US oil and gas wells, pipelines and compressors are emitting three times the amount of methane than the government thinks, a new study has calculated, reports the Associated Press. The methane is causing $9.3bn in yearly climate damage, the study published in Nature suggests. However, the article adds, as more than half of the methane emissions are coming from 1% or less of oil and gas sites, the study’s lead author notes that the problem is “both worse than the government thought but also fairly fixable”. The study was based on the “largest ever” dataset of its kind, with a million aerial measurements of the gas taken, reports New Scientist. Aerial surveys used infrared sensors to measure the methane leaks, it adds. The measurements taken over six oil and gas producing regions in the US found that an estimated 6.2m tons of methane a year are released, reports the New York Times. This is the equivalent of 3% of total gas produced in those regions annually, or the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 20m homes’ energy use, it notes. In parts of New Mexico, nearly 9% of the natural gas is being emitted into the atmosphere, the article adds.

In other US news, solar manufacturers are in a “dire” position as competition from Chinese companies grows, reports the Financial Times, adding: “A flood of Chinese-produced solar panels is driving prices to record lows in the US, a boon for renewable energy developers but a threat to solar manufacturers trying to create a domestic supply chain for the country’s fastest-growing source of electricity generation.”. US industry wants stronger tariffs as subsidies to help combat the low prices of panels and glut driven by growing Chinese manufacturing of solar panels, the article explains. European solar manufacturers are also calling for help amid an “existential crisis” created by China’s “near-total dominance” in the sector, reports Politico. European solar producers are “hurtling towards extinction”, the article suggests, following the EU hinting it would not bail out struggling manufacturers.

The UK government’s failure to insulate the nation’s homes has cost thousands of lives according to a new report from Greenpeace, says the Guardian. The report finds that, on average, 58 people have died due to cold homes every day during the winter since former prime minister David Cameron’s Conservative government “drastically slashed” support for home insulation as part of his pledge to “cut the green crap” in 2013, the article adds. (Carbon Brief analysis also found that this policy also increased energy bills by nearly £2.5bn.) Greenpeace activists erected hundreds of headstones made from insulation boards outside parliament to mark the release of the report and to warn of the cost of failing to tackle cold homes, reports the Press Association. The charity is urging the UK government to invest £6bn a year to “make homes warmer, improve health, cut bills and tackle climate change”, it adds.

In other UK news, the government has been accused of trying to “stoke a culture war on climate ” by Green MP Caroline Lucas, the Guardian reports. Lucas used an urgent question in the House of Commons to challenge energy minister Graham Stuart about plans announced on Wednesday to support investment in gas-fired power plants, despite the government’s commitment to phase out fossil fuels, it continues. Her concerns were echoed by shadow climate change minister Alan Whitehead, who questioned how many new gas-fired power plants the government was hoping to build, it adds. Meanwhile, Conservative MP Jacob-Rees Mogg welcomed the plans for new gas-fired power stations, saying they are a good first step against the net-zero “obsession” and calling for targets to be postponed “indefinitely”, reports the Press Association. Rees-Mogg continued: “We want cheap electricity, and we should have gas and we should have coal and we should postpone net-zero indefinitely, because we are only 1% of global emissions, we are making no difference and the US economy is growing consistently faster than ours because of cheap energy.” (Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans has highlighted on Twitter how Rees-Mogg took a very different view when he was briefly the energy secretary less than two years ago.) In response, Stuart pointed to the science and the evidence that there is a climate emergency, the article notes.

India has asked developed countries to provide “at least” $1tn per year in climate finance from 2025 onwards to help developing countries combat climate change, the Times of India reports. This figure is “not only a jump from the existing goal of $100bn per year, but also in sync with what the G20 Delhi declaration estimated last year”, the story adds, saying that India’s five-page submission makes it “possibly the first country to put a number on” a new collective quantified goal (NCQG) for climate finance from 2025-35 that will be the subject of intense deliberations at COP29 in Baku. According to the newspaper, the country “reminded rich nations of their unmet $100bn target” and called for the new goal to be “composed primar​ily of grants and concessional finance” and ready to be “scaled up in proportion to the rise in the needs of developing countries”. 

In Indian energy news, Business Standard reports that the government is “boosting coal supply at all ends” to power its grid “as summer inches closer with gloomy projections of extreme heatwaves and record electricity demand”, with peak demand expected to cross 256GW. Meanwhile, Mint reports that state-run coal companies including Coal India “aim to achieve an installed renewable energy capacity of over 9GW by 2030” in their mining operations, with the country’s coal ministry “promoting coal gasification” and “rooftop solar and ground-mounted solar projects across mining facilities.” Last Friday, the country’s prime minister Narendra Modi announced that he was cutting prices on liquefied petroleum gas cylinders by 100 rupees, Bloomberg reports, “in efforts to woo voters weeks ahead of polls”. In his Bloomberg column, David Fickling describes the Indian private sector’s renewed interest in building new coal plants as “an object lesson in the power of state intervention to skew markets away from cheap, clean power toward costly, fossil-fired incumbent businesses”. Separately, Mint features a comment piece by Indian academic and innovator Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala titled: “Don’t let hybrids muddle our path to net-zero: EVs must prevail.”

Elsewhere, the Guardian looks at sea-level rise in the eastern, cyclone-vulnerable state of Odisha, which “has recorded 28% erosion along its coastline” and where “16 villages had disappeared under the sea”, 247 others facing the same fate. Context.News and the Independent cover a new study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) which finds that drought and extreme heat are driving women to work on sugar plantations in Beed, Maharashtra, “with many of the migrant labourers opting to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies to work even harder”. 

Bangalore’s ongoing water crisis, however, continues to dominate headlines with the Indian Express reporting that city authorities have “banned the use of potable water for cleaning vehicles, gardening, building construction, fountains, swimming pools [and] entertainment” while “capp[ing] the prices charged by water tankers from the residents”. Mint reports that the city’s tech professionals “are calling for a shift to online work or work-from-home until the monsoon” and are “gradually moving back to their hometowns”, while resident associations are issuing their own emergency instructions to “bathe with half a bucket of water[,] use ‘half flush’ [and switch to] the economy cycle of washing machines”.

Record temperatures over the past year have pushed the world into “unknown territory”, Prof Jim Skea, the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), has said, the Financial Times reports. Speaking at an event in London, Skea said he was “surprised, in one sense” that the average global temperature last year exceeded the 1.5C threshold set out in the Paris Agreement, the article notes. “Last year really was much quicker than we all anticipated. Some of it can be explained with the start of an El Niño cycle, which will push temperatures up a bit. But it was still unexpected…there’s more science needed to actually understand why 2023 was such a distinctive year.”  Skew noted that breaching 1.5C did not signal a failure to uphold the threshold, as it refers by convention to the average temperature increase over two decades, the article notes. But the IPCC head did reiterate his view that the likelihood of keeping to 1.5C had shrunk, it adds.

The European Commission is finalising proposals that would “severely weaken” environmental requirements for farmers, reports Politico. The proposals – seen by the publication – would end the requirement to promote biodiversity, making it and other measures voluntary, the article notes. The “dramatic policy reversal” by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission follows protests around Europe by farmers, who have taken to the streets “to vent their fury at the environmental red tape they say is destroying their livelihoods”, it adds. (A recent Carbon Brief article explained the various drivers behind the farmer protests.) The changes “fly in the face” of advice from the European Commission’s scientists, who have warned that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be “decimated by climate change”, Politico notes.

Elsewhere, the EU is attempting to “smooth South American complaints” over its deforestation policy, reports Reuters. The union’s environment policy chief will tour South America this week “in an attempt to alleviate fierce criticism” over an EU law that will ban imports of goods linked to the destruction of forests, it adds. From December, this will mean importers of soy, beef, coffee, palm oil and other commodities must provide proof that their supply chain does not cause deforestation, notes the article. Von der Leyen is travelling to Greenland as part of an effort to secure “green” mineral supply chains, reports the Guardian. The autonomous Danish territory is becoming increasingly strategically important, due to melting Arctic ice, demand for green-technology raw materials, and competition from China, the article notes. The European Commission will now open an office in the capital, Nuuk, it adds.

Oil and gas giant Shell has moderated the pace of its near-term emissions cuts, but is maintaining its ambition to be a net-zero company by 2050, reports Bloomberg. The company’s latest energy transition strategy update states it will now aim to reduce its net carbon intensity by 15%-20% by 2030 against a baseline of emissions in 2016, compared to its previous target of 20%, the article adds. Additionally, Shell has dropped its goal of a 45% reduction by 2035, notes Bloomberg, with the company citing “uncertainty in the pace of change in the energy transition”. Shell is the latest of the European oil majors to adjust their net-zero transition plans, Bloomberg notes, following BP saying it will pump more oil and gas and produce more emissions this decade than previously planned within its update last year. Shell updates its energy transition plan every three years, as part of its commitment to eliminate all net emissions from its operations and the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions from the fuel it sells by 2050, the article adds. A separate Bloomberg article says that Shell has also announced it will reduce at least 20% of jobs in its deals team as part of a push to cut costs. Shell’s CEO Wael Sawan received a total pay package of £7.9m ($10.11m) in 2023, including an annual bonus of £2.7m, the company’s annual reports shows, reports Reuters. Shell’s move has also been covered by the Associated Press, the Financial Times and others. 

Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily reports that, in 2023, China completed nearly 4m hectares of afforestation and nearly 2m hectares of land desertification control. China has also established more than 1m hectares of “forest reserves”. Meanwhile, Reuters carries a commentary by Gavin Maguire, who says that China’s power-sector emissions have surged by more than 50% since 2015 during the peak summer months, due to “soaring use” of air conditioning. He adds that growing fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation have witnessed a more significant rise between June and August this year, revealing the increasing pressure on utility providers. Bloomberg reports on recent speculation that the government may “end its policy of limiting installations when power curtailments rise above 5% of installed capacity for a given source”, citing local media reports.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that analysts are predicting “hundreds of zombie factories…over the next decade in the Chinese auto market” as demand drops for traditional fuel cars in favour of electric vehicles (EVs). Economic outlet Caixin covers a report by McKinsey China that has highlighted “significant disillusionment” among Chinese EV owners in 2023, with “22% stating they wouldn’t consider new energy vehicles (NEVs) for their next car”, which could be due to “dissatisfaction among owners in smaller cities stems from inconvenient charging infrastructure”. This percentage stands in “stark contrast with the mere 3% recorded in 2022”, it adds. Beijing News also carries an article exploring the challenges of EV ownership, saying that, compared with traditional fuel vehicles, new energy vehicles (NEVs) are “more complex, service standards are not transparent and technical identification is difficult”. Another article by Beijing News says that the growth rate of NEV is “rapid” and that relevant departments should “promptly introduce consumer regulations suitable for NEV”.

Bloomberg quotes Huang Yiping, a former advisor to China’s central bank, saying that “China’s industrial policy is at the heart of US concerns about Chinese overcapacity and the EU’s anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EV imports”. The article notes that his comments signify a “rare admission among government advisers of the external challenges” encountering president Xi Jinping’s “efforts to drive growth by pouring money into manufacturing”. Development news outlet Devex reports on the Asian Development Bank’s climate strategy, which “reported [climate finance] commitments of $9.8bn in 2023”, adding that Chinese spending is “more demand-driven than that of its western rivals, for better and for worse”. An analysis for Yale Environment 360 says that, if it can create a unified power market, “China could not only enhance its position as the global leader in installed capacity for renewable [energy] but might also make better use of the clean energy it produces”. The Economist says that until China moves away from coal, “[it] will be more of a villain than a saint when it comes to climate change”.

The UK is “at risk of sleepwalking into an energy system that is chaotic and unplanned”, writes Baroness Brown of Cambridge, member of the House of Lords and chair of the select committee on science and technology, in BusinessGreen. Following the release of a report by the committee on long-duration energy storage (LDES) this week, she argues that the UK must take action now in order to prepare for a fully decarbonised system, which could struggle during a dunkelflaute, the German term for a period of low wind and cold weather. Currently in the UK, when renewable generation drops, gas power increases, but “the recent crisis shows relying on imported gas can be ruinously expensive” and this will be true if gas is kept on the system into the 2040s purely as back-up for rare weather events, she writes. This is where LDES comes in, with hydrogen leading the pack, she argues, but the government must provide support, including setting clear strategic vision for the technologies and expanding the grid to enable them to connect in a timely fashion. “Preparing for a crisis often looks uneconomic until you’re in one – at which point, the taxpayer generally has to bail everyone out at a far higher cost”, she concludes. 

In other UK comment, journalist Jonathan Cobb argues in the Times that Scotland’s “wind farm policy has been blown off course”. The Scottish government’s net-zero targets have “strayed beyond the realms of common sense and is desecrating Scotland’s iconic landscape”, he writes.

New research estimates that global economic losses from heat stress could reach 0.6-4.6% by 2060, depending on the socioeconomic pathway. The study develops a “disaster footprint” framework to estimate the socioeconomic impacts of heat stress by mid-century. The biggest losses stem from health costs related to heat exposure (37-45%), lower labour productivity (18-37%) and indirect losses due to economic disruptions cascading through supply chains (12-43%). But the impacts are not felt evenly, the paper notes. Health-related losses in south-central Africa are 2.1-4.0 times higher than the global average while labour productivity losses in west Africa and southeast Asia are 2.0-3.3 times higher.