Climate, in brief

New York's governor, Kathy Hochul, scrapped the state's legally binding 2030 emissions target in May, saying that keeping it would put crushing costs on New Yorkers. [1]

The target came from a bill signed in 2019, and that law let ordinary citizens sue the state if the rules needed to hit it were never written. [1]

Thirteen of the fifteen US states and districts with a 2030 target in law are cutting emissions more slowly than their own law demands. Only Maine and the District of Columbia are ahead. [1]

Delaware is furthest off. Its law asks for emissions to fall 6.3% a year, and they have been rising 4.1% a year. [1]

New York's answer is 5 gigawatts of new nuclear, which would make it the third-largest nuclear state in the country. [2]

The whole United States has added just over 3 gigawatts of new nuclear in twenty years, almost all of it at one plant in Georgia that ran late and over budget. [2]

New York closed Indian Point, its largest source of electricity that burned nothing, in April 2021, two years after passing the climate law. [2]

No new reactor has even been attempted in the state since Nine Mile Point 2 started up in 1988. [2]

A state senator from Brooklyn has already filed a bill to ban nuclear construction in New York for two and a half years. [2]

Emissions are moving anyway, without the targets. Renewables took 28.5% of US electricity in the first half of 2026, up 2.2 percentage points, and coal lost exactly the same share. [3]

Europe is drifting the same way. Countries responsible for half the EU's greenhouse gases made little progress last year and may be going backwards, according to their own official inventories. [4]

The UN's environment agency said this week that even its best case now warms the world by 1.8C, and that the plan is to pass 1.5C and come back down afterwards. [5]

Why it matters. Watch whether the state's Public Service Commission actually names a site. New York has raised its nuclear target twice without one, and a bill to pause construction for two and a half years is already filed. [2]

Battery-electric cars took 27,078 of Australia's 108,760 new-car sales in August, or 24.9% of the market, ahead of petrol on 25,824 and diesel on 23,608. Counting hybrids as well, cars that burn only fuel were a minority of the market for the first month ever. Electric sales were up 171% on a year earlier, and the whole market grew 4.9%. Seven of the eight best-selling electric models are Chinese brands, and the eighth is Tesla, which builds every right-hand-drive car it sells in Australia at its Shanghai factory. [6]

Why it matters. Europe crossed the same line last year and Australia has got there faster. [6] Nobody in Australia chose the cars: Tesla's Shanghai plant alone shipped 86,166 in August, to Europe, Asia-Pacific and Canada. [7]

European gas prices reached their highest level in more than three years after fresh strikes in the Middle East. The EU's storage caves and tanks are only 65% full. That is the emptiest they have been at the end of summer in at least 15 years. Storage is filled in summer, when gas is cheap and nobody is heating, and drawn down through winter. British households already face an average 60 pounds more a year from October, when the cap on what suppliers may charge rises to 1,723 pounds. Analysts quoted by the Telegraph expect prices to rise further before refilling begins. [4]

Why it matters. This is where a war a long way off reaches a kitchen. The bill for a cold January is being set in early September, months before anyone is cold.

EDF, the French state electricity company, has extended the shutdown of its Gravelines 5 reactor in northern France by seven weeks, to 25 January, after finding signs of corrosion. Reactors are normally taken off for maintenance in summer, when demand is low, precisely so they are running in midwinter. Bloomberg reports that the extension is likely to hold European power prices up, on top of the gas price rise already caused by the war in Iran. [11]

Why it matters. The plant that is supposed to cover a cold, still January is now the thing missing from it.

Researchers built China's first province-level record of what they call wind and solar electricity droughts, using nine years of output from the Yunnan grid in the south-west. Wind output collapses about nine times a year and solar about six, most events lasting two to four days, and both fail together roughly twice a year. The trigger is rarely one extreme reading. A wind drought needs wind speeds more than 55.5% below the monthly average, or a smaller shortfall arriving alongside a temperature drop. Solar needs sunlight more than 65.2% down, or a milder drop with temperatures 15.9% lower, and rain lowers the bar further. [9]

Why it matters. Grids are planned against single worst cases, and this says the days that hurt are made of two ordinary readings landing together.

NatureScot, Scotland's nature agency, counted 36,500 occupied puffin burrows this summer on the Isle of May, an island five miles off the coast of Fife. The last survey, in 2024, found 52,000. That is a 30% fall in two years at one of the largest puffin colonies in the United Kingdom, which has been a national nature reserve since 1956. A joint survey with the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology found that storms killed adult birds outright while warmer seas thinned the sand eels the puffins live on. Researchers pointed to poor winter survival in three of the last five winters. [10]

Why it matters. Nothing hunted them and nothing polluted the island. The bird and the fish it eats were hit by the same warming, in the same winters.

At least 1,200 people have died and more than 4,200 are missing after the flash floods that swept the Nepal-Tibet border on 26 August, Nepal's disaster agency says. On the Tibetan side 21 have died and more than 540 are missing. Damage to homes, roads and power stations is put at $2.56bn. Nepal's foreign minister, Shisir Khanal, has asked China, the United States and India for compensation, saying they made extremely large contributions to warming and left small countries paying for it. Eight developing-country members of the UN's loss and damage fund have signed a letter asking its board to hold an emergency meeting. [5][4]

Why it matters. The fund was built to finance long-term projects, and it is now being asked to behave like an emergency service.

The floods of 26 August knocked out 431 megawatts of generating capacity, about a tenth of Nepal's total, most of it hydropower in Bagmati province. Nepal had spent years building dams and had become an exporter, selling electricity to India. It has now halted those exports and will buy power from India instead over the coming months, its energy ministry spokesman Mohan Kumar Shakya told Reuters. A post-disaster assessment will decide how long the repairs take. [23]

Why it matters. Environmental experts told Reuters that plants built in flood-prone valleys and riverbeds compound the risk, and a valley with a steep drop is exactly where a dam wants to be. [23]

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, formally opposed a third runway at Heathrow airport, saying he saw no evidence it fits a credible path to net zero. Research by the University of Manchester, commissioned by the campaign group Friends of the Earth, found the runway would push the country past its legally binding carbon budget. British aviation is already forecast to exceed the limits set in the seventh of those budgets, and the study found that fuels made from waste such as used cooking oil cannot close the gap. [4]

Why it matters. The runway is a thirty-year object and the budget is a law, and only one of the two is easy to amend.

Spain's government wants the European Union to tax the profits of oil and gas companies and spend the money on adapting to climate change. It follows a summer of drought and wildfires across western Europe, the region's hottest on record. Adaptation means the unglamorous half of climate spending: flood walls, cooler buildings, water storage, firebreaks. It is chronically underfunded because it produces no revenue of its own, unlike a wind farm or a solar field. Any EU-wide tax would need agreement from member states that host those companies. [5]

Why it matters. Adaptation spending has no customer to bill, which is why it keeps losing to spending that does.

The Jackdaw gas field in the UK's North Sea is set to be approved in the middle of September, according to BBC News, and the Guardian reports the announcement could come as soon as next week. The North Sea is Britain's own oil and gas basin, in decline for two decades, and each new field is now argued over one at a time rather than licensed in rounds. [5]

Why it matters. It lands in the same fortnight the country's aviation carbon budget is being fought over, and in the same country that just had its hottest summer on record.

The United Kingdom had its hottest summer on record in 2026, on provisional Met Office figures. An analysis reported by the Guardian found that human-caused warming made that summer about 130 times more likely than it would otherwise have been. Attribution studies work by running climate models with and without the extra heat trapped by burning fuel, and comparing how often the event shows up in each. A 130-fold change is at the very high end of what these studies produce. [5]

Why it matters. It puts a number on a summer that most people in Britain simply experienced as unpleasant.

The testing firm AVILOO published the largest study yet of how electric-car batteries age, based on physical measurements of the packs rather than the car's own estimate. At 150,000 kilometres, roughly 93,000 miles, the Mercedes EQA still held 94% of its original capacity, the Hyundai IONIQ 5 93.8% and the BMW i4 93.6%. Twenty models were ranked. The worst results went to cars with small packs: the Nissan Leaf at 86.7% and the MINI Cooper SE at 87.1%. A 40 kilowatt-hour battery has to be charged and drained far more times than a 78 kilowatt-hour one to cover the same distance, and it is the number of times that wears it. [8]

Why it matters. Fear of a dead battery is the main reason people avoid a used electric car, and this is the first large set of measurements rather than estimates.

China now has more solar capacity installed than coal capacity, a milestone that produced a striking chart this week. Capacity is the maximum a plant could produce if everything ran flat out. What plants actually deliver is measured by the capacity factor, and Chinese coal runs at about 50% of its maximum while solar manages about 14%, because the sun sets and clouds pass. On those numbers China's solar fleet would have to be roughly 3.5 times larger than its coal fleet before it generated more electricity. [17]

Why it matters. A chart that is true can still be read wrong, and this one is being read as the end of Chinese coal.

Chinese makers of inverters and battery storage systems have responded cautiously to a run of US restrictions. The US communications regulator added certain foreign-made power inverters to a covered list on 28 July, which blocks new products from being certified. On 20 August it widened the list to wired devices, while exempting some inverters that qualify for a US manufacturing tax credit. An executive order on 26 August covers equipment on transmission lines of 69,000 volts and above. Sungrow, which gets an estimated 15% to 20% of its revenue from the United States, has published the most detailed response. [15]

Why it matters. An inverter is the box that turns a solar panel's output into grid electricity, and almost nobody outside China makes them at this scale.

The International Energy Agency, the rich countries' energy watchdog, published its country review of Turkiye. Electricity demand there grew by almost 5% a year on average between 2005 and 2024, the fastest of any IEA member, and is expected to keep rising to 2035. Renewables already supply 43% of the country's electricity and the national plan takes that to 55% by 2035, with solar capacity almost quadrupling and wind tripling. Turkiye also plans 7.5 gigawatts of new battery storage and a major expansion of its transmission network. Its first climate law, passed in 2025, sets up a national carbon market. [14]

Why it matters. It is one of the few large countries where demand growth and clean supply are being planned against each other rather than argued about afterwards.

Small modular reactors are being pitched to electricity companies as steady, low-carbon power for a strained grid, but the first commercial orders are not coming from utilities. They are coming from technology companies and defence customers willing to underwrite the risk. A three-party arrangement is emerging: a developer builds, a utility runs the power into the grid, and a large customer such as a data centre absorbs the cost of being first. Kairos Power's 2024 deal with Google targets up to 500 megawatts by 2035, and the company describes it as an order book rather than one plant, so the design can be repeated. [13]

Why it matters. Utilities recover costs from customers through a regulator, which makes them the wrong buyer for anything nobody has built before.

Sweden's energy minister, Ebba Busch, argued that a new generation of reactors would lower emissions, cut dependence on Russian energy and steady electricity prices. She told a crowd on the island of Gotland that nuclear power might be better than sliced bread. Her opponent set out a sharply different plan for the country's energy future at the same summer politics festival. The frontrunner to return as prime minister wants Sweden to lead in green industry again after failures in batteries and steel. The reactors have not been ordered, and the election decides whether they are. [12][4]

Why it matters. A reactor takes about fifteen years to build and a Swedish parliament lasts four, so the plans that survive are the ones both sides can live with.

Italy's Council of Ministers designated a project at the Carbosulcis coal mining complex at Nuraxi Figus, in Sardinia, as being of pre-eminent national strategic interest. The site will host a data centre of up to about 30 megawatts, built with its own renewable generation and storage, and the plan scales to about 100 megawatts of total site power. A government commissioner is expected to be appointed to speed the remaining permits. Construction is targeted for 2028 and operation for 2030. [16]

Why it matters. Coal regions have the two things a data centre wants most: a grid connection already built, and a workforce with nothing else to do.

US power plants produced 2.1% more electricity in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier, driven by data centres and other large users. The biggest rises were in Texas, Washington, Tennessee, Ohio and New Mexico, each for a different reason: solar in Texas, hydropower in Washington, nuclear in Tennessee, gas in Ohio and a coal and solar mix in New Mexico. California went the other way, with large-plant output falling sharply, partly because batteries now store solar power that used to be thrown away and the state needs less gas in the evening. [3]

Why it matters. It is the clearest sign yet that storage does not just add supply; it removes the need for some of it.

Angela Eagle, Britain's environment secretary, told the Guardian that people should keep enough food and water at home to last a few days without power or water, as part of a government campaign on preparing for emergencies. She linked the advice to the El Nino now building in the Pacific, which forecasters expect to bring a wet, stormy winter to the United Kingdom along with drier summers. El Nino is a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific that shifts rainfall and storms worldwide for a year or more. [18]

Why it matters. Advice like this is normally issued by a civil contingencies department, not an environment ministry.

Researchers writing in a Nature journal have defined charging poverty as being unable to afford or reach enough reliable electric-car charging. They set out five ways it happens: cost, distance, whether the charger works, whether it is free when you need it, and whether you can use the app. The authors set out indicators so governments can measure the gap as electric cars spread, and a list of the kinds of driver most likely to fall into it. [19]

Why it matters. Australia's crossover this month makes this the live question: who is left driving petrol because they have nowhere to plug in.

Australia now has 162 data centres with 90 more planned, and more than A$155bn of investment lined up, drawn by cheap clean power, gas reserves and empty land. One resident in Lane Cove, a suburb on Sydney's lower north shore, lives 350 metres from one, with four more planned at the local industrial park. Residents are raising water use, electricity demand and noise. Industry figures argue the alternative is importing the tools rather than owning any of the value. [20]

Why it matters. The same country that just crossed over on electric cars is adding a new electricity load faster than it is adding generation.

At the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau, the hosts called for climate funding rather than what they described as geopolitical squabbles. The forum, which brings together the region's governments, has previously declared climate change the single greatest threat to regional security. Pacific states have spent years trying to convert the strategic competition around them into money for sea walls, relocation and water supply, with limited success. [4][5]

Why it matters. These are the countries with the least ability to build their way out and the least say in whether anyone helps.

Europe's General Court rejected a challenge brought by two campaign groups, the Global Legal Action Network and CAN Europe, against the European Commission's decision setting each member state's annual greenhouse gas allowances for 2023 to 2030. Those allowances are the country-by-country share of the bloc's target, covering transport, buildings, farming and waste. The groups argued the shares were too weak. The court left them in place. [4]

Why it matters. It is the mirror image of the US picture: in the EU the targets survive in law and the emissions cuts are what is slipping.

France's finance ministry said this summer's drought and heatwaves could take 0.1 percentage points off the country's economic growth this year, mostly through lost farm revenue. Britain's hospitality trade paid a version of the same bill: pubs, bars and restaurants spent an average of 680 pounds a month more on energy over the summer, running cooling harder for longer. [4]

Why it matters. Heat rarely appears as a line in a national account, and this is one of the first times a finance ministry has put it there.

New research in Nature Geoscience finds that the length of drought each year has increased across more than half of the Earth's land surface since 1981. Separately, a review in WIREs Climate Change of studies attributing extreme weather in east Africa found that more than half detected a clear human influence. A third paper, in Earth's Future, concludes that the US energy department's 2025 climate report misrepresents the human fingerprint on warming. [5]

Why it matters. Longer drought is a different problem from less rain: soil, reservoirs and roots all recover on their own clock.

The climate protest group Just Stop Oil brought Parliament Square in London to a standstill, its first street action in 17 months, timed for Andy Burnham's first session of prime minister's questions. It was the group's first street action since it stood down its campaign of road and airport disruption. The protest fell in the same week the Jackdaw gas field moved towards approval. [4]

Why it matters. Disruptive climate protest in Britain had gone quiet for well over a year, and it has come back at the moment a new gas field is being signed off.

Climate shocks hit the maize-growing heartland of Hungary and Romania this season, Reuters reported. Maize is sown in spring and pollinates in high summer, which is exactly when heat and drought hurt it most, and unlike wheat it cannot be brought in early. Most European maize is grown to feed animals, so a bad crop travels into meat and dairy prices rather than into bread. [4]

Why it matters. It is the same summer that cost France a tenth of a point of growth, showing up in a different country as a crop.

Researchers publishing in a Nature water journal have built a solar-powered separator that produces clean water while recovering the material dissolved in it, running on sunlight alone rather than mains electricity. Most desalination and water clean-up is expensive because it is electricity-hungry, which is why it tends to exist only where there is a grid to plug into. Devices like this are aimed at places with strong sun and no reliable power. [21]

Why it matters. Water treatment is one of the few things that a warming world will need more of and that solar power is unusually good at running.

Pauline Hanson, who leads the Australian minor party One Nation, called for two nuclear reactors on the country's east coast. She was campaigning in Victoria before a November state election, and went beyond her party's published policy of one reactor costing A$6.8bn. She also called for taxpayer money to keep the coal-fired Loy Yang power station outside Traralgon running. Her party distanced itself from an earlier nuclear push by Peter Dutton that failed at a federal election. Australia has no nuclear power stations. [22]

Why it matters. It arrives in the same month the country's drivers quietly went electric, on cars built in China.