Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the president-designate of COP28, has sent a “comprehensive plan” for the summit to delegates, reports Axios. The agenda includes everything from details on the world leaders portion of the summit to potential “landing zones” on climate emissions reduction targets by 2030, it continues. The letter presents the summit as an “inflection point” and a “test” of the willingness and ability of the international community to dramatically speed and scale up its actions to tackle climate change, Axios notes. The first sentence references the “climate shocks” around the world in recent months to create a sense of urgency. Al-Jaber then pushes for countries to step up with new pledges and plans to address a lack of funding for aiding hard-hit countries, and the need to commit to more ambitious emissions cuts by 2030, the article continues. The letter “amounts to a road map for the climate summit”, the article adds, moving from the world leaders portion at the beginning of the COP and moving onto the more “tension-filled backroom talks” that typically characterise the second half of the two-week conference. Al-Jaber puts forward the goal of achieving “a responsible phasedown of unabated fossil fuels”, with a specific emphasis on halting new approvals of coal-fired power plants beyond 2030, Axios says. The letter also repeatedly refers to the need for more money to “flow” from industrialised countries and multinational development banks to developing nations, to help them withstand climate impacts, the article adds. In the letter, sent to the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Al-Jaber asked the 198 member countries to plan to cut 22 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions over the next seven years, in order to keep global warming at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, reports the Hindustan Times. The summit president asked parties to join the COP28 pledge to triple renewable capacity globally (to reach 11TW by 2030) and double the annual average global rate of energy-efficiency improvements between now and 2030 (to reach 4%), the article notes. He also urged them to come to COP28, which will be held from November 20 to December 12, in the United Arab Emirates, with “tangible commitments” to realise this goal, it adds.

Drought has turned the Amazonian capital of Manaus into a “climate dystopia”, with the second worst air quality in the world and rivers at the lowest levels in 121 years, reports the Guardian. An unusually dry season, worsened by El Niño and human-caused climate change, has threatened the wellbeing of the city’s 1 million residents and the survival prospects of the entire Amazon basin, the article continues. The forest capital has been “enveloped in a murky brown haze reminiscent of China during its most polluted phase”, while the “usually vibrant port has been pushed far out across the dried-up, rubbish-strewn mud flats”, notes the Guardian. There have been so many fires burning in the surrounding forest that air-quality monitors last week registered 387 micrograms of pollution a cubic metre, compared with 122 in Brazil’s economic capital of São Paulo, it adds. The severe drought has pushed “an imperilled Amazon to the brink”, reports the New York Times. The rainforest holds a fifth of the world’s fresh water, the article notes, but deforestation, dwindling rain and unrelenting heat “are sucking it dry”. As Amazonian countries struggle with air pollution produced by fires, a new study by  ​​the Global Climate and Health Alliance has found low- and middle-income countries are leading global efforts to improve air quality as part of national climate plans, reports the Guardian. Colombia and Mali scored the highest, while the United Arab Emirates, which is set to host the UN climate summit COP28 next month, was the worst, the article notes.

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, has been charged with a public-order offence, after being arrested at a protest on Tuesday, reports BBC News. The 20-year-old is accused of breaching a Section 14 order that police put in place outside the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane in London, where oil executives were meeting, it continues. Thunberg was among protesters from Fossil Free London who gathered outside the Energy Intelligence Forum event, adds BBC News, with 26 protesters arrested and subsequently charged, the Met Police has said. Speakers at the conference included the chief executives of Saudi Aramco and Norway’s Equinor, the German ambassador to the UK and Graham Stuart, UK energy security and net-zero miniter, reports Sky News. Additionally, leaders from Shell, Total and other oil giants were in attendance, it adds. “The world is drowning in fossil fuels. Our hopes and dreams and lives are being washed away by a flood of greenwashing and lies. It has been clear for decades that the fossil fuel industries were well aware of the consequences of their business models, and yet, they have done nothing. The opposite – they have actively delayed, distracted and denied the causes of the climate crisis and spread doubts about their own engagement in it,” Thunberg told reporters at the protest, Sky News states. Protests blocked Hamilton Place, where the conference was taking palace, at either end, with banners and pink umbrellas with eyes painted on them, reports the Guardian. They shouted “oily money out” – a nod to the conferences previous name the Oil & Money conference – and “cancel the conference”, as well as lighting yellow and pink smoke flares, it adds. This story has also been covered by the Independent, Press Association, Reuters and others.

Elsewhere in London, energy secretary Claire Coutinho has warned that the UK will become “reliant on foreign regimes”, if it allows the North Sea to decline further, reports the Daily Telegraph. Speaking at trade body Energy UK’s annual conference, she raised concerns that the UK’s oil and gas output will halve by 2030 without more drilling in the North Sea. She is reported saying: “Businesses need certainty. But policies that can’t command public support won’t give you any kind of certainty. We’ve seen that in Europe. Shutting down our domestic oil and gas industry – making us reliant on foreign regimes and decimating the same communities, workers and skills that will be needed for clean energy, doesn’t give you certainty.” (Carbon Brief analysis has found that ending new oil and gas licences would not necessarily lead to more reliance on imports, given the time it takes to bring new oil and gas assets onstream.)

US president Joe Biden’s administration has announced $3.5bn in grants for projects, to help protect the country’s ageing power grid from extreme weather and fires, as well as to help connect more renewable energy sources, reports Reuters. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by Biden in 2021 will be used to fund 58 projects across 44 states, according to energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, and is the largest-ever direct investment in the grid, the newswire continues. Granholm told reports that much of the US power grid was built nearly a century ago and is being strained by storms, floods and heatwaves fuelled by climate change, even as electric vehicles and artificial intelligence are boosting demand, Reuters adds. “The grid, as it currently sits, is not equipped to handle all the new demand…we need it to be bigger, we need it to be stronger, we need it to be smarter, to bring all of these new projects online,” the article quotes Granholm saying. The projects will help to bring more than 35GW of new renewable energy online, reports the Hill. Additionally, 75% of the projects will involve partnership with the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, with the administration continuing to try to assuage fears that transition to renewable energy will come at the expense of labour protections, it adds. The Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) Program, as the funding has been dubbed, follows the energy department announcing $95m for grid resilience in Hawaii, following the devastating wildfires on the island of Maui, the Hill notes. 

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that Biden’s 2030 offshore wind goal looks like it “simply won’t happen”. The US president laid out a target of deploying 30GW of offshore wind capacity during the next nine years, a plan that was seen as “bold and ambitious”, but “crucially within reach”, the article continues. However, due to a cascading series of setbacks, including sobering cost revisions to billions in possible impairment charges, the US offshore industry’s 2030 generation goal now looks further away than ever, the article states. According to BloomberNEF modelling, in June the forecast was for 23.1GW in 2030, but last week the industry suffered a further blow as New York forcefully rejected developers’ pleas for higher rates, the article notes. Atin Jain, senior wind analyst at BNEF slashed his estimate by 29%, putting the expected offshore wind capacity for the US at just 16.4GW by the end of decade – a little more than half of Biden’s target, Bloomberg adds.

China’s president Xi Jinping has outlined an action plan with “eight major steps” the country will take to strengthen “high-quality” cooperation in its “belt and road initiative” (BRI), reports state news agency Xinhua. These measures include “promoting green development”. Other outcomes include development of “green investment standards” and “$97.2bn worth of deals across a handful of sectors including clean energy”, says Bloomberg. There is widespread coverage of the BRI forum across Chinese media. Energy industry newspaper BJX News highlights another announcement of Xi’s at the forum, namely, that China is to “establish dialogue and communication mechanisms for the solar industry and create an expert network on green and low-carbon development”. Industry news outlet IN-EN.cn reports on Chinese premier Li Qiang’s meeting with Indonesian president Joko Widodo, where he said that China is “willing to expand cooperation with Indonesia in the solar and other industrial chains”. Another article by IN-EN.cn reports that China has signed memorandums of understanding with Papua New Guinea, Chile and Hungary, which include agreements to enhance cooperation on “green and low-carbon development”. 

Meanwhile, Xinhua covers comments by Chinese vice president Han Zheng at a session during the forum focused on green development, in which he stressed the need to strengthen cooperation in “green-energy investment”, finance and technology, and to support platforms such as the BRI Green Development Coalition. The state-run newspaper China Daily carries an opinion article by Alpha Mohamed Jalloh, director of the China Africa Institute at the University of Makeni, who says that, while certain BRI projects “may have triggered controversy because of the West’s indiscriminate dissemination of misguided information, they have had a positive impact on society and the environment”. London-based Middle East-focused outlet the National reports that COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber met China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and other top policymakers to discuss decarbonisation strategies and “a robust and effective response to the global stocktake at COP28”.

Separately, the Chinese ministry of ecology and environment (MEE) has released a policy document calling for “key industries, including petrochemicals, chemicals, construction materials, steel, non-ferrous metals, papermaking and civil aviation” to report their greenhouse gas emissions data, reports BJX News. Chinese business outlet Jiemian suggests that the move signals that China has started “foundational work” for expanding the national carbon market to include more sectors. Separately, China Daily reports that the

trans-Pacific green shipping corridor between Los Angeles and Shanghai will “start deploying ships featuring low- and zero-carbon emissions in the corridor by 2025. The Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post writes that China is “well-positioned” to play a key role in commercialising wind power technology to power cargo ships. 

Elsewhere, the Guardian carries a commentary by Simone Tagliapietra, senior fellow at the thinktank Bruegel, who argues that the US, EU and China need to “build a constructive dialogue”, come to an agreement on “green subsidies” and “develop new win-win industrial collaborations” to encourage trilateral cooperation on climate action. Chinese business newspaper 36Kr interviews industry experts on the challenges China faces in scaling up its carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) technology. 

India’s central “union” government is likely to direct power generators to increase mandatory imported coal blending from 4% to at least 6% “in the wake of fast-depleting stocks at power plants”, the Economic Times reports. “The direction will be issued soon,” one government official tells the paper, while another says that this is due to higher electricity demand and “lower than anticipated wind and hydropower generation in some states”. Meanwhile, India’s coal ministry has said that the country exported 1.16m tonnes of coal to neighbouring countries including Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan in 2022-23, according to another Economic Times story. A third report states that Russia topped India’s oil import list in August, “a jump of 114.19% from the previous year”. As the country’s dependence on energy imports continues to rise, advocating “for the phased reduction of coal while regarding oil and gas as transitional energy sources does not help to address the nation’s concerns regarding energy security and affordability”, says an analysis piece in Down to Earth.

Meanwhile, the country’s president Droupadi Murmu is quoted in the Times of India saying that climate change poses “a threat to the existence of entire humanity, but the poor and deprived class[es] are the worst affected by it” and that climate-resilient agriculture “can play an important role in dealing with the challenge.” India is one of the 25 countries “exposed to extremely high water stress”, according to a new interactive explainer by Bloomberg which investigates the rise of climate change-driven global water trade: “short-term droughts can quickly put these places at risk of running out of water”. Meanwhile, IndiaSpend reports on how climate change is affecting coffee farmers in Coorg, a rural district in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka. 

Separately, a comment piece in the Third Pole by International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development researchers says that climate action in the Hindu Kush Himalaya “is being stalled by scepticism over both political will and governmental capacity” and that “government departments are finding it difficult to mobilise resources for both climate-change adaptation and risk reduction”. Mongabay India reports on a study by the Coalition for

Disaster Resilient Infrastructure which finds that “low- and middle-income countries will require at least $2.84-2.9tn in funding to strengthen and make their infrastructure resilient” to climate disasters.

An editorial in India’s Telegraph says: “Setting up a mechanism to hold countries accountable for failing to meet their targets can be the way forward [for COP28 and] India, as the voice of the global south, must demand such accountability — from itself and the world.” Finally, a detailed investigation by Scroll.in finds that a national body “tasked with protecting the country’s most fragile areas” for wildlife rejected only 1% of 800 infrastructure projects between 2014 to 2016 and that “there has been a decline in dissent against projects” in key biodiversity areas.

The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) was “wrong” to rule out hydrogen, or the continued use of gas, argues writer Jill Kirby in the Daily Telegraph. [From 2007-2011, Kirby was director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-leaning “thinktank” that, at that time, promoted climate-sceptic views.] Following a report from the government advice agency this week, which suggested the UK commit to a total ban on gas boilers by 2035, Kirby argues that heat pumps are an “impractical” form of heating for millions of UK homes. [A recent study by the Energy Systems Catapult found that heat pumps were suitable for all housing types in the UK.] Kirby bemoans the commission’s suggestion that the gas grid should be shut down at a “decommissioning cost of £74bn” and subsidies provided to help homeowners cover the cost of installing a heat pump. Given the state of national debt, the economy and the “ever-increasing demands from the NHS, it is hard to see where all these billions will be found”, she argues. The commission stated that the initial upfront cost of the transition to heat pumps will be recouped through lower energy costs due to increased renewables, a statement Kirby challenges on the basis of the most recent Contracts for Difference auction, where no offshore wind bid due to the low strike price. She writes that “the prospect of cheap and plentiful renewable electricity remains a distant dream”. [Carbon Brief analysis of the auction showed that UK renewables were still cheaper than gas.]

Relatedly, a comment piece focused on the NIC report has also appeared over a full page in the Daily Mail, where Matt Ridley, the climate-sceptic, former Conservative hereditary member of the House of Lords, misleadingly claims that hitting the 2050 net-zero target will roughly double the amount of money needed for infrastructure to “£2tn”, an “additional £1tn” of which will be spent on “the green agenda”. [As Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans has made clear on Twitter, the NIC report does not offer incremental costs of net-zero in comparison with a high carbon scenario, making it impossible to draw this conclusion.] Similarly, omnipresent climate-sceptic commentator Ross Clark has written in the Sun condemning the supposed “£1tn cost”, the inefficiency of heat pumps [recent analysis covered by Carbon Brief show heat pumps are two- to three-times more efficient than fossil-fuel heating systems] and the “soaring” upfront cost of building wind and solar. [Ross fails to mention that sky-high gas prices drove the energy crisis and continue to keep consumer bills high.]

A new study finds that a rise in global average temperature of between 1.7C and 2.3C is sufficient to trigger “abrupt, complete loss” of the Greenland ice sheet. Using two independent ice-sheet models to investigate the impact of different warming projections, the study finds that an ice-free Greenland ice sheet can be avoided if global temperature temporarily “overshoots” 1.5C, but then returns below that level sufficiently quickly, within a few centuries. The authors say their findings “agree with the general consensus that limiting global warming below the range of 1.5-2.5C above pre-industrial levels can prevent the most severe consequences”.

A new analysis discusses ways to better integrate the perspectives of livestock keepers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda in developing indicators to track adaptation, which tend to be limited to government documents only. A thematic analysis of 48 focus group discussions revealed common ground in the way that livestock keepers and governments perceive climatic hazards, impacts, adaptation strategies, goals and adaptive capacities. However, differences in practical strategies for dealing with climate impacts, such as water scarcity and invasive species, underscore “the need for appropriate indicators of climatic impacts at multiple scales”, the study notes.