reports that “COP28 host the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has plans in place to extract 38bn barrels of oil and gas between now and 2085 – with significant further reserves that could also be extracted in that time.” It continues: “According to exclusive data from Energy Monitor’s parent company, GlobalData, there are some 28.3bn barrels of oil remaining in active fields in the UAE, with a further 1.5bn barrels in fields that are currently planned.”

China is “scouring” global markets for wheat, with “annual imports on track to hit record levels”, reports Bloomberg. One analyst is quoted telling the business outlet that “China’s recent buying activity is largely tied to the weather problems it experienced as this year’s crop approached harvest” and that “persistent rains” affected the quality of 30-40m tons of wheat, leaving it “suitable for livestock feed but not human consumption”. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says that China has reported grain output is expected to reach a record high in 2023, despite the impact of extreme weather events and geopolitics. The state-run newspaper China Daily quotes Bram Govaerts, director-general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, as saying that China has “made a tremendous effort” for food security at a time when “climate change could take out whole areas of food”.

Meanwhile, PBS News republishes analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ian Johnson, who argues that no “huge breakthroughs” should be expected from the meeting between presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on Wednesday. He adds that “[while] China and the US could issue a statement on fighting climate change…the US is politically divided over the issue, while China is pushing ahead with green energy yet also building new coal-fired power plants”. The state news agency Xinhua carries a series of editorials on US-China relations, with one saying that bilateral cooperation “aligns with the interests of both countries and the world”. The Communist Party-backed An editorial in the Global Times argues that the APEC meetings are a “test for the US”. Additionally, state broadcaster CGTN says that 74% of respondents to a global poll – which was conducted in a variety of languages, but not Chinese – believe that the US and China “should increase collaboration in areas such as energy, food security and climate change to improve global governance”. Elsewhere, the Times reports: “The meeting offers an opportunity to arrest the decline [in relations] by establishing common ground on areas such as climate and trade.” Reuters adds that Biden has met with leaders from Indonesia for discussions to “set the stage” ahead of Wednesday’s meeting with Xi. The South China Morning Post says that agreeing to tackle climate change is “low-hanging fruit” for Biden and Xi to agree on at the summit.

Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that China’s “massive” investment in renewables has attracted “odd newcomers” to the industry and led to an “oversupply of solar components”. Bloomberg says China is experiencing a “breakneck expansion of its copper industry”, transforming distribution of an essential metal for the global energy transition. Separately, Reuters reports that China’s development banks did not provide any “green energy finance” in 2022, for the second year in a row. 

Oil and gas company ExxonMobil will begin extracting lithium in the US state of Arkansas from 2027, the Financial Times reports. According to the paper, the company is undergoing this “major strategic pivot” with the intention of becoming a “leading player” in lithium mining. It adds: “Exxon’s shift into lithium is the first by an oil supermajor. Koch Industries, Occidental Petroleum and Norway’s Equinor have been exploring a move into the battery metal.” Bloomberg reports that ExxonMobil aims to produce enough lithium to supply more than a million electric vehicles per year by 2030. This would make the company one of the top ten producers globally, it notes. Reuters adds: “Analysts at financial firm TD Cowen estimate its goal would require some $2bn in capital expenditures to provide 50,000 tonnes, a volume that could generate $800m in potential cash.” The New York Times reports: “The announcement does not represent a fundamental shift in corporate strategy, but it is an acknowledgment that battery-powered vehicles will increasingly compete with cars and trucks fueled by gasoline and diesel. It could also open the door for southern Arkansas to emerge as a major source of lithium. Most of the metal today comes from Australia and South America, and much of it is processed in China.”

“The US treasury department has sent notices to ship management companies requesting information about 100 vessels it suspects of violating Western sanctions on Russian oil, according to a source who has seen the documents,” Reuters reports. The newswire explains that multiple countries imposed a $60 per barrel cap last December on sea-borne exports of Russian crude in response to the country’s invasion of Ukraine, but says “a rally in global oil prices this year has meant much of Russian oil has traded above the cap”. Separately, the Financial Times reports that the US-led price cap “is being almost completely circumvented”, according to western officials and Russian export data. It adds: “EU officials have held discussions in recent days on reinforcing the cap, including options for strengthening enforcement or clamping down on Russia’s access to the used oil tanker market.” Separately, Reuters reports that the US plans to buy 1.2m barrels of oil for its strategic petroleum reserve.

Restoring forests globally could capture an additional 226bn tonnes of carbon – an amount equivalent to one-third of all human-caused emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution– according to new research covered in the New York Times. However, the newspaper says this amount of carbon storage cannot be captured without also cutting greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the frequency of droughts, fires and other extreme events. The Guardian reports that around 61% of the carbon sequestration potential could be achieved by protecting standing forests and the remaining 39% secured by restoring fragmented forests and areas that have already been cleared. The newspaper includes a warning from the study authors that “mass monoculture tree-planting and offsetting will not help forests realise their potential”. The New Scientist adds: “The finding will fuel a heated debate over the role of trees in mitigating climate change, which was ignited by a 2019 paper by Thomas Crowther at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and his colleagues. That team estimated that restoring forests outside existing forested areas could store more than 200bn tonnes of carbon. Other researchers argued the study overstated this potential by as much as five times by counting areas like deserts where growing trees would be impractical or by failing to account for other factors, such as fire.” Reuters also covers the study.

The UK’s energy regulator Ofgem plans to reduce wait times to connect new projects to the electricity grid by culling “zombie” wind and solar projects, the Guardian reports. According to the newspaper, projects are currently connected to the grid on a first come first served basis, resulting in wait times of up to 15 years for some wind and solar projects. It continues: “The National Grid’s electricity system operator (ESO) has said that between 60% and 70% of projects in the queue ‘ultimately fail to materialise or connect’. The number of projects waiting in line rose from 600 in May to 1,000 by September. The average time between requesting a connection and being offered one has increased from 18 months in 2019-20 to five years in 2023. Ofgem said that, if the current projects in the queue were all developed, it would generate 400 gigawatts (GW) of power, far outstripping the UK’s existing power capacity of about 65GW. However, more than 40% of that is in held-up contracts with connection dates of 2030 or later; some are as late as 2037.” According to the Times, the ESO has “commissioned an external consultant to review 144 projects with earlier connection dates that it had identified as ‘potentially high risk’”. The Daily Telegraph says long queues have been “blamed on developers entering speculative connection requests to secure a place in the queue”. BusinessGreen also covers the news. Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph reports that “farmland equivalent to 40,000 football pitches could be turned into industrial solar farms across southern England under plans by Ofgem to boost green electricity generation close to London”.

In other UK news, the Times says: “The SNP [Scottish National Party] has been accused of a ‘sleight of hand’ after ministers wrote a brief note to a Holyrood committee in which they finally admitted overstating the country’s renewable energy resources.” According to the paper, the SNP has “bragged” for more than 15 years that Scotland has 25% of Europe’s offshore wind capacity. However, it says the recent submission “conceded” that the number is closer to 10%. It adds: “After a furore a year ago about the veracity of the 25 per cent claim, documents released recently show that ministers and their advisers tried to hush up the true statistics.” The Daily Telegraph reports that SNP ministers have downgraded their estimate to 7%. The Daily Mail calls the change “humiliating”.

Elsewhere, Reuters reports that British environment secretary Therese Coffey has resigned amid a cabinet reshuffle. Separately, Climate Home News reports that the UK’s decision to cut short a £52m climate adaptation scheme in Malawi leaves the country vulnerable to droughts and cyclones. The Press Association adds that the charity Wateraid is calling on the British public to sign a petition urging prime minister Rishi Sunak to invest more in climate adaptation, and show more leadership on these issues at COP28. Separately, the Press Association reports that Greta Thunberg joined a protest against government plans for new oil and gas licences. Meanwhile, the Times reports that the UK has slipped to seventh place in global rankings of the most attractive places to invest in renewables. And the Daily Telegraph reports that Bank of England policymaker Catherine Mann has said that “net-zero policies are pushing up inflation and hitting economic growth”. Mann told an audience at the University of Oxford that “climate change policies including carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes risk raising costs for families as companies pass the extra costs on to their customers”, according to the newspaper.

Mercy Barends, chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Parliamentarians for Human Rights, member of the Indonesian house of representatives and chair of its green energy caucus, has penned a comment piece in the San Francisco Chronicle ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific economic cooperation (APEC) summit. Barends writes that in the past two years, six environmental human rights defenders have been imprisoned in Vietnam, in decisions that the UN high commissioner for human rights called “arbitrary” and “repressive”. She says the imprisonments “show how Vietnam’s vague laws are being weaponized to silence those who are advocating for a clean energy transition” and “fly in the face of the Vietnamese government’s own recognition of the need for climate action”. Barends adds that “sadly, this alarming trend of silencing critical voices on the environment during a worsening climate crisis is not unique to Vietnam”, noting arrests in Cambodia, the Philippines and Indonesia. She concludes: “If APEC leaders really want to ‘create a resilient and sustainable future for all,’ they must insist that Vietnam’s — and ASEAN countries’ — just energy transition must start with the immediate and unconditional release of all environmental and human rights defenders who have been arbitrarily arrested merely for peacefully expressing their opinions.”

The Latin America editor at the Financial Times, Michael Stott, says it is easier for the continent to rely on oil than transition to renewables. He writes: “Latin America may be one of the world’s best regions for producing green energy, thanks to abundant hydro, solar and wind reserves, but is instead fast building up fossil fuel production.” He adds that when French oil company Total discovered nearly 700m barrels of oil off the coast of Suriname – one of only 3 countries that absorbs more CO2 than it emits – its citizens “rejoice[d]”. Similarly, he says countries including Guyana, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela are increasing their fossil fuel production. However, Stott says Colombia is taking a different path, increasing taxes on oil and gas revenue. “Private oil investment has plunged by a third this year and there is already a natural gas shortage,” Stott says. He adds: “The shift away from an industry that provides a third of Colombia’s exports might matter less if Colombia were building up its renewable energy industry quickly. But in May, Italy’s Eni abandoned a big wind farm project in La Guajira after years of protests by local communities. The debacle illustrates a problem dogging renewable energy projects in Latin America: political risk.”

Elsewhere, the Economist has published several articles in its “world ahead 2024” section. Ana Lankes, the Latin America correspondent, argues that “Latin America could lead the way on green power”. She says: “The region holds more than half the world’s lithium, used in electric-vehicle batteries; produces over a third of its copper, for electrical wiring; and churns out more than half its silver, crucial for solar panels. It is also home to around half of the world’s biodiversity and a quarter of its forests…Thanks to ample wind and sun, and strong rivers, more than a quarter of its primary energy currently comes from renewable sources, twice the global average.” Lanke says the region is also “at the forefront of climate-finance innovation”, noting that Chile was the first country in the world to “issue bonds with a reduced interest rate if it meets sustainability goals”. However, she argues that “the shift will not be an easy one”, noting that “Brazil and Guyana are pouring money into oil exploration” and “deforestation of the Amazon in Bolivia and Venezuela has rocketed”. Separately, west coast correspondent Aryn Nraun writes that Los Angeles, Miami and Phoenix have hired “chief heat officers” to oversee emergency response and adaptation plans, and suggests that more cities will appoint such officials, along with adopting other adaptation measures, in 2024. Christian Odendahl, the European economics editor, writes that “as Europe faces new challenges such as climate change and geopolitical upheaval, its countries’ economic fortunes are diverging in new ways that will start to become visible in 2024”. Dominic Ziegler, an economist from Singapore, says “the energy transition could create unexpected linkages in Asia”. Beijing bureau chief David Rennie writes that China’s leaders will seek to exploit global division in 2024. Environment editor Catherine Brahic says that “global average temperatures may pass a threshold in 2024”. And a final Economist piece focuses on the push to make the Mediterranean a “‘green’ hydrogen hotbed”.

Meanwhile, Christian Bretter and Felix Schulz – research fellows at the University of Leeds – outline their research on general public support for UK climate policies in the Conversation. Since winning the July 2023 Uxbridge by-election, “the UK government has made polarising voters on climate policy one of its main strategies”, the authors write. However, they say that according to their research, the government is “backing the wrong horse”. They continue: “We asked 1,911 people that are representative of the UK population in terms of age, gender and ethnicity to indicate the extent to which they support different climate policy instruments. Almost two thirds support the most stringent climate policies, while others receive even higher support.” Separately, Kevin Richard Butt from the university of central Lancashire writes in the Conversation that “earthworms are our friends – but they will make the climate crisis worse if we’re not careful”. He explains that worms are an invasive alien species in some ecosystems, where they are “unlocking carbon from the soil” and releasing it into the atmosphere. And Sean O’Donnell – professor of biodiversity, earth and environmental science and biology at Drexel University – explains in the Conversation how climate change is “altering animal brains and behaviour”. 

In other comment, omnipresent climate sceptic columnist Ross Clark writes in the Daily Telegraph that “the heat pump charade is unravelling”, arguing that they are “too loud for homes in built-up areas”.

Wildfires have burned through up to 25m hectares of timber-producing forest in the last two decades – an area the size of the UK, new research finds. The study combines global maps of logging activity and wildfires to assess how much timber-producing forest has been lost from 2001-2021. The research finds that the loss of timber forest to wildfires has “increased significantly” since 2001, with extensive burning in the western US and Canada, Siberian Russia, Brazil and Australia.

Courts are playing “an increasingly influential” role in the global response to climate change and should be recognised as “Anthropocene institutions” within an “Earth system law paradigm”, new research suggests. The paper draws on a set of prominent climate cases to come up with five “domains” where courts could potentially have influence on efforts to tackle climate change. According to the authors, these include “establishing accountability, redefining power relations, remedying vulnerabilities and injustices, increasing the reach and impact of international climate law and applying climate science to adjudicate legal disputes”.