In a vote on Friday, the member states of the EU “agreed to impose tariffs” as high as 45% on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), the Financial Times reports, adding that the move marks the “biggest trade dispute between the economic superpowers in a decade”. The decision comes despite previous offers from Chinese EV manufacturers on sale restrictions and raising prices to avoid tariffs, as well as “vocal opposition from Germany and Hungary”, adds the newspaper. Bloomberg also covers the story, saying that the tariffs will “be in effect for a period of five years”, adding that the EU and China will “continue negotiations to find an alternative to the tariffs”. Reuters publishes a collection of “reactions” from politicians and industries. China’s state news agency Xinhua publishes an English-language comment article, saying that the EU’s move “threatens to undermine decades of cooperation”, as well as “hindering Europe’s ability to meet its climate commitments”. It concludes: “The reckless move of imposing tariffs will never protect European industries. Instead, it risks sabotaging a global green partnership for political gain.” The South China Morning Post (SCMP), a Hong Kong-based newspaper, and Nikkei Asia, a Japan-based news outlet, also cover the story, as do the Times, CNBC and others.

Meanwhile, a Xinhua report says that the steel industry in Hebei province in northern China has made a new “breakthrough” in its “green transformation”, by successfully launching a project that “verifies the technical feasibility of the ‘green electricity – green hydrogen – green steel’ production process”. Chinese news outlet National Business Daily reports that the “commercial vehicle market” in China, particularly for heavy-duty trucks, needs to “accelerate its efforts in energy conservation and carbon reduction”, adding that there currently is a “noticeable trend of diesel commercial vehicles transitioning to hydrogen fuel and natural gas”. 

Elsewhere, SCMP carries a comment piece by Tim Daiss, an energy markets and geopolitical analyst, about China’s usage of natural gas. The Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily’s print edition says “the colour green determines the quality of [economic] development”. Finally, Dialogue Earth quotes João Cumarú, a researcher at Plataforma CIPÓ, a climate and foreign affairs NGO, saying that Brazil is eager to “seek benefits” from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including “green energy and technology cooperation, particularly in the context of the energy transition”.

Oil companies are attempting to persuade Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “not to slash provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act potentially worth billions”, the Wall Street Journal reports. It continues: “Many in the fossil-fuel industry opposed the law when it passed in 2022, but have come to love provisions that earmark billions of dollars for low-carbon energy projects they are betting on…They fear losing tax credits vital for their investments in renewable fuel, carbon capture and hydrogen, costly technologies requiring US support to survive their early years.”

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court said on Friday that it would not stop the Biden administration from enforcing rules on emissions of methane from oil and gas facilities, and mercury from coal-fired power plants, the New York Times reports. The decision came in response to requests from the fossil fuel industry and Republican attorneys general for an emergency “stay” on the rules, the newspaper says. Separately, the Financial Times says Indian solar firms “are moving to fill the gap left by the exclusion of Chinese exports from the fast-growing US solar industry, as Washington steps up its crackdown on manufacturers with ties to Beijing”.

The US death toll from Hurricane Helene has reached at least 227, the Associated Press reports, after the “monster storm ravaged the south-east and killed people in six states”. It adds: “The city of Asheville, in the western mountains of North Carolina, was particularly battered.” The Financial Times coverage says: “Scientists have found that warming sea temperatures are linked to more intense hurricanes. A preliminary study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that climate change may have boosted the amount of rainfall over parts of Georgia and North Carolina by as much as 50%.” The New Yorker says that Asheville had been seen by many as “a haven from extreme weather”. CBS News says most homes hit by Helene had no flood insurance. Another Associated Press article says “thousands” are still without water.

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald reports that Hurricane Milton in the Gulf of Mexico has strengthened, with Florida’s west coast “preparing for a potentially massive evacuation” in response. Articles from the Associated Press say Milton is expected to intensify rapidly and bring “risk of life-threatening impacts to parts of Florida”. The New York Times says the hurricane season is “spinning into action”. Another New York Times article says “it may be time to rethink how to communicate the risks posed by storms, especially extreme rain”.

A group of industry trade organisations from the manufacturing, steel and renewable sectors has written to ministers arguing against proposals to split the national electricity market into different zones or regions that “risk pushing up manufacturers’ costs and deterring investment”, the Financial Times reports. It says the letter claims the proposals could “increase the risks of de-industrialisation”. The newspaper explains: “Ultimately, supporters argue the move [to regional pricing] could encourage industry to shift to areas with abundant renewable supply, such as parts of Scotland, while developers could expand in areas less well supplied with renewable electricity, as they could get higher prices. However, the trade groups are concerned that the proposals would risk higher prices for industries that consume large quantities of electricity, such as steel, glass and ceramics. They would also add to the risks faced by renewable developers, they said.” The article quotes Guy Newey, former government adviser and chief executive of the Energy Systems Catapult, saying that the electricity market needed “urgent reform” and adding: “Zonal pricing is already common in a huge number of international markets and has driven down costs for consumers.” The Guardian also reports on the letter, quoting a government spokesperson saying: “We are reviewing responses to the consultation on reforming electricity markets and ensuring that any reform options taken forward focus on protecting bill payers and encouraging investment.” Another Guardian article reports on the “bruising debate over UK zonal energy pricing”. It quotes Greg Jackon, chief executive of energy firm Octopus saying: “It’s grotesque that energy costs are rising again this winter, whilst we literally pay windfarms these extortionate prices not to generate. Locational pricing would instead mean that local people got cheap power when it’s windy.” The newspaper adds: “But others fear the changes could come at a deeper cost to Britain’s climate goals – and billpayers, too. The clean energy companies preparing to spend billions on building new wind and solar farms are concerned that a redrawing of the market boundaries could radically change the economics of new renewable energy projects – which would, ultimately, raise the costs. Separately, the Guardian reports calls from the UK steel industry for “further protectionist trade measures as it braces for a flood of imported steel amid a global glut driven by China”. The article says the industry wants tariffs on imports above a certain level and a carbon border tariff, which the government is currently developing.

A frontpage story in Saturday’s Financial Times says chancellor Rachel Reeves has pledged to “invest, invest, invest”. It says: “Reeves has signalled she wants to ease borrowing rules in her 30 October budget, the first by a Labour government since 2010, to fund extra capital investment in areas such as green energy projects and transport schemes.” The Guardian reports: “[Prime minister] Keir Starmer has signalled his government will drastically increase its green investment plans in an attempt to avoid a rerun of 1980s-style industrial decline by safeguarding jobs in heartland manufacturing communities.” The Daily Telegraph says Centrica, the owner of British Gas, is “exploring” a £1bn investment in the Hinkley Point C new nuclear plant in Somerset. [In 2013, Centrica wrote off a £200m stake in the project.] BBC News reports that a local council is to lobby the government to “make the Lincolnshire Fens the first area of the country to be protected from green energy schemes in order to produce food”. The Guardian says that the government “could cut financial support for farms damaged by floods”.

In other UK news, the Times says British Steel’s plans to close its coal-fired blast furnace in favour of an electrically powered alternative “have been hit after National Grid told the struggling steelmaker that it will not have access to a new electricity connection until 2032”. The Times also reports that the Czech government is to take a minority stake in the Rolls Royce consortium planning to build small modular nuclear reactors.

There is also ongoing coverage of the news, announced on Friday, that the UK government will offer up to £22bn over 25 years to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in the north of England. BBC News carries a Q&A on CCS that says: “But both the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK’s Climate Change Committee see the technology as part of efforts to reach net-zero.” Sky News reports: “The expensive technology is regarded as critical to reaching UK climate targets, but green groups warn the wrong use [such as ‘blue’ hydrogen] risks prolonging dependence on fossil fuels.” The Press Association reports criticism of the CCS funding by the Scottish National Party, because it is to go to projects in England rather than Scotland. An article by Tom Peck, parliamentary sketch writer for the Times, notes how Conservative former energy secretary Claire Coutinho was “until extremely recently…very keen on [CCS]”. The piece continues: “Things have changed since then though. Coutinho has wasted no time in saying that now such a move will be: ‘Forcing more costs on to the taxpayer’, and also ‘wreaking havoc in the North Sea’. Politics eh? What fun.” Finally, some publications continue to carry articles on how the UK phased out coal power, including Le Monde and the Independent.

At least 21 people have been killed by floods in Bosnia, Reuters reports, describing them as the country’s “deadliest floods in years”. The newswire says: “The floods follow an unprecedented summer drought which caused many rivers and lakes to dry up, and affected agriculture and the supply of water to urban areas throughout the Balkans and much of Europe. Meteorologists said extreme weather changes can be attributed to climate change.” A second Reuters article says: “Ecologists say the floods in Bosnia have been particularly damaging because years of neglect of river beds, deforestation and uncontrolled construction and exploitation of wood and stone have aggravated the impact of climate change.” BBC News and the Associated Press also have the story.

In other extreme weather news, Reuters reports that floods have killed five people in Bangladesh and left thousands stranded. It adds: “The low-lying nation of 170 million has experienced multiple floods this year, underscoring its vulnerability to climate change. A 2015 World Bank Institute analysis estimated that 3.5 million people in Bangladesh are at risk of annual river flooding, a risk scientists say is worsening due to global climate change.”

One of the main tributaries to the Amazon has dropped to its lowest level on record as a result of severe drought, the Associated Press reports, citing Brazil’s geological service. Reuters says below-average rainfall “has plagued the Amazon and much of South America since last year, also feeding the worst wildfires in more than a decade in Brazil and Bolivia. Researchers say climate change is the main culprit.” The New York Times also has the story.

The government of Columbia, which is hosting the upcoming UN COP16 biodiversity summit, wants to write a pledge combining its response to the regime with that covering climate change, Reuters reports. The newswire quotes Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad saying responses to the UN climate, biodiversity and desertifcation regimes could be combined to save resources: “If you are repeating the same thing for three conventions, I think we are wasting time and probably also losing the opportunity for synergies…We will send for the three conventions a synthesis plan that covers in an integral manner the three conventions because actually they are deeply interrelated.”

An editorial in the Washington Post says that Hurricane Helene, which has already claimed at least 232 lives, shows that “tropical storms are no longer an exclusively coastal threat”. It continues: “This disaster should spur long-overdue reforms in the federal government’s troubled flood insurance programs.” It concludes: “Experts might not be able to predict which storms become the next Katrina or Helene. But one thing we do know is that they will happen, possibly with greater intensity because of climate change. Indeed, the current Atlantic hurricane season, which had been relatively mild until recent weeks, is not yet over – and indeed coincides with the stretch run of the presidential campaign. Effective government will help everyone in the storms’ paths get through it. Demagoguery will not.” A second editorial in the Washington Post says air conditioning is a “moral imperative”, adding: “Despite its contribution to climate change, the demand for AC will soar. It must be met.” The editorial accompanies a feature that says: “[S]cientists are working on new AC prototypes to cool the millions of people bearing the brunt of higher temperatures without further fueling global warming. The key, some experts say, may lie in transforming air conditioners from cooling machines into more efficient humidity gulpers.”

Former US climate envoy Todd Stern writes in a comment for the Atlantic that countries need to “raise their ambition again to complete the transition away from fossil fuels”. Asking how the world has changed since the 2015 Paris Agreement he helped forge, Stern says climate impacts “keep coming at us harder and faster than expected”, but that there has been “spectacular” progress in clean technologies, such as solar, wind and batteries. He notes that “very real obstacles lie in the way”, the “main one” being the fossil fuel industry. Stern calls for China to target a 30% emissions cut by 2035, for “deep reform” of the World Bank and for a “normative change, a shift in hearts and minds that can demonstrate to political leaders that their own future depends on unequivocal action to protect our world”. He concludes: “[W]hen anyone says the goals are too hard, too difficult, cost too much, require too much effort or too much change, ask them: Compared with what?”

In an article for the Independent following the government’s pledge of up to £22bn over 25 years for CCS, energy secretary Ed Miliband writes: “As the sun sets on the coal-fired age, people ask if the promise of good jobs that sustain communities has gone with it. The answer must be no. As we enter a new clean energy era, this government is determined to secure a new generation of good jobs in the industries that will power our future.” He concludes: “We will look back on this week as a turning point for our country – not just for the industry we are leaving behind, but the one we have started building.” In other comment about the CCS funding, Prof Mark Maslin writes for the Conversation that it “will lock in fossil fuels for decades”.

Elsewhere, the Times reports: “The energy secretary Ed Miliband has said that he would be happy living next to an electricity pylon as he warned that the biggest threat to the British countryside was not new energy infrastructure but climate change.” Saturday’s edition of the Times carries an interview with John Pettigrew, chief executive of National Grid, which among other things, runs the high-voltage electricity transmission grid in England and Wales. The piece says: “He is readying the company for a mammoth £60bn spending plan, to be unleashed over the next five years, to ensure that the operator of electricity transmission and distribution networks in Britain and the northeast of America can cope with the level of demand coming down the cables.” The article quotes him saying: “It is unprecedented in ambition, scale and pace. It is the equivalent of what the Victorians did, I guess, in terms of the scale of infrastructure.” The Times also interviews Dave Lewis, the chair of Xlinks, “an audacious £22bn scheme to bring Moroccan wind and solar power to Britain via the world’s longest electricity cable”. The Sunday Times interviews environment secretary Steve Reed, asking how he can “reconcile protecting the countryside” with “the government’s mission to boost economic growth through building”. It quotes Reed saying: “We need to allow people to influence how change happens…But collaboration isn’t the same as veto.”

In other UK comment, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger writes for the Independent under the headline: Locking up climate protesters for throwing soup is the mark of broken justice system.” Broadcaster Chris Packham writes for the Independent about his new rewilding campaign, Wild Card, “calling on the church to rewild 30% of their land by 2030”. (The Guardian reports that broadcaster Chris Packham has “urge[d] protesters to stop blocking roads” and “start holding fossil fuel executives personally to account”.) Finally, an article in the Mail on Sunday by columnist Dan Hodges seeks to imply, but does not offer any evidence to explicitly claim, that government policy has been bought by political donors.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is quoted as saying: “We are potentially headed towards 3C of global warming by 2100, if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment.” The article quotes Skea saying the 1.5C limit is “slipping away from us”, but begins: “Humanity has missed its chance of keeping global warming below 1.5C and it will take ‘heroic efforts’ to stay below 2C this century, the scientist leading the global effort to understand climate change has warned.” The piece concludes by quoting Skea saying: “When the IPCC started out, the existential question was, are human beings causing climate change. But that’s now been accepted and the question is, what do you do about it?…Frankly, it’s down to human agency and choice. It’s our politicians, our political system, that can choose or can choose not to implement the measures that we need.”

The Sunday Times profiles Liam Butterworth, the head of Dowlais, a company that makes parts for combustion engine cars, that quotes him saying that targets for electric cars are “just not realistic” and that “I don’t think the consumer is ready.” A Daily Telegraph news article reports Butterworth’s comments. The Mail on Sunday says “the switch to electric vehicles…has sent the car industry into reverse”. A comment for the Daily Telegraph by climate-sceptic columnist Matthew Lynn says “Labour’s” electric car policy, which was implemented by the previous Conservative government, is “ruinous” and “may end up harming the environment” because it is “fuelling a surge in sales” of diesel cars. [New diesel sales are down 12% year-on-year in 2024 to date.] A comment for the Observer by Ros Coward complains about electric car charging infrasructure.

The area of land in the Antarctic peninsula covered by vegetation increased from 0.86 square kilometres (km2) in 1986 to 11.95 km2 in 2021, a new study finds. The authors analysed archives of Landsat satellite data over 1986-2021 using a “Google Earth Engine cloud-processing workflow”. They find that the rate of vegetation change increased from 0.32km2 per year over 1986-2021 to 0.42km2 per year over 2016-21. The paper suggests “future widespread changes in the Antarctic Peninsula’s terrestrial ecosystems and their long-term functioning,” the study warns.

New research finds that, even if global warming is limited to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, the impacts of climate change will increase inequality by an average of 1.4 points of the Gini index – a measure of national wealth inequality – by the end of the century. Using eight large-scale integrated assessment models, the authors assess the “distributional implications” of climate impacts and of varying compensation schemes under 1.5C warming. They find that limiting warming to 1.5C “reduces long-term inequality increase by two-thirds but increases it slightly in the short term”. However, they add that “equal per-capita redistribution can offset the short-term effect, lowering the Gini index by almost two points”.