By Elena Giordano , Politico.  Excerpt: Public enthusiasm for clean energy comes as the Iran war exposes Europe’s vulnerability to global oil and gas markets....  Full article at https://www.politico.eu/article/poll-europeans-back-renewables-despite-higher-energy-costs/ . 

By Deema Zein , PBS.  Excerpt: Cocoa prices have swung sharply in recent years, driven by climate change and production issues in West Africa, where most cocoa is grown. Prices hit a record high at the end of 2024. And although they have fallen since, candymakers, who buy months ahead, are still feeling the impact....  Full article at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/candy-makers-quietly-change-recipes-as-climate-change-hits-cocoa-industry . 

By Hatty Willmoth , BBC Science Focus.  Excerpt: Compared to every other country in the world, the US is bearing the biggest brunt of the economic losses inflicted by climate breakdown – and will likely continue to do so. That’s according to a  recent study  from Stanford University, in which scientists calculated the economic loss and damages caused by major fossil fuel emitters. Lead author  Marshall Burke , professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford, told  BBC Science Focus  that the study aimed to find a way to link specific emissions to their economic consequences. ...Notably, the scientists estimated the US to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2020, responsible for $10.2 trillion (£7.6 trillion) of global harm. But they also concluded that the US had suffered the most substantial losses of any country, valued at $16.2 trillion (£12.2 trillion), due to climate collapse. “The US has experienced more [financial] dama...

By Grace van Deelen , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A warming climate could expose a Pennsylvania-sized chunk of ice-free land in Antarctica by 2300, which could drastically reshape Antarctic geopolitics as well as the continent’s geography. A study published in  Nature Climate Change  is the first to incorporate glacial isostatic adjustment—how land beneath heavy ice sheets uplifts after the ice retreats—into projections of ice-free land emergence in Antarctica. ...Within the area that Lucas and the research team projected would be ice-free by 2300 lie known or suspected deposits of copper, gold, silver, iron, and platinum— critical minerals  used in manufacturing and valuable metals in and of themselves. In particular, the study found the largest land emergence in Antarctica is likely to occur over territories claimed by Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom and contains a range of mineral deposits, including copper, gold, silver, and iron. ...Currently, commercial mineral...

By Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Clean energy isn’t dead in the Trump era. But it does look different these days. Since returning to office, President Trump  has dismantled federal efforts  to fight climate change and vowed to stop new wind turbines from going up. His administration  has canceled billions of dollars in funding  for technologies that might one day help reduce planet-warming emissions, and it has instead pushed to expand domestic oil and gas drilling. Those moves have taken a brutal toll on America’s budding clean energy industry, including  canceled offshore wind farms ,  shuttered electric-car factories  and  layoffs  at climate technology start-ups. Yet many clean energy executives say they are finding ways to adapt, and some promising technologies that might help slow global warming are moving forward. Some industries, such as geothermal energy or nuclear power, still receive support from the Trump admini...

202By Oliver Milman , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating  emissions , with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found. By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has  caused greater harm  to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper. About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds. ...The  new study , published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to “loss and dam...

By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Solar has risen from almost nothing in 2019 to roughly 10 percent of South Africa’s  electricity-generating capacity . ...No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. ...Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it “a bottom-up movement” to sidestep a generations-old problem... unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all,” ...South Africa was the largest destination for Chinese solar, but not the only one. Sierra Leone imported the equivalent of more than half its total current electricity-generating capacity, and Chad, nearly half. ...Chinese state-owned companies are among several international firms to bid on South Africa’s $25 billion grid expansion, vying to build the lines and then make money, in part, by operating them........

By Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul, The New York Times.  Excerpt: New research shared with The New York Times estimates the extent to which rising home insurance premiums, driven higher by climate change, are cascading into the broader real estate market and eating into home values in the most disaster-prone areas....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/19/climate/home-insurance-costs-real-estate-market.html . 

By Somini Sengupta , The New York Times.   Excerpt: A small group of countries is aiming to impose a fee on private jets and premium commercial fares. The revenue would help nations adapt to warming....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/climate/private-jet-tax-climate.html . 

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 Tim McDonnell, SEMAFOR.  Excerpt: Global investment in renewable energy reached $386 billion in the first six months of 2025, a half-year record in spite of headwinds for some sectors and regions. Investors are becoming more scrupulous about onshore wind and utility-scale solar projects, ... And investment across all renewable technologies fell precipitously in the US, down 36% compared to the second half of 2024 as the Trump administration and Congress raised numerous new barriers to construction. But those dropoffs were more than offset by the still-booming global market for small-scale solar, and a particular influx of capital to renewables projects in Europe.... But China still dominates, claiming 44% of new renewables investments so far this year....  Full article at https://www.semafor.com/article/08/26/2025/global-investments-in-renewable-energy-reach-half-year-record . 

By Warren Cornwall , Science.  Excerpt: In the wake of devastating floods, Vermont lawmakers last year passed legislation making fossil fuel producers liable for damages from natural disasters supercharged by their greenhouse gas emissions. ...But so far, no company has had to pay a penny under Vermont’s law. A key challenge: tying disasters to the actions of a specific producer and calculating its share of the cost. Now, two scientists say they can do just that. In a  paper appearing today  in  Nature , the researchers spell out a method for quantifying how much the emissions from a particular polluter contributed to a given heat wave. ...All told, the researchers say, the world economy lost $12 trillion to $49 trillion in productivity between 1991 and 2020 because of heat waves tied to pollution from the 111 largest individual polluters. The Saudi Arabia–owned energy company Saudi Aramco was responsible for the largest share of that cost, an estimated $850 billion ...

By Eshe Nelson , The New York Times.  Excerpt: In the past few months, some of the largest banks and asset managers in the United States have  quit net zero networks , the climate groups that encourage their members to set ambitious carbon reduction targets and collaborate internationally on sustainability efforts. But ...in November, NYCERS, a pension fund for New York City employees, went in the opposite direction. It joined a United Nations-affiliated climate action group for long-term investors, the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance. ...At a time of growing backlash to environmental, social and governance goals and investment strategies, pension funds,  particularly in blue states and Europe , have emerged as a bulwark against efforts to sideline climate-related risks....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/dealbook/pension-funds-climate-esg.html . 

By Eric Beinhocker and J. Doyne Farmer , The Wallstreet Journal.  Excerpt: Since Donald Trump’s election, clean energy stocks have plummeted, major banks have pulled out of a U.N.-sponsored “net zero” climate alliance, and BP announced it is spinning off its offshore wind business to refocus on oil and gas. Markets and companies seem to be betting that Trump’s promises to stop or reverse the clean energy transition and “drill, baby, drill” will be successful. ...But this bet is wrong. The clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop. ...Our research shows that once new technologies become established their patterns in terms of cost are surprisingly predictable. ... Since 1990, the cost of wind power has dropped by about 4% a year, solar energy by 12% a year and lithium-ion batteries by about 12% a year....  Full article at https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/thecleanenergyrevolution-is-unst...

By Chase DiFeliciantonio , San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: When the California Public Utilities Commission slashed the price PG&E had to pay to buy electricity from solar customers, the industry nearly collapsed. But experts say the goal was equity — and a sustainable model that encouraged installing batteries to store power locally. ...In late 2022, [California] state regulators voted to  slash the level of that payment  by around 75% to bring it closer to market prices. ...“We were on a completely unsustainable path,” said  UC Berkeley  energy economist Severin Borenstein. “Households producing solar were compensated at the full retail price — at least double the market value of the electricity — for the quantities they sold back to the grid.” That money had to come from somewhere, and the result was that customers in PG&E’s service area who did not have solar panels were effectively subsidizing those that did, according to Borenstein...

By Dennis M. Hogan, Guest Essay for The New York Times.  Excerpt: In 2023, ...July, the middle of Panama’s rainy season. But the rains had been sparse, and water levels in the canal had sunk to troubling lows. Without freshwater from rain, our guide explained, the locks on the canal could not operate. ...the true threat to U.S. commerce through Panama. If the goal is securing affordable access to the transit point over the long term, it is climate change, not Chinese influence, that U.S. policymakers should worry about. ...Sending a single ship through the canal’s locks can use around 50 million gallons of water, mainly freshwater collected from Lake Gatún. Though the canal is, for the moment, operating at full capacity, a drier climate and greater demand for drinking water have in recent years reduced the volume of available water. That has  forced the state-run Panama Canal Authority  at times to limit the number of daily passages through the canal, at one point by as m...

By Jonathan Allen , Reuters.  Excerpt: New York state will fine fossil fuel companies a total of $75 billion over the next 25 years to pay for damage caused to the climate under a bill Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law on Thursday. The law is intended to shift some of the recovery and adaptation costs of climate change from individual taxpayers to oil, gas and coal companies that the law says are liable. The money raised will be spent on mitigating the impacts of climate change, including adapting roads, transit, water and sewage systems, buildings and other infrastructure. ...Fossil fuel companies will be fined based on the amount of greenhouse gases they released into the atmosphere between 2000 and 2018, to be paid into a Climate Superfund beginning in 2028. It will apply to any company that the New York Department of Environmental Conservation determines is responsible for more than 1 billion tons of global greenhouse gas emissions. ...New York becomes the second state to p...

By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Electric heat pumps, the most affordable and energy efficient way to heat and cool homes, continue to outsell gas furnaces nationwide. They can also reduce outdoor pollution and, as a result, save lives, according to  a report issued on Tuesday . The study, by Rewiring America, a nonprofit group that promotes electrification, calculated that if every American household got rid of furnaces, hot water heaters and clothes dryers powered by oil or gas and replaced them with heat pumps and electric appliances, annual greenhouse gas emissions could drop by about 400 million metric tons. Fine airborne particulate matter and other air pollutants could decrease by 300,000 tons, the equivalent of taking 40 million cars off the road. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s households burn fossil fuels such as natural gas, propane and fuel oil for heat, hot water and drying clothes, releasing nitrogen oxides and other pollutants into the air. Wh...

By Noah Gordon  and  Daevan Mangalmurti , Vox.  Excerpt: ...Catching their own government by  surprise , Pakistanis have been  installing a massive amount of solar power . ...Pakistan has gone from an inconsequential solar market to the  sixth-largest  in the world. ...In the last three years, Pakistanis have imported  more than 25 gigawatts  of solar panels from China. This disorganized, bottom-up boom has increased Pakistan’s power supply by 50 percent. ...power plants burn  lots  of liquefied natural gas, which became costlier after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That same year, Pakistan fell into a  foreign exchange crisis  ...which made everything more expensive. All of this opened an  opportunity  for businesses and better-off Pakistanis to begin importing solar panels from China, which can pay for themselves in as little as  two years  and free their users from the expensive,  unreliable ...