By ANTON L. DELGADO , AP.  Excerpt: BANGKOK (AP) — China is exporting a record amount of clean energy technology and equipment as the energy crisis from the Iran war drives surging demand for renewables , and that will help reduce global emissions, according to a report released Thursday. Once installed or deployed, these 2026 exports will likely avert emissions of about 450 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, roughly equal to Brazil’s annual emissions, says the analysis by the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air [CREA]. It’s a small sign of progress as global efforts to curb climate change fall short. In November, Turkey will host annual U.N. climate talks where electrification is expected to be a leading topic. Record-breaking year for Chinese exports ...China is by far the largest global supplier of renewable energy equipment, from solar panels and wind turbines to electric vehicles and batteries. Most of what it makes is sold domestically ...

By Michelle Lewis , Eletrek.  Excerpt: Over the coming year, renewables’ share of total generating capacity will grow from 37.7% to 40.4%, surpassing that of natural gas and outstripping nuclear capacity fivefold, according to new data released by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and reviewed by the SUN DAY Campaign. Renewable electricity generation grew by more than 10% over the past year. According to the EIA’s latest “ Electric Power Monthly ” report (with data through August 31, 2026), renewably generated electricity during the first two-thirds of 2026 was 10.2% greater year over year. The growth was led by utility-scale [>1 MW] solar (up 20.0%), small-scale solar (up 12.0%), wind (up 7.8%), hydropower (up 4.2%), and geothermal (up 3.8%). From January to August 2026, wind produced 333,367 gigawatt-hours (GWh) – 10.6% of total US electrical generation – while utility-scale and small-scale solar combined produced 329,119 GWh (10.5%), hydropower produced 180,940 G...

By Rachel Frazin , The Hill.  Excerpt: The Trump administration is planning to loosen regulations on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, and particularly for low-producing, high-emitting oil and gas wells. President Trump will announce a proposed rule to roll back those regulations at a Tuesday night rally in Texas, an administration official confirmed. The draft rule would be expected to particularly ease regulations on “marginal wells,” which produce a relatively small quantity of oil or gas. These oil wells are estimated to produce just 7 percent of the nation’s oil and gas but about half of its methane emissions.  Methane is a planet-warming gas that’s about 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide and is responsible for about 25 percent of global warming. It mainly comes from the production and transport of fossil fuels — as well as from livestock and other agriculture and decaying waste in landfills. Natural gas is primarily made up of methane....  Full ...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: In 2003, wildlife biologists made a gruesome discovery on a mountain in West Virginia. Several thousand bats had been killed at a new wind farm. Until then, birds such as hawks and eagles were thought to be at the most risk of being struck dead by the massive spinning blades at the top of wind turbines. More than 28 bat species have since been confirmed as victims at similar facilities nationwide. But it has been challenging to estimate just how many bats are dying. Now, the most comprehensive study to date has yielded a distressingly large number. Some 18.7 million bats died from wind turbines in the United States between 1981 and 2024, it estimates—and the problem has grown dramatically worse in recent years. The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , suggests about 100,000 bats died per year 2 decades ago. But by 2021, the boom in wind farms had pushed the toll to 1.5 million bats annually. ...The...

By Michael Booth , The Colorado Sun.  Excerpt: Colorado’s electric grid has winter capacity “headroom” to power millions more clean energy heat pumps to replace natural gas furnaces, a transformation that would ease consumer bills and expand the global warming fight, according to a new study. The energy analysis nonprofit RMI, formerly Rocky Mountain Institute, says Colorado’s electrical demand peaks tend to come in summer from air conditioning, and that in winter the state could handle 1.6 million more heat pumps, or 17 times more than currently installed.  Heat pumps run on electricity instead of natural gas, and provide both winter heating and summer cooling. As Colorado’s electrical grid transitions to clean solar and wind generation, state officials and environmental groups see home and commercial furnaces as a key opportunity to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning.  Switching that many heating and cooling systems to heat pumps could lower expected ...

By Brooklyn Smith, The Cool Down (TCD).  Excerpt: In Northern Ireland, a four-bedroom house shows what happens when a family runs both its home energy use and its driving on electricity: two major expenses collapse into a single, lower bill. The owners of Tigh Beag, in the Glens of Antrim, said running the property and their electric vehicle together costs about £44 (approximately $59 USD) per week. ...Anne-Marie McGoldrick said, "We wanted a home that was really comfortable and easy to live in and that's exactly what we've ended up with. It just makes everyday life feel comfortable and effortless. And it's reassuring to know when we hear about another tariff hike or diesel price rise, we're much less affected. So much of our energy comes from our own renewable generation and battery storage, which gives us a lot more peace of mind." ...roughly half of [the cost] contributing to driving; and that's around 12,000 miles per year."...Instead of sending ...

By Ajit Niranjan , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths. Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering. The “staggering” death toll, modelled using historical relationships between heat and health in 854 cities, was the worst on record, the study found. Hot weather marked by relentless heatwaves killed nearly twice as many people as it did in each of the two next most dangerous years. ...People succumbed to heat at the highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, while absolute death tolls were greatest in Italy, France, Spain, Germany and the UK. Because death certificates rarely record contributing fa...

By Sara Herschander , Vox.  Excerpt: When the sun goes down, the wind picks up in central New Mexico, whipping through arid canyons with a ghostly howl that for centuries, locals have likened to the wails of the folkloric ghost La Llorona. A few hours east of Albuquerque, this June, those gusts began powering the largest wind farm this continent has ever seen, twirling over 900 colossal steel turbines. Each is as tall as the Statue of Liberty, scattered across a patch of desert roughly the size of Chicago. They plug into a 550-mile transmission line stitched across the Southwest and are now powering over one million homes — as far away as California....  Full article at https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/507189/sunzia-wind-energy-transmission-project . 

By Nicholas Kusnetz , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt:  United Nations fund to help developing nations pay the costs imposed by climate change voted Thursday to allocate money for Nepal as the country recovers from devastating flooding in August. It was a historic step for the fund—the first time it has allocated money to a vulnerable country in an immediate response to climate impacts. But that also highlighted the severe limitations it faces. It was 2022 when nations agreed to create the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage. The aim was for wealthy nations to contribute money that would flow to developing countries to cover irreversible economic losses caused by climate change. The fund has yet to disburse any money. The disaster in Nepal, where flooding unleashed by a landslide and glacial collapse killed some 1,500 people, with more than 5,000 still missing, was exactly what the fund was meant to address....  Full article at https://insideclimatenews.org/news/221020...

By Nathaniel Eisen , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: Picture a buoyant triangular steel or concrete platform roughly the dimensions of a baseball field.  Now place a wind turbine taller than the London Eye on top, connect mooring lines to the seabed and power cables to the grid, and you’ve got a floating wind turbine. This fantastical-sounding technology is real. At demonstration and small-scale projects in Europe, Asia and a single U.S. site in Maine, floating turbines are producing power. Multiple different platform designs have been field tested, from the aforementioned triangle to a single massive cylinder. But plans to build larger projects of 10 or more turbines, each capable of powering a neighborhood, have lagged behind early projections. The business case for floating turbines, as opposed to their fixed-bottom counterparts, boils down to two points: they can do their thing making power farther from shore, where the high winds are and the people generally aren’t. In so...

By Stefano Valentino in Sulawesi and Ajit Niranjan .The Guardian.  Excerpt: Volkswagen, Ford and Tesla are among the electric carmakers whose batteries may contain nickel mined in indigenous woodlands plagued by deforestation, an analysis has found, highlighting the struggle to make vehicles that are free from environmental destruction. Corporate disclosures and trade flows from the last two years show mines in the battery supply chains of automotive giants are linked to the loss of trees in Sulawesi, a wildlife hotspot in Indonesia that houses the world’s largest nickel deposits. The metal is widely used in cathodes in car batteries because it boosts energy density and increases range. Ore from the Cahaya and Hengjaya mines was traced through regional smelters and Chinese processing plants run by Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, a cathode manufacturer that supplies CATL, the world’s largest battery maker. Huayou’s corporate reports list US and European carmakers as end-users, while addi...

By Kathy Barnes, Better Homes and Gardens.  Excerpt: “If you’ve ever wanted to try solar power without committing to rooftop panels, permits, or installation costs, plug-in panels might be the way to go. Plug-in solar panels won’t power your entire home or replace a rooftop system. But in the right setting—with good sunlight and realistic expectations—they can trim energy costs, reduce daytime grid use, and make solar more accessible.” ...Unlike traditional rooftop solar systems, these units don’t require permanent installation. Anyone can use plug-in solar units, including renters , and place them on a balcony or patio, in the yard, or near a sunny window, with a power cord plugged into an outdoor-rated outlet. ...Experts say that a 300- to 400-watt system can reduce daytime electricity use by 5% to 15%, depending on how much sunlight it captures and your usage habits. ...A starter plug-in solar system has a relatively low barrier to entry. Smaller systems cost up to $800 for a 4...

By Eric Ralls , earth.com.  Excerpt: The heatwave season has stretched by about 39 days since 1979, with the biggest shifts in dry regions and a recent rise in fast-peaking heat. Scientists have mostly judged heatwaves by how often they strike, how hot they get and how long they last. When they show up in the year has drawn far less attention, and that timing is shifting across most of the world’s land. A new global analysis finds that the heatwave season now starts earlier, ends later and has been stretching at both ends since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 2023, the first heatwave of the warm season arrived about two weeks earlier, and the last one ended about 24 days later. Put together, the stretch from first heatwave to last grew by roughly 39 days. The researchers counted heat that’s unusual for the date, so an early heatwave isn’t always as hot as one in midsummer. Wenfang Xu of the South China Botanical Garden , part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences , is the study’s fir...