In a video address to a climate summit in New York, organised by UN secretary general António Guterres, China’s president Xi Jinping pledged yesterday to cut his country’s “economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions” to 7% to 10% below peak levels 2035, Bloomberg reports. Xi pledged that his country would aim for this goal, while “striving to do better”, says BBC News, adding that this is the first-ever “absolute” target to cut China’s emissions. The New York Times says Xi also announced targets to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in China’ energy mix to 30% by 2035, to raise wind and solar capacity to 3,600 gigawatts (GW) and to make “new energy vehicles” the “mainstream” option for new vehicle sales. State broadcaster CCTV has released a video of Xi’s speech and lists the other targets he announced for 2035, including increasing forest stock to 24bn cubic metres, extending the national carbon market to “major high-emission industries” and ensuring that a “climate-resilient society” is “essentially established”. Chinese state news agency Xinhua also lists Xi’s commitments. [Carbon Brief has an unofficial transcript of Xi’s speech.]

The Associated Press notes that China is currently responsible for 31% of annual global emissions. Beijing News describes the extension of China’s targets to cover the whole economy and all greenhouse gases as a “revolutionary upgrade”. The Financial Times calls the headline target “conservative”, while Climate Home News says it is “underwhelming”, adding that it “does not fully reflect its expansion of clean energy on the ground”, according to “experts”. The Guardian says it has received a “scathing response from experts who said they were much too weak to stave off global catastrophe”. BBC News notes that a target to cut emissions to at least 30% below 2024 levels was thought to have been needed to help limit global warming to 1.5C. CNN says the target is “short” of what other countries had hoped for. Another Bloomberg article says China “played it safe” with its first absolute target.

Elsewhere, Reuters leads its coverage with a headline saying that, by announcing its new pledge, China was “defying US climate denial”. The Wall Street Journal similarly reports that Xi “took an indirect jab at President Trump and criticised countries that are turning away from the fight against global warming”. The Washington Post headline says: “China asserts green energy leadership, as Trump dismisses climate ‘con job’.” The Times says “China declares itself climate leader”. Chinese financial outlet Cailianpress reports that Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s foreign minister, told a press conference ahead of the climate summit yesterday, in response to a question about the US’s absence: “Climate change is a challenge faced by all humanity and international cooperation is the only solution.”

A total of 120 countries and the EU have announced their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the UN general assembly, reports the Guardian. The announcements came “in a bid to spur fresh impetus to the beleaguered climate effort a day after Donald Trump called the crisis ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world’”, it adds. The Associated Press covers comments by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres at the opening of the “marathon” session in which countries presented their targets, who said: “The science demands action. The law commands it. The economics compel it. And people are calling for it.” BusinessGreen notes that the UN event was designed to “ratchet up pressure on more governments to deliver promised national climate action plans – or nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – ahead of the COP30.” It adds that several notable countries had already submitted their NDCs, including the UK, Brazil, the UAE and Australia, but “scores of countries” have yet to formally submit theirs. The New York Times covers comments by European Union climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, who said Trump’s criticism of climate change will not affect other countries’ ambitions. Hoekstra said in an interview that “we’re doing the exact opposite of what the US is doing, which, by the way, I find concerning and problematic”, the article adds. 

California governor Gavin Newsom has “lambasted” Donald Trump at an event as part of New York Climate Week, following the US president’s error-strewn claims the previous day that climate change is a “con job”, reports the Hill. The Los Angeles Times adds that Newsom called Trump’s rejection of climate change economic self-sabotage and “an abomination”, warning the country is “doubling down on stupid”. The New York Times reports that the governor dubbed the president’s speech “an embarrassment” and “a fraud”, as well as covering comments from other speakers, including Al Gore and Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest. BusinessGreen covers a joint statement from the America Is All In coalition of states and cities criticising Trump’s speech at the UN general assembly and accusing the president of deliberately “isolating the US”. There are further factchecks of Trump’s comments in a number of publications, including Climate Home News and Heated, the latter of which dubbed it the “dumbest climate speech of all time”.

MORE ON US

• The Guardian covers how Trump’s “assault on the US wind industry threatens jobs and power for nearly 5m homes”. 
• Bloomberg reports on how rising energy costs in the US are now a “major political issue”.
• Yale360 covers new analysis that shows that more Americans work in the clean-energy sector than as “servers or cashiers”.
• The Hill reports that the US energy department is planning to “claw back” $13bn in unspent climate funds.

The world’s oceans have failed their annual “health check”, becoming the “seventh of nine planetary boundaries to be crossed”, reports the Guardian. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research’s assessment has found that ocean acidity has crossed a critical threshold for marine life, predominantly due to fossil-fuel burning, it adds. Crossing this seventh boundary has led scientists to call for a “renewed global effort to end the use of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human pressures” that are tilting the Earth out of a habitable equilibrium”. In its coverage of the report, Canada’s CBC quotes Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who says: “Go outside of these boundaries and you first enter a danger zone, with higher risk of causing changes that would undermine that ability to support human life and human development.”

The Financial Times reports that UK prime minister Keir Starmer has “no plans to attend the [COP30] despite having branded Rishi Sunak’s absence from the world’s top climate conference a ‘failure of leadership’ just a few years ago”. The newspaper adds: “Although a final decision has yet to be made, three people familiar with discussions told the Financial Times that the UK prime minister was not at present expected to be at the COP30 leaders’ summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém. One Labour figure said there was a ‘big fight inside the government’ between some officials pushing Starmer to make the trip to underline Britain’s commitment to climate action and others wanting him to focus on domestic issues. The latter believe ‘Reform [UK] voters don’t think climate is important and the Mail and Sun [newspapers] complain that Starmer has spent a record number of days overseas’, he said.”

MORE ON UK

• BBC News: “Households to be offered energy bill changes, but unlikely to lead to savings.”
• The Guardian reports “exclusively” that Labour energy secretary Ed Miliband is looking into more North Sea oil and gas drilling, despite the government’s pledge not to grant new licences.
• The Scotsman reports on an “extreme” wildfire warning that has been issued in Scotland, the first in September in five years.
• The Guardian covers a plea from a coalition of 10 campaign groups calling on the Bank of England to do more to tackle climate change.

Typhoon Ragasa made landfall in south China’s Guangdong province on Wednesday, forcing local authorities to relocate nearly two million residents, reports state news agency Xinhua. “School classes have been suspended and hundreds of flights were cancelled in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and parts of Guangdong”, says the Financial Times. Benjamin Horton, dean of the school of energy and environment at City University of Hong Kong, says that extreme weather events, such as Ragasa, “should not be happening at such regularity, so late in the season, of such intensity, of such high winds and of such big storm surges”, adding that “the attribution of why this event is occurring is climate change”, says the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP). Horton continues that “climate change means that the intensification – how rapidly they go from a storm to a super typhoon – is quicker”. SCMP publishes another article under the headline: “What lessons can China learn from this northern city’s flood response?” BBC News also covers the typhoon – the “world’s strongest storm this year” – which it says some are describing as the “’king of storms”. The outlet adds: “It caused particular destruction in eastern Taiwan after a barrier lake burst in Hualien county on Tuesday, killing 17 people, with a further 17 still missing and 32 injured.”

MORE ON CHINA

• An article appears in the Study Times under the byline of Wang Hongzhi, head of the NEA, with the headline: “Vigorously promoting the high-quality development of China’s new energy sector.” Bloomberg cites the article in its report on China’s solar industry.
• Kongjian Yu, who popularised the idea of China’s “sponge cities”, has reportedly been killed in a plane crash in Brazil, says the Guardian. 
• Two coastal provinces in China, Guangdong in the south and Shandong in the east, are “showing how the country’s new market-based electricity pricing system can steer clean-energy investment to the areas that suit them best”, reports Bloomberg.
• China’s new building policy for 2025-26 calls for “green building materials”, Jiemian reports.

Mexico’s government proposes cutting spending on climate mitigation and adaptation for next year, reports Mongabay. The outlet notes that the climate adaptation budget will “undergo a reduction of 1.24%”, while “93% of the climate budget will benefit Mexico’s army to expand the wind and solar energy capacity within their facilities”. Additionally, the government proposes allocating $52m for nature protection, the “lowest budget in 21 years”, according to an analysis by the coalition Northwest Civil Society for Environmental Sustainability (NOSSA). In contrast, the outlet adds, the state-owned hydrocarbons company Pemex will receive a “millionaire increase” of 7.7% by 2026.

Elsewhere, Excélsior reports that the Mexican government will dedicate 0.67% of the federal budget to clean energy. Gonzalo Monroy, energy analyst, tells the newspaper that the spending “casts doubt on whether the environmental commitments established in national strategies and those made to international bodies will be fulfilled”.

MORE ON LATIN AMERICA

• After eight days of negotiations with business leaders, construction workers have ended their strike in Belém, according to Folha de São Paulo. COP30 organisers say the stoppage “did not affect the schedule of projects for the [climate] summit”.
• Colombia’s government recently launched a programme to “substitute energy subsidies to certain households for solar panels”, reports El Espectador.
• The inclusion of “energy solutions” in Peru’s agriculture, such as the use of telemetry for consumption monitoring, can improve efficiency and cut emissions, according to a commentary in El Comercio by the manager of a Peruvian gas company.

An editorial in the Guardian argues that, “with political will, cooperation can still avert the worst of the climate crisis”. The article highlights recent comments from Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, that “all is not lost” as well as research from the Potsdam Institute that shows seven of the earth’s nine planetary boundaries have now breached. It points out both the concern around big emitters hitting key decarbonisation targets and the continuing expansion of renewable energy capacity. The editorial notes that “renewables growth is essential, but unless carbon emissions are reduced at the same time, net-zero is impossible”. It cautions that, if planned fossil-fuel projects go ahead, the emissions output at the end of this century will be double what is needed to meet the 1.5C target. The article concludes: “The crisis won’t be solved at this COP or the next. But abandoning the process would mean abandoning hope – and handing victory to the wreckers.” 

MORE COMMENT

• In Reuters’ Context, Mary Robinson – the former Irish president, UN high commissioner for human rights and chair of the Elders – asks: “Earth’s life support is failing. Will we act?”
• In the Independent, UK Green MP Sian Berry argues that the expansion of Gatwick airport near London shows the Labour government is “even worse for the climate than the Tories”. 
• In BusinessGreen, veteran environmental journalist Roger Harrabin writes that climate change “is just one” of the reasons the Gatwick expansion “doesn’t add up”.  
• In the Guardian, Mohamad Bazzi, the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University, critiques Trump’s “embarrassing performance at the UN general assembly”. 
• In the Wall Street Journal, Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund, argues that energy dominance “needn’t be dirty”. 

In the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells discusses China’s shift in its approach to “green tech”. He writes that “however gloomy or defeated you may be feeling about the future of the planet”, the rollout of renewables and, in particular, solar has been a positive for decarbonisation in recent years. This has been driven by China, Wallace-Wells continues, noting that this is not just a story of climate action, but that the country’s dominance over the solar industry has been “uncomfortable” for some observers. He argues there is now a shift underway, writing: “Though it doesn’t seem that Beijing is about to turn off the faucet on green manufacturing and renewable exports, it’s also not clear how fast the green flow will be.” Wallace-Wells continues to hypothesise the impact of this change, both for the rollout of clean technologies and for China’s international relationships.

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Molly Lempriere, with contributions from Simon Evans, Henry Zhang, Wanyuan Song and Yanine Quiroz. It was edited by Leo Hickman.

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