By Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Electric car sales are on track to hit record highs this year, with 29 percent of all new cars purchased around the world expected to be either purely battery-powered models or plug-in hybrids, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency. That’s a sharp increase from just 4 percent in 2020. The boom in sales was somewhat unexpected. Some analysts had predicted a slower market for electric vehicles this year — until the U.S. war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused oil and gasoline prices to spike. That has led to a frenzy of electric car sales in many unexpected corners of the globe. In South Africa, sales of electric cars more than quintupled in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. In Laos, imports of battery-powered vehicles from China are soaring. And in countries as different as Australia, Colombia and South Korea, the E.V. share of total...

By J. Elliott Campbell and Roland Geyer , Science.  Abstract: Internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles represent the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions for most US households. Although battery electric vehicles (BEVs) considerably reduce use-phase emissions, the transition poses a fundamental life cycle optimization challenge: Is there a net climate benefit to retiring a functional ICE vehicle before its end of life? Retiring a functioning ICE vehicle incurs a fundamental trade-off between BEV manufacturing emissions and decreased vehicle operation emissions. In this study, we evaluated this trade-off across a comprehensive range of retirement scenarios and found that scrappage-and-replacement yields consistent emissions reductions across most contexts, including the retirement of new ICE vehicles. Although scrapping a functional asset remains economically prohibitive under current market conditions, these results demonstrate a major mitigation potential for policy...

By Kate Abnett and Bart H. Meijer , Reuters.  Excerpt: The European Commission ​last year proposed a rollback of the EU's effective ban on new combustion-engine cars from 2035 after ​pressure from Germany, Italy and the auto sector, changing the target to a 90% ⁠emissions reduction instead. ...France and Sweden were ⁠among those ​to defend the combustion-engine ban, warning that weakening it would ​delay urgently needed investments to help European EV manufacturers stay competitive. Weakening the policy after the Iran war's energy fallout would be a "terrible ​signal", French climate minister Monique Barbut said....  Full article at https://www.reuters.com/business/spectacular-electric-car-sales-weaken-pressure-lower-co2-standards-eu-climate-2026-06-25/ . 

By Jasper Jolly , The Guardian.  Excerpt: The price of new battery electric cars has fallen below petrol cars in the UK for the first time, according to the car sales website Autotrader, in a significant milestone in Britain’s transition away from fossil fuels. The average price of a new electric car listed on the website was £42,620, compared with £43,405 for a new petrol model – making the former £785 cheaper based on advertised prices after discounts. The higher upfront cost of electric vehicles has long been one of the big sticking points preventing some drivers from switching away from cars with polluting petrol and diesel engines towards those with battery motors, which  do not emit carbon dioxide directly . Total running costs for electric cars have been  lower for some time . UK battery electric car sales accounted for 22% of new car sales in the first three months of the year....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/17/new-uk-ele...

By UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. Excerpt: BERKELEY, Calif.  A new study, “ An Analysis of Japan’s Carbon Neutral Port Initiative and Yokohama Port and Harbor Decarbonization Plan ,” ( download the Japanese version here ) from the University of California, Berkeley examines Japan's innovative approach to decarbonizing maritime ports. Japan’s Carbon Neutral Port (CNP) certification framework and the City of Yokohama’s port decarbonization initiatives represent serious and forward-looking efforts to address the complex challenge of maritime emissions reduction. The study comes as momentum builds for decarbonization of the international shipping industry,....  Full article at https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/news/recent-news/new-analysis-by-uc-berkeley-highlights-japans-port-decarbonization-leadership . 

By John Timmer  , arstechnica.  Excerpt: On Tuesday, the US Energy Information Administration released full-year data on how the country generated electricity in 2025. It’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation. The bad news is that overall demand rose appreciably, and a fair chunk of that was met by additional coal use. On the good side, solar continued its run of astonishing growth, generating 35 percent more power than a year earlier and surpassing hydroelectric power for the first time. Overall, electrical consumption in the US rose by 2.8 percent, or about 121 terawatt-hours. Consumption had been largely flat for several decades, with efficiency and the decline of industry offsetting the effects of population and economic growth. There were plenty of year-to-year changes, however, driven by factors ranging from heating and cooling demand to a global pandemic. Given that history, the growth in demand in 2025 is a bit concerning, but it’s not yet a clear signal that ...

By Bill Gourgey , Popular Science.  Excerpt: In October 1914, as gas cars were tightening their grip on America’s roads, Frank W. Smith, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of America, stood before a convention in Philadelphia and declared victory . Electric cars , he said, were “absolutely and unquestionably the automobile of the future, both for business and pleasure.” ...In 1914, Smith’s optimism seemed justified. All year, E. G. Liebold, Henry Ford ’s influential private secretary, had been signaling to the press that Ford and Thomas Edison were teaming up to build a cheap electric car . ...Earlier that year, Ford and Edison, who had been friends for more than a decade, had even purchased their own electric cars from leading car manufacturer Detroit Electric to publicly affirm their faith in electric power. ...Gasoline cars, by contrast, were noisy and temperamental. To get them started required muscle to turn a stiff crank. They rattled, stalled, and belched exha...

By Ryan Craggs , Travel + Leisure.  Excerpt: In Norway, the Havila Polaris is sailing on liquefied biogas and battery power, making it the world’s first climate-neutral cruise. ...Norway built the world’s largest  sovereign wealth fund  by selling oil; Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, a  $2 trillion nest egg , was built almost entirely on North Sea oil and gas revenues. Now it's spending that money to prove you don't need oil at all. As of Jan. 1, 2026, Norwegian regulations require  zero emissions for passenger ships under 10,000 gross tons  operating in the country's five UNESCO World Heritage fjords, with larger vessels facing the same mandate in 2032....  Full article at https://www.travelandleisure.com/worlds-first-climate-neutral-cruise-powered-by-garbage-havila-polaris-11885603 . 

By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Tesla has lost its status as the world’s biggest seller of electric vehicles after Congress and President Trump eliminated the federal tax credits that had encouraged Americans to buy those cars. The company’s car sales declined 16 percent in the last three months of 2025, Tesla said on Friday. And its sales for the full year declined 9 percent even as other automakers notched gains. In 2025, for the first year ever, the company sold fewer electric cars than China’s leading automaker, BYD....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/business/tesla-electric-vehicles-fourth-quarter-sales.html . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: It seems an easy climate solution, almost too good to be true. Greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are stubbornly difficult to reduce—batteries cannot power a jumbo jet. But in the past few years, scientists and industry have seized on a way to trim airplanes’ climate footprint by limiting the clouds they leave behind. Jet contrails, when they turn into long-lived clouds, trap significant amounts of heat that would otherwise escape Earth—three times more than the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emitted by the engines, some studies have suggested. In theory, tweaking flight routes to avoid creating these clouds could slash aviation’s toll on the climate....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/airplane-contrails-may-not-be-climate-villain-once-feared .

By Cara Buckley , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Iowa City eliminated bus fares in August 2023 with a goal of lowering emissions from cars and encouraging people to take public transit. The two-year pilot program proved so popular that the City Council voted this summer to extend it another year, paying for it with a 1 percent increase in utility taxes and by doubling most public parking rates to $2 from $1. Ridership has surpassed prepandemic levels by 18 percent. Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles on city streets, according to government calculations, and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/climate/iowa-city-free-buses.html . 

By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey , The New York Times.  Excerpt: This summer, Len Necefer finally planned the road trip he’s been thinking about for nearly a decade: Going coast-to-coast in an electric vehicle, stopping only to charge on tribal lands. As a Navajo citizen and tribal energy expert who used to work in the federal government, he saw it as the ultimate test of how far energy infrastructure had come. Stop by stop, his plans came together until North Dakota, where a dearth of chargers seemed to prevent a Midwest crossing. Then, he spotted it: a level-2 charger at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation. It was more than a lucky break. Over the past three years, Standing Rock has installed chargers across the reservation as part of the Electric Nation project, a regional effort to create an intertribal charging network. By the time the project wraps at the end of November, Standing Rock Nation will operate 13 E.V. chargers, most of them in North Dakota. While there a...

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 Antonio Piemontese , Wired.  Excerpt: Speaking by video  at the UN Climate Summit in New York last week,  China's  president Xi Jinping laid out his country's  climate  ambitions. While the stated goals may not have been aggressive as some environmentalists would like, Xi at least reaffirmed China's green commitment. “Despite some countries going against the trend, the international community should stay on the right track, maintain unwavering confidence, unwavering action, and undiminished efforts,” he said. Any reference to Donald Trump and the United States was surely intended (though not explicit). ...Xi Jinping's speech included a commitment to reach 3,600 gigawatts (GW) of installed wind and solar capacity by 2035, six times the country's 2020 figures. This is already the leading country in terms of installed renewable power, and a giant on the technology front as well, with universities churning out environmental and climate tech research at full ...

By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: New electric vehicles cost thousands more than similar models that run on gasoline. But a growing number of shoppers are discovering that for used cars, often the opposite is true. Used battery-powered vehicles often sell for less than comparable cars with internal combustion engines, making them a good deal even before calculating savings in maintenance costs and fuel. That is expanding the number of people who can afford to buy such models. Sales of used electric vehicles rose 40 percent in July from a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive, a research firm....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/business/used-electric-vehicles.html .

By Patrick George , The Atlantic.  Excerpt: Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley commuted in a car that wasn’t made by his own company. In an effort to scope out the competition, Farley spent six months driving around in a Xiaomi SU7. The Chinese-made electric sedan is one of the world’s most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a  built-in AI assistant —all for roughly $30,000 in China. “It’s fantastic,” Farley said about the Xiaomi SU7 on a podcast last fall. “I don’t want to give it up.” ...Chinese EVs can be so cheap and high tech that they risk outcompeting  all  cars, not just electric ones. In the rest of the world, traditional automakers are already struggling as Chinese cars hit the market. In Europe, Chinese brands  now have roughly as much share of the market as Mercedes-Benz ....  Full article at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/arch...

By José María León Cabrera , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...20 Indigenous men in the Ecuadorean Amazon boarded a canoe in their community near the border with Peru. Their destination was a neighboring village 45 minutes away by river. ...The journey between the isolated villages was made possible thanks to their boat, a traditional river canoe aside from one distinctive feature on top: 24 solar panels that harness sunlight to power an engine. The canoe is part of a growing fleet of electric-powered vessels providing a cheaper and greener alternative to diesel-powered boats that typically travel the Indigenous region’s waterways....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/world/americas/electric-boats-ecuadorian-amazon.html .

By Jack Ewing , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans on Thursday would deal a serious blow to electric vehicles by repealing many of the subsidies that have been critical to the growth of the technology. If passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Trump, the bill would sharply slow the sales and production of battery-powered cars and trucks in the United States and set back the global effort to address climate change. The measure would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks. Republican leaders ...aim to use the money the government saves on the incentives to cut taxes, primarily for high-income households and businesses. ...The rollback of sales incentives will leave the United States even f...

By Andrew Chang, San Francisco Chronicle.  Excerpt: ...Some of the most exciting and impactful climate tech revolutions today are happening beyond the U.S. — they’re unfolding in China and emerging markets like Vietnam and Pakistan. ...Long derided for its coal dependence, [China] now leads the world in clean energy deployment. In 2024 alone,  China added 277 gigawatts of new solar capacity  — a 45% jump from the year before. That’s more than the  entire installed solar capacity of the United States . On a recent trip to Shanghai, I hopped into a taxi and was told we’d need to make a quick stop to swap the battery. I started to object, assuming it would take a while — but the driver just smiled and said, “Three minutes.” We pulled into a battery swapping station, scanned a QR code and drove onto an elevated platform. In less time than a coffee run, we were back on the road — fully charged. It was fast, seamless and completely routine....  Ful...

By Umair Irfan ,  Benji Jones ,  Adam Clark Estes , and  Sam Delgado , Vox.  Excerpt: Technologies that can power our lives and jobs while doing less harm to the global climate — wind, solar, batteries, etc. — are getting cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant. The pace of progress on price, scale, and performance has been so extraordinary that  even the most optimistic forecasts  about green tech in the past have turned out to be too pessimistic. Clean energy isn’t just powering our devices, tools, and luxuries — it’s  growing the global economy , creating a whole suite of new jobs, and reshaping trade. And despite what  headlines may say , there’s no sign these trends will reverse.  Political  and  economic  turmoil may slow down clean energy, but the sector has built up so much momentum that it’s become nigh unstoppable. ...Texas utilities have come to realize that investing in clean energy is not just good for the envir...