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Out of a superhero movie: Companies are coming up with plans to block out the sun.

Private companies are jumping into the race to deploy particles to the atmosphere to reduce global warming, prompting enthusiasm from investors and concerns from some scientists, Josh Marcus reports

Independent, 25 December 2025

A secretive team of scientists is working on an unprecedented plan to fill the atmosphere with tiny particles that imitate a volcanic eruption and block out the sun. It might save humanity, or it could spiral out of control. Thousands stand opposed to such a scheme, but these plans may move forward anyway.

This is not the plot of the next Marvel movie, but solar geoengineering, one of the very non-fictional frontiers of climate research.

In October, a start-up called Stardust Solutions announced it had raised $60 million to pursue technology that will bounce the sun’s light back into space using reflective, airborne particles.

It is the largest investment ever for a company pursuing such a strategy to cool our rapidly overheating planet, according to Politico, and builds off the firm’s previous $15 million funding series.

Stardust Solutions is one of a small but closely-watched group of companies and researchers pursuing such ideas in the hopes of making rapid gains on the climate crisis as international action remains perilously insufficient.

The basic idea is to limit how much of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth’s surface. While this won’t tackle the root cause of the climate crisis — still-rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — “solar radiation modification” could reduce the global temperature and slow the melting of the polar ice caps, buying us all some much-needed time.

While the idea has been around since the mid-Sixties, small-scale outdoor experiments have only begun in the last two decades, including cloud seeding in Switzerland and testing salt spray’s impacts on the clouds above the Great Barrier Reef.

For every fledgling experiment, another project has been canceled in the face of public opposition. A 2024 effort spraying sea salt aerosols from a decommissioned air craft carrier in Alameda, California, was quickly shut down because of outrage from community members who said they were not consulted, while the Indigenous Saami people of Scandinavia were among those who opposed the aborted 2021 SCoPEx project in Sweden, arguing the plan to spray calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere violated both their philosophy towards the Earth and would not be an impactful scientific strategy to stop the root causes of the climate crisis’

Despite these concerns, the daily glut of increasingly dire climate updates – including the recent news of the likely irreversible decline of ocean corals – has given new momentum to this once fringe idea.

A ‘human-safe’ particle spray

Stardust Solutions was founded in 2023 by Yanai Yedvab and Amyad Spector, nuclear physicists who met at an Israeli national laboratory, and particle physicist Eli Waxman, former chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/dim-sun-climate-change-b2877722.html

December 28, 2025 Posted by | climate change, Israel | Leave a comment

Earth’s frozen regions are sending a clear warning about climate change – but politicians are ignoring it.

The Conversation,  December 18, 2025, https://theconversation.com/earths-frozen-regions-are-sending-a-clear-warning-about-climate-change-but-politicians-are-ignoring-it-270604

  1. Chris StokesProfessor in the Department of Geography, Durham University
  2. Florence ColleoniSenior Researcher, Polar Geophysics, National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS)
  3. James KirkhamPostdoctoral Researcher, Antarctic Geography, British Antarctic Survey

“We cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice.” That’s the message from more than 50 leading scientists who study the Earth’s frozen regions, published in the latest annual State of the Cryosphere report.

In the past year alone, the vast polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are likely to have shed around 370 billion tonnes of ice, with a further 270 billion tonnes from the 270,000 mountain glaciers around the world, some of which are disappearing altogether.

In February 2025, global sea ice extent reached a new all-time minimum in the 47-year satellite record. Elsewhere, perennially frozen ground (called permafrost) continues to thaw, releasing additional greenhouse gas emissions each year that are roughly equivalent to the world’s eighth-highest-emitting country.

The warning lights from the cryosphere have been flashing red for several years, and governments ignore this at their peril.

Melting ice is driving an acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise, which has doubled to 4.5mm per year over the last three decades. If this acceleration continues, sea-level rise will reach around 1cm per year by the end of this century – a rate so high that many island and coastal communities will be forced to move.

The loss of mountain glaciers will affect billions of people who rely on their meltwater for agriculture, hydropower and other human activities; and the damage caused to infrastructure by Arctic permafrost thaw has been estimated to cost US$182 billion (£137 billion) by 2050 under our current emissions trajectory.

Negotiations based on ‘best available’ science

In an effort to reduce the risks and effects of climate change, including those from the cryosphere described above, the Paris climate agreement was adopted by 195 countries at the annual UN climate summit in 2015, with the aim of limiting “the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.

Its implementation should be based on and guided by the “best available science”. That includes evidence provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group created by the UN to provide governments with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

This guiding principle was strengthened by the International Court of Justice in July 2025, which reaffirmed 1.5°C as the primary legally binding target for climate policies under the Paris climate agreement.

Yet recent climate negotiations, including at the UN climate summit in Brazil in November 2025 (Cop30), have seen some countries – largely fossil fuel producers – push back on previously standard language endorsing the IPCC as a source of the “best available science”.

As cryosphere scientists who regularly attend the UN’s climate summits, we have noticed recent efforts to downplay, confuse and dilute some of the latest scientific findings, especially from the cryosphere. We find this alarming.

At Cop30, observations about the complete loss of glaciers in two countries (Slovenia and Venezuela) were removed from the final draft text. Other shocking scientific findings about “irreversible changes to the cryosphere” were diluted to a rather vague “need to enhance observations and address gaps in the monitoring of the hydrosphere and the cryosphere”.

This tactic to obfuscate the science is not new, but has been increasingly used over recent years, during which the indicators of climate change and its consequences on the cryosphere have become increasingly obvious to scientists.

At Cop30, climate negotiators from several countries expressed disappointment and concern that the role of the IPCC as the best available science was not highlighted alongside some of the more alarming scientific findings, with an intervention from the UK capturing this frustration.

While the final overarching summary text from Cop30 – the Mutirão decision – references the IPCC as the source of the best available science, and contains some strong language around the need to limit warming to 1.5°C, rather than 2°C, these look like empty words when the same document fails to even mention “fossil fuels”. Emissions from fossil fuels will result in 2.6°C of warming by 2100, without urgent action.

Indeed, the final text from Cop30 is the first to explicitly reference a temperature “overshoot”, reiterating the need “to limit both the magnitude and the duration of any temperature overshoot”. Most scientists agree that overshoot is now inevitable, but that 1.5°C increase remains the legal and ethical imperative for a long-term global temperature target.

However, some scientists – including ourselves – would argue that even this is too high, committing us to losing around half of the world’s mountain glaciers and several metres of sea-level rise from the polar ice sheets.

Among the dire warnings, a recent study offers hope that it is still possible to curtail warming in the next 15 to 20 years, peaking at an increase of around 1.7°C in the 2040s before declining to an increase of 1.5°C and then 1.2°C by the end of the century. But that requires rapid and deep cuts in emissions from now on.

Climate negotiations may move at a glacial pace, but the irony is that the pace of glacier change is rapidly overtaking our ability to adapt to it and protect the most vulnerable people. The science is clear. But the perils of ignoring it are even clearer.

December 24, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Nuc­lear power plant is threat to our future.

Western Morning News, Jo Smol­don Bridg­wa­ter, Somer­set18 Dec 2025,
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/western-morning-news/20251218/281835765040539

YES, of course the Stop Hinkley event you pub­li­cised (Let­ters, Decem­ber 13) was Christ­mas humour, but it does con­cern us that sig­ni­fic­ant facts are being ignored about the out­dated Hinkley Point C new (old) nuc­lear power plant being built on our pre­cious Severn estu­ary when cli­mate change pre­dic­tions sug­gest that the Hinkley coast­line will be inund­ated and flood­ing will occur across Somer­set.

How will this be safe when HPC radio­act­ive waste will be too hot to move and will have to reside on the fra­gile coast­line for over 200 years?

It seems that there are not enough skilled work­ers to com­plete the HPC job which has had design prob­lems, des­pite sup­posedly learn­ing from the mis­takes at Olkiluoto, in Fin­land, Flam­man­ville, in France, and Taishan, in China.

The ori­ginal work­force of 8,000 has now had to increase to 15,000, and still the start-up date is up in the clouds. The costs have escal­ated from £18 bil­lion to cur­rent pre­dicted costs of £46 bil­lion and rising.

How is the coun­try going to pay for this and all the other pie in the sky so-called new nuc­lear builds that roll off the tongues of the fast turnover of politi­cians that have been involved?

So far it has taken 10 Prime Min­is­ters, start­ing with Thatcher, to par­tially build HPC. Their leg­acy is a big mis­take that nobody has the cour­age to say we shouldn’t have star­ted this, it’s a run­away train on which nobody has figured out how to apply the brakes.

HPC is fin­ished. HPC will never be needed, I believe, other than for a build­ing site train­ing pro­gramme.

Not one of those Prime Min­is­ters will be account­able for the toxic high level radio­act­ive waste that will be lurk­ing on the Severn estu­ary coast­line far into the future for our chil­dren’s chil­dren to pay for and deal with.

The level of radio­activ­ity of the waste will be in total around 80% of the radio­activ­ity level cur­rently of Sel­lafield. This fact alone will mean that Hinkley will be the Sel­lafield of the South.

Hinkley’s design is cur­rently in the news due to its inten­tion of des­troy­ing more of our pre­cious Severn estu­ary fish and mar­ine life in its massive cool­ing water intakes, which will suck in an Olympic-sized swim­ming pool of water every 20 seconds.

EDF is fal­ter­ing over its require­ment to pro­tect the fish with an acous­tic fish deterrent. Even so, this tech­no­logy may save some of the fish, but the eggs and fry will pass into the cool­ing sys­tem and be des­troyed by the heat and chem­ic­als, which will then be pumped back out into the estu­ary.

The tech­no­logy of nuc­lear power belongs to the last cen­tury and is waste­ful of energy. The steam pro­cess res­ults in two thirds of the heat energy being pumped out into the estu­ary warm­ing the sea.

Stop Hinkley con­tin­ues to hold EDF to account, and we will be watch­ing, and we will be back for the next pre­dicted fin­ish date of 2027 with our HPC Christ­mas tur­key to cook.

December 21, 2025 Posted by | climate change, UK | Leave a comment

Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined’

Oliver Milman, Guardian 16th Dec 2025

Region known as ‘world’s refrigerator’ is heating up as much as four times as quickly as global average, Noaa experts say

The Arctic endured a year of record heat and shrunken sea ice as the world’s northern latitudes continue a rapid shift to becoming rainier and less ice-bound due to the climate crisis, scientists have reported.

From October 2024 to September 2025, temperatures across the entire Arctic region were the hottest in 125 years of modern record keeping, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said, with the last 10 years being the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

The Arctic is heating up as much as four times as quickly as the global average, due to the burning of fossil fuels, and this extra heat is warping the world’s refrigerator – a region that acts as a key climate regulator for the rest of the planet……………………………………………………………………….. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/16/artic-record-heat-shrunken-sea-ice-report

December 21, 2025 Posted by | ARCTIC, climate change | Leave a comment

Climateflation: the food system in crisis

Jonathon Porritt 11th Dec 2025

Someday soon, our mainstream media is going to blow the gaff on today’s self-appointed tribunes of the people who, often in the very same speech, will inveigh against the ever-rising cost of living (and the scourge of food inflation in particular) while robustly asserting that climate change is a myth—a middle-class obsession that imposes outrageous costs on working families.

I can’t say I much like the word, but the portmanteau ‘climateflation’ should provide a bit of a heads-up for these loathsome hypocrites. Food prices have been rising for all sorts of different reasons, and it’s not easy to attribute a particular percentage of these rises to the impact of climate change on food crops and supply chains. But figures of anywhere between 10% and 20% have been cited, with specific reference to extreme heat reducing crop yields around the world (all crops have their own heat tolerance limit), as well as the growing frequency of floods and droughts.

Major food retailers in both Europe and the US are much more exercised about the way this is translating into price rises for fruit and veg in particular, although the language they use often steers clear of pinning it explicitly on climate change. How about this for a classic euphemism from the British Retail Consortium: “seasonal food inflation driven by weather”!

…………………………………………….  climateflation is already with us, with an average temperature increase of around 1.5°C since the Industrial Revolution. No surprise then that projections for future impacts (with average temperature increases of 2°C+) are getting truly scary. The European Central Bank looked at potential impacts by 2035, causing food prices in Europe to rise by between 1% and 3% every year, adding 0.3% to 1.2% to whatever the rate of inflation might be in any one year.

The reprehensible get-out for politicians is that even the most sophisticated climate models are still not much cop when it comes to projecting extreme weather events, let alone the movement of pathogens (pests and diseases) as the weather goes on getting warmer. It’s always after the event that the true scale of the damage becomes clear—as with the killer bacteria ‘xylella fastidiosa’ that has been ravaging Italy’s olives over the last decade, resulting in significant hikes in the price of olive oil. The prices of both chocolate and coffee have been similarly affected by different climate-induced factors.

All that’s bad enough, but we should be thanking our lucky stars we don’t live in one of the many countries directly affected by retreating glaciers. A report from UNESCO in March this year (the World Water Development Report) confirmed that the food and water supplies of around 2 billion people will be affected over the next two or three decades by what is now the fastest rate of glacier melting on record. We’re not just talking about food inflation here—we’re talking about life and death for hundreds of millions of people…………………………………………………………………….

The cruellest response to all this that we hear from the politicians is that farmers must ‘adapt.’ But there’s really not a lot the individual farmer can do as once-reliable weather patterns go berserk, as warmer temperatures steadily reduce moisture in the soil, and as demand for irrigation water steadily rises—even as food retailers remain as greedy and inflexible as ever.

So is that it then? Just factor in the inevitability of worsening climate inflation and invest in more food banks for those already struggling with the cost of food?  Absolutely not! In fact, there are four big things the UK government needs to be focusing on right now:

  • Get really serious about food security. (Professor Tim Lang’s report earlier this year (“Just In Case”) written for the National Preparedness Commission, provides the clearest possible warning of the vulnerability of the UK’s food system to external shocks).
  • Regulate the hell out of all those companies profiting so handsomely from the sale of ultra-processed food.
  • Encourage consumers to eat less meat.
  • Reduce food waste — both at the farm gate (particularly in poorer countries) and post-consumer.

Uncomfortably, that means acknowledging that Big Ag (that drives or benefits from each of these meta-impacts on our health and the environment) poses as great a threat to the well-being of people and to our prospects as a species as Big Oil. Which is why you won’t find many politicians venturing into this increasingly controversial territory. https://jonathonporritt.com/climateflation-food-system-crisis/

December 15, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

What’s behind the massive death toll in floods across Southeast Asia –and why it should serve as a warning.


 Regional experts warn that without rapid cuts in fossil-fuel emissions and serious investment in resilience
– from restoring forests to enforcing planning rules – disasters like this year’s may become regular rather than rare.

 Independent 4th Dec 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/sri-lanka-indonesia-thailand-floods-deaths-storm-cyclone-b2877788.html
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 Regional experts warn that without rapid cuts in fossil-fuel emissions and serious investment in resilience
– from restoring forests to enforcing planning rules – disasters like this year’s may become regular rather than rare.

 Independent 4th Dec 2025, https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/sri-lanka-indonesia-thailand-floods-deaths-storm-cyclone-b2877788.html

December 6, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

‘Deeply disappointing’: Experts slam Cop30 for ignoring climate’s impact on food supply

 Food and nature experts have expressed dismay at the outcome of Brazil’s
recently-concluded Cop30 climate conference, after the final text failed to
make any mention of the impact of climate change on food systems. A plan to
address food systems emissions is critical to decarbonisation, with the
sector responsible for around one-third of overall emissions, which
originates from areas including livestock, waste disposal, food processing,
as well as rice paddy fields, which produce large quantities of methane.

 Independent 28th Nov 2025,
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/cop30-brazil-food-amazon-climate-b2871542.html

December 1, 2025 Posted by | Brazil, climate change | Leave a comment

Beyond the negative headlines, some truly good things came out of Cop30.

In this week’s newsletter: Ultimately, climate progress will come from
real-world action, and this year’s summit made some promising strides on
that front. ome commentators have called Cop30 a failure. An attempt to
insert plans for a route to the phaseout of fossil fuels into the legal
text was stymied, consideration of how to improve countries’
emissions-cutting plans was put off till next year, and although developing
countries got the tripling of finance for adaptation that they were
seeking, it will not be delivered in full until 2035 – and will come out
of already promised funds. Look beyond the headlines, however, and the Cop
achieved a great deal more. Take the outcome on fossil fuels – it seems
absurd, but until 2023 three decades of annual climate summits had failed
to address fossil fuels directly. More on the positives to come out of this
year’s climate conference, after this week’s most important reads.

 Guardian 27th Nov 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/27/beyond-the-negative-headlines-some-truly-good-things-came-out-of-cop30

November 29, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Fossil Fuels at COP30: Sacred, Profane and Unmentioned

Most conspicuously, the final agreement makes no mention of fossil fuels (it made a unique appearance in COP28), tantamount to discussing a raging pandemic without ever mentioning the devastating virus.

28 November 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/fossil-fuels-at-cop30-sacred-profane-and-unmentioned/

If the camel is a committee’s version of a horse, then the concluding notes of the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) at Belém, Brazil were bound to be ungainly, weak, and messy. That is what you get from an emitting gathering of over 56,000 mostly subsidised attendees keen to etch their way into posterity. Leave aside the fact that some of the conference mongers might have been well meaning, the final agreement was always going to be significant for what it omitted. It was also prominent for lacking any official role from the United States, a country where Make America Great Again has all but parted ways with notions of climate change.

For three decades, these events have drawn attention to climate change ostensibly to address it. For three decades, the stuttering, the vacillation, the manipulation, have become habitual features, making the very object of condemnation – fossil fuels – both sacred and profane. The message is that humanity must do without it lest we let planet Earth cook; the message, equally, is that it can’t. “COP30 will be the ‘COP of truth,’” Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva declared extravagantly at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in September, immediately dooming it to comic platitude. The sacred and profane – fossil fuels – would remain strong at the end of the show.

There was some initial promise that attending member states might do something different. Initial pressure was exerted by the Colombia-led coalition (“mutirão” or joint effort) of 83 countries to abandon the use of fossil fuels and chart a Roadmap to decarbonise the global economy.  

Then came a soggy threat by a group of 29 countries in a letter to the Brazilian COP presidency that any agreement lacking a commitment to phase out fossil fuels would be blocked. “We cannot support an outcome that does not include a roadmap for implementing a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels,” emphasised the authors, which included such countries as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Palau, the UK and Vanuatu. This expectation is shared by a vast majority of Parties, as well as by science and by the people who are watching our work closely.” The threat duly sagged into oblivion.

The resulting COP 30 agreement, with the aspirational title “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change” was a tepid affair. There were the usual tired acknowledgments – the importance of addressing climate change (yes, that’s what they were there for); the need to conserve, protect and restore nature and ecosystems through reversing deforestation (wonderful); the human rights dimension (rights to health, a clean, healthy and sustainable environment); the importance of equity and the principle of common albeit differentiated responsibilities specific to the States (fine sentiments) known as the just transition mechanism.

Most conspicuously, the final agreement makes no mention of fossil fuels (it made a unique appearance in COP28), tantamount to discussing a raging pandemic without ever mentioning the devastating virus. As Jasper Inventor, Deputy Programme Director of Greenpeace International acidly remarked: “COP30 didn’t deliver ambition on the 3Fs – fossil fuels, finance and forests.” In what can only be regarded as an observation born from defeat and desperation, UN Climate Change Secretary Simon Stiell offered his summary: “Many countries wanted to move faster on fossil fuels, finance, and responding to climate disasters. I understand that frustration, and many of those I share myself. But let’s not ignore how far this COP has moved forward.” In this area of diplomacy, movement is excruciatingly relative.

There remained a modish insistence on voluntariness, with COP30 President André Corrêa de Lago announcing a voluntary “roadmap” to move away from fossil fuels. Officially, the sacred and the profane could not be mentioned; unofficially, other countries and civil society could do what they damn well wished to when addressing climate change challenges. To that end, the process would take place outside the formal UN processes and merge with the Columbia-steered “coalition of the willing.” The parties would otherwise, as the agreement stipulated, “launch the Global Implementation Accelerator” to “keep 1.5°C within reach,” yet another woolly term conceived by committee.  

Colombia and the Netherlands were quick to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. “This will be,” explained Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”

Admirable as this may be, a note of profound resignation reigned among many in the scientific community. While COP30 might have been seen as a meeting of “truth and implementation,” the truth, charged Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was that keeping the target of 1.5°C within reach entailed bending “the global curve of emissions downward in 2026 and then reduce emissions by at least 5% per year.” And that’s saying nothing about implementation.

November 29, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

How the United Nations has under-predicted the rate of global temperature rise

The UN’s climate science body has been conservative in its predictions of temperature rises

.We sometimes hear misleading stories
claiming that the United Nations has exaggerated the greenhouse effect.
However, looking back at the studies published by the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the early 1990s its
predictions have, in reality, been on the conservative side. That is, its
median projections look like they were, in 1992, under-predicting, not
over-predicting, the rate of global temperature increase.

 Dave Toke’s Blog 26th Nov 2025,
https://davidtoke.substack.com/p/how-the-united-nations-has-under

November 28, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

COPout 30 Backpedals on Climate Action

SCHEERPOST, November 22, 2025, By Bob Berwyn for Inside Climate News

Offering no new plans to cut fossil fuels, the UN’s climate conference failed to produce a roadmap to stop global warming

BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 conference center was as pervasive as the diesel fumes from the generators outside the tent.

This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was billed as the “COP of Truth” by host country Brazil, but it could go down in history “as the deadliest talk show ever,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

COP30 was yet another “theater of delay” with endless discussions, and the creation of yet more administrative duties, “solely to avoid the actions that matter—committing to a just transition away from fossil fuels and putting money on the table,” he said.

A draft text released Nov. 18 clearly spelled out the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the final version, the language was watered down, merely acknowledging that “the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.”

After setting out ambitious targets ahead of the climate talks, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago, the secretary for climate, energy and environment in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the disappointment. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/22/cop30-backpedals-on-climate-action/

November 25, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

‘It’s like arguing with robots’: negotiators on the state of Cop30 talks.

Three representatives of developing countries speak candidly about meetings
behind closed doors in Belém. In the negotiating rooms at the Cop30
climate conference, representatives from vulnerable countries work to get
the best deal they can. Here, three of them reveal what happens behind
closed doors. ‘They don’t listen. They don’t want to listen’; ‘I get
very frustrated with the developed countries’ positions’; ‘Some are
saying: “Why even come to Cop?”’

Guardian 21st Nov 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/21/cop30-climate-summit-brazil-negotiators-talks-developing-countries

November 24, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Pledges to triple renewables, reduce methane and double efficiency will deliver huge climate savings.

 Triple renewables, double energy efficiency and cut back on methane by
2030 – that’s what it would take for the world to cut global emissions
by 18 billion tonnes by 2035, according to a report by Climate Analytics.
The report, released at COP30 in Belem, Brazil on Thursday and timed for
the crescendo of negotiations at the international climate conference,
found that the rate of projected warming over the next decade can be
slashed if countries do what they have already promised. This would amount
to a reduction of 0.9°C of warming – almost the entire 1°C improvement
achieved since the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

 Renew Economy 20th Nov 2025, https://reneweconomy.com.au/pledges-to-triple-renewables-reduce-methane-and-double-efficiency-will-deliver-huge-climate-savings/

November 23, 2025 Posted by | climate change | Leave a comment

Fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber all Cop30 delegations except Brazil, report says

 More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the
Cop30 climate negotiations in Belém, significantly outnumbering every
single country’s delegation apart from the host Brazil, new analysis has
found. One in every 25 participants at this year’s UN climate summit is a
fossil fuel lobbyist, according to the analysis by the Kick Big Polluters
Out (KBPO) coalition, raising serious questions about the corporate capture
and credibility of the annual Cop negotiations.

 Guardian 14th Nov 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/14/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-cop30

November 17, 2025 Posted by | climate change | 1 Comment

COP30 won’t save us, but China might.

From Fix the News, 17 Nov 25

We’ve been writing about China’s renewable energy revolution here for years, so we know it’s not news to you. But it does feel like something has shifted in the last few weeks; that mainstream outlets seem to have finally woken up to what’s actually happening and more importantly, what it means. It’s not just that China is building lots of solar and wind. It’s that China might actually be the country that saves us from climate catastrophe.

This is a difficult thing for many of us in the West to get our heads around. China has been the world’s collective climate bogeyman for so long, the largest emitter, still pumping out coal, refusing to make the commitments everyone else has agreed to. But, as negotiations kick off in earnest at COP30 in Belém, the story has flipped. China’s emissions are plateauing and more crucially, they’re now supplying the technology for the energy transition to everyone else.

The Economist  says China is “a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale;” already home to a terawatt of installed solar capacity, more than double what the United States and Europe have combined. It makes more money from exporting green technology than America (the world’s biggest petrostate) makes from exporting fossil fuels.

Reuters notes that China now dominates clean energy supply chains and files three times more clean-tech patents than the rest of the world combined. “China is now the main engine of the global clean energy transition.”

The New York Times reports that China’s overseas investments in clean energy have exceeded $225 billion since 2011, more than the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. In Pakistan, a standalone panel costs farmers $125, and they never have to worry about buying diesel again. In Nepal, electric vehicles now make up 76% of new car sales because the Chinese Seres Mini EV sells for $10,000. These aren’t moral decisions. They’re economic ones.

But the journalist who captures it best is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph. He starts with the grim reality that CO2 emissions hit record levels last year, oceans are the warmest ever recorded, and forests are burning at unprecedented rates. Then he introduces the idea of a “second derivative” – the early signs of an energy shift most people are missing.

Global fossil use in industry peaked in 2014. Sales of petrol and diesel cars peaked in 2017. Transport emissions are finally rolling over. China’s coal use appears to have peaked. Its emissions have fallen by 1% this year.

His conclusion is worth repeating: “We may or may not avert a scorching runaway world of two degrees plus, but whether we succeed will have nothing to do with anything said or agreed to by the 50,000 people descending on Belém. It will be decided by geopolitics, market prices and the tidal force of technological change.”

Try not to worry too much about the climate summits. What matters far more is that China is now playing midwife to a clean energy transition that makes economic sense for the 80% of humanity that lives in countries that import fossil fuels. Those 6.4 billion people have no reason to stay dependent on shipments from petrostates anymore, when they can import solar panels made by the world’s first electrostate.

This doesn’t mean the problem is solved, energy is too big and complicated for that. China and India are still building coal plants. Almost every country is building fossil gas. But the trajectory has changed. And it’s changed not because of international agreements or appeals to the better angels of our nature, but because national self-interest is finally aligning with climate action.

November 17, 2025 Posted by | China, climate change | Leave a comment

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