Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from European airlines are set to exceed their pre-pandemic levels this year, the Financial Times reports, adding that this “underlin[es] the aviation industry’s struggle to decarbonise as it lobbies Brussels for looser green rules”. The newspaper says: “European airlines have collectively committed to reaching net-zero by 2050 through a mix of new technologies, notably alternative fuels, as well as carbon-trading schemes and more efficient aircraft, engines and air-traffic management. But carriers have complained that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is too expensive, and not enough is being made, and last month urged the EU to soften some of its environmental rules.” It quotes the European Commission saying that the forecast rise in aviation emissions “underscores the need for action to reach our climate commitments” and adding: “Aviation needs to do more.”

China’s installed capacity of wind and solar power reached 1,482 gigawatts (GW) by the end of March, surpassing that of thermal power “for the first time in history”, state news agency Xinhua reports. Wind and solar capacity are expected to “maintain the lead over thermal power”, says the National Energy Administration, adds the news agency. Business news outlet Jiemian says that electricity generated from wind and solar reached 536 terawatt hours (TWh) in the first quarter, accounting for 22.5% of China’s total electricity consumption. Reuters also has the story. The Global Times, a state-supporting newspaper, publishes a related editorial, which concludes: “We welcome more countries and enterprises to ride on the fast train of China’s development and jointly write a new chapter of global green prosperity.” Industry news outlet BJX News says that the share of coal-fired power in the installed capacity has fallen 4 percentage points year-on-year to 35%.

Meanwhile, state-run newspaper China Daily reports that the draft of the “ecological environment code” is ready to be reviewed by lawmakers. It quotes an official saying the code addresses the needs for green and low-carbon development, climate change response and China’s “dual-carbon” goals. China Energy Net reports that China has set a goal of increasing the share of electricity consumption in the total energy usage of the transport industry to 10% by 2027. China News reports that tax records show China’s green development remains “stable and positive” in the first quarter of the year. Xinhua covers the same story.

Elsewhere, an unbylined “opinion” article in the Global Times says that Chinese president Xi Jinping’s recent speech expressing a commitment to climate action represents a “solemn pledge to the international community” and serves as a “clear and rational guide in a time of global uncertainty”. The newspaper adds that “no matter how the international situation changes, China’s actions to actively address climate change will not slow down”. China Daily publishes a comment article by Robert Walker, a professor at the Beijing Normal University and emeritus fellow of Green Templeton College at University of Oxford, arguing that “Trump’s bid to chase unfettered and unsustainable economic growth contrasts markedly with China’s commitment to an ecological civilisation” and that China is “well placed to lead the world into a sustainable green future”. China Daily carries another comment article by the newspaper’s EU bureau chief Chen Weihua, under the headline: “A good time for EU to pursue strategic autonomy.” The Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily carries an article in its print edition, saying that China has “incorporated” its “dual-carbon” goals into the “overall framework of ecological civilisation”, as well as its economic and social development. 

There is ongoing coverage of the IEA energy security summit hosted by the UK government in London last week where, reports Politico, UK prime minister Keir Starmer told delegates he is pushing for “home-grown clean energy” to “take back control of our energy system”. The outlet says: “Starmer is convinced such patriotic arguments will neuter the attacks of net zero-sceptic rivals in the shape of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives and – more potently, judging by recent polls – Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.” It continues: “Labour’s strategy is to portray any reliance on fossil fuels – touted by Farage – as tantamount to accepting foreign influence on British energy supply and, therefore, over national security…It’s a deliberate strategy, said one government official, to ensure that – if net-zero is indeed the new Brexit – Farage will this time find himself on the side arguing for foreign influence and international markets, while Labour can present themselves as the patriots, arguing for home-grown clean power.” (DeSmog reports: “Farage’s top fundraiser targets oil and gas donations.”)

Meanwhile, the Press Association covers comments at the summit by UK energy secretary Ed Miliband, saying the government was “not for bending” on net-zero and calling on opponents to “bring on the fight”. The newswire quotes Miliband saying: “Let’s have the argument and any day of the week, any hour of the day, any month of the year we will have the argument between cheap, clean renewables that give you energy security, lower bills, the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century, against their case to say no to all that, to stick simply with expensive, insecure fossil fuels which gave us the cost-of-living crisis, which ruined family finances, which ruined public finances, which ruined business finances, and they will say no to these huge job opportunities that are on offer.” The Daily Telegraph and Sky News also cover Miliband’s comments. The Guardian covers a different aspect of Miliband’s comments at the summit under the headline: “Britain will find ‘common ground’ with US on energy policy, says Miliband.” The i newspaper says: “The UK can work with Donald Trump on building new nuclear energy, Ed Miliband has told the i newspaper.” The Guardian reports “six things we learned” from the energy security summit. Politico says: “The Trump administration arrived in the UK last week with a simple message: China is a malign actor, benefitting from misguided climate policies, and the world is better off copying America’s newfound embrace of fossil fuels. It was met with a shrug.”

Elsewhere, the Times reports on comments made by UK chancellor Rachel Reeves. It says: “The chancellor told a panel hosted by the International Monetary Fund in Washington that green rules were ‘well-meaning regulations that come in for the right reason…that end up stopping good things from happening’.” The newspaper says she added: “We’ve spent £100m in the UK building a bat tunnel to go alongside the high-speed rail link between London and the north of England…It is absolutely insane, the costs that are added to essential infrastructure investments.”

The price cap for domestic energy bills in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland), which has gone up for the past two quarters, is set to fall by 9% in July, Reuters reports, citing forecasts by analysts Cornwall Insight. It says: “Benchmark British gas prices have tumbled around 40% since February as warmer weather curbed demand, the EU parliament backed weaker gas storage rules and fears of a global trade war rose that could hamper economic growth and industrial output.” BBC News, the Times, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph all carry the news. Meanwhile, there is ongoing coverage from Sky News of the government’s upcoming decision over whether to split the country’s electricity market into regional zones. The Financial Times says Scotland’s deputy first minister has said so-called “zonal” pricing would be “hugely challenging” for Scotland. It says: “Kate Forbes told a gathering of business executives at Holyrood on Friday that the scheme risked undermining investment into Scotland’s energy sector while also failing to deliver lower energy bills.” The Times reports: “Household energy bills are already a ‘postcode lottery’ even without contentious plans for regional wholesale prices, new analysis shows. Consumers in north Wales and Merseyside will pay £120 more than households in London for their electricity over the coming year, Cornwall Insight forecasts, while those in the north of Scotland will pay £96 more than those in the capital.”

In other UK energy news, Politico says the government is in talks over buying three nuclear sites – Bradwell, Heysham and Hartlepool – from French firm EDF. The Daily Telegraph reports that the Eastern Green Link 1, a £2bn electricity “superhighway” linking Scotland and England, “is facing delays in a blow to Ed Miliband’s clean-power plans”. Another Daily Telegraph story says US firm Westinghouse has “pulled out” of the UK government’s competition to start building small modular nuclear reactors in the country. It says three firms “remain in the running” – Rolls-Royce, GE-Hitachi and Holtec. A third Daily Telegraph story says councils “face £747m charge for burning waste under Labour’s carbon-pricing expansion”. The Guardian says London councils are “yet to spend £130m in local climate funds” raised through a levy on property development.

Elsewhere, a frontpage story in Monday’s i newspaper reports: “British firms working for the UK’s military or intelligence services are advising staff not to connect their mobile phones to Chinese-made electric cars over fears that Beijing could steal sensitive national security data.” MailOnline picks up the story. Finally, there is ongoing coverage of last week’s news that the UK government is funding a £50m research project that will test techniques for dimming the sun at a small scale. Saturday’s Daily Star carries coverage on its frontpage with the misleading headline: “Boffs plan to switch off the sun.” The Times of India reports on why the project “is getting flak” due to the risk of “dangerous and unpredictable consequences”. The Independent also has ongoing coverage.

Germany’s new coalition government “faces an early test of its sway in Brussels as it defies pressure from neighbouring countries to break up the German electricity market”, the Financial Times reports. The newspaper says the umbrella organisation for European grid operators is today “expected to push for a division of the German market into either two or three zones, according to people with knowledge of the process”. It adds that neighbouring countries, including Sweden and Belgium, are in favour, whereas German industry is “strongly opposed…amid fears that it would drive up prices for the heavily industrialised south”. Meanwhile, some groups see the coalition agreement of the new German government (CDU/CSU-SPD) as neglecting climate protection, Der Spiegel reports. It says the Klima.Gerecht [Climate.Just] network, a wing of the Social Democratic party, criticised the deal, saying the coalition “is not willing to take responsibility for Germany’s future”. However, it also quotes Andreas Jung, deputy CDU leader, as saying: “In the past, during major crises, climate policy always received less attention. That must not happen again”. 

Elsewhere in German media, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports that transformers, needed for power grid expansion, have become an “unexpected obstacle” for the energy transition. It says that global demand has surged and prices for large transformers have more than doubled since 2019, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), leading to manufacturers being booked out for years. Separately, Reuters reports that Germany’s RWE has paused offshore wind development in the US following moves against the industry by the Trump administration. Handelsblatt quotes the firm’s CEO Markus Krebber saying: “In the US, where we have temporarily halted our offshore activities, our business with onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically.”

Finally, the Wall Street Journal carries an editorial in its climate-sceptic comment section criticising Germany’s energy policy, noting that the renewable share of electricity generation fell from 56% in the first quarter of 2024 to 47% in 2025. It argues that “renewables alone cannot power an industrial economy” and criticises Germany’s nuclear phaseout.

Pacific island states have written to developed countries “urging them to hurry [in publishing their new UN climate pledges, known as nationally determined contributions, NDCs] and to make the steep cuts in carbon needed”, the Guardian reports. It quotes the states’ letter as saying: “We call on all leaders, especially the leaders of the G20, to submit ambitious, 1.5C-aligned economy-wide NDCs covering all greenhouse gases before the UN general assembly in September.” The newspaper adds: “All countries have also agreed to phase out fossil fuels, and NDCs should contain clear details on how governments plan to achieve this, the islands added in their letter.” A second Guardian article asks if the upcoming COP30 climate summit, due to be held in the rainforest city of Belém, Brazil, will “help or harm the Amazon”.

A feature article in the New York Times says of today’s Canadian election that climate change “isn’t even among the top 10 issues for voters, according to recent polling”. It adds: “Even though Liberal candidate Mark Carney has a lengthy climate policy résumé, Trump’s threats have nearly drowned the issue out of the campaign.” The Canadian Press says: “Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have laid out how – or even if – their policy platforms will work to have Canada meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets under the global Paris climate pact.” The Energy Mix covers Carbon Brief analysis showing that a Conservative election win could add 800m tonnes to Canada’s emissions over the next decade. It says, based on the analysis, that this “could make Canada the only G7 country with rising emissions”. DeSmog says Conservative leader Pierre Polievre’s campaign “has links to gas industry astroturfing effort”. (See Carbon Brief’s “Canada election 2025: What the manifestos say on nature, energy and climate.”)

Commenting on last week’s energy security summit held in London, BusinessGreen editor James Murray says UK prime minister Kier Starmer “could not have made his point more emphatically” short of “getting an ‘I heart wind farms’ tattoo”. Murray lists all of the clean-energy related announcements made by Starmer’s government and writes: “The government’s net-zero strategy is accelerating, regardless of what anonymous sources keep suggesting to the contrary.” He concludes: “If Reform does well in the upcoming local elections there will be a temptation to replicate the Tory response to its shock victory at the Uxbridge by-election, over-interpret the results, and symbolically sacrifice some environmental policies on the altar of Farageist populism. But just as it proved for the Tories, such an approach would be a grievous error.” For the Times, Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin writes under the headline: “It’s a mistake to inflate the danger of Farage.” He adds: “Labour’s campaign staff say there’s scant evidence that his efforts to import a divisive Maga-style campaign – toxic tall tales of immigrant crime waves, the exaggerated cost of net-zero policies or where people should go to the toilet – are getting as much traction in Runcorn as Reform’s overexcited supporters might think.” In the Guardian, columnist Gaby Hinsliff has a comment piece under the headline: “We obsess over the angry young men going Reform. But what of the anxious young women going Green?”

Meanwhile, an interview in the Sunday Express with UK opposition leader Kemi Badenoch says: “She is concerned energy secretary Ed Miliband’s push for net-zero carbon emissions will result in more pylons appearing across the countryside.” It quotes her saying without evidence: “Net-zero will bankrupt us unless we change course and actually start delivering cheap abundant energy…We need to look after our environment but we can’t look after it if we’re bankrupt.” (See the Carbon Brief factcheck of Badenoch’s recent net-zero comments.) Separately, for the Times, Terry Leahy, former chief executive of Tesco, writes in favour of a national food strategy: “Climate change and the seismic shift towards global protectionism mean that a national strategy is needed now to secure our most basic needs.”

The climate-sceptic Sun carries yet another editorial calling for the UK to endorse fracking for shale gas. In the Daily Telegraph, climate-sceptic columnist Liam Halligan writes under the headline: “Reeves needs to ditch her net-zero delusions for Britain’s sake.” The Daily Express carries a comment by the climate-sceptic campaigner Lois Perry, who rails against “utterly bonkers” funding for experimental research on dimming the sun. City AM gives a comment slot to Matthew Bowles of the free-market Institute for Economic Affairs, which has long campaigned against climate policies. He writes that electric vehicles and heat pumps are “paving the path to bankruptcy”. [Recent research shows EV drivers can save more than £1,000 a year relative to petrol car owners.] In the Sunday Times, climate-sceptic columnist Dominic Lawson criticises subsidies for biomass burning. 

In an article for the Financial Times, Hank Paulson, a former US Treasury secretary and chairman of the Paulson Institute, argues that the US needs a national energy strategy to fuel its push for artificial intelligence. He writes: “Since demand for electricity substantially exceeds supply, it makes sense to think of clean electricity as an ‘addition’ to existing energy supplies. In fact, nearly all additional electricity in the US last year came from solar and wind – traditional energy sources can’t meet the need. Gas cannot fill the void in the short or medium term because of turbine shortages. Coal won’t solve the problem because decommissioned utilities cannot be ramped back up fast enough to meet urgent needs (and air pollution harms health). Expansion of nuclear power is an essential part of the solution, but the US lags years behind and China is far ahead in developing cutting-edge nuclear power.” Paulson says that rather than relying on gas power, a “smarter, faster model” is to use solar plus storage, with gas backup, which he said would be quicker to scale and need less upfront investment. A comment for the Sydney Morning Herald by senior business columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz is titled: “Trump’s billionaire oil industry donors aren’t getting what they wished for.”

In the Times, Daniel Yergin, vice chair of S&P Global, reprises the arguments he set out in a February article for Foreign Affairs: “The world is using more wind and solar energy than ever – and more oil and coal. That’s because energy transition doesn’t follow neat timelines.” He writes: “Today’s energy transition is meant to be fundamentally different from all preceding energy transitions, being transformative rather than additive. For the most part worldwide, it is proving to be, as in the past, a case of addition not replacement. The wide range of challenges facing the transition mean that it will not unfold in a linear way. Instead, it will continue as it already is: multidimensional, developing at varying rates of speed in different regions with different mixes of technologies and, definitely, with different priorities. That reflects the complexities of the energy system that is foundational for the modern world. It also makes clear that continuing investment in conventional energy will be a necessary part of the energy transition.” A comment for the Financial Times by chief features writer Henry Mance reflects on the aftermath of last year’s deadly floods in Valencia under the headline: “When is a natural disaster human-made?”

“Surprisingly warm” sea surface temperatures near north Africa played a “major role” in eastern Europe’s “record rainfall” in the autumn of 2023, new research finds. The authors used observations and atmospheric model experiments to assess the drivers of the extreme rainfall. They found that the “warm blob” of water directed moisture towards eastern Europe, resulting in heavy rainfall. The findings highlight the importance of monitoring the sea surface temperature off north Africa to “improve seasonal precipitation forecasts and develop effective adaptation strategies for Europe in the context of climate change”, the authors say.