Climate, in brief

President Trump said on Friday that the US has secured majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves. [1][2]

That is about a fifth of Venezuela's 303 billion barrels, the largest proven reserves of any country. Trump said the deal would more than double US reserves. [2][4]

He gave almost no detail. The State Department said it is a partnership with a private company, and no contract has been published. [3][1]

Reuters reported the week before that 17 fields were in negotiation, and that a lease was the legal model being considered, with the fields then auctioned to US producers. [5]

The fields include untouched ground in the Orinoco Belt and old wells around Lake Maracaibo. Some are currently run by a small Chinese firm on a contract signed under Maduro. [5]

Venezuelan law keeps the state in charge of the core oil industry, so the arrangement may face constitutional challenges inside Venezuela. [1][5]

Nobody outside PDVSA really knows what is down there. Venezuela has not published routine oil statistics for more than a decade, and its last annual bulletin was 2015. [6]

The US firm SLB signed a contract with PDVSA this month to organise and rebuild those databases, after years of neglect and a recent cyberattack. [6]

Venezuela is separately weighing whether to leave OPEC, which it helped found more than sixty years ago, as it moves closer to Washington. [7][8]

It would be the second member to go in months. The United Arab Emirates quit in May. [8][9]

OPEC+ pumped about 40% of the world's oil in July, down from more than 48% before the US and Israel attacked Iran in late February. [9]

The group's core seven producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia among them, accounted for only about a quarter of world output. [9]

The war shut the Strait of Hormuz, the export route for Saudi and other Gulf barrels, so OPEC's spare capacity cannot reach a buyer. Its statements barely move prices now. [9][11]

What has steadied the market instead is China cutting its crude imports. Reuters calls it the swing consumer, a job that used to belong to producers. [9]

Brent crude sat at $89.45 on Friday and fell 5.3% over the week. It briefly topped $120 in April and averages about $90 this year, against roughly $70 last year. [10][11]

Why it matters. Watch whether an actual contract is published and whether Venezuela's courts are asked to rule on it. A deal announced on social media and never filed anywhere is not yet a barrel.

Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Interior Department and Golden State Wind on Friday over an April deal that killed a project off the Central Coast. Interior paid the developer $120 million of federal money to hand back a lease it had bought at auction in 2022. [12]

Why it matters. It is the first direct legal test of paying developers to stop building.

By mid-August the administration had committed roughly $4 billion to buy back offshore wind rights, cancelling an estimated 21 gigawatts of planned capacity. [13]

Why it matters. That is enough planned power for over 15 million homes, on a coast with rising electricity prices and few other places to build.

The Energy Department approved PacWave South off Oregon, the first large US site for testing electricity from ocean waves. It is connected to the grid but has not generated any power yet, because no device has arrived. [14]

Why it matters. The same government blocking offshore wind is opening a door for a technology that is still years from working.

A draft Spanish decree would require data centres to prove at least 80% of their electricity is renewable. It would have to be matched hour by hour rather than averaged over a year. Each new megawatt of demand would also need a new megawatt of generation, built within 18 months. Spain has granted over 12 GW of grid rights to data centres since 2021. [15]

Why it matters. Annual averages let a data centre claim clean power at 2am; hourly matching does not.

Intertek CEA expects 638 GW of solar to be built worldwide in 2026, below last year, with the whole drop coming from a stalling Chinese market. Factory capacity is far above demand: about 2,034 GW of polysilicon and 1,908 GW of modules against those 638 GW of installs. [16]

Why it matters. More than a terawatt of idle factory is what keeps prices below cost.

Tongwei lost 5.12 billion yuan ($762 million) in the first half, worse than a year earlier. JinkoSolar's revenue fell 22.3% and its loss widened to 3.08 billion yuan, and it cut full-year shipment guidance to 60-70 GW. [17][18]

Why it matters. The cheapest panels in history are being sold by companies losing money on every one.

The OPIS benchmark for Chinese TOPCon modules rose 2.86% in a week to $0.108 a watt, which buyers attribute to US Section 232 tariffs taking effect on 4 December. Producers say actual deals are still closing below their asking prices. [19][20]

Why it matters. A tariff in one country lifts the sticker price everywhere, even where demand is weak.

Ember found solar generated just over 10% of global electricity in the first half of 2026, up from 8.9% a year earlier. It met more than 25% of world demand between 11am and 2pm, and close to nothing between 8pm and 5am. In Chile it hit 71% at midday and had vanished by 9pm. [21]

Why it matters. Solar's problem is no longer how much it makes. It is the hours it does not.

Wood Mackenzie expects new US home solar capacity to drop 21% this year against 2025. Tariffs raised panel prices, and the main federal tax credit for rooftop systems is being phased out. [22]

Why it matters. The part of solar that ordinary households control is the part shrinking fastest.

The administration is putting billions into large lithium-ion batteries. Officials see them as essential for powering AI data centres and building military drones, and are alarmed by China's lead. [23]

Why it matters. Batteries got support that wind and solar lost, because they were argued for as defence, not climate.

Arizona installed more grid battery capacity in the first half of 2026 than any state except Texas, adding three projects of 250 megawatts and 1 gigawatt-hour each. New Jersey separately proposed buying 150 MW of home and small-business batteries to run as one virtual power plant. [24][25]

Why it matters. Storage is being built by states, not by Washington.

A paper in Nature's Communications Earth and Environment found climate change cut over a third of the American West's normal snowpack from 2014 to 2024, and 13% of its streamflow. About half of that is attributed to 122 fossil fuel and cement companies. The water lost is roughly the full capacity of Lake Mead. [26][27]

Why it matters. Attribution studies like this are the evidence that climate liability lawsuits need.

The justices will hear Boulder's suit against Suncor and ExxonMobil in early October, at the oil companies' request. More than two dozen similar state and local cases are pending, and none has reached trial in nine years. [28]

Why it matters. One ruling could settle whether any of these cases can be heard in state courts at all.

Oil and gas interests spent more than $17 million in the first half of this year fighting California climate and worker-safety bills, a record for the state. [29]

Why it matters. Spending that size is a measure of what the industry thinks the rules would cost it.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, financed by solar entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, spent $1 million helping Darline Graham beat Rep. Ralph Norman in South Carolina's Republican Senate primary. It was the group's second strike against Norman this year, and its adverts avoid clean-energy language entirely. [30]

Why it matters. The industry stopped lobbying and started picking candidates in the primaries.

Nearly 3,000 people were missing on Saturday as the search entered a fourth day, with 669 confirmed dead in Nepal and seven in Tibet. A Nepali minister said rebuilding will cost billions of dollars. [31]

Why it matters. Homes, roads, bridges and power plants along the Trishuli river were swept away.

Experts say the lower part of a glacier broke off and crashed onto the valley floor, bursting the river's banks. Nepal's flood warnings rely on river gauges built to catch water rising slowly, and researchers say the speed and remoteness of the cascade made a useful warning nearly impossible. [32][33][34]

Why it matters. The alarm was designed for a different kind of flood from the one that came.

Researchers read modern and fossil corals from the Galapagos. Sea-surface temperature swings in the eastern tropical Pacific grew sharper from the late 19th century, beyond anything in the previous thousand years. [35][36]

Why it matters. El Nino sets off heatwaves, floods and droughts worldwide, so a stronger swing lands everywhere.

A Science Advances attribution study found more than 40% of children under ten already live through at least 20 additional heat-stress days each year because of climate change. [37]

Why it matters. Small bodies handle heat worse, and the study locates the burden by age and region.

The Rosebank and Jackdaw fields are both awaiting UK government decisions. An analysis put the economic damage from their carbon pollution at 119 billion to 336 billion pounds, far above any benefit. Experts called the energy-security argument for them a delusion. [38]

Why it matters. It puts a number on the gap between a project's private return and its public cost.

The Interior Department is preparing a categorical exclusion that would speed permits for winter exploration in Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve, including seismic surveys and exploratory drilling. [39]

Why it matters. A categorical exclusion means a project skips detailed environmental review rather than passing one.

The IEA expects world electricity demand to grow 3.6% a year through 2030. That is about 50% faster than the past decade, driven by industry, electric cars, air conditioning and data centres. Emerging economies account for nearly 80% of the increase, and China alone for about half. [40]

Why it matters. For the first time in thirty years electricity is growing faster than the economy that uses it.

July electric vehicle registrations rose 13% across 16 European markets and reached 25.7% of new car sales. France hit a record 35% as its social leasing subsidy took effect. [41]

Why it matters. High oil prices are doing more for EV sales this year than any climate policy.

Ember and the African Tech Futures Lab found rooftop and small solar now make up most new solar in sub-Saharan Africa. It is largely unrecorded, because these systems are neither tracked nor regulated. Analysts had to use customs data to see them. [42]

Why it matters. Countries planning around official figures will under-buy batteries and wires and over-buy fossil plants.

Sungrow broke ground on a $50 million battery assembly plant in the Suez Canal Economic Zone. It is due to produce from April 2027, and Egypt calls it the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa. Wood Mackenzie separately raised its Latin America storage forecast from 2.5 GW in 2025 to 34 GW by 2035. [43][44]

Why it matters. Storage manufacturing is spreading beyond China and the US for the first time.

Federal court rulings ordered the administration to release billions in climate grants it had cancelled. The money was meant for communities including Jackson, Mississippi, where brown tap water caused rashes and illness for years. [45]

Why it matters. Cancelled grants can be restored by a court; the years the projects lost cannot.

Federal agencies have pledged more than $4 billion since July 2025 to prop up American liquefied natural gas projects. More terminals are proposed than there are buyers for the gas. [46]

Why it matters. It is the same tool used against wind, pointed the other way.

Nearly 10,000 people in Southeast Queens lost power during a July heatwave, and the state's grid operator issued an energy watch that month. The mayor asked residents to hold air conditioners at 78F. [47]

Why it matters. Asking people to sit warmer is what a grid does when it has run out of other options.

Nextnova Solar plans a 2 GW solar cell plant in Yukon, Oklahoma, starting construction in November and production in March 2027, initially employing 300 people. [48]

Why it matters. Section 232 tariffs are the reason a US cell factory pencils out at all.

Grid-scale solar farms produced 1,101 GWh in Ireland in 2025, up 51% on 2024. Output peaked at 1.26 GW on 11 August this year, about a third of national demand at that moment. Half of Ireland's grid-scale electricity came from renewables. [49]

Why it matters. Solar works in a cloudy country, which is the assumption most people still get wrong.

MIT researchers argue US power-sector emissions still fall substantially by 2035. The Natural Resources Defense Council points to work finding less than half the cuts expected under earlier policy. Analysts expect clean-energy building to stay healthy until about 2030 either way. [50]

Why it matters. The two camps are measuring different things, which is why both numbers can be right.

ARPA-E, the Energy Department's programme for early clean-energy research, has handed out more than $4 billion over fifteen years and appears set to survive, despite the cuts elsewhere. [51]

Why it matters. Research that pays off in a decade has no lobby, which usually makes it the first thing cut.

Countries are divided at the UN desertification talks in Mongolia, while ocean temperatures broke records again and the Colorado River's shortfall deepened. [52]

Why it matters. Three slow stories that will still be here long after this week's announcements.

A Cabinet Office campaign will advise UK citizens to keep supplies and prepare for national emergencies, naming extreme weather alongside attacks by hostile states. The aim is to free emergency resources for the most vulnerable. [53]

Why it matters. A government telling people to prepare themselves is a statement about what it expects to be able to do.