There is continued widespread coverage of the news that the Trump administration is set to announce plans to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding on Thursday, a ruling allowing the government to regulate pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions. According to the Guardian, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a press conference yesterday: “Trump will be joined by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to formalise the recession of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding.” She repeated Zeldin’s earlier quote that “this will be the largest deregulatory action in American history”. Meredith Hankins, federal climate legal director at the environmental advocacy not-for-profit National Resources Defense Council, tells the Guardian that “this is the biggest attack ever on federal authority to tackle the climate crisis” and confirmed that her organisation, along with others, plans to launch a legal challenge against the move.

The New York Times looks at why the EPA is “racing” to repeal the finding, noting that the “action will have taken just over a year to finalise, a remarkably rapid pace for an agency that typically spends at least three years on such efforts”. It continues: “Legal experts said the speed would be no accident: It could allow the supreme court to consider related legal challenges while Trump is still in office. There, the conservative majority with an anti-regulatory bent could chip away at the federal government’s power to limit the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously warming the Earth. And in an extreme scenario, the court could sharply curtail a future Democratic administration’s efforts to fight global warming.” The New York Times Climate Forward newsletter examines the “four Trump allies have been a driving force” behind the repeal move.

Politico describes the move as Trump’s “biggest swing yet against climate change rules”. The climate-sceptic UK newspaper Daily Telegraph leads its coverage with the headline: “Trump will scrap Obama-era rule that inspired net-zero.” There is further coverage in publications including the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Los Angeles Times, CNBC and Semafor.

MORE ON US

• Trump is to unveil “plans to use government funding and Pentagon contracts to sustain US coal-fired power plants as he seeks to drive domestic reliance on the fossil fuel”, says Bloomberg.
• The Associated Press reports that the US’s “largest public utility says it now would prefer to keep operating two coal-fired power plants it had planned to shutter” ahead of a “meeting of its board, which has a majority of members picked by the coal-friendly Trump administration”.
• The US has “stopped supporting climate-linked lending at the International Monetary Fund, casting ‘no’ votes or abstentions on financing programmes it had previously backed”, reports Bloomberg.
• The Treasury department has issued a general licence to facilitate oil and gas exploration in Venezuela, according to Reuters.
• The Wall Street Journal says Trump’s administration “might be on board” with a carbon offset scheme for airlines known as Corsia.

Weather-related property damage reached £1.6bn in the UK last year, amid storms, flooding and higher rebuilding costs following disasters, the Financial Times says. It continues: “Analysis of industry data by Deloitte predicts the total for claims linked to weather for 2025 will be higher than the £1.3bn paid out in 2024 and more than double the annual amounts between 2017 and 2021.”

It comes as many publications examine what could be behind the UK’s extended period of wet weather. The Independent reports that, according to the Met Office’s chief forecaster Neil Armstrong, the UK’s long stretch of rain has “been driven by a strong, south-shifted jet stream steering low pressure systems directly towards the UK”. Armstrong continues: “Cold plunges of air across North America have strengthened the temperature gradient across the north-west Atlantic, energising the jet, while a blocking high over northern Europe has prevented weather fronts from clearing, causing them to stall over the UK.” The Daily Telegraph and Sky News also report on the “blocking” weather pattern behind the long period of rain. [For more on blocking weather patterns, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.] BBC News at Six last night spoke to climate scientists about how the rainy weather could be linked to climate change. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports from Cornwall, one of the regions that has experienced 41 consecutive days of rainfall.

MORE ON UK

• Financial Times: “UK electricity will cost more in 2030 than after invasion of Ukraine, warns Centrica.”
• The billionaire Duke of Westminster is planning to oppose a wind farm project in the Scottish Highlands, says the Daily Telegraph.
• The i newspaper reports on “lying cowboys” that exploited the UK’s heat pump support scheme.
• In continuing coverage of the UK’s latest “contracts for difference” auction, the Daily Telegraph says that energy secretary Ed Miliband has approved plans for new solar farms that could cover an area “nearly as large as Manchester”.

China companies from specific sectors with emissions equivalent to at least 26,000 tonnes of CO2 must report their 2025 emissions to the government by the end of March, says Bloomberg, citing an announcement by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE). These sectors include petrochemicals, copper, aerospace, chemicals, glass and paper, it adds, representing a “key” step in China’s plans to expand its national carbon market by 2027. China Metallurgical News also covers the story, saying that local policymakers will “pre-allocate” 2025 emissions allowances for the steel, aluminium and cement sectors by early April, while power sector companies will receive their pre-allocated allowances by the end of June, according to the MEE. BJX News reports that China’s supreme court and the MEE jointly released a set of typical cases on carbon market development, addressing issues such as the “validity” of emissions trading contracts and “carbon sink subscriptions”.

MORE ON CHINA

• Sales revenue in China’s key “green manufacturing sectors” grew 30% on average over 2021-25, reports Xinhua. Science and Technology Daily says sales revenue in “new energy” sectors rose 51% during this period, while revenue for coal, oil, chemicals and other “energy-intensive” sectors fell slightly.
• China’s central Anhui province has released the country’s first “electricity carbon footprint factor data”, reports BJX News.
• An opinion article in China Daily by the University of Nairobi’s Prof Patrick Maluki says Chinese energy projects in Africa are “more likely to win public trust and endure” if they “align with African domestic laws and international environmental standards”.
• China Green-Metal Certification Centre manager Zhao Yue writes in a China Daily commentary that, in the long-term, the development of China’s carbon market will “ultimately neutralise the impact” of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism on its aluminium exports.
• Bloomberg: “Costlier cells from China jolt Indian solar supply chains.”

A new study has found that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached over 2014-17, “a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves”, reports the Associated Press. The newswire continues: “The analysis concluded that 51% of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching, while 15% experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the ‘third global bleaching event’.” Dr Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, tells the newswire that it was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record” and “yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe fourth event, which started in early 2023”.

The US climate newsletter Heated examines the ramifications of Trump’s move to repeal the endangerment finding for the oil industry. It says: “While environmental groups will undoubtedly sue, they’ll have their work cut out for them. If even one of the EPA’s many legal arguments hold up in court, those precedents could restrict future presidential administrations from trying to regulate planet-warming emissions. Fossil fuel companies, power plants and other major emitters could effectively be free to pollute as much as they want – forever.” However, the oil industry lobby “isn’t celebrating” the news, the newsletter continues, adding: “The reason is simple: oil corporations have realised that repealing the endangerment finding could backfire, leaving them more vulnerable to accountability than ever before.”

MORE US COMMENT

• A Washington Post editorial says the “EPA is right to reverse Obama overreach”, arguing that “free-market-driven innovation has done more to combat climate change than regulatory power grabs like the ‘endangerment finding’ ever did”.
• Commenting on the endangerment repeal, a Daily Telegraph editorial claims that the US – and not the UK – is “leading the way on energy”. It says that Trump has “sought to change the basis of its energy policy to prioritise affordability, international competitiveness, and domestic industry”.

Adam Bell, head of policy at the consultancy group Stonehaven and the UK government’s former head of energy policy, has a frontpage piece in the House Magazine (Politics Home online) on whether the UK Labour government can close the gap to reaching “clean power” by 2030. He says: “These are strong headwinds, but there is an unexpected chink of light. The government may be on course to achieve its 2030 target, albeit not in the way it expected. [UK net-zero scenarios] presume significant increases in [electricity] demand. If demand doesn’t increase dramatically – driven by heat pumps, electric cars and data centres – then a smaller generation build-out might be sufficient to decarbonise the power system. Given that demand for electricity has been declining for the last 20 years, this would be in keeping with the existing trend.” The climate and energy special edition of the magazine also features a comment article by climate minister Katie White, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho and an article on Labour’s new local power plan by Melanie Onn MP. 

MORE UK COMMENT

• Times political columnist Daniel Finkelstein says that energy secretary Ed Miliband has emerged as “the winner” from a recent attack on prime minister Keir Starmer’s leadership, with departures of key advisers meaning the party is likely to “put more effort and emphasis on net-zero”.
• Independent chief business commentator James Moore asks: “Is energy giant BP running out of gas?” Meanwhile, a Lex opinion in the Financial Times says “BP is not getting enough credit for its turnaround”.
• Sam Ashworth-Hayes, a columnist and leader writer at the climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph, claims that “the industrial revolution would be illegal now”.

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Daisy Dunne, with contributions from Anika Patel and Henry Zhang. It was edited by Robert McSweeney.

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