President Joe Biden has announced a “permanent stop” to new oil and gas drilling across more than 625m acres of coastal waters around the US, the New York Times reports. According to the newspaper, the announcement protects around 20% of the nearly 3.2bn acres of seabed controlled by the country. The newspaper reports that Biden called the move a “climate imperative”. The Guardian says: “Biden is taking the action under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, which gives the federal government authority over the exploitation of offshore resources. A total of eight presidents have withdrawn territory from drilling under the act, including Trump himself who barred oil and gas extraction off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. However, the law does not expressly provide for presidents to unilaterally reverse a drilling ban without going through Congress.” BBC News says the ban “covers the entire Atlantic coast and eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Pacific coast off California, Oregon and Washington and a section of the Bering Sea off Alaska”. The Financial Times says that the move “is expected to complicate the policy agenda of incoming president Donald Trump”. The newspaper continues that in a radio interview, Trump said “I have the right to unban it immediately”. However, it adds: “[O]verturning the order could prove challenging and may require an act of Congress, according to legal experts.” The Hill reports that Trump posted on Truth Social that “Biden is doing everything possible to make the TRANSITION as difficult [as] possible”. The Associated Press says that “environmental advocates hailed Biden’s action”. Reuters says the move is mostly “symbolic”, as it “will not impact areas where oil and gas development is currently underway, and mainly covers zones where drillers have no important prospects”. E&E News says the US is currency producing record-high levels of oil and gas, and “Biden’s order is unlikely to change that”. The outlet notes that Congress “is now led by a slim Republican majority and closely divided along partisan lines”. It adds that “oil and gas leaders have responded with outrage”. The Washington Post, Axios, CNN, the South China Morning Post, Agence France Presse, the MailOnline and NBC News also cover the news. 

In other US news, Bloomberg reports that California’s first carbon capture and storage project, which aims to remove around 38m tonnes of CO2, has been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wind generated a record-high 83 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity across Great Britain in 2024, according to data from the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO), BBC News reports. It says the figures show that clean electricity, which includes wind, solar, hydropower, bioenergy and nuclear, made up a record high 56% of Great Britain’s electricity last year. The paper adds that “major fossil fuel generation (mainly gas) fell to 26%, while a further 16% came from imported electricity”. The broadcaster notes that NESO’s figures do not include smaller-scale operators that feed in electricity at a local level, meaning that they may differ from the government figures due to be published in March, which will take into account all power sources. The Daily Mail’s coverage of the story quotes Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans, adding that he “expects wind to overtake gas in the mix as soon as this year”. The Daily Telegraph reports that wind has “overtaken gas as Britain’s biggest source of electricity”. [Last week, Carbon Brief analysis showed that gas remained slightly ahead of wind in 2024. The NESO figures do not account for certain sources of gas-fired electricity, such as industrial combined heat and power plants.] Separately, following a frontpage story for the Times yesterday that had the online heading “How wind turbines could be used to spot incoming missiles”, the Daily Telegraph runs a story with the headline: “Miliband’s turbine building spree leaves Britain vulnerable to Putin’s missiles.”

In other UK news, there is continuing media coverage of the government implementing its intention, reported last year, to scrap a proposed 2035 ban on the sale of new gas boilers. The Guardian says: “Government sources confirmed the future homes standard (FHS), expected to be published soon, will not include a ban on gas boilers. They also confirmed there will not be a ban on the sale of gas boilers by 2035 and people will not have to remove them from their homes.” The Daily Mail adds: “The Tories warned it could be a ‘bait-and-switch’ move by the government, ahead of the introduction of a ‘boiler tax’.” BusinessGreen and the Daily Telegraph also cover the story. Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports that Britain has become Europe’s biggest electric car market. It says: “The UK outsold Germany last year and surged ahead of France after a rise in electric vehicles (EV) registrations at the end of 2024.” Bloomberg adds that registrations of new fully electric vehicles in Germany fell more than a quarter last year. The Times reports that the UK “is on the ‘cusp of an electric car charging point revolution’, with the number of plug-in stations set to increase considerably in the next two years”. And the Daily Telegraph reports that “four Just Stop Oil protesters who blocked a main road in north-west London have been spared jail”. 

China Meteorological Administration confirms that the average temperature in 2024 reached 10.92C – 1.03C higher than the historical average – making 2024 the warmest year on record, state-run newspaper China Daily reports. The newspaper adds that “global warming is the primary reason” for the above-average temperatures and that the past four years are China’s “top four warmest years” since data collection began in 1961. 

Meanwhile, industry news outlet BJX News reports that China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) and top economic planner the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) have jointly issued a plan for “optimising regulation capacity of the power system”. According to the plan, more “new energy” storage sites, such as batteries, will be retrofitted or constructed during the “periods of difficulty absorbing renewable energy”, adds the outlet. A separate BJX News report says that plan aims to add more than 200 gigawatts of “new energy” capacity, such as wind and solar, annually from 2025 to 2027.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that a “persistent surplus” in China’s carbon market and the “expiry of old permits following a rule change” are likely to “slow a price rally seen in 2024”. In its “hyperdrive” newsletter, Bloomberg says that China’s top electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers have “high hopes” for this year, despite “some falling short on last year’s goals”. The newswire cites a forecast by the China Passenger Car Association, saying that EV sales in 2025 may “touch 13.3m units”. An editorial by the state-supporting Global Times argues that China’s “strong infrastructure, labour advantages, and mature, complete supply chain are indispensable pillars of Tesla’s successful ‘Chinese story’”. 

Finally, in an interview with China Daily, Filippo Grandi, chief of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), says the agency is “anticipating an expanded role for China in assisting forcibly displaced communities to enhance resilience and navigate climate threats”. Another China Daily report says that the “dynamic cooperation in green energy” by China and the Middle East, spanning solar power, hydrogen and EVs, is “remoulding the region’s ‘power’ dynamics”. Finally, Japanese news outlet Nikkei Asia publishes an opinion article by Tim Daiss, a journalist and analyst covering energy markets and geopolitics, under the headline: “Did China finally kick its coal addiction in 2024?”

Dana Fisher, the director of the Center for Environment, Community & Equity, and Hajar Yazdiha, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, write in a comment for the Hill that climate activist tactics are becoming more radical. The piece outlines some of the recent “attention-grabbing tactics” used by climate activists and says that “it’s no surprise that the general response to these actions has been relatively negative”. It continues: “Critics often compare climate activists to a sanitised memory of the civil rights movement as ‘a purely peaceful movement’ to argue that radical and confrontational tactics won’t win hearts and minds.” However, the piece notes that in the 1960s, the US civil rights movement “received the same critiques and was accused of similar divisiveness as today’s climate movement”, and is today held up as the “epitome of a successful social movement”. The piece argues that “the civil rights movement shows us that successful movements can strategically embrace rather than reject their radical wing”, and says that “the climate movement is likely to learn about the important role that violence plays in successful movements from the struggle for civil rights”. It concludes: “Leveraging moments of violence and state repression are opportunities rather than threats to the movement. Separately, a comment by the Hill contributor William Becker says that “we cannot afford to delay modernising the US power grid”.

In other comment, the Financial Times Lex column calls for greater cross-channel links between power markets in the UK and EU, saying that “electricity co-operation post-Brexit has far more positives than negatives”. In the Conversation, Georgina Ramsay, Gareth Morgan and Lauren McGregor – researchers from the University of Leicester – explain why “anger, anxiety and anguish are understandable psychological reactions to the climate crisis”. Separately, Jabulile Mzimela and Inocent Moyo from the University of Zululand explain in the Conversation how women in South Africa are using Indigenous knowledge to cope with drought.

Arctic marine heatwaves could intensify “on orders of magnitude” during the rest of this century under climate change, new research finds. The study, which uses high-resolution climate models, also finds that more intense heatwaves are likely to be accompanied by changes to the structure of the warm and cool water layers in the Arctic Ocean. The findings “suggest major challenges for Arctic ecosystems, and may negatively impact food webs through direct physiological temperature effects”, the authors say.

A survey of 1,500 farmers across 10 African mountain regions finds that these communities are already experiencing “multiple impacts” from climate change. Climate impacts reported by African mountain farmers include reduced stream flow, reduced crop yields and cow milk production, increased soil erosion, increased crop and livestock diseases and reduced human health. The farmers are “mostly responding by intensifying farming practices and using off-farm labour”, the authors say.