Climate, in brief

Chubu Electric, one of Japan's big regional power companies, says it handed the country's nuclear regulator manipulated earthquake data for years. [1]

The figures covered reactors 3 and 4 at the Hamaoka plant, on the coast about 200km west of Tokyo. [1]

An outside investigative panel found the numbers had been bent so they would meet the safety requirement. [1]

President Kingo Hayashi and chairman Satoru Katsuno step down on 30 September. A director, Minoru Yasui, becomes president on 1 October. [1]

Neither man was linked to the data itself. The panel said the top management made an early restart a key business target and harshly told off the team handling the permit. [1]

Chubu applied to restart the two reactors in 2014 and 2015 and was still waiting eleven years later. [1]

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority suspended the safety check last December, after months of investigation that began with a whistleblower's tip. [1]

The company has now dropped the application. It says it will apply again after preventive measures, restructuring and what its president called a fresh start, and gave no date. [1]

Hamaoka sits above the Nankai Trough, a stretch of seabed where Japan expects one of its largest future earthquakes. Two other reactors there are being taken apart and a fifth is idle. [1]

Of Japan's 54 commercial reactors, 11 are running, 20 are offline and more than 20 are being decommissioned. [1]

Opinion in Japan has been split on nuclear power since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, though acceptance has grown as Middle East fighting pushed household fuel costs up. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether Japan's regulator now goes back over the earthquake files at the other plants waiting on a restart decision. [1]

Virginia's utility regulator ruled on 31 July that Dominion Energy must charge very large electricity users directly for some of the substations and power lines built to reach them. [2] Microsoft filed a notice of appeal on 28 August but has not appealed, and a spokesperson said the notice preserves its ability to challenge how the rule is applied later. [2] Virginia law gives it until late November to decide. [2] Dominion must file its amended policy in October. [2]

Why it matters. Virginia hosts a massive hub of data centres. [3] Whether the data centre or the household pays for the new power lines is being decided there first. [2]

NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy want to merge into the largest regulated electricity business in the world, a deal NextEra announced in May. [3] Virginia's governor and legislative leaders have been sceptical. [3] On Monday the two companies added a package for the state. [3] It includes a co-headquarters tower in downtown Richmond paid for by shareholders, 600 new jobs, more money for training, and a $10 monthly household bill credit stretched from two years to four. [3] The longer credit is to be paid for by ending credits that would have gone to large data-centre customers. [3]

Why it matters. Dominion powers about 3.6 million homes and businesses in Virginia and the Carolinas, so the terms agreed here set what those customers pay for years. [3]

S&P Global, which grades how safely governments and companies can borrow, told a webinar that American utility rates have risen 38% since 2020 and are now high compared with household income. [4] Gabe Grosberg, its managing director for regulated utilities, called that something they had never seen before. [4] Sarah Sullivant, who leads its US public finance work, said towns with expensive bills may draw fewer buyers and businesses, shrinking the tax base that pays for the pipes and wires. [4] She called it a simmering risk rather than one changing credit ratings today. [4]

Why it matters. Expensive electricity has been a household problem for five years. S&P now calls it a simmering risk to the credit quality of the cities themselves. [4]

In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, Parvin Akter sometimes waits until midnight to cook, because the piped gas comes and goes. [5] Attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel six months ago cut oil and gas exports out of the Strait of Hormuz. [5] Fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis now threatens the Red Sea too. [5] Asian prices for shipped gas are back near $30 a unit, from about $10 before the war. [5] Pakistan began a fuel subsidy on Wednesday, and drivers must register a vehicle and a phone to claim it. [5]

Why it matters. A government with little money to spare cannot cushion a price like this, so the shortage arrives in the house as a cooker that will not light. [5]

Japan's Meteorological Agency warned that Typhoon Dujuan could bring record rainfall through Tuesday as it neared the country's east coast. [6] It forecast up to 350mm in the Tokai region, 300mm in Kanto and the Izu Islands and 200mm in Tohoku, and told people on the coast to watch for landslides. [6] All Nippon Airways grounded flights to Hachijo Island south of Tokyo, and the rail company JR East suspended some services in Chiba, where Narita Airport is. [6] Dujuan is Japan's 25th typhoon of the year and arrived during a five-day holiday. [6]

Why it matters. Dujuan arrived in the middle of a five-day holiday, so the disruption reached travel and events as well as the coastal areas told to watch for landslides. [6]

Energy Aspects, a consultancy, forecasts that Europe will be short 510,000 barrels a day of jet fuel in the last quarter of this year. [7] The United States expects a surplus of 18,000 barrels a day and the Asia-Pacific 419,000. [7] Jet fuel is the kerosene airliners burn, and the Iran war cut off roughly half of Europe's imports of it. [7] South Korea is the newest large supplier, shipping 129,000 barrels a day to Europe this month, its most since October 2022. [7]

Why it matters. Europe lost about half its jet fuel imports when the war hit Middle East supplies, and has been buying since from Nigeria, the United States, Canada and now South Korea. [7]

On 2 September, US District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency acted improperly when it sent four California waivers to Congress in June for a fast-track repeal. [8] A waiver is the permission that lets California set stricter tailpipe limits than the rest of the country, and the four covered cars, trucks and lawn-and-garden equipment. [8] The Trump administration appealed that ruling on Tuesday. [8] If it wins, California would be barred indefinitely from regulating tailpipe emissions, and a future president could not easily restore the power. [8]

Why it matters. The fight is not about one limit. It is about whether California keeps the power to set any tailpipe rule at all. [8]

American clean-energy developers can sell the federal tax credits their projects earn to companies that want to cut their own tax bills. [9] Renewable Credit Management's third-quarter report finds developers are now producing credits faster than firms are buying them, which hands the bargaining power to buyers. [9] Credits tied to electricity actually generated hold at 92 to 94.5 cents on the dollar. [9] Credits based on the cost of building a project fetch 90 to 93 cents, and technology-neutral ones 88 to 91. [9] About one in four Fortune 1000 companies now buys them. [9]

Why it matters. A developer selling at 88 cents instead of 94 raises less money from the same credit, and the report says sellers are now competing with each other for deals. [9]

The Clean Air Task Force, a US energy think tank, said in a Wednesday report that states with deregulated electricity markets should start their own long-term planning to get nuclear, offshore wind, geothermal and long-duration storage built. [10] Deregulated means the state stopped letting one utility own everything and made generators compete on price instead. [10] Kasparas Spokas, who led the report, said those market prices are inherently near-term, so they say nothing to anyone whose project takes a decade. [10] He said long-term planning was largely removed at deregulation and never replaced. [10]

Why it matters. It is an argument that a market can be good at running today's power system and bad at ordering the next one, and it names the technologies that fall into the gap. [10]

A study released this month says Himalayan glaciers are losing mass faster than a decade ago. [11] It says the region is nearing peak water by the middle of the century, the point where river flows stop rising and start to fall. [11] The work came from Systemiq, the Integrated Mountain Initiative, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and India's G.B. Pant institute. [11] Only about 21 of the region's estimated 40,000 glaciers are watched from the ground, and close to 200 glacial lakes in India are rated high risk. [11]

Why it matters. A melting glacier gives more water before it gives less. The comfortable years downstream are the years the store is being spent. [11]

Leaders met on Sunday and Monday in Rovaniemi in northern Finland for a European Arctic Summit, among them German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. [12] Thinning sea ice is opening shipping routes across the top of the world, and fighting around the Strait of Hormuz has made the Northeast Passage along Russia's coast more valuable. [12] The meeting is a rehearsal for a new European Union Arctic policy due this autumn, with security at its centre for the first time. [12]

Why it matters. Shorter sea routes save shipping companies fuel and days at sea. They are opening because the ice is thinning, and Europe is now writing its Arctic policy as a security document. [12]

Indonesia is fighting its most intense wildfires in 11 years, with strong El Nino conditions drying out forests and fields on Borneo and Sumatra. [13] President Prabowo Subianto told his cabinet there would be zero tolerance for any person or company found to have started them, and asked ministers to look at classifying it as ecological terrorism. [13] He told regional governments to abolish the exemptions that let smallholders clear small plots by burning, and asked police to open criminal investigations into companies breaking fire rules. [13] The smoke has pushed air quality down in Singapore and Malaysia. [13]

Why it matters. The exemption he wants abolished is the one that lets smallholders clear small plots with fire, so the change reaches them directly. [13] He also asked police to open criminal investigations into companies. [13]

B2U, a California company, has switched on a second grid battery in Texas built entirely out of used electric-car batteries, at the Bexar Martinez site near San Antonio. [14] Each of its projects holds more than 700 batteries that once powered cars, and is rated at about 10 megawatts. [14] That is small enough to use the faster connection process Texas offers small generators. [14] B2U says it has at least 100 megawatt-hours of second-life storage running and a June deal to take Waymo's self-driving car batteries as they age out. [14]

Why it matters. A car battery too weak to drive well can still store plenty of power while sitting still. [14] One engineering professor quoted in the report said second-life packs could reach a fifth to a quarter of installed storage in the 2030s, if battery health checks keep improving. [14]

North Korea set off its largest underground nuclear test beneath Mount Mantap in 2017, estimated at the equivalent of 100 to 250 kilotons of TNT. [15] Small aftershocks were expected and were expected to fade within weeks. [15] A study published in Science finds that earthquakes near the Punggye-ri site instead increased over the following years, and were still happening in 2025 along two suspected faults up to 30km away. [15] Kwang-Hee Kim of Pusan National University, a co-author, said it was completely different from the textbook case. [15]

Why it matters. Injecting oilfield wastewater, mining, filling reservoirs and geothermal drilling are all known to set off earthquakes, and what is unusual here is how long the shaking has outlasted the explosion. [15]

A Reuters poll published on Thursday found investors more bearish on most emerging Asian currencies, meaning more of them are betting those currencies will fall. [16] Attacks on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline last week pushed oil above $100 a barrel, and firmer US Treasury yields made the dollar more attractive at the same time. [16] Bets against the Philippine peso are the highest since late April, and bearish views on the Thai baht the highest in nearly two months. [16] Investors turned slightly less bearish on the Indonesian rupiah. [16]

Why it matters. Most of these countries buy their oil in dollars, so a dearer barrel and a dearer dollar land on the same import bill in the same month. [16]

Mahan Air, one of Iran's biggest commercial airlines, told travel agencies on Wednesday that it would stop flying to Oman from Thursday and to Turkey from Monday. [17] It gave no reason beyond unspecified decisions by the Turkish and Omani aviation authorities. [17] The US Treasury had put restrictions on Iran's aviation industry just over a week earlier, which also make it risky for companies outside Iran to work with Iranian airlines. [17] The US Navy is blockading Iran's southern ports, cutting its oil exports and its imports, and Iran raised some fuel prices this month. [17]

Why it matters. The blockade is an energy measure, and this is one of the places it shows up that is not a barrel: ordinary Iranians with fewer ways out of the country. [17]

Canada's tax agency will prioritise advance tax ruling requests tied to investments of C$1 billion, about $719 million, or more, Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said on Monday. [18] An advance ruling is a binding decision on how tax law will apply to a deal, given before the money is committed. [18] The change took effect the same day. [18] Champagne said it is meant to cut risk, inform financing decisions and support Canada's effort to build major projects. [18]

Why it matters. Large energy and resource projects are exactly the kind that wait years on paperwork before a hole is dug, and this shortens one of those waits. [18]

Reading Borough Council in southern England said an emergency team removed dead fish from the surface of the pond at Prospect Park, where the water level had been left low by a long dry summer. [19] The council got permission from Thames Water for the fire service to top the pond up, but it reached only half its normal depth. [19] It contacted the Environment Agency in late August about the low water and the dying fish. [19] The agency said it could not help, because similar incidents were happening across the country. [19]

Why it matters. The council had to ask a water company and the fire service for help, because the national agency said it could not come. [19]