Climate & Energy · Monday, 7 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Rules cleaned up factories and traffic. The UN's weather agency says wildfire smoke is making clean air harder to reach.

Climate & Energy 28 sources

The World Meteorological Organization's yearly air quality report says extreme fire-smoke events have tripled since the 1990s, and that meeting health limits for clean air is getting harder even where chimneys and exhaust pipes have been cleaned up. Borneo is the live example, with about 200,000 hectares burned since July and smoke reaching Singapore, Manila and Kuala Lumpur.

as many extreme fire-smoke events worldwide as in the 1990s

a study in the report links them to nearly 100,000 extra deaths a year from 2010 to 2018 [1]

200,000 ha

of Indonesian Borneo burned since early July

the smoke has reached Singapore, Manila and Kuala Lumpur [2]

554m tonnes

of carbon released by Canada's fires in 2023

about 23% of everything the world's wildfires emitted that year [5]

15.1m ha

burned in Canada in that one season

about seven times the average of the twenty years before it [5]

The lead story — what happened

The World Meteorological Organization, the UN agency that tracks weather and the air, published its yearly report on air quality and climate on Monday. [1]
Its finding: rules in many rich countries have cut what comes out of chimneys and exhaust pipes, and wildfire smoke is growing as a source of pollution anyway. [1]
The agency says meeting the World Health Organization's guidelines for clean air will get harder, because extreme fires are becoming more likely. [1]
PM2.5 - soot particles small enough to pass out of the lungs and into the blood - ran above its long-run average in northern Canada, parts of Russia and west-central Africa in 2025, all because of fires. [1]
North-west Spain was a hot spot after exceptional late-summer fires. Europe had extreme heat and destructive fires this year in Spain, France and Greece. [1]
A study quoted in the report found extreme fire-smoke events have tripled worldwide since the 1990s. It links them to nearly 100,000 extra deaths a year between 2010 and 2018. [1]
Particles from a fire are especially harmful because they arrive with a load of toxic chemicals, the agency's scientific officer Lorenzo Labrador said. Breathing them inflames the whole body. [1]
The live example is Borneo, the island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. About 200,000 hectares of forest and farmland have burned on the Indonesian side since early July. [2]
The smoke has crossed borders to Singapore, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. It is the region's worst haze in more than a decade. [2]
Forecasters expect this El Nino - a periodic warming of the Pacific that shifts weather worldwide - to be the largest in at least 1,000 years, and a UN agency says it could push 50 million people into acute hunger. [6][7]
These fires burn in peat - waterlogged ground where dead plants have piled up for thousands of years without rotting. Drained and dried, it smoulders underground, and hand tools and portable pumps are what volunteers have to fight it with. [2][3]
A hectare of deep peat can hold more than 6,000 tonnes of carbon, about what 4,800 cars put out in a year. Burning releases it fast. [2]
Malaysia lifted an emergency declaration in Serian, a district of Sarawak state on Borneo, after air quality readings dropped back down. [4]
None of this is a one-off. Canada's 2023 fire season burned 15.1 million hectares, about seven times the average of the previous twenty years. [5]
It released 554 million tonnes of carbon, roughly 23% of everything the world's wildfires emitted that year. Most of it, 423 million tonnes, came out of the soil rather than the trees. [5]

Who is involved

The World Meteorological Organization

the UN agency that tracks weather and the atmosphere; it published Monday's report and says air pollution and warming have to be handled together, not separately
Lorenzo Labrador

a scientific officer at that agency; he explained why smoke particles do more harm to the body than factory ones
Dwi Sujatmoko

a 35-year-old volunteer firefighter in Indonesian Borneo; he has spent more than a month in the haze digging at fires that burn underground
Malaysia's Sarawak state government

Sarawak is a Malaysian state on Borneo, next door to the Indonesian fires; the state government declared an emergency in Serian district and has now lifted it

How it unfolded

Early July fires begin spreading across Indonesian Borneo, on peat dried out by drought [2]
1 September a NASA satellite photographs thick grey smoke streaming off the island [3]
Monday the UN's weather agency publishes its yearly report on air quality and climate [1]
Monday Malaysia lifts its emergency in Serian district after air readings drop [4]
Next the fires are still burning, and forecasters expect this El Nino to peak in November or December [2][6]

Where this points

Watch whether the Borneo fires are still burning when this El Nino peaks around November, because that is what decides whether the smoke season ends or runs on into the new year. [2][6]

What is pushing on the whole day

The bar and the word are our reading of how hard each one is pushing today. The arrow is where it is heading. The evidence is in the stories below.

Smoke from fires High↑

extreme smoke events have tripled since the 1990s [1]

Cleanup of factories and traffic Steady→

rules have cut chimney and exhaust pollution across many rich countries [1]

Drought over Borneo High↑

a very strong El Nino has dried out the peat swamps [2][6]

Ability to put the fires out Easing↓

peat fires smoulder underground and volunteers fight them with hand tools [2]

The rest of the day

19 more stories on this beat.

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

02
China stops approving new battery factories

China has paused approvals for new battery storage factories while officials review how much production capacity the country already has and has planned, the financial outlet Cailianshe reported. Projects that have not broken ground are on hold; those already under construction carry on. [8] The worry is too many factories chasing the same buyers. Chinese solar and electric car makers went through that squeeze, and solar firms moved into batteries when panel profits collapsed. [8] From 1 September China also began charging a 2% tax on lithium-ion batteries, ending an eleven-year exemption. [9]

Why it matters — China makes most of the world's grid batteries, so a pause in Beijing's approvals office is a decision about how cheap storage will be everywhere else. It lands on new entrants hardest, because the firms that already have concrete poured keep their place in the queue.
03
Ships are running short of fuel

The heavy oil that powers most of the world's cargo fleet is heading into a shortage. Refineries have been damaged by strikes in Russia and the Middle East, and those still running are choosing to make diesel, petrol and jet fuel, which pay better. [10] Energy Aspects, a consultancy, forecasts a shortfall of 218,000 barrels a day this quarter. The main shipping fuel is up 76% since the Iran war began, to just under $825 a tonne in Singapore. [10]

Why it matters — Ships carry almost everything that is traded, so their fuel bill ends up inside freight rates and then inside prices in shops. Asia is worst placed, because Singapore imports more than half of the roughly one million barrels a day it sells.
04
Africa's biggest refinery sells shares

The Dangote refinery near Lagos, the largest in Africa, is raising money on the stock market. Its owner, the Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote, is looking to raise $1.6 billion by offering 4.1 billion shares at 525 naira each, and the offer opens on 14 September. [11] The plant matters well beyond Nigeria: it runs at 650,000 barrels a day and has been pushing out more diesel, petrol and jet fuel while its output of heavy ship fuel falls. [10]

Why it matters — This is the same switch that is starving the shipping fleet, seen from the refinery's side, and it is being rewarded with money from investors. Nigerian savers are being invited to buy into a plant whose profits currently come from a war.
05
Volcanic ash shuts eight airports

Eight Indonesian airports stayed closed on Monday because of ash from Anak Krakatau, a volcano in the strait between Java and Sumatra. Jakarta's main airport was shut until 6pm local time. Ash reached 6,000 metres on the Java side and 15,000 metres on the Sumatra side. The disaster agency told people to wear masks outdoors, and schools in Jakarta and Lampung switched to remote lessons. The volcano grew out of the crater left by Krakatoa, whose 1883 eruption killed more than 36,000 people. [12]

Why it matters — It is a second kind of dirty air over the same country in the same week, and it shows how quickly ordinary life stops when the sky is unbreathable: no flights, no school.
06
South Korea's soft corals are sagging again

Divers off Jeju island in South Korea report that its soft corals are slumping for the second time in two years. Soft corals have no hard skeleton and hold themselves up with internal fluid pressure, so a change in the water makes them sag and break off. About half of one cluster off the islet of Beomseom has been struggling for months. [13] Marine heatwaves around Korea have grown almost four times longer over the past decade, to 83.3 days. [13]

Why it matters — The colonies are a national monument inside a UNESCO-listed biosphere reserve and the nursery for much of Jeju's sea life, and one researcher says each round of damage leaves them less able to recover than the last.
07
Heat and hunger together empty the nets

A study in Nature Communications used three decades of data - 6,659 catch records covering 1,246 species in 254 regions - to test what extreme ocean conditions do to fishing. Hot water alone hurts. Water low in plankton, the tiny drifting life that feeds everything else, also hurts. When the two arrive together the chance of a very poor catch rises sharply, most of all in tropical seas. [14] The species hit hardest are the ones people rely on for food. [14]

Why it matters — It lands on the countries with the least money to absorb a bad year, and it explains why fish stocks sometimes crash in a season that looked survivable on temperature alone.
08
Air conditioning saved 58,000 lives

A study in Nature Health went through 30 million US death records over eleven years and worked out how many people air conditioning kept alive in extreme heat: about 5,267 a year, or nearly 58,000 between 2010 and 2020. [15] The same machines feed the warming that makes the heat. Most of the electricity running them comes from burning fossil fuels, and the UN expects greenhouse gas from cooling to rise from 4.5 billion to 7.2 billion tonnes a year within 25 years. [15]

Why it matters — UN officials estimate about half a million people die of heat worldwide each year, so nobody is arguing for fewer air conditioners. The researchers found more than half the cases they looked at were offices cooled so hard that workers wear jumpers in summer.
09
No right to clean drinking water, court rules

A divided US federal appeals court ruled that the country's constitution gives people no right to clean drinking water, and no right to accurate information from public officials either. The ruling upholds the dismissal of a lawsuit brought over lead-contaminated tap water in Jackson, Mississippi. [16] The court did not decide whether that water was safe. It decided that the claim had no basis in the constitution, which ends this route to a remedy. [16]

Why it matters — Lead damages the developing brain, and the people who drank the water are left with the state and city bodies that ran the system in the first place.
10
New Mexico bans new uranium leases

New Mexico, once the largest producer of uranium ore in the United States, banned new leasing of state-owned land for uranium mining on Friday. The state land commissioner, Stephanie Garcia Richard, signed the order in Santa Fe. The state has hundreds of abandoned uranium shafts, two active leases and no working mines. [17] It does not stop mining on federal land inside the state, and the US government has been pushing to restart domestic uranium production, adding one New Mexico project to a fast-track permitting list. Two companies still aim to start producing there next year. [17]

Why it matters — Nuclear power needs fuel, and the fuel comes out of somebody's ground; this is a state government deciding it will not be its own.
11
Patagonia sues over a shrunken monument

The outdoor clothing company Patagonia joined conservation and Native American groups in suing the US president over the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah. A proclamation signed in July cut 91% of the protected area, more than 1.2 million acres of red-rock canyons full of archaeological sites, and cut a second Utah monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by nearly 1.7 million acres. [18] The case opens a wider legal fight over whether a president has the power to shrink such sites at all. [18]

Why it matters — Protection that one signature can remove is a weaker thing than it looks, and the answer will apply to every national monument, not just these two.
12
The farm secretary owns the oil that is hurting farmers

Brooke Rollins, who runs the US Department of Agriculture, and her husband Mark Rollins, an oil and gas executive, together hold as much as $2.5 million in fossil fuel investments, in disclosures filed in July. At least $1 million is in a partnership with oil and gas interests in Iraqi Kurdistan, and $1 million more in a Texas venture. [19] US diesel prices hit record highs this week, and her department has cut support for cheaper renewable energy on farms. [19]

Why it matters — Farmers are paying record diesel prices and higher fertiliser prices caused by the war, and the official whose department is meant to help them is invested in the industry selling the fuel.
13
A reactor a mile under Kansas

A California start-up called Deep Fission is preparing to lower a nuclear reactor down a borehole in south-east Kansas. A mile of rock is meant to do the job of the thick concrete dome around a normal reactor, and the weight of the water above supplies the pressure. That removes two of the most expensive parts of a nuclear plant. The reactor is nine metres tall, less than a metre wide, and designed to make 15 megawatts. [20] The US energy department approved the safety design this month. [20]

Why it matters — The parts are all ordinary - a pressurised water reactor, an oil-industry borehole, a geothermal heat exchanger - and one outside engineer says the hard bit is proving they work together, and that nobody can easily reach the reactor to inspect it.
14
Record money into solar with batteries attached

Projects that put solar panels and grid batteries on the same site pulled in a record $25 billion in the first half of 2026, according to BloombergNEF. That is nearly double the previous record, set in the second half of 2025. [21] The pairing exists because solar's weakness is timing: nothing at night, a flood of power on sunny afternoons. A battery on the same site lets the project behave like a plant that can be turned up or down. Nearly half the storage the United States added last quarter sat beside a solar farm. [21][22]

Why it matters — It is the clearest sign yet that batteries have stopped being an add-on and become part of how a solar farm is designed and financed.
15
Hot bricks instead of a furnace

Steel, cement and chemical plants need heat of several hundred degrees, and they still mostly get it by burning gas or coal. A Boston company, Electrified Thermal Solutions, is selling a stack of firebricks that conduct electricity. The bricks heat up when cheap power is available, hold the heat, then release it as hot air into a furnace or boiler. [23] The system stores heat at up to 1,800C and can deliver anything from 200C upwards. [23]

Why it matters — Industrial heat is one of the hardest parts of the energy system to run on electricity. A store that soaks up power when it is cheapest also helps a grid carrying a lot of midday solar.
16
A heat pump ten times better than a boiler

Skyven Technologies, a company with sites in Texas and Antwerp, says its industrial heat pump has reached a sustained coefficient of performance of 8.0 at its Dallas demonstration centre. That means eight units of heat delivered for every unit of electricity used, because the machine moves heat rather than making it. The centre managed 6.5 when it opened in November 2025. [24] Skyven says 8.0 is about ten times better than a conventional boiler, and the machine lifts heat from 38C to 185C. [24]

Why it matters — Factory steam is a large and quiet share of world emissions, and a machine this efficient changes the sum a plant manager does when deciding whether to keep the gas boiler.
17
Solar on a car body, for the battery not the range

Researchers at the University of Exeter reviewed the studies published between 2015 and 2026 on building solar cells into the bodywork of vehicles. Their conclusion is that the point is not adding driving range, which is small, but keeping the battery topped up and in good condition when the car is parked. [25] They also argue that the industry needs its own test standard, because existing solar ratings are measured on flat panels held still, and a car body is curved and moving. [25]

Why it matters — Battery replacement is the largest single cost hanging over a used electric car, so a technology that slows the wear changes what the car is worth years later.
18
Found alive ten days after Nepal's flood

Rescuers pulled Chandika Kumari Shrestha alive out of her collapsed four-storey house in Betrawati, ten days after the flood that buried the Nepali village. She had survived in a narrow pocket of air among water and mud, and her family had already begun the eleven-day mourning ritual. Police heard a voice calling for help while walking around the ruin. [26] More than 1,300 people died in the floods across Nepal and thousands are still unaccounted for. [26]

Why it matters — Betrawati was among the worst-hit places, and rescue teams there are still finding people, alive and dead, in the same rubble.
19
Plant proteins to replace oil in detergents

The molecules that make soap foam and stop oil and water separating are called surfactants, and they are in detergent, paint, food and cosmetics. Most are built from oil. A team writing in Communications Chemistry, a Nature journal, built a computer method that sorts plant proteins by the shape they take when they settle on a surface. [27] Sequence alone did not predict how a protein behaves. Splitting each settled protein into blocks did, and the method found hundreds that work like the oil-based molecules. [27]

Why it matters — It is a screening shortcut rather than a product, and it matters because finding plant replacements for these molecules has until now been mostly trial and error.
20
The first wind turbines are wearing out

A wind turbine lasts 20 to 30 years, and the large number installed in the early 2000s are reaching the end of that. Solar panels last longer, up to about 40 years, but the earliest ones are old now too. Unless the parts are reused or the materials recovered, both become electronic waste. [28] There is a catch in how recycling is measured: targets are set by weight, so a recycler can hit them on the heavy glass, frames and cables and leave the solar cell alone. [28]

Why it matters — A UK waste company estimates about 350 million tonnes of electronic waste is already sitting in landfill worldwide, and the equipment now coming out of service was built when nobody was planning for this day.

02 Lesson why it matters

A rule has to be given to somebody

A factory has an owner who can be handed a limit and fined for breaking it, and a burning forest has nobody to hand one to.

The twist

A law is an instruction that has to be addressed to somebody, and smoke from a burning forest has no address.

How it works

Air pollution comes from two kinds of source
One kind has an owner - a factory, a lorry, a power station
An owner can be handed a permit, a limit and a fine
A burning forest has nobody to hand one to
So the owned sources shrink and the unowned ones grow
The air a person breathes is both of them added together

The same force, elsewhere today

Where this chain is also running, in today's other stories.

China stopping new battery factories

the owned half of the same chain - a factory needs a permit, so one office in Beijing can halt a whole industry in a day
New Mexico's ban on uranium leases

the state could act because it owns the land, and its order stops at the boundary of the federal land next door
Jeju's soft corals

the unowned half - Korea's heritage service and oceans ministry can monitor, research and survey, because there is nobody to serve an order on
The eight airports shut by volcanic ash

the same again - the transport ministry could close airports and tell people to wear masks, and could do nothing at all about the ash

Where you've seen this

Rubbish on a street

a shop can be fined for the litter outside its door, and nobody can be fined for the leaves

Noise at night

a bar has a licence that can be taken away, and a barking fox does not

Fishing

boats are given catch limits, and the warming water emptying the sea is given none

The catch

The line moves. Borneo's peat burns because the swamps were drained, and draining is done by people who can be told to stop.

And the whole of it

Everyone here is doing the job they were given. An inspector counts what comes out of a chimney, a volunteer in Borneo digs at smoke coming out of the ground, and an official in Sarawak lifts an emergency because a reading came back down. None of them can see the whole of it, and all of them breathe it.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The UN's weather agency reported that the pollution governments can order down is going down, and the pollution from fires is going up faster. The same split runs through the rest of the day: China's ministries can halt a whole battery-factory industry with one order, and South Korea's oceans ministry can only send divers to watch its corals collapse.

Why it works on us — Pollution stories usually come with somebody to be angry at - a company, a minister - and that makes an argument people follow. Smoke drifting in from fires in another country offers nobody to be angry at, so it gets filed as bad weather and read past.

Who gains

Chinese battery makers who have already broken ground — The approval pause leaves projects under construction untouched and freezes the ones behind them, so the firms already pouring concrete keep their place. [8]
Refiners with flexible plants — Diesel, petrol and jet fuel pay more than heavy ship fuel right now, so refiners are making those instead. Nigeria's Dangote plant has raised its diesel, petrol and jet fuel exports while its fuel oil exports fell. [10]
Aliko Dangote — He is selling 4.1 billion shares in Africa's largest refinery from 14 September, at a moment when refining margins are unusually wide. [11][10]
Brooke Rollins and her husband — They hold up to $2.5 million in oil and gas investments, which have risen with the war, while she runs the US department whose farmers are paying the diesel bill. [19]
Uranium companies outside New Mexico's state land — The order covers state land only, so mining on federal and private ground inside the same state is untouched, and one project there is already on a federal fast-track list. [17]

Who pays

People living under a fire plume — Extreme fire-smoke events have tripled since the 1990s, and a study in the UN report links them to nearly 100,000 extra deaths a year between 2010 and 2018. [1]
Households across Singapore, Manila and Kuala Lumpur — Smoke from Indonesian peat fires has crossed borders into all three, in the region's worst haze in more than a decade. [2]
Residents of Jackson, Mississippi — A US appeals court dismissed their case over lead in the tap water, ruling that the constitution gives no right to clean drinking water. [16]
Shipowners, and everyone buying goods that travel by sea — The main shipping fuel is up 76% since the Iran war began, to just under $825 a tonne in Singapore, and higher bunker costs feed into freight rates. [10]
Fishing communities in tropical and subtropical seas — Extreme heat and low ocean productivity arriving together sharply raise the chance of a very poor catch, and the study finds the risk concentrated in poorer countries. [14]
Air passengers and schoolchildren around Jakarta — Eight airports stayed shut and schools in Jakarta and Lampung moved to remote lessons because of volcanic ash. [12]

What nobody knows yet

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

01

How much of the world's fine soot now comes from fires rather than from industry and traffic.

The UN report names regions where fire pushed PM2.5 above its long-run average, but no global share is given, and the agency says black carbon and microplastics are still poorly tracked despite being everywhere in the air. [1]
02

How much carbon Borneo's fires have released this year.

About 200,000 hectares have burned since early July, and the total depends on how deep the peat is at each site, which is not known field by field. No figure has been published. [2][3]
03

Whether Sarawak stays out of emergency conditions.

Malaysia lifted the Serian declaration after readings fell, and the fires feeding the haze are still burning across the border in Indonesia. [4][2]
04

How long China's pause on new battery-factory approvals lasts.

The report that revealed it cited industry sources saying the policy could be adjusted later, and no end date has been given. [8]
05

Why Jeju's soft corals are slumping.

Researchers name warm water, heavy rain and fresher water flowing down from China's Yangtze river as candidates, and South Korea's oceans ministry has only now said it will investigate the scale of the damage. [13]
06

How big the ship-fuel shortfall actually gets.

One consultancy forecasts 218,000 barrels a day short in the third quarter and another gives a similar outlook, but both depend on refinery damage in Russia and the Middle East that outsiders cannot see. [10]
07

Whether a reactor down a borehole works as claimed.

The US energy department has approved the safety design, and an independent nuclear engineer says it is unclear how well the approach will work and that nobody will be able to reach the reactor easily to inspect it. [20]
08

Whether a US president may shrink a national monument at all.

Bears Ears was cut by 91% in July and the lawsuit filed this week is the first to put the underlying power in front of a court. [18]

04 Hope carry this

Rescuers pulled Chandika Kumari Shrestha alive out of her collapsed four-storey house in Betrawati, ten days after the flood that buried the Nepali village. Her family had already begun the eleven-day mourning ritual.

Also true today

Air conditioning kept about 5,267 people a year alive in the United States during extreme heat, and nearly 58,000 between 2010 and 2020, in a study that went through 30 million death records.
Malaysia lifted its emergency in Serian, a district of Sarawak, after the air quality readings there dropped back down.
Investors put a record $25 billion into projects that build solar panels and grid batteries on the same site in the first half of this year, nearly double the previous record.