Climate & Energy · Wednesday, 9 September 2026

01 Briefing what happened

Warming has sped up, and part of the reason is that we cleaned the air

Climate & Energy 44 sources

Sulphur pollution from coal and oil was bouncing sunlight back to space. Clean-air rules cut it, the cooling stopped within weeks, and the warming carbon dioxide was already causing became visible.

0.05C-0.1C

of extra warming a decade, from the air getting cleaner

greenhouse gases are adding about 0.2C a decade on top of that [1]

2.8C to 3.5C

warming by 2100 on today's policies, before and after this evidence

the higher figure is Piers Forster's, and he says the record behind it is short [1]

26.5x

how much likelier 2022-scale heat deaths became in southern Europe

measured against the climate before industry, and about ten times the European average [3]

16% to 35%

the soot share of human black carbon, 1750 to 2019

soot absorbs more sunlight than the char it displaced, so the same mass warms more [2]

The lead story — what happened

The rate of global warming has sped up, and more carbon dioxide in the air is not the whole reason. [1]
Burning coal and oil throws out sulphur as well as carbon dioxide. Sulphur makes tiny bright particles that bounce sunlight back to space before it can heat anything. [1]
Clean-air rules cut that sulphur sharply, starting with the US Acid Rain Program in the early 1990s and later with limits on the fuel ships burn, while carbon dioxide stayed near record highs. [1]
Sulphur particles wash out of the air in days or weeks, so the cooling they were doing stopped almost as soon as the pollution did. Carbon dioxide stays for centuries. [1]
Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England, puts the extra warming from cleaner air at 0.05C to 0.1C a decade, against about 0.2C a decade from greenhouse gases. [1]
Reto Knutti's team at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, stripped out El Nino and other natural swings and still found the underlying warming rate rising. [1]
The gap between the sunlight Earth takes in and the heat it lets out has roughly tripled in twenty years, Knutti says. Fewer bright clouds over warming oceans are part of it. [1]
The climate models that best matched the last two decades are the ones that assume the climate reacts strongly. Knutti's analysis suggests the same emissions could give about 25% more warming than previously thought. [1]
Current government policies point to roughly 2.8C of warming by 2100. Forster says that if this new evidence holds, the same path lands nearer 3.5C. [1]
Forster also says be careful. The satellite record is short, natural swings are large, and one or two decades of observations do not overturn earlier estimates. [1]
A separate study in Nature Geoscience finds the soot share of human black carbon rose from 16% in 1750 to 35% in 2019, so today's particles warm more per gram than the older kind did. [2]
What the extra heat costs is now being measured. A study in Nature Health finds heat-death events on the scale of 2022 are 26.5 times more likely in southern Europe than before industry. [3]
The UN's environment agency said this month that the world will pass 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures within a few years. [4]

Who is involved

Reto Knutti

a climate physicist at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, and a former lead author for the UN's climate science panel; his team found the warming rate rising once natural swings are removed [1]
Piers Forster

a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England; he put a number on how much of the speed-up is cleaner air, and a warning on how short the record is [1]
Oivind Hodnebrog

a researcher at Cicero, a Norwegian climate institute; he studies falling sulphur pollution and says the particles had been masking warming from earlier greenhouse gases [1]
Richard Tice

deputy leader of Reform UK, a British political party; in July he used the sulphur science to argue carbon dioxide is not the main cause of warming, which the BBC's climate editor says is wrong [1]

How it unfolded

Early 1990s the US Acid Rain Program cuts sulphur pollution from power plants [1]
Since Europe, North America and China cut sulphur sharply, and new rules cut it in ship fuel too [1]
This July a row breaks out in Britain over whether cleaner air, rather than carbon dioxide, is behind the heat [1]
Last three years the three warmest ever recorded [1]
2027 the UK Met Office says it is very likely to beat 2024 as the warmest year on record [1]

Where this points

The test is whether the speed-up holds once this El Nino passes: Forster says one or two decades of satellite data cannot settle it, and Australia's weather bureau expects this El Nino to peak in late spring or summer. [1][23]

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.

New electricity demand High↑

Texas averaged a record 74.5 gigawatts for six record weeks running [13], and South Korea's energy minister says chip plants and AI data centres alone will add 25 to 30 gigawatts [8]

The fight over who pays for it Building↑

a tracker had catalogued 264 large-customer tariff filings by 17 August, increasingly carrying upfront payments and exit fees [14]; the US energy department would not say how a $1.9bn nuclear loan fits its pledge that households do not fund data-centre power [7]

Expensive gas in Europe High↑

stores are 66% full, the lowest in 15 years, with Germany at 54% [9]; American states are trimming their 2030 climate targets partly because the war on Iran pushed energy prices up [26]

Clean power actually replacing coal Building↑

coal generation has stopped growing in 17 of 26 Chinese provinces and thermal output fell 0.7% while demand rose 5% [10]; Northern Ireland took a record 53% of its electricity from renewables [29]

The rest of the day

34 more stories on this beat.

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

02
A dead nuclear plant gets $1.9bn to restart

The US Department of Energy closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion on Tuesday to NextEra Energy, to restart the Duane Arnold plant near Palo, Iowa. The 615-megawatt reactor shut in 2020 after a windstorm damaged it, and its retirement was already planned because repairs and relicensing cost more than the power was worth. It is the third shut American plant the department has financed back to life, after Constellation's Crane in Pennsylvania and Holtec's Palisades in Michigan. NextEra is aiming for early 2029. [6][7]

Why it matters — Google has already agreed to buy the output for its cloud and AI computers in Iowa, so a plant the public is helping to finance is spoken for by one customer. The department did not answer Utility Dive's question about how the loan fits its pledge that ordinary households will not pay for data-centre power. [7]
03
South Korea says AI needs 25 more gigawatts

South Korea's climate, energy and environment minister, Kim Sung-hwan, told Reuters that the chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix expanding production, plus new AI data centres, will lift the country's electricity demand by 25 to 30 gigawatts. Electric cars and electric home heating add more on top. South Korea's government publishes an updated energy plan next month, now stretching to 2040, and the main question inside it is whether to order more nuclear reactors. Kim would not say how many, because experts are still reviewing it. [8]

Why it matters — The demand is arriving from a handful of very large buyers, and the answer being weighed takes a decade to build. What South Korea decides in October sets the shape of its power system until 2040. [8]
04
Europe enters winter with the least gas in 15 years

European gas storage sites are about 66% full, the lowest for this point in the year in 15 years and roughly 12 percentage points below last year, on Gas Infrastructure Europe data. Germany's stores, the largest in Europe, are 54% full and the Netherlands' are 48%. Benchmark European gas reached 75 euros per megawatt hour last week, more than double a year earlier and the highest since late 2022. The cause is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz six months ago, which choked off about a fifth of the world's shipped gas. [9]

Why it matters — Stores usually peak in early November near 83%; Reuters estimates 70% to 75% this year, which means buying at whatever January's price turns out to be. Households meet that in a heating bill and factories in an electricity bill. [9]
05
China's coal generation stops growing in 17 provinces

Coal-fired generation has stopped growing in 17 of the 26 Chinese provinces and regions studied by Ember, an energy think tank, including the industrial heavyweights Shandong and Hunan. Together those regions hold more than half of China's coal and gas capacity. Thermal generation, most of it coal, fell 0.7% in 2025 even as electricity demand jumped 5%. That is the first year clean power grew fast enough both to cover new demand and to start replacing coal, and coal has been flat on a twelve-month rolling average since early 2024. [10]

Why it matters — China is the world's largest electricity market, so the year its coal generation stops rising matters far beyond China. [11] Ember calls this the start of building the new system while taking the old one apart. [10]
06
Solar passes coal in China, on paper

China now has 1,288 gigawatts of installed solar capacity against 1,285 gigawatts of coal, the first time solar has been the largest kind of generating capacity there, at 31.5% of the total. Capacity is not electricity, though. Panels deliver about a quarter of their rated output over a year and coal plants about half. In the first half of 2026 wind and solar together made 24.6% of China's electricity while coal made 49.7%, the first time coal has been under half. [11][12]

Why it matters — Both numbers are true and they say different things: China has now built more solar than coal, and it still gets twice as much electricity out of coal. Canary Media took the widely shared chart apart for exactly that reason. [12]
07
Texas power demand sets records six weeks running

Hourly electricity demand on the Texas grid run by ERCOT averaged a record 74.5 gigawatts in the week of 22 August, the US Energy Information Administration said in a report on 3 September. Every one of the six weeks from late July to the end of August beat the old 2023 record, and the week of 22 August ran 10% above the best week of summer 2025. ERCOT also hit a new peak of 91 gigawatts on 22 July, met mostly by gas at 48% and solar at 32%. [13]

Why it matters — Sustained heat is what the agency blames for it. Doug Lewin, who leads Google's Texas energy market work, noted that PJM, the grid operator for the eastern United States, declared an energy emergency when it neared its own record and Texas did not. [13]
08
US utilities start making data centres pay in advance

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group found that upfront payments, exit fees and agreed ramp-up schedules have become common in the special electricity contracts American utilities write for very large customers. They analysed 55 of the 264 filings a tariff tracker had catalogued by 17 August, most of them covering data centres. The size that triggers one of these contracts ranges from under 1 megawatt to 150 megawatts depending on the utility. Five of the eight long-established terms lock the customer into a minimum commitment. [14]

Why it matters — These contracts exist to keep the cost of new wires and new plants off everyone else's bill. They are spreading because public anger arrived faster than the data centres did. [14]
09
Google backs solar and batteries on an old coal mine

Google, the developer MN8 and the battery maker Eos Energy said they will build the Mammoth Solar project on a former coal mine in West Virginia. It will hold 86 megawatts of solar, 70 megawatts of lithium batteries and 10 megawatts of zinc-based batteries that keep discharging for more than eight hours. The solar is due in 2028 and the batteries in 2029 and 2030. The zinc installation is one of the largest anywhere; most zinc batteries now running are a megawatt or less. [15]

Why it matters — It sits inside PJM, the grid stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, where the last capacity auction hit its price ceiling and a special auction this autumn has to fill a shortfall of nearly seven gigawatts. Google says the project is shaped to match its own data centres' demand through the day. [15]
10
US wind shrinks while 44 gigawatts wait at the defence department

The United States added nearly 5 gigawatts of land-based wind in the second quarter, but the queue of planned wind projects fell 4%, the American Clean Power Association reported. At least 44 gigawatts of wind is stuck in review at the US Department of Defense, and a judge recently ordered the department to restart reviews it appeared to have paused. The wider clean-power queue, counting solar and batteries too, passed 200 gigawatts and grew 11% year on year. [16]

Why it matters — Solar has got cheap enough that the price gap with wind has widened, so a shrinking wind queue and a growing overall queue are one story seen from two sides. Google alone accounted for 54% of American corporate clean-power announcements in the quarter, the association's John Hensley said. [16]
11
Alberta landowners sue over 7,300 abandoned wells

A group of farmers and ranchers in Alberta went to court this week, arguing that the Canadian province's energy regulator has knowingly and chronically underfunded the programme meant to clean up oil and gas wells left behind by bankrupt companies. Alberta has roughly 7,300 inactive wells. The industry-funded Orphan Well Association has decommissioned about 8,900 sites since 2002 and puts the remaining backlog at 1.66 billion Canadian dollars. [17]

Why it matters — The wells sit on land these people farm, and the case tests whether the regulator has to make the industry pay before the public does. Both Canada's and Alberta's governments currently want more oil produced, not less. [17]
12
Argentina moves against 60 over Falklands drilling

Argentina's government said on Tuesday it has begun sanctions proceedings against 60 people and companies for taking part in oil exploration around the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that Argentina claims. It filed a criminal complaint against the Israeli company Navitas Petroleum and its executives, then added 15 more names to the 45 announced late last week. The move follows a televised address by President Javier Milei promising to punish the firms drilling there. It is not clear that any Argentine court has accepted the charges. [18]

Why it matters — The companies say they do not expect the threats to change the Sea Lion oil project. Argentina can enforce a sanction inside its own territory, and the drilling is not in it. [18]
13
Asia set to take 70% of Canada's oil exports

Asia, led by China, is expected to buy 70% of Canada's crude oil exports once the Trans Mountain pipeline expands, its chief executive Mark Maki said on Tuesday. The Canadian government owns the line, which carries 890,000 barrels a day from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia and reached full capacity for the first time in June. Another 90,000 barrels a day of capacity arrives this quarter and 210,000 more by the end of 2028. Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer and will beat last year's record of 5.3 million barrels a day. [19]

Why it matters — Asian refiners turned to Canadian crude because the war on Iran disrupted Middle East supply. A pipeline built so Canada would depend less on American refineries is being filled by a war on the other side of the world. [19]
14
Nepal's flood bill reaches $2.56bn

Two weeks after flash floods swept down the river valleys on Nepal's border with Tibet, Nepal's government puts the damage at $2.56 billion. Roughly 7,500 homes were destroyed, another 20,000 need rebuilding and at least 12 hydropower projects were damaged. Nepal's entire national budget this year is $14 billion. At least 1,300 people had died by 6 September, and insurers expect over $130 million in property and hydropower claims before any life or injury claims are counted. Search teams pulled a woman alive from a collapsed house in Betrawati on 5 September. [20][21][22][44]

Why it matters — The rebuilding falls to a government six months old. Prime Minister Balen Shah, 36, took office in March after protests over corruption toppled the last one, and a member of parliament described the flood zone to AP as a wasteland. [20]
15
Australia forecasts the strongest El Nino on record

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said this week that the El Nino now forming will peak in late spring or summer above anything observed since reliable records began in 1950. Sea surface temperatures in the stretch of the equatorial Pacific used to track it ran 2.2C to 2.3C above average in August, and senior climatologist Felicity Gamble said it has escalated faster than any previous event. El Nino is a natural warming of the Pacific that shifts heat and rain worldwide, and it tends to bring heat, drought and bushfire risk to southern and eastern Australia. [23]

Why it matters — A record El Nino arrives on top of the warmest atmosphere on record, which is why the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said it was being supersized. In Britain a minister has told households to keep a few days of food and water in the cupboard. [23][24]
16
21 explosive devices found near a German power grid

Police in an eastern German state defused 21 explosive devices found near power grid equipment, Reuters reported on Monday. Officers are still hunting a man who sent letters claiming responsibility for a run of sabotage attacks on the grid the week before, and who appeared to be storing explosives at home. A transformer substation fire in Berlin the same day turned out to be a technical fault. Germany formally blamed Russia for a drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport in August. [25]

Why it matters — Grid equipment sits in fields and beside roads with nobody watching it, and Germany has become Europe's test case for how much that matters. [25]
17
US states quietly cut their 2030 climate targets

Most American states that wrote 2030 emissions targets into law are not on track to meet them, and several are now trimming or dropping the targets rather than tightening the rules underneath them, the New York Times found. The targets were written after the United States left the Paris climate agreement, as state-level substitutes. New York scrapped its 2030 target in May, in a law that had let citizens sue if the rules needed to hit it went unenforced. The reason given is cost to consumers, sharpened by the war on Iran. [26]

Why it matters — A target is only as real as the rules underneath it, and the rules are the part voters meet as a bill. The states dropping them are the same states that set them. [26]
18
Southeast Asia spends $20bn on Chinese clean tech

Countries in ASEAN, the ten-member Southeast Asian bloc, have spent more than $20 billion on Chinese-made batteries, grid equipment, electric vehicles and clean-power components so far in 2026, according to the think tank Ember. That is 50% more than the same period last year, and it makes the region the largest market for Chinese clean tech anywhere in Asia. Europe has been the main destination in recent years. [27]

Why it matters — A Reuters commentary calls Southeast Asia the next frontier for China's clean-tech exporters, and says it could give them a demand boom lasting years. It also means the region's grids get built to Chinese specifications. [27]
19
China's biggest inverter maker shrinks as batteries take over

Sungrow, a Chinese maker of solar inverters, the boxes that turn a panel's direct current into grid electricity, reported first-half revenue of 30.91 billion yuan ($4.34 billion), down 29% on a year earlier, with profit down 32%. Battery storage overtook inverters to become half its sales. Inverter shipments fell from 76 gigawatts to 66, while storage shipments rose 28% to 25 gigawatt-hours. A smaller rival, Deye, grew revenue 92% over the same six months. [28]

Why it matters — The industry the world buys its solar equipment from is being reshaped from the inside while its total output still looks steady. Nearly three-quarters of Sungrow's revenue now comes from outside China. [28]
20
Northern Ireland hits 53% renewable electricity

More than half of Northern Ireland's electricity, 53%, came from renewable sources in the year to June, beating the 51% record set in 2022. Since January, renewable generation has stayed above non-renewable generation every month for the first time. Wind supplied almost three-quarters of it, bioenergy just under a fifth and solar 6%. The target is 80% by 2030. [29]

Why it matters — Turbines there are still switched off often, because the grid can only carry so much variable power at once, so the record was set despite wasted generation rather than in the absence of it. Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald said the rise moves Northern Ireland away from price swings and towards more stable and fairer prices. [29]
21
Hyundai starts a $6bn steel mill in Louisiana

Hyundai was due to break ground last Friday on a nearly $6 billion steel mill in southern Louisiana, on the cleared fields of a former sugarcane plantation. When it opens in 2029 it will run on natural gas rather than coal, which would make it the lowest-carbon mill of its kind in the United States. Most American car steel still comes from ageing coal-fuelled mills. The new plant will still emit carbon dioxide and other air pollution. [30]

Why it matters — Steel is one of the hardest things to make without burning something, and this is what the best available answer looks like at the moment: much better than coal, and not clean. [30]
22
Drought takes Europe's maize heartland

Repeated heat and water shortage are shrinking maize harvests in Hungary and Romania, two of the European Union's main growers, and the area planted has fallen sharply. Hungary, normally an exporter, is set to import maize this year, and Romania's exportable surplus has dwindled. Karoly Kovacs, a farmer in north-east Hungary, told Reuters he reaped 17 tonnes a hectare around 2010, when the region got 1,000 millimetres of rain a year, and now gets almost none. Some growers are switching crops or putting in irrigation. [31]

Why it matters — Eastern Europe has been a pillar of the bloc's grain supply, and what used to be an occasional bad year has become the ordinary one. [31]
23
Melting glaciers are leaking ancient methane

Researchers sampled meltwater from 19 valley glaciers in central Svalbard, the Norwegian islands in the Arctic, and found every one of them loaded with methane, a gas that traps heat far more strongly than carbon dioxide. In places the water held 425 times the methane it would carry in balance with the air. Chemical fingerprints show the gas is mostly thermogenic, meaning ancient methane cooked out of rock rather than made by living microbes. Radar showed it comes from where the ice base is warm enough to melt over organic-rich shale. [32]

Why it matters — Faster melting means more of this gas reaching the air, and the team says the same combination of warm ice and shale exists in glaciated regions worldwide. [32]
24
Slower ships cut carbon and change their smoke

Researchers flew drones through 14 ship exhaust plumes and analysed the particles one by one, to see what happens when a vessel slows down. Slowing ships is an established way to cut their carbon dioxide, but the study finds it also changes what comes out of the funnel. Sulphate signals were 2.3 to 10.7 times higher in particles carrying vanadium, a metal from heavy marine fuel. About a fifth of the particles looked like smoke from burning plants, which the authors warn could be mistaken for wildfire pollution in air samples. [5]

Why it matters — Ship exhaust brightens clouds over the ocean, and bright clouds reflect sunlight away, so a rule that cuts a ship's carbon dioxide also touches the cooling side of the lead story. [1][5]
25
The transition's metal is running short

Copper carries the current in every major clean technology, from solar panels and wind turbines to batteries and electric cars, and nothing substitutes for it, researchers write in Communications Earth and Environment. Supply is tight while demand accelerates, and mining and smelting copper is itself carbon-intensive. They propose scoring mines and smelters on how much copper they actually recover from the same rock, arguing that even modest gains in recovery would unlock large lifetime carbon savings when that metal goes into clean equipment. [33]

Why it matters — Every gigawatt of solar or wind is also an order for copper, so the pace of the transition may be set in mines rather than in factories. [33]
26
Dacia moves its cheap electric car out of China

Renault's low-cost brand Dacia will build a larger version of its Spring electric car in Europe instead of importing it from China. Dacia has sold 210,000 Springs since 2021 but missed a recent electric-car boom in France, its biggest market, because the French subsidy for lower-income buyers excludes Chinese-made cars. Moving production is how the car qualifies for it. [34]

Why it matters — A subsidy written to favour European factories has changed where a European company builds a European-branded car. Where a car is assembled is now part of what the buyer pays. [34]
27
UK car sales best August in eight years

New car registrations in Britain rose about 13% in August to more than 90,000, the highest for that month in eight years, according to preliminary figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. Battery-electric cars took about 30% of the month's sales and 26% of the year's so far. Both numbers sit below Britain's zero-emission vehicle mandate, which requires 33% of a maker's sales to be electric in 2026. [35]

Why it matters — The mandate is what pulls the share up. Carmakers must close the gap between 26% and 33% by the end of the year, or pay for missing it. [35]
28
US carmakers ask for a permanent ban on Chinese cars

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Honda and Stellantis, urged the US Congress to pass a law permanently barring Chinese vehicles from the American market before the end of the year. An existing ban dates from the Biden administration, and lawmakers want to toughen it. The group points to Chinese car sales rising worldwide. China opposes the restrictions. [36]

Why it matters — The companies asking for the wall are the ones that would have to compete without it, and the case they make rests on Chinese sales everywhere rather than Chinese sales inside the United States. [36]
29
A big US power agency reopens a market decision

The Bonneville Power Administration, the US federal agency that markets about a third of the electricity in the Pacific Northwest, is reconsidering which regional trading market to join. Administrator Travis Kavulla, who started in June, said he is looking again with fresh eyes at the 2025 choice of Markets+ and may switch to EDAM, run by California's grid operator. Bonneville sells power from 22.5 gigawatts of federal hydroelectric dams and runs about 15,000 circuit miles of high-voltage lines. A draft decision is due by the end of the year. [37]

Why it matters — Two rival markets in the western United States create seams where power cannot flow freely, and Bonneville is big enough that its choice decides which market has depth. [37]
30
Faster grid connections, for customers who accept a cap

Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility for northern California, offers large customers a quicker connection if they agree to have their power capped when the grid is strained. Over the pilot's first two years those customers got the full capacity they asked for in 90% of hours. Most are electric-vehicle charging businesses; the waiting list also includes smaller data centres, factories and battery sites. [38]

Why it matters — The ordinary route is a queue measured in years, and this trades a guaranteed connection for a conditional one. It is the cheapest capacity a grid can add, because nothing gets built. [38]
31
A school district builds its own emergency power

Roanoke City Public Schools in Virginia is installing solar-and-battery microgrids at its two high schools, both of which double as official disaster shelters, with the work due to finish by the end of the year. It is the first district in the state to add storage to its solar panels. When the grid fails the batteries run first, then diesel generators, then the batteries recharge the next day. Schools are 60% of the shelters the US federal emergency agency designates in Virginia, and half of them nationally. [39]

Why it matters — Shelters that lose power in the storm they were opened for are a familiar failure, and this one is paid for partly by a state emergency grant that normally buys diesel. [39]
32
Energy Star moves to the US Energy Department

The US Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency finalised a plan on 28 August. It hands leadership of Energy Star, the label on appliances that tells buyers how much electricity they use, to the energy department within a year. The two agencies will meet every two weeks for three months and then monthly as needed. Supporters point to the department's Better Buildings programme as evidence it can run a joint public and private scheme like this one. [40]

Why it matters — The label is one of the very few climate policies most people actually meet, on a fridge in a shop. Which agency owns it decides how strict it stays. [40]
33
Japan adopts a maximum-nuclear policy

A council chaired by Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, adopted a policy package on 26 August seeking maximal use of nuclear power, the Washington Post reported. Japan turned against nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, and the shift back dates to 2022, when officials called it necessary to meet the country's emissions targets. Takaichi has since pointed to the oil prices caused by the war on Iran as a further reason. [41]

Why it matters — Japan has the strongest reason of any country to avoid nuclear power and is expanding it anyway, which is why the turn is being read elsewhere as more than an American story. [41]
34
Tesla's China-built sales grow, but barely

Tesla sold 86,166 China-made cars in August, up 3.6% on a year earlier. It was the tenth straight month of growth and a sharp slowdown from July. The figure covers Model 3 and Model Y cars from the Shanghai factory, including those exported to Europe, Asia Pacific and Canada. [42]

Why it matters — Shanghai is Tesla's export hub as well as its China plant, so one factory's monthly number carries several markets at once. [42]
35
Audi's cheapest electric car promises 400 miles

Audi revealed the A2 e-tron on Monday, its new entry-level electric car, starting at about $45,000. It uses 12.8 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometres on Europe's official test, which Audi says makes it the most efficient production car the company has ever built, with a range of up to 401 miles. The name revives the original A2 of 25 years ago, an unusually light and efficient small car. Four power levels and three battery sizes are offered. [43]

Why it matters — Range and price are the two numbers that decide whether an electric car replaces a petrol one, and this is a mainstream European brand putting both into the same car. [43]

02 Lesson why it matters

Why a steady number can hide a big change

Sulphur from burning coal cooled the planet while carbon dioxide heated it, and the number everyone watched showed only the difference.

The twist

A number can jump because something that was holding it down went away, not because the thing pushing it up got any stronger.

How it works

Two things push a number in opposite directions
Only the total gets published
The total moves slowly, so nobody asks what is inside it
One of the two stops
The number jumps, and the wrong cause gets blamed

The same force, elsewhere today

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

Solar passing coal in China

the same adding-up one step back: capacity rose while running hours stayed low, so one number says solar won and the other says coal still makes twice as much electricity
The US clean power queue

the whole queue grew 11% while the wind queue shrank 4%, so the published total hides 44 gigawatts frozen in defence department reviews
Europe's gas stores at 66%

that average is made of Germany at 54% and countries far higher, and the average is the only figure most people ever see
Sungrow's shrinking revenue

a 29% fall is one business collapsing and another growing past it, and the single figure shows neither

Where you've seen this

A school report

half the class improves and half slips, and the class average does not move

A shop chain

one town's branch collapses while another booms, and head office sees a flat line

A household budget

the rent went up and the fuel bill came down, so the total stayed put and nobody looked at either

The catch

Pulling a total apart is estimation, and careful people get different answers. Piers Forster says the satellite record behind these numbers covers only one or two decades.

And the whole of it

Sulphur sat in the air for a century and almost nobody knew it was cooling anything. It went because people in Europe, North America and China wanted to stop breathing it, and they were right to want that. The two effects reached everybody already added together, scientists included, which is why they are only now pulling them apart.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

Nothing new started warming the planet this year. Europe, North America and China cut the sulphur pollution that had been bouncing sunlight back to space, the cooling stopped within weeks, and the warming carbon dioxide was already causing showed up in the record. [1]

Why it works on us — In July the deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, used this real science to argue that carbon dioxide is not the main cause of warming. It works because one true fact is much easier to repeat than the picture it sits inside. [1]

Who gains

NextEra Energy — The US government is lending it up to $1.9 billion to restart a plant the company itself retired as uneconomic six years ago. [6][7]
Google — It has already bought the output of that restarted plant for its Iowa data centres, and it accounted for 54% of all American corporate clean-power announcements in the second quarter. [7][16]
Gas sellers shipping to Europe — European gas is 75 euros per megawatt hour, more than double a year ago, and Germany and the Netherlands must buy cargoes at that price to fill stores 54% and 48% full. [9]
Chinese battery and grid-equipment makers — Southeast Asian countries have spent over $20 billion on Chinese clean tech this year, 50% more than the same period last year. [27]
Deye — The smaller Chinese inverter maker grew revenue 92% in the same half-year that its much larger rival Sungrow shrank 29%. [28]
Trans Mountain and Canadian oil producers — The pipeline hit full capacity in June, and its chief executive expects Asian refiners to take 70% of Canada's exports as it expands. [19]

Who pays

Older people in southern Europe during a heatwave — Heat-death events on the scale of 2022 are 26.5 times more likely there than in the climate before industry, about ten times the European average. [3]
Households in Germany and the Netherlands — Their countries' gas stores are 54% and 48% full going into winter, so the rest gets bought at whatever January's price turns out to be. [9]
Maize farmers in Hungary and Romania — Hungary will import maize this year after repeated drought, and one farmer's yields have fallen from the 17 tonnes a hectare he reaped around 2010. [31]
Alberta landowners — About 7,300 wells sit abandoned on their land after company bankruptcies, with a cleanup backlog of 1.66 billion Canadian dollars and a regulator they are now suing. [17]
Nepal — 7,500 homes destroyed and a $2.56 billion damage bill, against a national budget of $14 billion for the year. [20][21]
American wind developers — At least 44 gigawatts of projects are stuck in review at the US defence department, and the wind queue shrank 4% in the quarter. [16]

What nobody knows yet

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

01

How much of the speed-up is cleaner air.

Piers Forster puts falling sulphur at 0.05C to 0.1C a decade against about 0.2C from greenhouse gases, but that split is estimated from a satellite record he says covers only one or two decades. [1]
02

How much of the cloud change comes from pollution and how much from the warming itself.

Reto Knutti was asked directly and answered that they do not know, and clouds are the hardest thing to represent in climate models. [1]
03

Whether American households end up paying for the Duane Arnold restart.

The US energy department did not answer Utility Dive's question about how its $1.9 billion loan fits a pledge that residential customers do not fund data-centre infrastructure. [7]
04

How many reactors South Korea will order.

Minister Kim Sung-hwan declined to give a number, saying experts are still reviewing it, and the roadmap is not published until next month. [8]
05

How full Europe's gas stores will be at their peak.

Reuters puts the likely peak at 70% to 75% against 83% last year, but that is its own estimate and the peak is still two months away. [9]
06

How big Nepal's final rebuilding bill turns out to be.

The disaster authority calls $2.56 billion an estimate with a detailed assessment still to come, and insurers are still assessing hydropower policies before any life or injury claims are counted. [21][22]
07

Whether the 44 gigawatts of US wind projects held at the defence department get processed.

A judge ordered the department to restart the reviews, and the wind industry says it does not know how the department will respond. [16]
08

Who planted the explosives near the German power grid.

Police defused 21 devices and are still searching for a man who claimed responsibility for the earlier attacks in letters. [25]
09

Whether China's coal decline lasts.

Ember reports coal generation flat on a twelve-month rolling average since early 2024 and down 0.7% in 2025, but a single year of decline is not yet a trend. [10]

04 Hope carry this

Chandika Kumari Shrestha was pulled alive from a mud-buried house in Betrawati, Nepal, days after her family had begun her mourning rites. Rescuers heard her calling from inside.

Also true today

Coal made less than half of China's electricity for the first time, 49.7% in the first half of 2026, while wind and solar together made 24.6%.
Northern Ireland took 53% of its electricity from renewable sources in the year to June, a record, and renewable generation has run above non-renewable every month since January.
Two high schools in Roanoke, Virginia, which the state uses as disaster shelters, will have solar panels and batteries able to keep them running through a blackout by the end of this year.