By Somini Sengupta  and  Brad Plumer ,  The New York Times.  ' Excerpt: As the United States  torpedoes climate action  and Europe  struggles to realize its green ambitions , a surprising shift is taking hold in many large, fast-growing economies where a majority of the world’s people live. Countries like Brazil, India, and Vietnam are rapidly expanding solar and wind power. Poorer countries like Ethiopia and Nepal are leapfrogging over gasoline-burning cars to battery-powered ones. Nigeria, a petrostate, plans to  build its first solar-panel manufacturing plant . Morocco is creating a battery hub to supply European automakers. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has electrified more than half of its bus fleet in recent years. Key to this shift is the world’s new renewable energy superpower: China. Having  saturated its own market  with solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, Chinese companies are now exporting their wares to energy-hungr...

By Max Bearak , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...Fatih Birol... has led out of obscurity over the past decade, the International Energy Agency [IEA]. ...Mr. Birol likes to joke that he is “the world’s most boring man.” He certainly exudes a kind of bureaucratic plainness. But he has also deftly led the I.E.A. through a decade during which energy has re-emerged as a geopolitical weapon. The debate over how to address climate change is upending economic and diplomatic relations around the world — right as the Trump administration works to reverse a global push for a transition to renewable energy by producing, consuming and exporting as much fossil fuel as it can. Mr. Birol, for his part, has repeatedly offered the fossil fuel industry a kind of “adapt or fail” warning, particularly as solar power grows at a pace that even the I.E.A. underestimated. ...The organization’s members, mostly Western countries, have increasingly turned to it for guidance, even if the I.E.A. has occasionall...

By Alan Gould, GSS. Excerpt: The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP) to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international effort to dramatically reduce human caused climate change. The Quaker Youth UN Ambassadors Program has organized a delegation to COP30 from the US, tropical Africa, and the Middle East. Most of the delegation are credentialed remote observers rather than actually on the ground in Belem, Brazil for COP30 which is November 10 through 21. If you are interested in participating in virtually connecting up with these ambassadors, please contact Frank Granshaw.  Here is the portal: A Virtual Observers Guide to COP30 , the 2025 UN Climate Conference https://sites.google.com/view/virtualobserversguidetocop30 . 

By Somini Sengupta ,  Brad Plumer  and  David Gelles , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The international climate summit opened on Thursday in Belém, a Brazilian city on the edge of the imperiled Amazon rainforest, with several of America’s global allies and rivals alike making the case that slowing down global warming is today key to economic growth and energy security. It was a sharp counterpoint to President Trump, who has called climate change a “con job” ...attacked global efforts to transition away from coal, oil and gas ...has launched a full-throated...attack on global efforts to reduce the world’s reliance on fossil fuels. ...no senior American government officials are present at the meeting in Belém. ...extreme weather events, aggravated by the burning of coal, oil and gas, has heightened human suffering. In the last two weeks alone, storms and hurricanes supersized by climate change clobbered Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti. Globally, 2025 is on track to be the sec...

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Hurricane Melissa’s path through the Caribbean last month was made more violent by climate change, according to a scientific analysis released Thursday. Researchers from the group World Weather Attribution found that the storm had 7 percent stronger wind speeds than a similar one in a world that has not been warmed by the burning of fossil fuels. They also found the rate of rainfall inside the eyewall of the storm was 16 percent more intense. Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Jamaica on Oct. 28 with wind speeds of 185 miles per hour, collapsing buildings and knocking out internet to most of the island. It continued on to Cuba as a Category 3 storm, forcing hundreds to evacuate, and pummeled Haiti with catastrophic flooding. Dozens of people in hard-hit areas have died. Even a small increase in wind speed can cause substantial damage, said Friederike Otto, one of the group’s founders and a climatologist at Imperia...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: It’s a hallmark prediction of climate change: As the world warms, trees will migrate not just toward the poles, but also up the slopes of mountains, eating away at fragile alpine ecosystems. Although advancing tree lines have been tracked at individual mountains, a new large-scale study  has found something surprising : Over a span of 4 decades, the largest upward movement of these forests has come not near the poles, as one might expect, but instead in the tropics, where monitoring has been far more limited....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/forests-are-migrating-mountain-peaks .