Greece is “battling several wildfires…with smoke covering parts of the capital Athens in a haze, amid warnings for extreme weather conditions for the rest of the week”, reports AFP. The newswire says that “the country’s minister for civil protection [warned] that half the country was under a high-risk warning for fires due to high temperatures, wind gusts and drought conditions…The Mediterranean country is exceptionally vulnerable to summer blazes, with this season seeing fires burn daily. After the warmest winter on record, Greece also experienced its hottest June and July since reliable data collection began in 1960. It registered its earliest recorded heatwave in June. Scientists warn that human-induced fossil fuel emissions are worsening the length, frequency and intensity of heatwaves across the world.” Reuters says that “more than 400 firefighters backed by 16 waterbombing planes and 13 helicopters battled the blaze [that began outside Athens]…and quickly reached the village of Varnavas 35km (20 miles) north of Athens”. The newswire adds: “Hundreds of wildfires have broken out across Greece since May and scientists attribute their frequency and intensity to the increasingly hot and dry weather conditions linked to climate change…Fires have also burned this summer amid extreme heat elsewhere in Europe, including in Spain and the Balkans.” The New York Times says the “wildfire with 80ft flames spreads near Athens”. The Daily Telegraph says Greece has “ordered the evacuation of hospitals and homes near Athens…as wildfires spread despite ‘superhuman’ efforts to combat the flames”. BBC News says “thousands of residents are being evacuated from their homes”.

New figures from the Association of British Insurers (ABI) show that the amount paid out in the three months to the end of June hit £1.4bn, a 5% increase on the first quarter of the year and the highest figure of any quarter since it started collecting the data in 2017, reports the Guardian. The newspaper says that the ABI, which represents the UK’s largest insurance firms, are “warning that the climate crisis has contributed to driving up insurance payouts to the highest level in seven years, after a sharp rise in damage to households and businesses from weather events”. It adds: “The industry trade body said the increase was largely driven by a leap in weather-related claims, as payouts for damage to UK homes from storms, heavy rain and frozen pipes hit £144m. It is calling on the government to do more to reduce the country’s vulnerability to the impacts of the climate crisis, after weather-related claims cost the industry more than £100m for a fifth consecutive quarter.” The Financial Times says the ABI figures show that the “average UK home insurance policy has jumped by almost one-fifth to just under £400, an all-time high, as insurers increase their prices after paying out a record amount of money in weather-related claims last year”. The FT continues: “The data underscores the growing affordability pressure on consumers as the home insurance sector responds to its worst underwriting conditions for decades. Inflation in insurers’ rebuild costs and other factors have combined with more severe and extreme weather linked to climate change to push up payouts.”

Relatedly, the FT has published part three of its series about the “consequences of climate change on insurance”. The article is headlined: “The uninsurable world: rethinking how to cover for climate damage.” And the FT has another article headlined: “How the City of London is preparing for climate change: Historic financial centre is investing £68m in an ‘extreme weather’ plan – but is it enough?”

Beijing has issued “a set of guidelines to ramp up green transition in all areas of economic and social development”, reports state news agency Xinhua. The newswire says the “main objectives” of the guideline are that, “by 2030, the country will achieve ‘remarkable results’ in the green transition in all areas…and, by 2035, a green, low-carbon and circular development economic system will be basically established and the goal of Beautiful China will be basically achieved”. According to the report, other detailed goals include: “By 2030, the scale of the energy conservation and environmental protection industry in the country will reach about 15tn yuan ($2.1tn), the proportion of non-fossil energy will increase to about 25% of energy consumption and the installed capacity of pumped storage hydropower will exceed 120m kilowatts (120GW). By 2030, the carbon emission intensity of commercial transport per unit of turnover will drop by about 9.5% compared with 2020 and the annual utilisation of bulk solid waste will reach about 4.5bn tonnes, with the output rate of main resources to increase by about 45% compared with 2020.” The state-sponsored Global Times calls the guidelines “groundbreaking”, saying it is the “first systematic deployment” of Beijing’s “green and low-carbon goals”.   

Meanwhile, China has filed an appeal with the World Trade Organization against the EU’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), reports Agence France-Presse (AFP). China says the EU’s preliminary ruling “lacks a factual and legal basis” and “undermines the overall situation of global cooperation in addressing climate change”, AFP adds. The Financial Times explains: “In early June, the European Commission announced it would sharply increase its tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles following a months-long investigation which found that Beijing was unfairly subsidising its car industry. The measure is still provisional, pending a vote by EU member states in November. The EU’s trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis told the Financial Times last week that he expected them to approve the tariffs. The levies vary across companies, which include Geely and BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, but could be close to 50% for carmakers judged not to have co-operated with the EU probe.”

In other news, Shanghai has released a work plan that aims to “completely [switch]” the buses and taxi fleets in the city to EVs by the end of 2027, Xinhua reports. The New York Times says that the emphasis on scientific education and research has allowed China to “[outpace] other countries in research fields like battery chemistry, crucial to its lead in electric vehicles”. State-run newspaper China Daily quotes Liu Bingjiang, chief engineer of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, saying the goal for “more than 80% of the country’s crude steel production capacity” to meet the ultra-low emission transformation targets “remains unchanged” despite “underlying structural issues”.

Finally, Reuters says “natural disasters” cost China nearly 77bn yuan ($10.7bn) in losses last month, which it says is “the biggest amount of losses for the month of July since 2021”. Bloomberg says China’s spate of recent policy announcements, including ambitious renewable goals and a multiyear power grid plan, highlight the country’s “rising confidence in accelerating climate action”. It cites analysis for Carbon Brief showing that emissions in the “world’s top polluter fell 1% in the second quarter”. And the Financial Times has a news feature headlined: “Does Europe need Chinese wind technology to meet climate goals?”

The Daily Telegraph reports that the UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has been “urged to intervene in a row over a mini nuclear power plant in Cumbria, amid fears a government quango is hoarding land needed for the project”. The newspaper adds: “Moorside, located near Sellafield, is one of six sites currently being assessed by Great British Nuclear (GBN) as it aims to roll out a new generation of reactors. However, MPs and businesses have warned the energy secretary that the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is putting Moorside’s hopes of hosting the first small modular reactors (SMRs) in jeopardy. That is because GBN has signalled it will only pick sites that have enough land available for several SMRs. As a result, Moorside is at risk of missing out after the NDA unveiled plans to use most of the site’s space for other decommissioning purposes. In a letter seen by the Telegraph, MPs, Lords, business leaders and union officials urged Miliband to instruct the NDA and GBN to prioritise the land at Moorside for new nuclear use ‘first and foremost’, warning that failure to do so would have ‘considerable’ consequences.” Meanwhile, BBC News says: “Sizewell C nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast is still awaiting a final investment decision, but there are five signs that preparation work for a possible go-ahead is ramping up.” These include “resurfacing work and speed restrictions” on local roads.

In other UK news, the Times reports that the “government is closing in on a bailout of British Steel in which the taxpayer would inject £600m into the group”. It explains: “Labour this weekend signalled a new intent to break an impasse in talks with British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, that has clouded the future of its vast works in Scunthorpe for more than four years. Now, Jingye has helped hone in on a compromise by committing to bankroll the hugely loss-making operations until the second half of 2025 at least…Bosses want to switch from the company’s loss-making blast furnaces to cleaner electric arc furnace (EAF) production, at a cost of £1.25bn. Doing so would reduce carbon emissions by 75%, British Steel has claimed. But Jingye is not prepared to make the switch without significant public subsidy and is in talks to gain access to £600m of taxpayer aid…The change of government has injected new impetus into negotiations, with a number of options now under consideration, according to sources close to discussions. These are thought to include plans to invest in carbon capture and storage and to continue running blast furnaces until the new EAFs are in operation.”

Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph – and its Sunday sister edition – continue their run of news stories which seek to cast doubt on net-zero policies. Headlines include: “How Ed Miliband’s net-zero plans risk pushing up bills in the Home Counties”; “Wind turbines taller than skyscrapers to march across British countryside”; “Labour abandons Tory pledge not to build solar farms on food-growing fields”; and “Treasury officials pushed for pay-per-mile pricing, says Hunt’s former top adviser”. An analysis in the Guardian by Jillian Ambrose concludes that a “scheme transporting Scotland’s green power to England is likely to be controversial despite lengthy consultations”. BBC News says that “landowners have raised concerns about the potential impact of a planned carbon dioxide pipeline”, adding: “Exxon Mobil is seeking approval for the Solent CO2 Pipeline Project, which would see a 60cm-wide pipe running from its Fawley oil refinery near Southampton to a CO2 storage site under the English Channel.”

Finally, the Times says “severe weather warnings for thunderstorms have been issued for parts of the UK as a plume of heat looks set to make Monday the hottest day of the year so far”. 

An investigation by the Financial Times claims to have found that “some 40% of the biggest US manufacturing investments announced in the first year of US president Joe Biden’s signature overhaul of industrial and climate policy have been delayed or paused”. The article continues: “Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Chips and Science Act offered more than $400bn in tax credits, loans and grants to spark development of a domestic US cleantech and semiconductor supply chain. However, of the projects worth more than $100m, a total of $84bn have been delayed for between two months and several years, or paused indefinitely, the FT found. Companies said deteriorating market conditions, slowing demand, and lack of policy certainty in a high-stakes election year have caused them to change their plans. The delays raise questions around Biden’s bet that an industrial transformation can deliver jobs and economic returns to the US, which has offshored its manufacturing for decades. They could also complicate efforts by vice-president Kamala Harris to use the administration’s record of delivering a manufacturing renaissance to attract blue-collar voters in November’s presidential election.”

In other US news, Bloomberg says that “climate groups aren’t going to stop talking about Project 2025”. It explains: “The manifesto, published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, had become ammunition for Democrats and a growing liability for the GOP ticket…The plan proposes deep changes to the federal government that include severely cutting back the Environmental Protection Agency, replacing some career civil servants with political appointees, selling off public lands and breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some advocates have seized on recent climate-related disasters to draw attention to the document.” Politico says that “climate cash [is pouring] into the election swing [state] region”, but it asks: “Will it help Harris?” The article continues: “An area near Pittsburgh is being recast into a clean energy hub by IRA cash. It’s a test of whether climate policies can help Democrats beat Trump…[But] national polls show that many voters are unaware of the Inflation Reduction Act.” Finally, the Associated Press writes: “The Vermont town of Lyndon was hit by severe flash floods twice last month. As residents brace[d] for the remnants of Tropical Storm Debby to arrive [last] Friday, some worr[ied] that the pace of small-town recovery can’t keep up with the increasingly severe weather fueled by climate change.”

The Times reports that Scotland’s SNP government has been “accused of watering down its commitment to tackling climate change by planning to delay the introduction of a new legally enshrined strategy”. The newspaper adds: “The next statutory climate change plan was initially promised by the Scottish government in draft form by November last year and must be published in three months’ time. Ministers are instead proposing a new bill on five-year emissions-lowering carbon budgets, subject to the approval of MSPs, that will push the previous legal deadline into 2025. The move has been described as hugely concerning by the Green Party, the SNP’s former coalition partners, who were ousted from government earlier this year when Humza Yousaf, first minister at the time, scrapped the Bute House agreement.” The Scotsman says that the “move is a further blow to Scotland’s stuttering climate strategy after nine of the last 13 annual targets have been missed”. It continues: “For the legislation to pass and both the targets to be watered down and the climate change plan to be delayed, the Scottish government, which is now a minority administration, will need the support of opposition parties.” An editorial in the Scotsman says that the “SNP government’s plan to delay legally required climate change strategy may be a sign that ministers are finally getting real about previous administrations’ fantasies”. It adds: “Countries that cling too long to the old ways of fossil fuels risk becoming out-dated backwaters; those that embrace the future of clean, renewable electricity have a chance to become world leaders. A new industrial age is dawning and Scotland must not be left behind…This latest climate delay is a backwards step, but perhaps [Sottish first minister John] Swinney has finally realised that continuing the years of false promises and inaction would be a historic, era-defining mistake. And that, for the SNP, would be a giant leap forward.”

Politico says that the “once ever-accelerating corporate roadshow at the annual United Nations climate talks is finally slowing down – at least for this year”. The outlet explains: “Businesses of all stripes are planning to either skip or send smaller delegations to this year’s global COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, wary of the event’s location and logistics, the oil-evangelising autocratic regime running it and, perhaps most notably, the prospect of Donald Trump winning the US presidential election just days before the November summit begins.” The article continues: “Some reasons for the pullback are prosaic: There are concerns about getting hotel rooms or even accessing the venue on the outskirts of Baku, the host city. Others are policy-focused: COP29 is expected to be more low-key than Dubai or next year’s talks in Brazil, and companies are already preparing for that event, where nations will finalise climate strategies through 2035. Then there’s the Trump factor. The climate-sceptic Republican nominee would significantly rattle the global response and message coming out of Baku if he wins.”

Pilita Clark, the FT associate editor, business columnist and former environment correspondent, argues that “Elon Musk’s antics are turning off the most obvious customers for his cars”. She writes: “I have wanted a Tesla ever since the day in 2012 when Elon Musk came to the FT’s London offices to talk about his electric car company.” However, she says the Tesla owner’s recent “inflammatory words” and conduct on Twitter, the social media platform he has “turned into a dismal shell of its former self since buying it in October 2022”, mean that, “all things considered, I would rather not buy one of Musk’s cars”. Clark continues: “The carmaker’s so-called ‘consideration rates’, or share of would-be buyers, have been trending down in the US since Musk started upending Twitter, now X, in late 2022, says Shahar Silbershatz, head of Caliber, the market intelligence firm that tracks Tesla’s scores daily. The rates are considered a good predictor of sales, he told me last week, and Caliber’s data shows Tesla’s numbers started falling – from about 40% in November down to 30% in February – after a series of controversies including the antisemitism uproar. Tellingly, the falls were steeper among Democrats, who are generally bigger electric car fans, and this was before Musk endorsed Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, in July. Caliber’s preliminary August figures suggest Tesla’s scores among Democrats have plunged further. It’s impossible to say if Musk’s outbursts are causing these shifts. Tesla has suffered a raft of other pressures, from higher interest rates to supply chain glitches. But, as Silbershatz says, at a time when Tesla faces all those headwinds, plus growing competition from other carmakers, Musk is giving his ‘natural buyers’ in the US a good reason to shun his cars. As of last week, I would say the same applies in the UK. In spades.”

Relatedly, the Guardian has a news feature headlined: “‘His rhetoric has made Tesla toxic’: Is Elon Musk driving away his target market?” Jasper Jolly, the newspaper’s financial reporter, says “there are signs the billionaire is becoming unpopular with the very demographic group most likely to buy EVs”, adding: “Regular polling by the market research firm Caliber shows a clear decline since January 2022 in trust from US consumers who say they trust or like Tesla, and who say they would consider buying one. Caliber has previously attributed the decline at least partly to polarised views of Musk.” The Times reports that “Tesla, the undisputed king of Britain’s electric car market, is within weeks of losing its crown to BMW”. The article adds: “Latest industry figures show that, after seven months of the year, sales of electric BMWs in the UK have risen to more than 22,000, firmly in the rear-view mirror of Tesla, the all-electric marque whose sales in the country this year have declined to 25,500. Demand for BMW’s electric cars in the year to date has almost already superseded the number it sold in the whole of 2023 and the marque’s new battery electric car registrations in Britain are up by about 70% year-on-year. All of which is in marked contrast with the situation at Tesla. Already in 2024, on a worldwide basis it has suffered its first two consecutive quarters of decline, with its sales down by nearly 5% in the three months to the end of June. Its pace of decline in the UK is greater still: in the year to date, Tesla sales are down by 13%, after a fall of more than 9% to 49,500 in 2023, from a record high of 54,600 in 2022. Meanwhile, Britain’s electric market, despite having slowed, is growing at a rate of more than 10% a year.” Meanwhile, the Sunday Times has a feature under the headline: “No petrol or diesel by 2030? Carmakers say EVs are going nowhere fast. While Labour wants to step on the accelerator with zero-emission vehicles, some in the industry claim the targets are impossible.”

An editorial in the Daily Mail responds to a new report by Ember which claims that the Drax biomass power plant in Yorkshire is “easily Britain’s biggest polluter, producing four times more carbon than our last surviving coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar”. The editorial says: “It was always hard to believe cutting down forests halfway across the world, transporting them to the UK in high-polluting cargo ships, then burning them in power stations could be good for the environment. Trees absorb carbon and help enormously in the fight against climate change. When burned, they produce as much damaging greenhouse gas as other fossil fuels. Yet since 2012 the owners of the Drax…have received almost £7bn in public subsidies to switch from coal to ‘biomass’ – a euphemism for the wood pellets made from felled trees. The firm claims it is carbon neutral, as the trees are replaced, and that it makes a major contribution to cleaning up our energy production…[The Ember report] follows a Chatham House study, which shows burning wood pellets releases more emissions per unit of electricity generated than coal or gas. It described the current subsidy framework, due to run until at least 2027, as ‘not fit for purpose’. There have been many muddle-headed policies where the desperation of ministers to appear virtuous over climate change has seriously clouded their judgement. This is surely one of them.” [In its latest sixth assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said with high confidence: “The provision of biomass for bioenergy…and other bio-based products represents an important share of the total mitigation potential associated with the AFOLU [agriculture, forestry and land use] sector, though these mitigation effects accrue to other sectors…The use of bioenergy can lead to either increased or reduced emissions, depending on the scale of deployment, conversion technology, fuel displaced, and how, and where, the biomass is produced.”]

Meanwhile, an editorial in the Times argues that “ministers are right to seek growth through housebuilding…yet an uncompromising stance on net-zero may act as a brake on their economic ambition”. The editorial concludes: “That is only one example of a trade-off that will become increasingly pressing for this government, whose second ‘mission’ in government is ‘accelerating to net-zero’, even promising a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030. The truth is that this country is increasingly isolated in its insistence that these environmental targets can be achieved without economic pain. In New Zealand, a new centre-right government has reversed a number of environmental policies to stimulate its economy. The US, for all its climate advocacy, is a major oil producer that has forged ahead with fracking during the Biden presidency. Last year even Emmanuel Macron and Alexander De Croo, the French and Belgian leaders, called for a pause on new European green initiatives amid concerns of a consumer backlash to the costs of the transition. In Britain, too, there is a need for more cool-headed, pragmatic assessment of how the government’s plans for growth fit in with its accelerated net-zero timetable. The Climate Change Committee has estimated that the cost of reaching net-zero by 2050 is about £1.4tn. [This figure excludes direct economic benefits of around £1tn, which substantially offset the cost of investment. See Carbon Brief’s “Factcheck: How ‘scary-sounding numbers’ are being used to mislead the UK about net-zero.”] There will be economic benefits too but much later: official ­projections show most of the investment in the 2020s and 2030s, with savings arriving in the 2040s. There is no one to pay for all this except consumers, taxpayers and businesses. Labour’s ambition of ‘green prosperity’ is laudable: but ­uttering those words in the same breath cannot erase the tension between them.”

Separately, an editorial in the Sun writes: “There are an increasing number of warnings that the UK cannot possibly hit its target of getting all petrol and diesel cars off the roads in just over a decade. [Former prime minister] Rishi Sunak sensibly pushed back the original target by five years to a still-ambitious 2035. But Labour [pledged to] immediately reverse it back again. Now a senior car industry boss says we will be lucky to get to half of all vehicles being electric by 2040. There are nowhere near enough charging points and plug-in cars are still way too expensive…So how does energy secretary Ed Miliband plan to do it – along with taking the whole national grid to net-zero, too. We are still waiting to hear.” Finally, the Mail on Sunday gives a whole page to climate-sceptic commentator Ross Clark to rage under the headline: “Before carpeting Britain with your beloved solar panels, Ed, spare a thought for the slave labour building them in China.”

Implementing new tailpipe emissions standards in the US to increase EV sales would cut emissions by up to 457.3m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e), a new study finds. The authors analyse the critical mineral supply chain constraints of implementing the new emissions standards. They find that at least 10.21m new internal combustion engine vehicles would need to be replaced with EVs over 2027-32 to meet the standards. However, they find that “mineral production capacities in the US and amongst allies support the deployment of 5.09m vehicles” in this time, leading to a “shortfall of at least 59.54MtCO2e in lost lifecycle emissions benefits”. The paper adds that “limited production of battery-grade graphite and cobalt may represent particularly profound constraints”.