A Guardian “exclusive” on its frontpage reports that the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company has “been able to read emails to and from the COP28 climate summit office and was consulted on how to respond to a media inquiry”. The UAE is hosting the COP28 summit in November, the paper explains, with Sultan Al Jaber, also chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), acting as COP president. It continues: “The COP28 office had claimed its email system was ‘standalone’ and ‘separate’ from that of Adnoc. But expert technical analysis showed the office shared email servers with Adnoc. After the Guardian’s inquiries, the COP28 office switched to a different server on Monday.”

Meanwhile, Politico reports under the headline: “An oil state hired the biggest PR firms to buff its climate image. It didn’t help.” The outlet describes how the UAE “is engaged in a wide-ranging public relations and lobbying campaign to cast itself as an environmental leader before it hosts the United Nations’ next climate talks in November”. It adds: “But the UAE’s efforts are colliding with a barrage of criticism from lawmakers and environmentalists in both the US and Europe, who scoff at the idea that the oil-flush nation is committed to helping shift the world off planet-heating fossil fuels.” Separately, the Guardian reports: “UN climate talks this year might skirt the vital question of whether and how to phase out fossil fuels, as nations have not yet agreed to discuss the issue, one of the top officials hosting the talks has said. Majid Al Suwaidi, director-general of the COP28 climate talks for its host nation, the UAE, said governments were not in agreement over whether the phaseout of fossil fuels should be on the agenda for the conference, which begins in November.”

In other news relating to the UN climate process, the Hindustan Times reports: “India will not accept prescriptive messages from the global stocktake scheduled to take place at [COP28] on what national determined contributions should constitute. At the ongoing climate conference in Bonn, seen as a run-up to the COP28 meeting later this year in Dubai, India and other developing countries demanded that the global stocktake be guided by the principles of equity and historical responsibility.” Finally, Reuters reports: “Russia intends to block European Union countries from hosting next year’s UN international climate negotiations, according to internal emails seen by Reuters, a potential setback for EU-member Bulgaria’s competition with Azerbaijan and Armenia to draw the massive conference.”

The wildfires in Canada that are currently engulfing swathes of North America in smoke are, reports the Guardian, “a harbinger of our climate future, experts and officials say”. It continues: “Research shows that climate change has already exacerbated wildfires dramatically. A 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association found that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in hot, dry fire weather in the western US. By 2090, global wildfires are expected to increase in intensity by up to 57% thanks to climate change, a UN report warned last year. Canada is on track to experience its most severe wildfire season on record, national officials said this week. It’s part of a trend experts say will intensify as climate change makes hotter, drier weather and longer fire seasons more common.” The Washington Post reports: “The cloud of smoke inundating the East Coast on Wednesday…underscored how climate change’s threat to human health can transcend national boundaries.” Reuters says: “The US National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for virtually the entire Atlantic seaboard.” Heatmap News says the event is “already one of the worst wildfire pollution events in US history”. (For commentary on the wildfires, see below.)

Many publications and politicians have linked the events to climate change, with the Hill reporting: “Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the Canadian wildfires ‘truly unprecedented’ in floor remarks Wednesday and warned of the ongoing damage caused by climate change.” The Independent says Democratic politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders “warn that Canada wildfire smoke is [a] sign of climate crisis catastrophe to come”. Politico reports under the headline: “Climate change ‘is here’: NY officials warn of health impacts from Canada wildfire smoke.” Another Politico article reports: “[This episode is] also the latest manifestation of a trend that those [air pollution] regulators are effectively helpless to confront in the short term: bigger and longer-lasting wildfires linked to the effects of climate change.” It quotes White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre saying: “It is yet another alarming example of the ways in which the climate crisis is disturbing our lives and our communities.” Axios says: “Climate change is worsening the wildfires in Canada, with extreme heat events hitting northwestern Canada, exacerbating drought conditions and priming the region for major blazes. Numerous studies show close ties between climate change and wildfires, in addition to land use changes and other factors at play.” It quotes Canada’s minister of natural resources, Jonathan Wilkinson saying: “Wildfires certainly took place before we started to clearly see the acceleration of the effects of climate change. However, we are now experiencing a new reality. One where we need to pay attention to what science is telling us.” The Associated Press reports: “Scientists say warming temperatures increase the risk of the hot, dry weather that often fans wildfires.” Elsewhere, however, Yahoo News reports under the headline: “What’s causing Canada’s raging wildfires? It’s not as simple as blaming climate change, expert says.”

There is blanket coverage in UK media of comments made by prime minister Rishi Sunak to reporters accompanying him on a trip to the US, where, reports BBC News, he said: “It does appear that these kind of eco-zealots at Just Stop Oil are writing [Labour leader] Keir Starmer’s energy policy…My view is we should focus on energy security, not weakness and dependency which seems to be the Labour Party’s policy. They are putting ideology ahead of jobs, ahead of investment, and ahead of our energy security. I think that is wrong. It is a completely bizarre policy which says, ‘we won’t ban oil and gas; we will just ban British oil and gas’. The only people that benefit from Keir Starmer’s energy policy are dictators and autocrats like Vladimir Putin.” [As Carbon Brief’s new weekly DeBriefed newsletter has noted, Labour’s 2021 pledge on banning new oil and gas developments followed findings earlier that year from the world’s most influential energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, that there was no room for new oil and gas expansion anywhere in the world if the global energy system is to reach net-zero by 2050 in order to limit warming to 1.5C.] Sunak’s comments are also reported by the Press Association, Sky News, the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, among others.

Meanwhile, the Times reports: “Starmer is being urged to water down Labour’s commitment to spend £28bn a year on green projects by incorporating other infrastructure projects in the sum.” The paper says: “One plan understood to be under early consideration as a way of softening the policy is deciding to count existing government schemes towards the figure, meaning that less of the sum would come from new borrowing. Another possibility is broadening the scope of projects that can be paid for by the money. Other capital expenditure such as new hospitals or schools could come out of the budget within certain environmental constraints. A senior source said that this idea would mean spending more of the money ‘on things that win votes’.”

In other news from the UK, the Press Association reports that Caroline Lucas, the country’s only Green MP, is to stand down at the next election for “focus as much as I would like on the existential challenges that drive me – the nature and climate emergencies”.

Chinese president Xi Jinping has said during a tour in Inner Mongolia that China has made “remarkable progress in preventing and controlling desertification, but still faced major challenges”. Xi added that, “in the past two years, the number of dusty weather incidents in northern China has increased due to the impact of climate change,” the outlet notes, citing a report by the state news agency Xinhua. Xi warned that “large areas were still affected” and called on officials to make “long-term, arduous, repetitive and uncertain” efforts to address desertification.

Meanwhile, Clean Technica, a US news site, has published an article, titled: “China pushed ahead with carbon capture while IPCC warns against it.” It says that, while celebrating the establishment of two new carbon capture projects, China is expanding its electricity grid with the addition of “dozens more” coal-fired power plants. Climate Home News carries an article focusing on “confusion surrounding China’s pledged climate finance towards the global south”. China’s progress in delivering its commitment to a “multi-billion climate fund”, pledged almost eight years ago to support the global south, remains “unclear”, the article says, citing experts. Separately, Bloomberg says that European producers “worry” that Chinese companies are gaining an unfair advantage by blending fuels with cheaper materials and mislabeling them to qualify for renewable-energy incentives.

In other news, China Business Network carries an “exclusive” saying that China “expressed regret” over measures such as the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (often referred to as CBAM), as they “fail to adhere” to the “fundamental principles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris Agreement and WTO rules”. Xinhua, citing a report from the People’s Daily, reports that the government’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) recently issued a document that aims to determine the pricing of provincial-level electricity transmission and distribution networks based on “rigorous cost supervision”. Finally, online magazine Responsible Statecraft runs an article saying that, if a conflict were to arise between Beijing and Washington, the US could deploy its forces to obstruct “vital energy shipments” from the Middle East to China.

A Swiss regulator has ruled that the global football association Fifa “misled fans” when it claimed that the Qatar World Cup was carbon neutral, the Guardian reports. It adds: “The verdict is damning for football’s governing body and a victory for environmental campaigners from across Europe.” It continues: “The message that Qatar would be the ‘first carbon neutral World Cup’ was prominent in the buildup to the tournament, even though estimates pointed to the tournament generating more CO2 than any previous event. Fifa claimed these emissions would either be offset or ‘compensated’’ for by – for example – the planting of gardens around the stadiums. The Swiss regulator found these claims to be unproven and unprovable.” BBC Sport reports: “Fifa made false statements about the reduced environmental impact of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, a Swiss regulator has said.” The broadcaster explains: “The complaints centred on the argument that Fifa’s claim of a carbon-neutral World Cup is false because of an underestimation of emissions and a lack of credibility in its offsets, which, say campaigners, means consumers and fans are being misled.” The Financial Times and Reuters also have the story. Separately, Reuters reports: “A Dutch court on Wednesday allowed to proceed to the next phase a civil suit brought by environmental groups against KLM for commercials that allegedly misled consumers about the airline’s environmental credentials.” BusinessGreen reports: “A trio of rulings from the UK’s advertising regulator could have major consequences for oil and gas firms’ marketing strategies.”

The government’s weak ambition for the installation of heat pumps will, reports City AM, “force the UK to spend a further £9bn on extra gas imports from overseas vendors, warned the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU)”. The paper explains: “The government launched a consultation in March earlier this year on the potential for a clean market mechanism – a set of production targets to trigger an upsurge in electric heat pumps – which closes today…The government expects these targets to correspond to credits for qualifying heat pump installations totalling around 60,000 in 2024/25 and around 90,000 in 2025/26. ECIU, however, warns that these targets are no more ambitious than current heat pump sales, and that market mechanism must aim to create a mass market for heat pumps.” It continues: “[ECIU] predicts that laws requiring manufacturers to supply heat pumps and still allowing gas connections for new homes will see the UK buying an additional 200TWh [terawatt hours] of foreign gas between 2024 and 2035.” BusinessGreen also has the story.

A comment for the Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, by Graham Edwards, chief executive of Wales & West Utilities, which operates the gas distribution network in Wales and southwest England, is titled: “Heat pump tunnel vision will cost jobs, push up bills, and ruin British industry.” Edwards says the heat pump targets are “unrealistic”.

Writing for the Guardian, Carbon Brief’s deputy editor Dr Simon Evans responds to an article published by the same paper on Saturday, in which comedian Rowan Atkinson made a series of factually incorrect claims about electric vehicles. The factcheck says: “Contrary to Atkinson’s article, EVs cut emissions in the ‘bigger picture’ taking into account vehicles’ full life cycles, from the extraction of oil or mining of lithium for batteries through to actually driving the cars. As Carbon Brief noted some years ago, EVs already cut planet-warming emissions by two-thirds on a life cycle basis relative to combustion engine cars in the UK – and the benefits are growing.” Meanwhile, Atkinson’s error-strewn article has been republished in full by the Daily Mail, with the piece occupying the lead comment slot for today’s print edition of the paper. Inevitably, omnipresent climate-sceptic columnist Ross Clark has a piece for the Daily Telegraph titled: “Mr Bean is right about electric cars.”

An editorial in the Washington Post says this year’s wildfires in Canada are “off the charts”. It continues: “More than 173,000 hectares (upward of 430,000 acres) have burned in Quebec’s ‘intensive protection fire zone,’ relative to a 10-year average of 247 at this time of year, according to Canadian officials.” The paper says: “Washingtonians have suffered through wildfire haze from time to time, usually from western forests stricken with drought. But as the world warms, they should prepare for more code orange days, including potentially from fires closer to home…While it often takes time to assess how much climate change contributed to a specific disaster, a national increase in wildfire activity is one of the most predictable effects of global warming.” In his newsletter for the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells writes: “Until now, if people in the green and leafy Northeast looked at arid Western cities covered in smoke from wildfires, they could say, that can’t happen here, thank God. On Tuesday, it did.” Veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben writes on the Crucial Years, his Substack: “In the case of the eastern US today, the smoke – and the dangerous particulates it carries – comes from Canadian wildfires. They are a result of the hot dry weather that climate change has made more likely…It’s not just Canada, of course. A new analysis released last week by Climate Central analysed the fifty-year shift towards more severe fire seasons.” McKibben continues: “If the climate crisis is the great existential crisis on our earth, then smoke is the great daily crisis. Happily, they’re both caused by the same thing: burning coal and gas and oil. And even more happily, we know how to end it.” For Time, author John Vaillant writes under the headline: “Even as smoke engulfs us, we can’t wrap our heads around climate change.”

An editorial in the climate-sceptic comment pages of the Wall Street Journal takes a different tack, arguing: “Progressives are proclaiming that the smoky skies engulfing the eastern US from Canadian wildfires are another sign that the climate apocalypse is nigh. Instead, they’re a reminder that government policies to mitigate the impact of natural disasters matter more than those to reduce CO2 emissions.” [Emissions from wildfires in Canada amounted to 55m tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) last month, New Scientist reported earlier in June. Monthly emissions from the US are roughly ten times higher than that.] In the New York Post, Australian columnist Miranda Devine writes under the headline: “Smoky New York isn’t climate change – it’s bad forest management.”

In a piece for the Conversation, scientists Gavin Bridge and Gisa Weszkalnys look at the UK opposition Labour Party’s pledge to end new licences for North Sea oil and gas, saying that it is “not a bolt from the blue”, but is instead supported by the independent Climate Change Committee and the International Energy Agency, among others. They write: “Labour’s plan would draw new licensing to a close, but it would not end oil and gas production.” For BusinessGreen, editor James Murray writes: “The debate around Labour’s proposal to halt oil and gas licenses has become fundamentally unserious – investors and the public deserve better.” He concludes: “Just Stop Oil was always going to be a contentious demand. There is no obligation to unthinkingly accede to its demands. A range of policy programmes for reaching net-zero are available, each of varying degrees of credibility. There is huge uncertainty and multiple competing scenarios available here. But proposals to halt new fossil fuel development deserve serious thought and engagement. They are entirely in line with scientific recommendations and global technology trends. If you are not going to stop new drilling, what are you going to do? How are you going to decarbonise? How are you going to convince others to do likewise?”

In the Sun, the seventh consecutive editorial attacking Labour’s climate policies says: “Starmer’s dangerous capitulation to the eco mob is nonsensical, and Labour’s justification incoherent.” For the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Heath writes: “Opinion polls are predicting a landslide victory for Sir Keir Starmer, giving him carte blanche to implement policies that socialist ideologues have only dreamt of for years. There will be a tax raid on private schools, a war on the dreaded non-doms, more council homes, greater rights for workers and trade unions and a ban on new North Sea oil and gas plants [sic].”

Cooling the Earth through solar engineering, by releasing reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, would dampen extreme fire weather risk in some parts of the world but heighten it in others, a new study finds. The research uses models to simulate a scenario where solar geoengineering is used in 2035 to offset 1.5C of global warming. It finds that doing this would “dampen” wildfire risk “over much of the globe, including the Mediterranean, northeast Brazil, and eastern Europe”. But the authors add: “However, SAI has little impact over the western Amazon and northern Australia and causes larger increases in extreme fire weather frequency in west central Africa relative to the moderate emissions scenario.”