Germany has given “leeway” for France to use government subsidies to support its nuclear power plants, allowing for a “long-stalled reform” of the EU electricity market, the Financial Times reports. Energy ministers finally reached an agreement, after months of debate, on new rules that are intended to provide better investment signals to renewable energy developers and ensure a secure power supply that avoids sudden jumps in prices, the newspaper continues. It adds that some ministers framed the outcome as “crucial to the bloc’s response to vast state subsidies for clean power available in the US and China”. Reuters explains that the revisions were proposed by the European Commission after EU power prices reached record levels last year following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and others had expressed concerns that France would be able to apply state-backed schemes called contracts for difference (CfDs) to support its nuclear reactors – which generate 70% of the nation’s power and already produce cheap electricity, Politico notes. They argued that France would therefore be able to secure a “competitive edge” by taking “huge profits from its mammoth nuclear fleet and redistribut[ing] these to its own industries”, the news website explains. As a compromise, the final text says governments “may decide” to apply CfDs to existing nuclear reactors, but also includes text that says the use of revenues raised should not distort competition or trade in the EU, it adds.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the agreement on EU member states’ negotiating stance going into COP28 has “revealed regional rifts that anticipate global tensions” at the summit. The decision to push for deals to phase out fossil fuels, triple production of renewable energy and halt the building of coal power plants marks the bloc as being “among the most ambitious major economies”, the article notes. However, the level of this ambition had proved contentious, with poorer EU states such as Poland and the Czech Republic pushing back against fossil fuel restrictions in particular, Reuters continues. These countries ensured that the EU’s position would allow for the continued use of fossil fuels in some industries alongside carbon capture technologies, it adds. The Financial Times reports that EU environment ministers decided against lifting the bloc’s emissions reduction goal from 55% by 2030 to 57%. The newspaper says the EU would have presented the new target at COP28, but Poland, Hungary and Italy objected to it.

Finally, EurActiv reports that the “roster of EU environment ministers” could soon include a man “who believes the elite invented climate change to take away people’s cars”. The potential minister in question is Rudolf Huliak, a man nominated by the Slovak National Party to lead Slovakia’s environment ministry.

The government has been urged to phase out gas boilers and spend billions on rolling out heat pumps across the UK, in a “major intervention” by the country’s National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), the Daily Telegraph reports. It quotes a new NIC report – which has received widespread coverage – that states: “Gas boilers need to be phased out and replaced by heat pumps. There is no public policy case for hydrogen to be used to heat individual buildings. It should be ruled out as an option.” The article says the commission is calling for a total ban on gas boiler sales by 2035 and for plans to shut down the national gas network gradually over the next 27 years. It adds that, according to analysis for the NIC report, “the total cost of hydrogen heating comes out as £385bn more expensive than a system using heat pumps”. The Financial Times leads its coverage on the NIC recommendation to rule out hydrogen for heating straight away rather than waiting until 2026 to decide, under current government plans. According to BBC News, heat pumps and heat networks are described by NIC as “the solution” and they are already being “deployed rapidly in other countries”. The Guardian reports that among the NIC recommendations are calls for the government to spend up to £4bn annually for the next 12 years to cover the full cost of heat pumps and energy efficiency improvements for 1.5m households on lower incomes in England. On top of this, the report recommends spending another £4.5bn a year to support energy efficiency improvements and heat-pump installations across the public sector estate and social housing. According to Reuters, NIC says the nation would need combined public and private sector investment of £70-80bn a year in the 2030s, up from around £55bn a year over the last decade, to fund not only home heating but also new electricity assets, power networks and rail, road, water and broadband upgrades. An analysis piece by the Guardian’s environment editor Fiona Harvey asks: “Will Tories embrace [the] infrastructure report or stick with rhetoric?” The article  notes that the NIC’s call for £30bn a year in public money spending “is at the upper limit of what the NIC is legally allowed to call for”, and adds that it is “strikingly similar to the Labour party’s pledged investment of £28bn a year. By contrast, Harvey notes that the NIC’s proposals “run contrary to recent government rhetoric” on the environment and net-zero. Meanwhile, in a statement to parliament, BusinessGreen reports that energy security and net-zero secretary Claire Coutinho stated that the government remains “resolutely committed” to net-zero but cannot “risk sacrificing the whole climate agenda” by moving too quickly.

In its coverage of the NIC report, the Daily Mail says that the “genuine cost of ensuring that households and small businesses reach net-zero could top £1tn”. The article also states: “£2tn will have been ploughed into Britain’s energy system by 2050”. [In a statement shared with Carbon Brief, the NIC says: “These indicative costs of building and operating a low carbon electricity and heating network of the future are not the additional costs of meeting net-zero. Under any scenario, heating and power networks would need to be maintained and enhanced to meet customers’ needs.” The Mail’s £1tn headline appears to be a recognition of this, but it is unclear how they arrived at this figure.] Further down in the article, the newspaper includes some caveats – for example, noting that the proposed investments would roughly halve household energy bills. The Daily Mail has also published an editorial on the NIC report titled “zero common sense”.

The head of the UK’s gas transmission network, National Gas, is quoted by City AM saying that if the government scraps the country’s pipelines in favour of full-scale electrification of the grid, it risks “jeopardising the viability of businesses and meeting demand to heat people’s homes”. Meanwhile, Sky News reports that the government’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched an investigation into leading boiler manufacturer Worcester Bosch over whether it has misled people by marketing a range of gas boilers as “hydrogen-blend ready”. 

Finally, the Guardian reports that the UK is changing its definition of “climate finance” in order to meet the five-year £11.6bn target it has set itself to spend money on climate-related projects in developing countries. Under the original, stricter definition, the UK has been far off track to meet this target, as a recent analysis by Carbon Brief revealed.

Shell has abandoned specific spending and volume targets when purchasing carbon offsets, amid growing scrutiny of their climate benefits, Reuters reports. The announcement came from the oil company’s chief executive Wael Sawan at the Energy Intelligence Forum event in London, the article adds. He told the audience that while the firm no longer plans to invest around $100m a year on offsets and use credits worth up to 120m tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year by 2030, Shell would continue its drive to make nature-based offsets a “viable business for us as a company”. (For more on issues around offsets, see Carbon Brief’s recent series, including an analysis of how many offsets Shell has used in recent years.) According to Bloomberg, Sawan assured the audience that the company is sticking to its target of net-zero emissions by mid-century, but changing the “pathway” it takes to get there. It notes that during his tenure, Shell has sold off assets in its low-carbon business and focused more investment on oil and gas. The article notes that Sawan addressed the conference via video link as protesters had blocked the entrance to the site. Another Bloomberg story reports that Sawan assured staff at an internal meeting on Tuesday that he “believes in urgent climate action”. Also speaking at the Energy Intelligence Forum event, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser told the audience that the COP28 climate summit should focus on cutting emissions from oil and gas, rather than reducing their production as many have been calling for, Reuters reports. 

Climate activist Greta Thunberg joined the large demonstration outside the fossil-fuel event at the InterContinental Hotel, according to the Independent. It notes that “dozens of people” attempted to block access to the hotel, chanting “oily money out” and “cancel the conference”, and 14 people – including Thunberg – were subsequently arrested by the police. The Daily Express quotes the Swedish activist outside the gathering of major oil industry figures saying “we have no other option but to put our bodies outside this conference and to physically disrupt”. Huck magazine reports on the ground from the Fossil Free London protest.

Separately, Bloomberg reports that while in previous years oil-and-gas companies have supported US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, they have now switched to his Republican rivals such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that advocacy group Climate Power plans to spend $80m on advertising to lift president Joe Biden’s standing and highlight the positive impact of his landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Chinese financial institutions “extended more than 5tn yuan ($687bn) in loans” as of the end of 2022 to support “belt and road initiative” (BRI) projects over the past decade, Chinese business and economy newspaper Caixin reports China’s national administration of financial regulation as announcing. Meanwhile, at an international summit on the global infrastructure initiative, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced that China’s policy banks will “each set up a 350bn yuan (US$47.8bn) financing window” to fund “small but beautiful” projects, reports Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post (SCMP). Xi also pledged to “deepen green infrastructure, energy and transport cooperation” and organise “training for 100,000 people from developing countries” to advance green development, it says. Meanwhile, China has supported countries along the BRI with “decarbonisation and green energy” since it was launched in 2013, reports Chinese finance newspaper Yicai Global, helping reduce average emissions to carbon emissions per unit of electricity generation in partner countries.

Bloomberg covers Chinese vice premier He Lifeng’s comments that China is willing to “improve cooperation” under the BRI to make it “greener and healthier”, as Beijing tries to “reinvigorate” the BRI. The state-run newspaper China Daily reports that Zhou Guomei, director-general of the department of international cooperation of the ministry of ecology and environment (MEE), says that many renewable energy projects built by Chinese companies “have become notable green landmarks” in BRI countries. 

Russian president Vladimir Putin is slated to speak at the belt and road forum, reports Caixin, as is UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that China intends to equip the province of Inner Mongolia with “more transport links with Russia and Mongolia” and intends to make it “play a greater role in ecology, energy, strategic minerals and border security”. Another Yicai article reports that China plans for the “ultra-low emission transformation” of its  existing steel production capacity to be 80% complete by 2025, adding that “as of September 2023, about 346m tons of crude steel had completed its ultra-low emission transformation”. 

Finally, the Communist Party-affiliated Guangming Daily carries a comment piece by Lan Qingxin, vice dean of the school of international economics and trade at the University of International Business and Economics, who calls for China to “make green the underlying colour of Chinese-style modernisation”.

The Guardian is running a special investigation exploring how local governments in the US are “increasingly exploiting a loophole in the Clean Air Act, leaving more than 21 million Americans with air that’s dirtier than they realise”. The series explores how regulators have used a little-known provision called the “exceptional events rule” to exclude pollution caused by “natural” or “uncontrollable” events, such as wildfires, from records used by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) for regulatory decisions. It emphasises that this comes “at a time when the climate crisis is posing an unprecedented challenge to the health of millions of Americans”. The series includes an explainer article and a case study from south east Detroit.

Global energy transition columnist Gavin Maguire writes in Reuters that while Poland’s pro-EU Civic Coalition, led by former European Council president Donald Tusk, are on track to lead the country’s next government, “supporters of a speedy energy transition away from fossil fuels may be disappointed by Poland’s pace of change over the coming years”. Despite the rapid growth in renewables in recent years, more than 70% of Poland’s electricity still comes from fossil fuels – mainly coal – according to Maguire. Yet despite enthusiasm from Poland’s likely new leaders, he explains that when it comes to renewable development: “Stalled connections are delaying revenue flows to project developers just as production costs are rising due to higher interest rates.” He adds that a “combination of connection delays and grid congestion may in turn dim the overall enthusiasm for further clean power capacity development in Poland over the coming years, regardless of which political party may be in power”.

Meanwhile, Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based thinktank Bruegel, writes in the Guardian that the only way to address climate change is to “get the three largest historical emitters – the US, Europe and China – to join forces, directly or indirectly, to accelerate the global shift to green energy”. He emphasises the need for the three powers to work together and focus on “win-win industrial collaborations” rather than competing.

A “global irreversible solar tipping point”, where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets – even without any further climate policies – “may have passed”, a new study suggests. The researchers use “data-driven conditional technology and economic forecasting modelling” to assess which zero-carbon power sources could become dominant across the world. As a result of “technological trajectories set in motion by past policy”, solar energy “appears to follow a robust trajectory to become the future dominant power source before mid-century”, the study says. However, the authors identify uncertainties around “grid stability in a renewables-dominated power system, the availability of sufficient finance in underdeveloped economies, the capacity of supply chains and political resistance from regions that lose employment”.

Climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier” for conflict, yet there is a wide range of indicators used for “climate” in this area of research, a new study says. The authors analyse 32 studies published from 2004 to 2020 on climatic indicators and their relationship with violent conflict. The study finds a total of 113 different climate-conflict combinations, most of which “represent various forms of climate-related phenomena and variability rather than climate change”. In some cases, climate indicators refer to natural processes, which can make it “challenging to determine whether climatic variability impacts conflict”, the authors note.