UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is planning to weaken some of the country’s key climate measures, including its ban on new petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and new petrol boilers by 2035, BBC News reports in a major scoop that led the broadcaster’s flagship 10 o’clock evening news programme and made the frontpages of many newspapers. Responding to the new story in an “unusual” late evening statement, Sunak said: “This realism doesn’t mean losing our ambition or abandoning our commitments…We are committed to net-zero by 2050 and the agreements we have made internationally, but doing so in a better, more proportionate way…No leak will stop me beginning the process of telling the country how and why we need to change. As a first step, I’ll be giving a speech this week to set out an important long-term decision we need to make so our country becomes the place I know we all want it to be for our children.” According to BBC News, “some specifics of the speech are still thought to be under discussion, but as it stands it could include as many as seven core policy changes or commitments”. It continues: “First, the government would push the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars – currently set to come into force in 2030 – back to 2035. The 2030 date has been government policy since 2020. [The Times reported just this weekend that the 2030 deadline was to be kept.] Second, the government would significantly weaken the plan to phase out the installation of gas boilers by 2035, saying that they only want 80% to be phased out by that year. Third, homeowners and landlords would be told that there will be no new energy efficiency regulations on homes. Ministers had been considering imposing fines on landlords who fail to upgrade their properties to a certain level of energy efficiency. Fourth, the 2026 ban on off-grid oil boilers will be delayed to 2035, with only an 80% phase out target at that date. In addition, Britons will be told that there will be no new taxes to discourage flying, no government policies to change people’s diets and no measures to encourage carpooling.” [The move comes as other world leaders gather in New York to reinforce the need for ambitious climate action (see below).]

BBC News carries reactions of outcry from across the political spectrum. Conservative MP Chris Skidmore, the former chairman of the UK government’s net-zero review, tells BBC News this would be the “greatest mistake of [Sunak’s] premiership” and “cost the UK jobs and future economic growth”. Lord Zac Goldsmith, who resigned as a minister earlier this year over Sunak’s “apathy” on climate change, described it as a “moment of shame” and said Sunak’s time as prime minister “will be remembered as the moment the UK turned its back on the world and on future generations”. Green Party MP Caroline Lucas called the move “economically illiterate” and Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said it was “an absolute farce”. However, BBC News also carries reaction from Tory MP Craig Mackinlay, who chairs the “net-zero scrutiny group” of MPs, who said he was “pleased to see some pragmatism” from Sunak. [BBC News does not mention Mackinlay and his group have deep ties with climate-sceptic networks.] Speaking on the broadcaster’s 10 o’clock news programme last night, BBC climate editor Justin Rowlatt said that many car manufacturers told him they wanted the ban to remain as they had already started gearing up for the changeover for electric vehicles. He further added that, if it went ahead, the move “could breach the UK’s political consensus on tackling climate change”, which has long played a major role in the country’s past climate leadership status. BBC political editor Chris Mason releases an analysis on how the story could “turbocharge” climate politics in the UK.

In its coverage of the story, the Financial Times says: “One figure close to the government questioned whether a delay to the 2030 ban was likely to happen, noting how BMW this month committed to invest £600m to produce electric Minis at a plant in Oxford. Tata Group in July agreed to build a £4bn gigafactory for electric vehicles in Somerset.” Press Association says it understands that some Tory MPs are considering writing letters of no confidence in Sunak if he goes ahead with the changes. The Guardian, Times, Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph also have the story as frontpage news. The news blankets the frontpage of the Daily Mail, which reads: “Finally! Common sense on net-zero.” Reuters reports this morning that the UK’s interior minister Suella Braverman has said this morning that the country needed to take a pragmatic approach to reaching net-zero because it could not “save the planet by bankrupting the British people”. 

Many publications cover a new rapid analysis finding the record rains behind Libya’s floods were made 50% more intense and 50 times more likely by human-caused climate change. BBC News reports that “climate scientists at the World Weather Attribution group found that years of conflict in the region compounded the vulnerability of people to flooding…and it turned the extreme weather into a full-scale humanitarian disaster”. It adds: “But they cautioned that a lack of data, particularly in Libya, meant considerable uncertainties in their findings.” The analysis is featured by the Washington Post, New Scientist, Independent and Guardian. Carbon Brief has an in-depth rundown of all the factors behind Libya’s flooding. Reuters reports on rising unrest in Libya, saying: “Communications went down, some journalists were pushed out and a UN aid team was blocked from the flood-hit city of Derna on Tuesday, as the authorities sought to contain public anger over the failure to prevent Libya’s worst ever natural disaster.” The Guardian has a video of flood survivors protesting against the authorities. In All Africa, two analysts from the Institute for Security Studies describe the crisis as a “climate change and governance tragedy”. In an editorial, the Financial Times says: “In an ideal world, the Derna tragedy would act as a wake-up call to Libya’s ruling elite that their nation desperately needs to change course. But the accountability demanded by many Libyans is highly unlikely to materialise as entrenched factions plunder the oil-rich state’s resources.”

Reuters reports that UN secretary general Antonio Guterres will today gather heads of state and business leaders “that he has identified as taking stronger action on climate change” in New York to “build momentum ahead of the COP28 climate summit”. It continues: “Missing from the list of 34 speakers representing countries at Guterres’ Climate Ambition Summit are the world’s biggest emitters China and US, as well as the United Arab Emirates, the host of the COP28 gathering in December.” The UK is also missing. Reuters continues: “The summit will feature speeches from leaders who are responding to his call to ‘accelerate’ global climate action, including Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Pakistan, South Africa and Tuvalu. Guterres said one of the aims was to spur action from countries and companies whose climate plans were not in line with the global climate target. Non-member states and international financial institutions that will get speaking slots include Allianz, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the city of London and the state of California.” 

In other UN general assembly-related news, the Financial Times reports that US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has “announced a series of voluntary ‘principles’ to spur more private sector cash into climate and clean energy projects and combat greenwashing, in response to what she described as the ‘significant economic costs’ from global warming”.

Brazil is planning to strengthen its climate target to cut emissions by 53% by 2030, official sources tell Reuters. The newswire explains: “The country will institute an annual cap of 1.32bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, equivalent to a 50% reduction from 2005, said a Brazilian official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media ahead of the announcement. Brazil intends to cap 2030 emissions at 1.20bn tonnes of greenhouse gas, a reduction of 53% compared to 2005, the source said. Brazil’s new climate change targets would be more ambitious than the US, which has pledged to cut emissions by 50-52% by 2030, also compared to 2005.” The new target represents a step up from the previous set by far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro, Reuters adds. It says: “Soon after nearly 200 countries agreed to the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, Brazil pledged to cut its emissions by 43% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. Bolsonaro, facing international pressure on rising deforestation, increased that figure to 50% – but his government also raised the 2005 baseline so the new pledge was easier to meet than the old target.” Current Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is expected to make the announcement at today’s Climate Ambition Summit in New York, a source tells Reuters.

The first local climate summit taking place at COP28 will be co-chaired by China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and his US counterpart John Kerry, writes Axios in an “exclusive”. This is the first time that a COP presidency has announced a formal sub-national summit within the COP process. The news outlet adds that COP28’s local focus will help foster progress in mitigating and adapting to climate change at all levels of government, which is of “keen relevance” to the Chinese government as the country has many “growing megacities”. Separately, state news agency Xinhua reports that “white elephant projects” and “formalism” can still be found in the landscape engineering projects managed by some Chinese cities. 

Meanwhile, Chinese energy website IN-EN.com reports that the country’s “first urban gas-hydrogen demonstration project” has been put into operation. The Chinese business news outlet Jiemian carries a commentary by Ouyang Minggao, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), who says that green hydrogen electrolysis equipment has the potential to become the “fourth major export product” for China’s new energy sector, after solar components, lithium batteries and electric vehicles. 

Separately, the Chinese outlet the Paper reports that, according to several government bodies, China continued to experience a “rapid increase” in 2022 in research and development (R&D) expenditure. It adds that the R&D expenditure on electricity and heat production and supply reached $3.4bn.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg carries two reports on Chinese “green technology” in China. The first highlights that Chinese battery manufacturer CATL is building Europe’s biggest factory making batteries for electric vehicles in Hungary, despite the concerns of local residents. The second another argues that EU moves that risk “depriving European consumers of access to cheap Chinese electric vehicles will only make it harder to reach the continent’s climate goals”.

An editorial in the Sun joins other right-wing newspapers in celebrating the news that prime minister Rishi Sunak is considering weakening key climate policies (see above). It says: “The Sun has long said that the hasty, arbitrary climate deadlines which past Tory governments committed us to would prove ruinous. That our readers could not yet afford to buy battery cars or vans or abandon their gas boilers for vastly more expensive and less effective heat pumps. A delay was inevitable at some point to allow the technology to improve and prices to fall. The PM has commendably made that call.” An editorial in Daily Express describes the decision to weaken the UK’s commitment on ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars as a “pragmatic move”, adding: “The shift from a carbon-based economy is essential but it must not be bungled.” [Commentators across the political spectrum have reacted with outrage to Sunak’s reported plans, see above.]

Writing for the Washington Post, US climate envoy John Kerry and International Energy Agency chief Dr Fatih Birol urge countries to tackle growth in the use of coal ahead of the UN Climate Ambition Summit taking place in New York today. They write: “The US is partnering with India – which is deploying solar and wind at a spectacular pace – on new ways of driving progress on renewables and energy storage investments. This month, the United Arab Emirates announced a $4.5bn initiative to support renewables across Africa. Nigeria has made a brave decision to eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies, positioning the country to unleash a clean-energy boom that could increase solar capacity by a factor of 20 by 2030. China, the world’s second-largest economy, already has the capabilities and technology to quickly turn the corner on coal, and there are many willing partners in the international community ready to make that desperately needed change.”

Elsewhere, Financial Times columnist Pilitia Clark argues that the process of needing every country to agree on new measures at UN climate negotiations is hamstringing ambitious action. Meanwhile, Scientific American has a feature on solar geoengineering with the headline: “It’s time to engineer the sky.” [The print edition had the headline: “A stratospheric gamble.”]

New research explores how US federal climate policies will affect air pollution and its disparities across different racial and ethnic groups. Cutting CO2 emissions by 50%, compared to 2005 levels, would reduce exposure to fine particulate matter “across racial/ethnic groups”, the study says, “with greatest benefit for non-Hispanic Black and white populations”. However, the “average exposure disparity for racial/ethnic minorities rises from 12.4% to 13.1%”. In fact, the study finds, “no alternate combination of reductions from different CO2 sources would substantially mitigate exposure disparities”. This suggests that CO2-based strategies “are insufficient for fully mitigating…exposure disparities between white and racial/ethnic minority populations; addressing disparities may require larger-scale structural changes”.