Climate & Energy · Friday, 4 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

China's carbon fell because of oil, not coal - the first time ever. Travel held steady and fuel use dropped 9%.

Climate & Energy 1 min 47 sources

In the three months to June, China's carbon dioxide fell 1% while its power stations burned more coal. The whole fall came from oil. People kept moving; the fuel to move them did not.

fall in China's oil use in the three months to June

the first time a drop in oil, rather than coal, has pulled the country's total carbon down [1]

36 Mt

of oil that electric vehicles kept out of China's engines in six months

more oil than the whole United Kingdom burns over the same half-year [1]

+2.9%

growth in city journeys in China while transport fuel use fell 16%

trips between regions were up 0.1% and freight tonnage up 2.4%, so movement did not shrink [1]

+2.4%

rise in coal burned in China's power stations in the same quarter

more wind and solar was switched off unused, so coal filled the gap [1]

The lead story — what happened

China's carbon dioxide fell 1% in the three months to June, and every bit of the fall came from burning less oil. [1]
That has never happened before. Every earlier fall in China's emissions was driven by coal. [1]
Oil use dropped 9% in the quarter and transport fuel dropped 16%, after the Strait of Hormuz shut and fuel got dear. [1]
People did not stop travelling. City journeys rose 2.9%, journeys between regions rose 0.1%, and freight tonnage rose 2.4%. [1]
Electric vehicles did much of the work. The number on China's roads rose 33% in a year, and charging rose 60% in the quarter. [1]
That is more than new sales explain. Drivers who already owned an electric car used it for journeys they used to make on petrol. [1]
Electric vehicles saved China 36 million tonnes of oil in six months, more than the United Kingdom burns in half a year. [1]
Electric lorries grew fastest. They passed 45% of new truck sales in China, and June sales more than doubled from a year earlier. [1]
But electric vehicles explain only about a third of the drop in oil use. Emptying the country's oil stores covered most of the rest. [1]
Coal went the other way. Power stations burned 2.4% more, because wind and solar power was switched off unused and the wind was poor. [1]
China's emissions have now been flat for more than two years, since a peak in March 2024. They rose 2% in the first quarter and fell 1% in the second. [1]

Who is involved

The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air

a Finland-registered research group that counts China's emissions every quarter; it wrote this analysis for the climate site Carbon Brief [1]
Sinopec

China's largest oil refiner and fuel retailer; its fuel sales fell 9% in the first half of the year [1]
China's National Bureau of Statistics

China's official statistics agency; it publishes the energy and transport figures the analysis is built on [1]
China's electric truck makers

builders of battery lorries, now more than 45% of every new truck sold in the country [1]

What is pushing on this

Electric vehicles replacing fuel Building↑

charging rose 60% in the quarter, so cars already bought were driven much harder [1]

Expensive petrol after the Hormuz shutdown High→

crude oil processing fell 11% and imports fell 32% in the quarter [1]

Clean power thrown away Building↑

wind and solar were switched off unused, so coal power rose despite record new capacity [1]

The oil stockpile Easing↓

about 60% of the import drop was covered by using stored oil, not by burning less [1]

How it unfolded

March 2024 China's carbon dioxide reaches a peak and then flattens [1]
Earlier in 2026 the Strait of Hormuz shuts and fuel gets dear [1]
Jan-Mar emissions rise 2%, because wind and solar power is being wasted [1]
Apr-Jun emissions fall 1%, and the whole fall comes from oil [1]

Where this points

Watch whether China's fuel sales climb back when oil moves freely through the Strait of Hormuz again. That is the test of how much of this fall was the shortage and how much was the switch to electric.

The rest of the day

38 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
California refuses to cap wildfire bills

California's legislature rejected the governor's plan to limit what power companies pay for fires their equipment starts. Shares in PG&E fell 20% and in Edison International 23%, its worst day in over 25 years. [2]

Why it matters — As the state dries out, the cost of fire is being left on the companies that own the wires, and investors just repriced it in a day.
03
Data centres get their own grid rulebook

MISO, which runs the power grid from Louisiana to Minnesota, asked US regulators for rules aimed at data centres. They would have to forecast their demand a day ahead, limit how fast they change it, and stay connected through faults. [3]

Why it matters — One computing site can now swing enough power to shake a grid, so it is being governed like a power station rather than a customer.
04
US grid order threatens battery supply

An order effective 26 August bars some foreign-made batteries, transformers and inverters from connecting to the US grid, and lets the energy secretary set conditions on kit already installed. The research firm BloombergNEF expects storage delays and cancellations. [4]

Why it matters — China holds 80% of the world's lithium battery manufacturing capacity, and Chinese firms supplied about 40% of US inverters in 2025. [4]
05
Wind buyouts pass $4bn as an eighth state sues

The Trump administration has paid nearly $4bn since the spring to get energy firms to drop a dozen US offshore wind leases, often in exchange for investing in fossil fuels. California became the eighth state to sue. [5]

Why it matters — Developers paid $150.3m at auction for the Morro Bay site off California and were paid $120m to give it back. [6][7][8]
06
US reviews California's coastal powers

The US government opened a federal review of California's coastal management programme, run largely by a state commission, and has already announced new offshore oil leases off California and Florida. [9]

Why it matters — Campaigners fear the review strips the state commission of its say over federal projects on its own coast. [9]
07
Wind's price gap with solar is the widest recorded

US power contracts averaged $83.79 per megawatt hour for land-based wind against $61.40 for solar in the second quarter, a 36% gap and the largest ever recorded. At least 44 gigawatts of wind sits stuck in a US Defense Department review. [10]

Why it matters — The wind industry's own market analyst says the shrinking pool of buildable projects lets the survivors charge a premium. [10]
08
Equinor's biggest US battery starts up in Texas

Equinor, Norway's state oil company, switched on a 100 megawatt battery at Harlingen in south Texas. It has no long-term contract and earns by buying power cheap and selling it dear. [11]

Why it matters — Its two Texas batteries together can supply about 30,000 homes for two hours. [11]
09
A five-year cell deal for a Georgia factory

SK On of South Korea will supply NeoVolta Power with 9 gigawatt hours of lithium iron phosphate cells from 2027 to 2031, to be built into storage systems in Pendergrass, Georgia. A second 9 gigawatt hours is only a framework so far. [12]

Why it matters — The US battery build-out is still mostly assembly; the cells themselves are imported.
10
Data centres are buying the batteries too

Data centres took 5 of the nearly 31 gigawatt hours of battery capacity installed across the US in the first half of the year, and 75% of everything installed at commercial and industrial sites. [13]

Why it matters — They pair batteries with on-site gas generators to get more out of them while they wait for a grid connection. [13]
11
The shortage is transformers, not chips

Suppliers of transformers and cooling equipment across Asia are the quiet winners of the data-centre build-out, and analysts say transformer tightness is among the main things holding deliveries up. [14]

Why it matters — What limits how fast computing grows is a piece of heavy electrical equipment with a years-long queue.
12
Australia argues over what powers its data centres

Australia's energy minister says he will legislate that new data centres run on 100% renewable electricity, backed by gas. Queensland and the Northern Territory want to use their own state-owned coal and gas instead. [15] The country has 162 data centres and plans for 90 more. [16]

Why it matters — Electricity is only about a tenth of a data centre's spending, so the fight is over who sells the power rather than what it costs. [15]
13
Data centres are less popular than nuclear plants

The Economist reports data centres are now less popular than almost any other kind of US infrastructure, nuclear plants included. Counties and states are banning them or wrapping them in rules. [17]

Why it matters — A bill limiting their effect on electricity prices passed committee in the House of Representatives in July, so the objection has reached federal law-making. [17]
14
A flash flood kills at least two in the Grand Canyon

About an inch of rain fell in half an hour on Saturday, and water, mud and debris tore down Bright Angel Canyon. At least two people died and around 80 were evacuated from the canyon floor. [18]

Why it matters — The storm crossed the burn scar of the Dragon Bravo fire, which swept nearly 150,000 acres in July 2025, and burnt ground sheds water instead of soaking it up. [19][20]
15
Edouard's remains flood south-east Texas

The storm came ashore near the Texas-Louisiana border with 60mph winds and then crawled inland, dropping well over a foot of rain in places. Crews helped people out of flooded homes in Polk County. [22][23]

Why it matters — The danger was water, not wind: the storm had already weakened to a depression while it was still dumping rain. [23]
16
A category 4 hurricane circles south of Hawaii

Hurricane Lowell has tracked well south of the islands and forecasters do not agree on when it turns north. It is the 13th named storm of an eastern Pacific season that averages about 15 in a whole year. [24]

Why it matters — Three months of the season are left, and the US weather service has told residents to keep rechecking a forecast that keeps moving. [24]
17
This El Nino may be the strongest in 70 years

The World Meteorological Organization, the UN's weather agency, says the Pacific warming could run until at least February 2027. The UN's head said the planet has entered a danger zone of extreme weather. [25]

Why it matters — El Nino pushes some regions into drought and others into stronger storms and floods, on top of the warming already there. [25]
18
Indiana's floods killed seven and got no federal aid

Record flooding damaged about 250 houses in Cambridge City, a third of the town's total. Ten days after the water went down, the US president had not approved emergency aid. [26]

Why it matters — The state has also cut funding for its own environmental agencies, so the money is thin at both ends. [26]
19
Germany investigates sabotage at two substations

Explosive devices were found at a substation beside the Jaenschwalde coal plant in Brandenburg, and a deliberate short circuit near Cologne took 4,200 megawatts of RWE coal units offline. [27]

Why it matters — A regional interior minister said the two possibilities being investigated are a foreign government and left-wing extremism, and neither can be ruled out. [27]
20
Indonesia builds coal plants to make green metal

Researchers are tracking 32 off-grid coal plants built purely to power aluminium smelters. Indonesia wants to go from about 1 million tonnes of aluminium in 2025 to 14.5 million by 2030. [28]

Why it matters — Aluminium is classed as a transition metal, so coal-fired smelters get described as part of the clean build-out. One campaigner called it a loophole an elephant could walk through. [28]
21
The methane mystery was the air cleaning itself

Methane in the air barely grew between 1999 and 2006 and nobody knew why. A study in Nature attributes it to a 1.4% rise in the hydroxyl radical, the chemical that destroys methane, mostly over the tropics. [29]

Why it matters — That rise came from more nitrogen oxides, the pollution from engines and ships, spreading towards developing countries and the oceans as trade grew. [29]
22
Dam reservoirs may become the biggest energy emitter

A study projects that on a net-zero path, greenhouse gases from existing and planned hydropower reservoirs reach 87% of energy-sector emissions by 2050, with planned dams making up nearly half of that. [30]

Why it matters — The surge is mostly methane bubbling out of flooded ground, which is counted after a dam is built rather than before. [30]
23
Drought is reaching all the way down the soil

Droughts where every soil layer down to a metre is dry at once have grown longer across more than half of the world's land over four decades, a Nature Geoscience study finds. [31]

Why it matters — Averaging the whole soil column hides them: it overstates how long they last by about 128% and understates the damage to plants by about 28%. [31]
24
401 coastal conflicts, mostly over energy and mining

A study counted 401 disputes on coasts worldwide involving at least 275 Indigenous ethnic groups, driven mainly by energy production, mining and biomass. [32]

Why it matters — Reported harms include loss of ancestral land and sea, and they varied with how far Indigenous rights were legally recognised. [32]
25
Five more Chinese solar makers post losses

Longi's first-half revenue fell 17.6% to 27.05bn yuan while its net loss widened 43.4% to 3.68bn yuan. TCL Zhonghuan, GCL Technology, Daqo New Energy and Xinte Energy also reported losses. [33]

Why it matters — Longi blames oversupply, idle factories, dearer silver and currency moves, though some rivals' losses are narrowing. [33]
26
India built the factories before the demand

India now has 233 gigawatts of solar module capacity, second only to China, but its factories run at 35% to 40%, below the 50% to 65% considered sustainable. [34]

Why it matters — Module capacity is nearly seven times cell capacity and 116 times ingot and wafer capacity, so the inputs still come from China. [34]
27
A Swedish solar cell factory is shelved

Midsummer has put its planned thin-film cell factory in Flen on hold after being refused a Swedish state investment grant, and will give up European Union money it had already won. [35]

Why it matters — Its chief executive said self-financing the plant would still have cost several hundred million kronor even with the EU contribution. [35]
28
Tesla's Solar Roof ends and installers eat the loss

Tesla stopped supplying its solar tiles in August. Over about seven years it installed roughly 3,000 systems, peaking at 21 to 32 a week against a promise of 1,000 a week. [36]

Why it matters — Certified installers who put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the programme are carrying the cost. [36]
29
Australia funds the next solar cell

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency put A$7.25m into a A$19.5m University of Sydney project on durable silicon-perovskite tandem cells, alongside a Brisbane startup planning a 500 megawatt factory. [37]

Why it matters — Silicon alone tops out near 25% efficiency; stacking perovskite on top could in theory reach about 40%. [37]
30
Norway starts writing rules for batteries

Norway's energy ministry told its regulator to review battery licensing by October, while the grid operator Statnett capped how much smaller equipment can qualify to help balance the grid. [38]

Why it matters — The market is getting official attention and new restrictions at the same time, and consultants say grid access and weak economics still bind. [38]
31
Volkswagen approves cutting 100,000 jobs

Its supervisory board approved a plan on Thursday taking planned cuts to about 100,000 worldwide. Four German plants, Emden, Zwickau, Hanover and Neckarsulm, have no vehicles allocated after their current models end between 2031 and 2034. [39]

Why it matters — Volkswagen says it may stop building electric cars at those sites as it cuts costs to catch faster Chinese rivals. [39]
32
California will not fund its biggest virtual power plant

The state budget left out about $70m for the Demand Side Grid Support programme, which pays 130,000 homes with batteries and nearly 75,000 with smart thermostats to cut or share power when the grid is tight. [40]

Why it matters — A test in July 2025 got roughly 476 megawatts out of it, capacity built from equipment people already own. [40]
33
US regulator moves to hand shareholder votes to states

The US Securities and Exchange Commission said it will consider scrapping rule 14a-8, which sets who may put a proposal to a company's annual meeting, and giving that power to individual states instead. [41]

Why it matters — Reuters reports the shift would reduce the influence of activist investors, who use that rule to force votes company boards do not want. [41]
34
More US refiners to be let off biofuel rules

The US environment agency was expected to grant small-refinery exemptions covering more than 1.8 billion renewable fuel credits, with facilities owned by Marathon Petroleum and Chevron among the applicants. [42]

Why it matters — Farm-state lawmakers objected because the waivers cut demand for the crops that go into the fuel. [42]
35
US coal lost exactly what renewables gained

Gas made 38.4% of US electricity in the first half of the year, renewables 28.5%, nuclear 17.1% and coal 14.4%. Renewables gained 2.2 percentage points and coal lost the same. [43]

Why it matters — Texas led the rise on solar; California's large-plant output fell, partly because batteries now store solar that used to be wasted. [43]
36
Polar satellites sharpen hurricane strength forecasts

NOAA, the US ocean and atmosphere agency, says microwave sounders on its polar-orbiting satellites see through cloud into a storm's core, improving estimates of how strong it is. [44]

Why it matters — Most hurricanes form over open ocean where there is nothing else to measure them with. [44]
37
The greenest building may be the one that survives

A Florida beach house built to roughly double the required wind speed survived Hurricane Michael in 2018 while more than half its neighbours were destroyed. The extra strength cost 15% to 20%. [45]

Why it matters — The extra concrete makes a building look worse on a carbon count, until you add the carbon of rebuilding it. [45]
38
Battery swapping is a job in Tangail

In Bangladesh, women are becoming franchisees of solar-powered battery-swapping cabinets for electric three-wheelers, of which the country has more than six million. [46]

Why it matters — The International Renewable Energy Agency points to the model as a way to electrify road transport in poorer countries. [46]
39
New scenarios for the next climate models

A new set of emissions pathways has been published for CMIP7, the coordinated model runs that feed the UN's climate assessments. They replace the pathways used in the last round. [47]

Why it matters — The old ones were named after their warming effect; the new ones are named after the emissions themselves. [47]

02 Lesson why it matters

The petrol pump stopped counting the traffic

Fuel sold has always been the way to count how much a country moves, and in China this spring the two came apart: journeys held steady while transport fuel use fell 16%.

The twist

A measure never announces that it has stopped standing for the thing it stood for. It goes on producing a perfectly accurate number about itself.

How it works

Moving anything used to mean burning fuel
So fuel sold became the count of how much a country moves
Taxes, forecasts and plans were built on that count
Electric cars, lorries and trains break the link
In China this spring, journeys held and fuel fell 9%
Every plan reading the fuel number now reads the country wrong

Where you've seen this

Newspapers

copies sold counted readers, until the readers moved to a screen

Cash machines

withdrawals counted a high street's trade, until people paid by card

Office electricity

the meter counted who came in to work, until the laptops went home

Exam results

they counted what a class had learned, until the class was taught the exam

The catch

The fuel number is not wrong. It is still an exact count of fuel, and of the carbon that comes off it. It just stopped being a count of journeys.

And the whole of it

Fuel duty pays for roads, oil forecasts set the price of crude, and a great deal of ordinary planning still runs off the pump. Anyone reading a number whose meaning quietly changed is in the same position, and from the inside it looks exactly like a number that went up or down.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

China's carbon fell because a war made fuel dear and the country emptied its oil stores, and underneath that because electric vehicles it had already bought were finally driven hard.

Why it works on us — A single figure - down 1% - reads as a verdict on a country's climate policy, when most of it is the arithmetic of one shut sea lane.

Who gains

China's electric vehicle makers — Dear petrol pushed drivers onto electricity, and battery lorries passed 45% of every new truck sold in the country. [1]
Oil buyers outside China — China cut its oil imports 32% in the quarter, which analysts describe as the main thing that steadied world oil prices during the Hormuz shutdown. [1]
Marathon Petroleum and Chevron — The US environment agency was expected to exempt small refineries they own from biofuel blending rules, covering more than 1.8 billion credits. [42]
Wind developers whose projects are already through review — With at least 44 gigawatts frozen in a US Defense Department review, the industry's own analyst says the projects that can still be built command a premium. [10]
Asian transformer and cooling suppliers — Data-centre construction has made equipment they already build scarce, and analysts name transformer tightness as a main brake on delivery. [14]

Who pays

Shareholders in California's two big power companies — The legislature refused to cap wildfire liability, and PG&E fell 20% and Edison International 23% in a single day. [2]
Contractors who sold Tesla's Solar Roof — Tesla stopped supplying the tiles in August, and installers say they had put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the programme. [36]
About 100,000 Volkswagen workers — The supervisory board approved a plan taking planned job cuts to roughly 100,000, with four German plants holding no vehicle allocations after 2031 to 2034. [39]
Households in Cambridge City, Indiana — Record flooding damaged about 250 houses, a third of the town's total, and no federal emergency aid had been approved ten days later. [26]
India's solar factory owners — 233 gigawatts of module capacity is running at 35% to 40%, below the level generally considered sustainable. [34]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

How much of China's oil drop is a real cut in use rather than emptied storage tanks.

Government energy figures imply consumption fell about 9% in the quarter, but imports fell 32%, leaving roughly 60% of the import fall to be covered by stockpiles whose size nobody publishes. [1]
02

Whether China's fuel use climbs back when oil flows freely again.

Electric vehicles account for about a third of the first-half drop. The rest is stockpiles, slower chemicals output and changes in how people travelled, and none of those has been measured apart from the others. [1]
03

What Indonesia's off-grid coal plants actually emit.

There is little public data on the 32 plants being built to power aluminium smelters, and a researcher tracking them says the boom is essentially untracked. [28]
04

How many people are still missing after the Grand Canyon flood.

The Guardian reported at least 15 missing on 31 August; Scientific American reported at least one missing on 1 September. No reconciled count has been published, and both figures are in print. [19][21]
05

How much the Dragon Bravo burn scar contributed to the Grand Canyon flood.

Federal models had flagged raised runoff risk after the fire, but it is still unclear how directly the burnt ground turned Saturday's rain into a deadly flood. [20]
06

How close Hurricane Lowell gets to Hawaii.

The models forecasters rely on still disagree on when the storm turns north, which is what decides whether it brings surge and heavy rain to the islands. [24]
07

Who attacked the two German substations.

The interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia said a foreign government and left-wing extremism are both under investigation and neither can be ruled out. [27]
08

Whether California's biggest virtual power plant survives.

The budget left out its roughly $70m but also declined to move it to a different regulator, so the decision was deferred rather than taken. [40]
09

Whether hydropower reservoirs really become the energy sector's biggest emitter.

The 87%-by-2050 figure comes from machine-learning models trained on published reservoir measurements, in a paper published early and still subject to further edits. [30]

04 Hope carry this

Electric cars and lorries kept 36 million tonnes of oil out of China's engines in six months, more than the whole United Kingdom burns in half a year. Battery lorries passed 45% of the country's new truck sales.