Climate, in brief

The UN Environment Programme published a report on Wednesday saying the world will pass 1.5C of warming within a few years. [1][3]

The 1.5C line is the one more than 190 countries agreed to try to hold in the Paris deal of 2015. [1]

The world is already about 1.4C warmer than it was in 1850 to 1900. One analysis puts the crossing in 2030. [2]

The report does not drop the number. It changes the shape of the goal to overshoot, peak, then come back down. [3]

That only works if the peak stops at about 1.8C. Above that, the report says the way back to 1.5C closes. [3]

Today's emissions pace points to 2.7 to 3.0C by 2100. Every promise already made under the Paris deal, if kept, gives about 1.7 to 1.8C. [1]

Coming back needs emissions cut now, halved by 2035, and billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide pulled out of the air before 2100. [1]

The report itself says the world must still figure out how to remove carbon at that scale. [1]

If temperatures stay high for long, ice sheets and the ocean currents that carry heat can pass points that are difficult or impossible to reverse on human timescales, the report says. [1]

The damage is already here at 1.4C. A co-author points to about 15,000 heat-related deaths in Germany this summer, and to hospitals, schools and care homes that could not cope. [1]

Antonio Guterres, the UN's secretary-general, said the overshoot must be made as small and as short as possible. [1][3]

A separate study published this week found that limiting warming to 1.5C is no longer plausible, and that without cuts to methane the peak passes 1.7C. [38]

Why it matters. Watch what governments bring to the COP31 summit in Antalya: a set of plans that peaks warming below 1.8C keeps the return path open, and anything above it does not. [3]

China's solar capacity reached 1,286 gigawatts at the end of July, 31.5% of all its power capacity, overtaking coal for the first time. [6][4] Electrek reports 1,288 gigawatts of solar against 1,285 of coal. [7]

Why it matters. Capacity is what is built, not what runs, so coal still generates more of China's power for now.

Carbon Brief's analysis found China's CO2 fell 1% in the second quarter, driven for the first time by falling oil use rather than falling coal. Oil use dropped 9% overall and 16% in transport after supply disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. [5]

Why it matters. The oil China's electric cars displaced in six months was more than the United Kingdom burned in the same period. [5]

A US federal judge struck down New York state's Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, which would have made large fossil fuel companies pay $75bn over 25 years. [9][8] Governor Kathy Hochul said the state is looking at its options. [10]

Why it matters. Twenty-two Republican-led states brought the suit [8], and lawyers are split on what it means for Vermont's similar law. [3]

Better satellite images show an entire mountain slope collapsed in Nepal and Tibet on 26 August, with rock below and around the glacier falling too. [11] The death toll passed 1,000 with more than 4,400 missing. [4]

Why it matters. The frozen ground binding Himalayan rock is thawing, so the same failure can happen where there is no glacial lake to watch. [12]

Fervo Energy signed a deal to supply Google with nearly 400 megawatts from its Cape Station project in Utah, the largest ever for next-generation geothermal, which drills deep into hot dry rock to make steam. Fervo is spending over $2bn; its shares rose 15%. [13]

Why it matters. A first-of-a-kind plant cannot borrow money without a named buyer, which is what this deal actually is.

Negative-price hours across five big European markets in the first half of 2026 ran about 2% above 2025's record, and 2025 itself had more than 13 times as many as 2022. France had the most, Italy none. [14]

Why it matters. Evening spikes are what pay batteries, and German daily price gaps topped 650 euros per megawatt-hour. [14]

Solar made just over 10% of world electricity in the first half of 2026, up from 8.9% a year before, the think tank Ember found. It supplied more than a quarter of demand between 11am and 2pm and close to nothing between 8pm and 5am. [15]

Why it matters. In Chile solar hit 71% of demand at midday, which is why storage is the binding job rather than panels.

US renewable generation ran 10.9% higher in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier, led by large-scale solar up 21.6%, while coal output fell 11.3%. [16]

Why it matters. On the same data, renewables' installed capacity overtakes natural gas within a year. [16]

PJM's market monitor says data centre load made up 9% of wholesale power costs so far in 2026, while the total wholesale bill jumped 46% to $116.53 per megawatt-hour. [17]

Why it matters. PJM runs the wholesale market for 13 eastern states, and that increase lands on the bills there.

MISO, which runs the grid from Louisiana to Minnesota, asked US regulators for reliability rules covering large customers and data centres specifically. It expects 1% to 2% annual demand growth to 2044, after 15 years of about 0.5%. [18]

Why it matters. Data centres change how much power they draw fast, and all at once, which is a different problem from growth.

PJM dropped Oklo's Ohio project from its interconnection study cycle. Oklo says that delays by at least 14 months a 1.2-gigawatt campus mixing 150 MW of advanced nuclear, 300 MW of fuel cells and 300 MW of gas, backed by Meta. [19]

Why it matters. The queue's rules were never written for a plant with three kinds of generator inside it.

CERA Consulting modelled about a dozen transmission projects across the eastern United States and found billions of dollars in savings, concentrated in the PJM region. [20]

Why it matters. A line that lets cheap power reach an expensive area removes the need to build the plant there at all.

Twenty-two small modular reactor designs are under development in the United States and two have regulator approval, but as of August none is running commercially. [21]

Why it matters. The obstacle is the timeline, not the technology, and data centres are being built now.

Governor Josh Shapiro is slowing approvals for enormous data centres after a public backlash, a year after Google, Amazon and Anthropic pledged more than $90bn for the region. [22]

Why it matters. In a place that lost its steel industry, the construction money is welcome and the electricity bill is not.

An Argentine environmental lawyers' group and a veterans' association went to a federal court on Tuesday. They asked it to block Rockhopper Exploration of the UK and Navitas Petroleum of Israel from drilling the Sea Lion field, about 136 miles north of the Falkland Islands. [23]

Why it matters. It ties a marine-ecosystem case to a sovereignty claim, which is a harder thing for a court to split.

A draft Indian framework adds approval requirements for foreign reactor designs. Experts say it could steer buyers towards domestic technology and slow the country's nuclear expansion. [24]

Why it matters. The reform it sits inside was meant to bring foreign money and expertise in.

Chubu Electric said demolition volume and equipment figures for reactors 1 and 2 at its Hamaoka plant differed from the real numbers, and it will check how much it billed Japan's nuclear decommissioning agency. [25]

Why it matters. The company is trying to restart Hamaoka's other three reactors, halted since the Fukushima disaster in 2011.

Nuclear plants in France and Switzerland went offline this summer as river temperatures rose, and plants on the Danube in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria shut or cut output as drought dropped water levels. [26]

Why it matters. The machines sold as weather-proof need a cool river, and the air conditioning they power is what the heat demands.

Clearway's proposed 800-megawatt wind farm in Aroostook County, plus a 1,200-megawatt Avangrid line to Haynesville, would lift Maine's onshore wind capacity by 66%. The state estimates $387m of savings for bill-payers. [27]

Why it matters. Northern Maine has excellent wind and was never wired into the regional grid, which is the whole reason it is empty.

Wind development has fallen out of favour in North Dakota, where residents have grown tired of turbines in rural areas despite decades of money from them. [28]

Why it matters. Local consent, not cost, is now the limit in places where wind was cheapest first.

Jaguar Land Rover opened orders for its first electric Range Rover, a year later than planned and built in Solihull in England. [29] It travels 372 miles on a charge and costs almost 50,000 pounds more than the petrol version. [49]

Why it matters. The top of the car market goes electric last, and charges a premium for it.

Ford's midsize electric pickup, the Fathom, goes on sale in early 2027 at $28,350 before a $1,595 delivery fee. [30]

Why it matters. It is the other end of the same market, and the end that decides how fast petrol volumes fall.

Tesla's China-made sales rose 3.6% year on year in August to 86,166 cars, a tenth straight monthly gain but far slower than July. [31] In Europe its registrations rose 279% in France and 104% in Denmark while falling in Norway and Sweden. [32]

Why it matters. Electric car growth is now country by country, not one global curve.

Toyota said its global sales and production fell in July, dragged down by China, the United States and the Middle East, and offset only partly by a stronger Japan. [33]

Why it matters. The world's biggest carmaker has the same China problem Tesla does, from the opposite direction.

Drought dropped the Danube and Rhine to record lows this summer, upending hundreds of river cruise itineraries. Parts of the Danube in Romania and Serbia hit their lowest levels in 30 years. [34]

Why it matters. This is what an adaptation cost looks like when it arrives as a refund rather than a disaster.

New York City's post-Sandy defences around lower Manhattan are close to complete. The city has more than 500 miles of coastline and over a million people living in its coastal zone. [35]

Why it matters. Every one of those miles is vulnerable differently, and the finished part is the smallest.

Research led by the Food Systems Countdown Initiative found most UN Sustainable Development Goals on food are now virtually impossible to reach by 2030. The team published a dashboard of about 50 measures for nearly every country. [36]

Why it matters. Farming is both a large source of emissions and the first thing a hotter climate breaks.

A study published this week found that without cuts to methane, peak warming passes 1.7C, and that holding warming to 1.5C is no longer plausible whatever is done. Methane already adds more than 0.6C, and a further sustained 10% cut each year to 2050 widens the room to stay below 2C. [38]

Why it matters. Methane is the second-largest cause of warming after carbon dioxide and leaves the air far faster, so cuts show up sooner. [37]

Under Australia's new mandatory climate reporting rules, several of its biggest energy and resource companies have published the warming they treat as their base case, and it does not match the Paris goal. [39]

Why it matters. What a company plans around is a better forecast than what it pledges.

The IEA, the rich countries' energy watchdog, expects Southeast Asia to supply about 20% of the growth in world energy demand to 2035 under today's policies. Clean energy meets just over 40% of that growth; fossil fuels meet about 60%. [40]

Why it matters. That split is where a large share of the next decade's emissions gets decided.

About a third of West Africa's 565 million people had no electricity in 2023. IRENA modelled solar mini-grids with battery storage for Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal, where extending the main grid does not pay. [41]

Why it matters. It feeds Mission 300, the plan to reach 300 million people in Africa with power by 2030.

District heating, which pipes hot water from one central plant to a whole neighbourhood, serves more than 600 million people over a million kilometres of network, and delivers about 35% more heat than in 2010. [42]

Why it matters. Heating and cooling are more than half of all energy used at the point of use, and this is one place to swap the fuel once instead of building by building.

The average daily global sea surface temperature hit 21.10C on 22 August, a record, according to the Copernicus climate service. [43]

Why it matters. A warm ocean is the fuel an El Nino builds on, and one is forming in the Pacific now.

A World Weather Attribution analysis found human-caused warming cut May to July rainfall by 6% in Jamaica and 9% in Puerto Rico. [43]

Why it matters. Both islands depend on farming for income and food, and El Nino may suppress the late rains too.

UN desertification talks in Mongolia closed on Friday without agreeing a legally binding global drought pact. The decision moves to Egypt in 2028, having already slipped once from 2024. [4]

Why it matters. African states led the push for a binding rule; richer countries preferred a weaker framework that is quicker to set up.

Chevron said it had agreed to expand in Venezuela and double its output there to 600,000 barrels a day within five years, investing $7bn, days after the US-Venezuela oil deal. [48]

Why it matters. That is roughly half of everything Venezuela currently exports, from one company.

A new forecast from the risk modeller Verisk puts natural catastrophe losses at about $450bn in a typical year, with 62% of them uninsured, leaving about $279bn on households, firms and governments. [4]

Why it matters. Uninsured is the word doing the work: someone still pays, without a policy behind them.

The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago will buy about 6 gigawatt-hours a year from community solar arrays due online in 2027. [45]

Why it matters. An anchor customer taking 40% to 50% of a project's output is often what makes a lender agree to fund it.

Carbon Brief set out the seven new CMIP7 pathways, which replace the shared socioeconomic pathways and are named by their emissions rather than by a physics term. [46]

Why it matters. These are the futures the next round of climate models, and the next IPCC report, will be built on.

An MIT report argued US power-sector emissions are still on track to fall substantially by 2035 despite Trump administration policy. The Natural Resources Defense Council published a rebuttal pointing at a peer-reviewed study reaching the opposite conclusion. [44]

Why it matters. Two careful models, the same data, opposite answers, which is itself the honest state of play.

Nepal called for a global effort on climate change after the floods, stressing how small its own share of world emissions is. [47] Its foreign minister said big industrial emitters have a historical responsibility to compensate vulnerable countries. [3]

Why it matters. The UN's overshoot report leaves that question open, and the money for it is not attached to anything.