Climate

Far-right president may announce country’s departure from agreement after meeting Donald Trump

There is growing concern that Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, is set to announce his country’s departure from the Paris climate accord.

Earlier this week, negotiators from Milei’s government were ordered to leave the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, after just three days. Now, the Guardian understands that Milei is considering announcing a formal withdrawal from the agreement, and that a decision could be made after a formal meeting with Donald Trump.

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Exclusive: UK energy secretary says at Cop29 that people see the economic advantages of making the transition

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Renewable energy is now “unstoppable”, and no government can prevent the shift to a global low-carbon economy, UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has said.

He said the UK was acting out of national self-interest by taking a global lead on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting financial help available to poor countries at crunch UN climate talks this week.

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Humanoid called Digit fuelled boosterism at Web Summit, but also raised concerns about jobs, safety and climate

This year’s Web Summit, in Lisbon, was all about artificial intelligence – and a robot sorting laundry.

Digit, a humanoid built by the US firm Agility Robotics, demonstrated how far AI has come in a few years by responding to voice commands – filtered through Google’s Gemini AI model – to sift through a pile of coloured T-shirts and place them in a basket.

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Climate change minister’s effort to convince Ankara to drop out underlines push for ‘Pacific Cop’

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The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, made a whistle-stop visit to Turkey on Friday night in an attempt to reach a deal for Australia to host tens of thousands of people at a major UN climate summit in 2026.

Bowen visited the Turkish capital, Ankara, on the way to the Cop29 climate conference in the Azerbaijan capital, Baku. The two countries are vying to host Cop31, and the Albanese government hopes Turkey will exit the race in time for an announcement before next week.

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The negotiations continue with plenty of disagreement about the way forward, as we approach the halfway mark in Baku, Azerbaijan

According to an interesting piece in the Africa Report, African countries at Cop are wary of alienating China.

But this year, the main issue at stake in the negotiations is the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG). In the jargon of climate finance, this is the amount that developed countries will have to provide to vulnerable countries to help them adapt to climate change.

When they signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, the developed countries undertook to allocate $100bn a year from 2020 onwards – via loans and grants – to finance projects that enable developing countries to adapt to climate change (rising sea levels, drought, etc.) or help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This amount was not reached until 2022, but is due to be renegotiated upwards this year.

The developed countries are also lobbying to broaden the base of contributing countries to include the “new polluters”: China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, among others. “The African Group will not be supporting this proposal, as it is too sensitive and we don’t want to alienate China,” says an African negotiator.

The African countries are also members of the G77, the group of developing countries to which China belongs.

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Start-ups say we’re closer than ever to near-limitless, zero-carbon energy from fusion. When will we get there?

What would it witness in Azerbaijan? A species that knows it is destroying itself but is too greedy to change course

Imagine, as many people do, an all-seeing eye in the sky, looking down on planet Earth. Imagine seeing what it sees. It watches, over the course of decades, ice caps shrinking, rainforests retreating, deserts expanding, ocean circulation slowing, freshwater dwindling and sea levels rising, and it thinks – for it has been there since the beginning – “this is familiar”. All the signs are there, of an Earth system sliding towards collapse, as it has done five times since animals with hard body parts first evolved.

But this time, it knows, is different. Not only is one of the life forms causing the collapse, but it shares some of the eye’s supernatural abilities: it too can see what is happening. So, with heightened curiosity, the eye zooms in, to see what this well-informed being is doing to avert catastrophe.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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The South American nation says it is considering withdrawing from the landmark agreement, which aims to limit carbon emissions and slow global warming.

The North Dakota governor helped strengthen ties between the oil industry and President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Project 2025, the conservative playbook, calls for breaking up the federal agency that maintains weather data and collects climate change information.

The city will be the first in the U.S. to adopt a fee on driving in certain areas, with the aim of reducing traffic and pollution. For some other cities, that has long been the norm.

Police reveal ages and genders of the 216 people who died in Valencia, along with eight other victims elsewhere in Spain

Almost half of the 216 people known to have died in the catastrophic floods that hit the eastern Spanish region of Valencia at the end of October were 70 or above, according to a police analysis.

Figures from the data integration centre set up after the disaster show that 131 of the victims were male, 85 were female and 104 were aged over 70, including 15 aged over 90.

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They’re up in nearly every major U.S. metro area, but homeowners in the South have seen especially large increases.

Trump could stop in its tracks US’s emergence as clean energy superpower and forfeit billions in investment

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50bn in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

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Months after devastating rains displaced 420,000 people in Rio Grande do Sul, an unusual consensus has formed around the need for a faster transition to renewables

Beside a narrow canal that runs through the outskirts of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, a row of wooden houses with makeshift fences lean among piles of debris and power poles tangled in sagging wires. From the dirt road, Alexandra Marina Romero, 27, gazes at the aftermath of a disaster. “There used to be a church here,” she says. “Now it’s all gone.”

In May, a devastating flood ravaged her neighbourhood, leaving a trail of chaos and triggering a humanitarian crisis. “What we went through was horrific. The water took over everything,” says Romero, a supermarket assistant who migrated to Brazil from Venezuela in 2018.

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Join us for all the latest developments from day 4 of the climate summit in Azerbaijan

Josh Gabbatiss, from Carbon Brief has published an update on social media about where negotiations at Cop29 have got to.

You may have seen talk of new texts about the climate finance negotiations doing the rounds.

These proposals have been produced by the co-chairs and circulated among negotiators and civil society observers, but for some reason they are not being published on the UNFCCC website.

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Dutch appeal court ruled in favour of oil and gas company over judgment telling it to limit emissions

A court ruling in favour of Shell does not spell the end of climate litigation against companies, legal experts have said.

The oil and gas company celebrated on Tuesday when it won an appeal against a landmark climate judgment by a Dutch court.

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A new report forecasts global temperature increases well above the level that world leaders have pledged to avoid.

Crops have failed in several countries, with 27m people at risk of hunger according to World Food Programme

Emmanuel Himoonga paced his dry field, picking up stalks of maize that had been bleached almost to bone white.

The 61-year-old chief of Shakumbila, a mainly agricultural community of about 7,000 people roughly 70 miles west of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, had seen droughts before.

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Analysis by Climate Action Tracker puts median temperature rise by 2100 at 2.7C if current policies continue

World leaders have promised to try to stop the planet heating by more than 1.5C (2.7F). But current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C, a report has found.

The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago.

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