Climate, in brief

China's carbon dioxide fell 1% in the three months to June, and every bit of the fall came from burning less oil. [1]

That has never happened before. Every earlier fall in China's emissions was driven by coal. [1]

Oil use dropped 9% in the quarter and transport fuel dropped 16%, after the Strait of Hormuz shut and fuel got dear. [1]

People did not stop travelling. City journeys rose 2.9%, journeys between regions rose 0.1%, and freight tonnage rose 2.4%. [1]

Electric vehicles did much of the work. The number on China's roads rose 33% in a year, and charging rose 60% in the quarter. [1]

That is more than new sales explain. Drivers who already owned an electric car used it for journeys they used to make on petrol. [1]

Electric vehicles saved China 36 million tonnes of oil in six months, more than the United Kingdom burns in half a year. [1]

Electric lorries grew fastest. They passed 45% of new truck sales in China, and June sales more than doubled from a year earlier. [1]

But electric vehicles explain only about a third of the drop in oil use. Emptying the country's oil stores covered most of the rest. [1]

Coal went the other way. Power stations burned 2.4% more, because wind and solar power was switched off unused and the wind was poor. [1]

China's emissions have now been flat for more than two years, since a peak in March 2024. They rose 2% in the first quarter and fell 1% in the second. [1]

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

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

Why it matters. As the state dries out, the cost of fire is being left on the companies that own the wires, and investors just repriced it in a day.

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

Why it matters. One computing site can now swing enough power to shake a grid, so it is being governed like a power station rather than a customer.

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

Why it matters. China holds 80% of the world's lithium battery manufacturing capacity, and Chinese firms supplied about 40% of US inverters in 2025. [4]

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

Why it matters. Developers paid $150.3m at auction for the Morro Bay site off California and were paid $120m to give it back. [6][7][8]

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

Why it matters. Campaigners fear the review strips the state commission of its say over federal projects on its own coast. [9]

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

Why it matters. The wind industry's own market analyst says the shrinking pool of buildable projects lets the survivors charge a premium. [10]

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

Why it matters. Its two Texas batteries together can supply about 30,000 homes for two hours. [11]

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

Why it matters. The US battery build-out is still mostly assembly; the cells themselves are imported.

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

Why it matters. They pair batteries with on-site gas generators to get more out of them while they wait for a grid connection. [13]

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

Why it matters. What limits how fast computing grows is a piece of heavy electrical equipment with a years-long queue.

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

Why it matters. Electricity is only about a tenth of a data centre's spending, so the fight is over who sells the power rather than what it costs. [15]

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

Why it matters. A bill limiting their effect on electricity prices passed committee in the House of Representatives in July, so the objection has reached federal law-making. [17]

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

Why it matters. The storm crossed the burn scar of the Dragon Bravo fire, which swept nearly 150,000 acres in July 2025, and burnt ground sheds water instead of soaking it up. [19][20]

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

Why it matters. The danger was water, not wind: the storm had already weakened to a depression while it was still dumping rain. [23]

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

Why it matters. Three months of the season are left, and the US weather service has told residents to keep rechecking a forecast that keeps moving. [24]

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

Why it matters. El Nino pushes some regions into drought and others into stronger storms and floods, on top of the warming already there. [25]

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

Why it matters. The state has also cut funding for its own environmental agencies, so the money is thin at both ends. [26]

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

Why it matters. A regional interior minister said the two possibilities being investigated are a foreign government and left-wing extremism, and neither can be ruled out. [27]

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

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

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

Why it matters. That rise came from more nitrogen oxides, the pollution from engines and ships, spreading towards developing countries and the oceans as trade grew. [29]

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

Why it matters. The surge is mostly methane bubbling out of flooded ground, which is counted after a dam is built rather than before. [30]

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

Why it matters. Averaging the whole soil column hides them: it overstates how long they last by about 128% and understates the damage to plants by about 28%. [31]

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

Why it matters. Reported harms include loss of ancestral land and sea, and they varied with how far Indigenous rights were legally recognised. [32]

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

Why it matters. Longi blames oversupply, idle factories, dearer silver and currency moves, though some rivals' losses are narrowing. [33]

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

Why it matters. Module capacity is nearly seven times cell capacity and 116 times ingot and wafer capacity, so the inputs still come from China. [34]

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

Why it matters. Its chief executive said self-financing the plant would still have cost several hundred million kronor even with the EU contribution. [35]

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

Why it matters. Certified installers who put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the programme are carrying the cost. [36]

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

Why it matters. Silicon alone tops out near 25% efficiency; stacking perovskite on top could in theory reach about 40%. [37]

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

Why it matters. The market is getting official attention and new restrictions at the same time, and consultants say grid access and weak economics still bind. [38]

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

Why it matters. Volkswagen says it may stop building electric cars at those sites as it cuts costs to catch faster Chinese rivals. [39]

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

Why it matters. A test in July 2025 got roughly 476 megawatts out of it, capacity built from equipment people already own. [40]

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

Why it matters. Reuters reports the shift would reduce the influence of activist investors, who use that rule to force votes company boards do not want. [41]

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

Why it matters. Farm-state lawmakers objected because the waivers cut demand for the crops that go into the fuel. [42]

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

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

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

Why it matters. Most hurricanes form over open ocean where there is nothing else to measure them with. [44]

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

Why it matters. The extra concrete makes a building look worse on a carbon count, until you add the carbon of rebuilding it. [45]

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

Why it matters. The International Renewable Energy Agency points to the model as a way to electrify road transport in poorer countries. [46]

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

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