Climate, in brief

Computing's power orders

the US forecaster expects record demand in 2026 and 2027 [10]; an Ohio utility plans for demand nearly tripling [11]; Malaysia's data centres took a record 9.3% of its power [12]

Dry ground burning

Indonesia's fires put out 19.7m tonnes of carbon dioxide in a week, the most of any country [5]; almost 650,000 hectares have burned in the EU this year [6]

Oil moving through a war

Brent passed $100 with Gulf exports near two-thirds of pre-war levels [7]; diesel in Serbia is the dearest it has ever been at 234 dinars a litre [9]

Ice losing its grip

tarpaulins now cover the Mer de Glace ice cave in France [31]; a study puts the Blatten avalanche at 9.3 million cubic metres of rock and ice [33]

2 pressures seen across the day run through Climate too.

• The war on Iran reaching the ships that carry oilHigh ↑ · seen in 3 beats→
• Data centres bidding for the power and the parts everyone else buysHigh ↑ · seen in 3 beats→

1. 1August tied the hottest month ever measured, and the ocean set its own record
2. 2Oil passes $100 and a third of Gulf exports cannot be traced
3. 3Serbia's diesel is the dearest it has ever been
4. 4Indonesia's fires overtake Russia's
5. 5Record electricity demand forecast for two years running

Watch the next few Copernicus months: this El Nino has not peaked, and the test is whether the run of records continues into a season that is normally cooler. [1][4]

Brent crude, the benchmark most of the world's oil is priced against, passed $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July, having been down at about $70 in early July. [7][15]

Gulf shipments are still far below pre-war levels: Goldman Sachs and the analytics firm Vortexa each put them near 15 million barrels a day, about two-thirds of normal, and much of that sails with tracking transponders switched off. [7]

Producers outside OPEC are adding 1.4 million barrels a day this year, and dear fuel has cut demand by about 3.5 million. [8]

The US energy secretary said last week that shipments were almost back to pre-war levels, and the industry's own data says two-thirds. [7]

One of those numbers is a supply crisis and the other is a bad quarter.

Diesel in Serbia reached 234 dinars a litre in the week to 11 September, the highest retail price ever recorded there, the country's mining and energy ministry said. [9]

Petrol stands at 205 dinars. [9]

Serbia imports its fuel, and the reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the sea lane that carries a fifth of the oil traded worldwide, has raised shipping costs and refining margins. [9]

Supply and demand are roughly balanced, the energy researcher Aleksandar Kovacevic told the BBC; what has grown is the risk attached to moving the stuff. [9]

Serbia pumps almost no oil of its own, so a fight over a sea lane 3,000 kilometres away arrives as the number on the pump.

Also seen in World and Finance.

Fires in Indonesia released 19.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1 and 7 September, more than a third of the world total and more than Russia, according to Fire Emissions Watch, run by the EU's Copernicus atmosphere service. [5]

The fires are burning forest and peatland on Borneo and Sumatra. [5]

Peat is waterlogged ground packed with half-rotted plants; when it dries it burns underground and is very hard to put out. [5]

Officials call this the country's most intense fire season in eleven years. [5]

Mark Parrington of the Copernicus atmosphere service says El Nino is the reason they burn this hard: drier, hotter, and any ignition goes further. [5]

The same El Nino is in the record August above.

Water keeps Borneo's peat from burning and ice keeps the rock faces above Chamonix from falling, and this summer took away some of each.

drought dried the peat swamps of Borneo and Sumatra, and the carbon the water was holding down came out as 19.7 million tonnes in seven days

the same step with frozen water: permafrost was the cement in those faces, the heatwaves thawed it, and about 400 collapses are expected this year

ice was part of what held that slope together, and when its grip weakened 9.3 million cubic metres of rock and ice moved at once

From a single seat it all looks like ground.

Power use in the United States will set records in 2026 and 2027, the US Energy Information Administration said in its short-term outlook on Wednesday. [10]

It expects demand to rise from 4,195 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,270 billion this year and 4,349 billion next. [10]

The agency names data centres running artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, plus homes and businesses switching heating and driving from fuel to electricity. [10]

Even with a pause on new data-centre connections in Texas, the south-central states account for the largest share of the growth. [10]

Two decades of flat demand are over, and every extra kilowatt-hour has to be generated by something that exists.

Also seen in Tech and Finance.

American Electric Power's Ohio company, the state's largest regulated electric utility, expects demand on its system to nearly triple over the next decade, almost entirely because of data centres it expects to be built. [11]

Utilities size their grid spending on such forecasts, and customers repay that spending through bills. [11]

Jonathan Koomey, a researcher who studies computing and energy, says the forecasts assume recent trends simply continue, when computing keeps getting more efficient and developers shop the same project around several states. [11]

Ohio households are already seeing bills rise. [11]

If the data centres arrive, the wires were needed. If they do not, Ohio households have paid for a grid built for customers who never came.

Data centres took 9.3% of Malaysia's electricity in the second week of August, a record, against an average of 7% this year, the head of its Energy Commission, Siti Safinah Salleh, said. [12]

Hotter weather is part of it: cooling the machines takes much more power as temperatures rise. [12]

The country now needs 9 gigawatts more gas-fired capacity by 2032, its economy minister said, while it plans to close its last coal plant by 2044. [12]

Malaysia is Southeast Asia's fastest-growing data-centre market. [12]

The heat that raises the cooling bill is the same heat the extra gas burning adds to, and the bill for the gap falls to a country of 35 million people.

Google will spend 13 billion euros, about $15 billion, on data centres in Finland, and will buy up to half the electricity from one of the country's nuclear power stations as part of it. [13]

It is the company's largest single investment in Europe, with sites at Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala and an expansion at Hamina, a converted paper mill. [13]

Finland was picked for cool air, low-carbon power and a grid with room on it; cold outside air cuts what it costs to stop servers overheating. [13]

TikTok announced a $1bn Finnish data centre this week too. [13]

Electricity is expensive to move and computing is not, so the machines are going to where the spare cold power already sits, and half a reactor now has one customer.

Brazil will use a visit to China next week to test whether the country could buy Brazilian carbon credits.

Its carbon market secretary, Cristina Reis, told Reuters she hopes for a deal by the COP31 climate summit in Turkey in November. [14]

Officials meet in Wuhan from 14 to 18 September, where a Brazil-China-EU group covering about 42% of world emissions is due to approve a plan to align their trading systems. [14]

The credits at issue count towards a country's own emissions pledge. [14]

A carbon credit is only worth what someone will pay for it, and the world's largest emitter has never been a buyer.

Tackling air pollution and climate change together would raise world economic output by 2.8% by 2035, a new report from the UN Environment Programme finds, as reported by the Financial Times and summarised by Carbon Brief. [15]

The two problems share causes: burning fossil fuels, some farming practices, and industrial processes. [15]

The authors say that holds on market benefits alone, and that each year of delay carries costs that cannot be recovered. [15]

Clean-air rules and carbon rules are usually written, argued over and paid for separately, by different agencies.

French winemakers expect this year's production to be the lowest in three decades after a summer of drought and heatwaves, the Guardian reports. [15]

Early estimates point to a 6% drop on last year and output 17% below the average of 2021 to 2025. [15]

Champagne is expected to make about half what it made in 2025. [15] Most French vineyards began picking in August because the heat pushed ripening forward. [15]

France has just had its hottest summer on record, and this is what a record August looks like in a farm account rather than in a temperature series. [15]

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a 200 million euro partnership package for Greenland in Nuuk on Monday, to be spent this year and in 2027 on digital connections, mining, energy and tourism. [16]

Greenlanders are Danish citizens, though Greenland itself left the EU in 1985, and the US president has spent this year pressing for American control of the island. [17]

Von der Leyen said the Arctic is of strategic importance to the EU; melting ice is making the island's minerals easier to reach and opening new shipping routes. [17]

Greenland's ice retreating is what put its rocks within reach, and the money now arriving is a consequence of that, not a response to it.

The Dubai Tower, a Chinese cargo ship, is completing a three-week voyage from Qingdao in China to Teesport in England across the top of Russia, part of the first regular cargo service using the Northern Sea Route. [18]

The northern passage takes about 21 days; the same ship's route to Europe through the Suez Canal took 36. [18]

China lies more than 800 miles from the Arctic Circle and calls itself a near-Arctic state; it has run coast guard patrols with Russia and announced Arctic projects that mostly never happened. [18]

The route exists because the sea ice that closed it has thinned, which makes a shipping line one of the first businesses to be built on warming rather than damaged by it.

The United States will help Kenya build an industry that processes critical minerals rather than exporting raw rock, Frank Garcia, the US assistant secretary of state for Africa, told a business group in Nairobi on Wednesday. [19]

Kenya is weighing bids to develop Mrima Hill on its coast, thought to hold tens of billions of dollars of rare earth minerals and niobium, a metal used in aerospace. [19]

The US development finance agency is backing several African rare-earth projects. [19] China dominates the processing of these metals worldwide. [19]

Every wind turbine, motor and magnet runs on these metals, and processing is the step where nearly all the value and nearly all the pollution sit.

The boards that have run the US refiner Citgo on behalf of Venezuela's opposition for seven years are winding down this month, two people involved told Reuters. [20]

Citgo refines oil in the United States and is owned by Venezuela's state oil company, PDVSA. [20]

Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodriguez, whose government replaced Nicolas Maduro's after he was captured by US forces in January, has been recognised by the US government and has replaced the lawyers representing the country abroad. [20]

Citgo has been the one large Venezuelan asset outside the country's own control, and it is now going back.

China's installed solar capacity reached 1.286 terawatts at the end of July, edging past its 1.285 terawatts of coal, the National Energy Administration said. [21]

Solar is now about 31.5% of the country's total generating capacity of 4.078 terawatts. [21] It ends a century in which coal was the largest source by installed size. [21]

Capacity is not output: coal still generates far more electricity, because a coal plant runs whenever it is told to and a panel only works when the sun is on it. [22]

The two numbers get reported as one story and they are not: the crossover in capacity happened this summer, the crossover in electricity has not. [22]

Solar generation in Portugal peaked at about 3.85 gigawatts in August, a record, after the country added 372 megawatts of panels between December and May to reach 7.3 gigawatts. [23]

Renewable sources supplied 52% of the country's electricity that month, with imports covering 36% and non-renewable generation 12%. [23]

Solar became Portugal's largest single source of electricity for the first time in July, at 19% of consumption, ahead of hydropower, wind and biomass. [23]

Imports also hit a record 5.2 gigawatts. [23]

A country that used to burn coal for its baseload now leans on the sun and on its neighbours' wires, and both of those have weather attached.

New car registrations in the UK rose about 13% in August to more than 90,000, the strongest August in eight years, preliminary figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders show. [24]

Battery electric cars took about 30% of the month, and 26% of the year so far. [24]

Both figures sit below Britain's zero-emission vehicle mandate, which requires 33% of a carmaker's sales to be electric in 2026. [24]

A separate count by New AutoMotive also put August at about 30%. [24]

The mandate is what makes carmakers discount electric models, and a gap this size decides how hard they discount for the rest of the year.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote to Ford's chief executive Jim Farley on Tuesday about the carmaker's dealings with the Chinese battery maker CATL and the Chinese carmakers Geely and BYD. [25]

He said they raise national security concerns and urged Ford to cut the ties. [25]

CATL makes more electric-car batteries than anyone else and licenses its technology to Ford's plant in Marshall, Michigan; it sits on the US defence department's list of firms accused of military links. [25]

Ford called the letter wrongheaded and said it is investing in batteries built in the United States. [25]

Cheap batteries are what make an affordable electric car possible, and the cheapest ones are Chinese or built to Chinese designs.

Plug-in hybrid cars in Europe emit about six times more carbon dioxide than laboratory tests indicate, and the gap is widening. [26]

That comes from on-board fuel monitoring data for 220,000 vehicles, analysed by the campaign group Transport and Environment. [26]

Real-world emissions rose from 138 grams per kilometre in 2023 to 145 in 2024, only 14% below the average petrol or diesel car. [26]

The tests assume owners plug in far more often than they do. [26]

Buyers who paid extra for a car sold as the clean middle option are getting a fraction of the saving, and carmakers count these sales towards emissions targets.

Projects that combine generation and storage on one site attracted $25 billion of investment worldwide in the first half of 2026, nearly double the previous record set in the second half of 2025, according to BloombergNEF. [29]

The category is dominated by solar with batteries alongside it. [29] Solar's weakness is timing: nothing at night, a flood in the afternoon, rarely matching when people want power. [29]

A battery on the same site lets the project behave like a plant that can be switched on. [29]

This is the money deciding that the useful unit is not a solar farm but a solar farm that can choose its hour.

The queue of planned land-based wind projects in the United States is shrinking as the price gap with solar widens, according to the American Clean Power Association. [30]

At least 44 gigawatts of wind projects are stuck in review at the US defence department, the group's John Hensley said. [30]

The wider clean-power pipeline, counting wind, solar and storage, passed 200 gigawatts and grew 11% on the year. [30]

Utilities signed 71% of new purchase contracts; Google alone accounted for 54% of corporate deals in the second quarter. [30]

Wind and solar are not interchangeable: wind blows at night and in winter, which is exactly when a solar-heavy grid is short.

Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University, expects about 400 rock collapses in the Mont Blanc range this year, roughly ten times the number two decades ago and above the previous worst year, 2022, at nearly 300. [31]

A collapse means more than 100 cubic metres of rock coming off a face. [31]

Permafrost, ground that has stayed frozen for thousands of years, works like cement in these peaks, and this summer's heatwaves took it apart. [31]

July on the Aiguille du Midi averaged 3.3C, its warmest on record, against 1.6C in 1994. [31]

Chamonix's deputy mayor says the town must now plan for pieces of glacier or mountain reaching inhabited ground, and a local guide cancelled a summit trip last week. [31]

A project run by the Summit Foundation and the University of Lausanne is testing sheep wool instead of plastic sheeting to slow melting on the Tsanfleuron glacier in western Switzerland. [32]

The tarpaulins normally used shed plastic microfibres into the mountains; sheets like them now cover the ice cave of the Mer de Glace above Chamonix. [32][31]

Between 40% and 70% of Swiss wool is thrown away each year, so the four master's students behind the idea had a free material to work with. [32]

This summer's heat stripped the snow off Swiss glaciers weeks earlier than usual. [32]

Reuters notes that the early loss of snow feeds the ice loss blamed for rockslides like the one that destroyed the village of Blatten in 2025. [32]

A study in Communications Earth and Environment reconstructs the rock and ice avalanche that buried the Swiss village of Blatten on 28 May 2025, using seismic recordings, ground surveys and models. [33]

About 9.3 million cubic metres of rock and ice moved. [33] More than two weeks of accelerating rockfalls and small glacier collapses came first. [33]

The models only match what happened if friction inside the moving mass fell very low, possibly because water pressure built up in the rock, though the authors cannot rule out the ice itself. [33]

The authors write that these cascading failures are becoming more common as glaciers retreat and slopes adjust, and this gives the next one a method to be studied with. [33]

Air bubbles in ice are the record of what the atmosphere used to contain, and a study in Communications Earth and Environment finds that sunlight can alter that record near the surface. [34]

In the Larsen blue-ice area of East Antarctica, carbon dioxide fell with depth and levelled off at about 4.6 metres, while methane first rose and then declined. [34]

The authors rule out melting, modern air leaking in and microbes, and point to chemical reactions driven by light. [34]

The authors say light-driven chemistry should be allowed for when anyone reads a greenhouse-gas record out of blue ice. [34]

During the last ice age the Atlantic's overturning circulation, the system of currents that carries warm water north and cold water back south, reorganised abruptly several times. [35]

A study in Nature Geoscience finds those switches changed how much heat the Earth held overall: the ocean interior took up heat while the circulation was weak and gave it back when the circulation was strong. [35]

The effect was amplified by changes in how much sunlight the planet reflected or trapped. [35]

The same circulation is being watched now for signs of weakening, and this says a change in it does not just move heat around, it changes the total. [35]

Researchers found charcoal, burnt plant matter and fire chemistry in Late Cretaceous rainforest and wetland deposits laid down about 900 kilometres from the South Pole, and report it in Communications Earth and Environment. [36]

The record shows frequent, low-temperature surface fires in a world with far more carbon dioxide in the air than today. [36]

Those fires ran alongside the swamp turning into the oldest known peat bog from southern high latitudes. [36] Repeated burning kept the vegetation open and helped the peat form. [36]

It is the same pairing burning in Borneo this week, running in a hot, high-carbon world, and it says fire is normal in these systems rather than an intruder. [36]

Almost 650,000 hectares have burned across the European Union since the start of the year in more than 1,913 separate large fires, according to European Commission figures reported by New Scientist. [6]

The headline fires were in France and Spain, but the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Italy have all had major blazes in forests, grassland and nature reserves. [6]

Those are countries whose fire services and land managers have not had to plan around this. [6]

A country that has never needed fire breaks, water bombers or burn bans has to buy them and learn to use them, which takes years.

The International Renewable Energy Agency, the intergovernmental body that tracks and promotes renewable power, is using the UN General Assembly and Climate Week in New York to argue for electrification as the fastest way to cut emissions. [37]

Its target is for electricity to meet 35% of the world's final energy demand by 2035, through four routes: tripling renewable capacity, doubling grid investment, switching more end uses to electricity, and lowering the cost of borrowing. [37]

An Electrification Day is co-hosted with the COP31 presidency. [37]

Most energy is still burned rather than wired, so the share of demand that runs on electricity is the number that decides how much cleaning the grid is worth.

Four American companies committed a combined $2 billion of investment in South Korea across semiconductors, advanced materials and energy, the country's industry ministry said, announced at a ceremony in Washington. [38]

The industrial gases supplier Air Products will expand facilities in Pyeongtaek that make the gases used in chip manufacturing, and the equipment maker Axcelis will expand production of ion implanters. [38]

Both projects supply chipmaking rather than making chips, which is the part of the industry South Korea already leads. [38]

Chip plants are among the heaviest continuous electricity users there are, so an investment in fabrication is also an order placed on a national grid.