For the second time, EU energy ministers have delayed an agreement on a gas price cap, as part of the bloc’s emergency measures to curb the soaring prices of gas imports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Financial Times reports. Following an eight-hour meeting in Brussels, ministers “agreed the rough framework of a mechanism to limit gas prices if they reached ‘excessive’ levels, but failed to reach a deal on specifics such as the level at which the cap would be triggered”, according to the newspaper. Countries such as Spain and Belgium have called for a cap for months, but some of the more gas-reliant nations, such as Germany and Belgium, fear “it could cause much-needed gas to be redirected to higher-paying markets”. Politico says the the Czech presidency of the European Council has suggested several amendments to an original proposal from the European Commission proposal, which was widely seen as being set too high. However, since then “hours of talks failed to make a final breakthrough”, it adds. Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck said that member states agreed on 90-95% of what was discussed on Tuesday, but big decisions will be left until another meeting on 19 December, Bloomberg reports.

There is also extensive continued coverage of the EU’s new carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). The Financial Times reports that the EU has agreed to introduce “the world’s first carbon border tax with the aim of raising environmental standards globally and protecting its domestic industry”. The deal struck between European parliament members and EU country representatives comes “despite concerns that the plans could breach World Trade Organisation rules and spark trade disputes”, it adds. The Washington Post frames the move as the EU “seek[ing] to pressure China on climate by taxing steel and cement”. Aside from those products, the Guardian notes that “green tariffs” will also be levied on other potentially high-emissions imports, such as fertilisers, aluminium, electricity, hydrogen and some chemicals. The newspaper also has an explainer about these tariffs and the issues they raise.

Separately, Bloomberg reports that UK business secretary Grant Shapps has said Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act “inadvertently” includes elements of unfair competition. It notes that this adds to criticism from other European leaders of the climate and tax measures introduced by the US.

Finally, Reuters reports that the G7 group of major powers has decided to set up an international “climate club” to help advance international partnerships for low-carbon products. The newswire adds that the group has invited “interested states that pursue ambitious climate policies to join”.

As the COP15 biodiversity summit reaches its halfway stage, negotiators have said divisions mean there is a growing risk of a “Copenhagen moment”, referencing the 2009 UN climate summit that ended in a widely criticised outcome, the Guardian reports. The piece notes that over the next two days, environment ministers from more than 100 countries will arrive at the venue in Montreal, Canada, to work on the text known as the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. It references “entrenched positions from the EU, the Africa group and Latin American countries” and talk of “a leadership vacuum” from China –the official host of the event – in negotiations. (Follow Carbon Brief’s coverage of COP15 via our Nature page.)

Reuters reports that some experts have called for selling “biodiversity credits” to help pay for the “monumental task” of halting species loss and the degradation of land. The article adds that the UN says the world is far short of the $384bn required each year by 2025 to protect nature and credits could go some way to generating this money. A BBC News article explains the significance of the “30×30” target to protect 30% of the planet by 2030, which for many is the key ambition of COP15. Seven of the world’s largest economies have announced an alliance at COP15 to improve the sustainability of mining minerals essential to decarbonisation, such as cobalt and lithium, New Scientist reports.

Meanwhile, in an “exclusive” story, Reuters reports that that deforestation in the Brazilian Cerrado, the world’s most biologically diverse savanna, rose by around 25% in the 12 months through to July 2022.

Vietnam and developed country donors from the G7 have reached a deal on a $15.5bn climate-finance package, according to sources quoted by Reuters. It says the deal is expected to be announced later today on the sidelines of a summit of EU and Southeast Asian leaders in Brussels.

Prior to Reuters’ story, Bloomberg reported that the nations involved were still debating “issues including the pace of the nation’s potential shift away from fossil fuels” and the split between loans and grants in the package. The package marks the third in a series of deals known as just energy transition partnerships, which Bloomberg says are “to help coal-reliant middle-income countries accelerate the transition to cleaner energy”. Vietnam is among the world’s top 20 coal users.

Writing in Climate Home News, researchers Zoha Shawoo and Inès Bakhtaoui explain their work on guiding principles for loss-and-damage finance, in light of the fund that was agreed at the end of the recent COP27 summit in Egypt.

Coverage of a “breakthrough” in nuclear fusion continues, as the researchers behind the work confirm that they have overcome a “major barrier” in the development of the fledgling low-carbon power technology, BBC News reports. It says that scientists from the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California reported they have successfully produced more energy from a fusion experiment than was put in – overcoming a key roadblock for this technology. LLNL director Kimberly Budil told reporters including Reuters at a US Energy Department event yesterday that “with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant”. According to the Hill, the US government is even more ambitious, with energy secretary Jennifer Granholm stating that the administration had a goal of achieving commercial fusion within a decade. The Guardian says the experiment has been “hailed…as evidence that the power of the stars can be harnessed on Earth”. In its coverage, the Daily Telegraph takes a slightly more sceptical and UK-centric approach, noting that Budil said the breakthrough would not bring imminent benefits and also acknowledged that “British technology was further ahead”. This references so-called “magnetic confinement fusion power reactors”, such as the Joint European Torus (JET) at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, the newspaper adds.

The Financial Times, which broke the story earlier in the week, has an explainer with graphics about the significance of the nuclear fusion achievement. Meanwhile, in Australia, the Guardian reports that a coalition of technology companies “intend to create a high-intensity laser industry in Australia, with potential applications including nuclear fusion”.

China Daily reports that the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, which is China’s “leading producer of coal”, has “increased production to meet heating needs as cold waves send temperatures plunging across the country”. The state-run newspaper says that, according to data from the local energy bureau, the region’s coal output reached “970m tonnes in the first 10 months of this year, up 13.6% year-on-year, of which 600m tonnes were sent out of the region to meet the coal demand of 29 provincial-level regions”.

Elsewhere, S&P Global Commodity Insights writes that crude oil futures “settled higher” on Tuesday “amid a further easing of Covid-19 restrictions in China, and a tightening of supplies from Canada and Russia”. SPI Asset Management managing partner Stephen Innes is quoted saying: “With China planning to stop tracking some travel, policymakers are clearly shifting towards quarantine-free travel, boosting the economy and increasing oil demand.”

Finally, Project Syndicate carries a comment piece by Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard Kennedy School, who writes: “Years of high subsidies for the country’s solar and wind industries turned Chinese firms into world champions, and China into the world’s preeminent renewable-energy producer. With American and European firms priced out of global markets, the west admonished China for its egregious favouritism.”

New “natural gas”-only boilers in the UK face a ban within four years “under net-zero proposals for the grid to use hydrogen instead”, the Daily Telegraph reports. The newspaper says the government’s plan, mentioned in a consultation, would mean all boilers installed after 2026 would have to be hydrogen-ready. It notes that this is the preferred option of the heating industry, rather than heat pumps that run on electricity. The Financial Times says the proposal is “likely to reignite a bitter row over the future of home heating”. It adds: “Some academics, climate groups and electricity companies argue that hydrogen is expensive and question its suitability for domestic properties. They insist low-carbon alternatives to gas boilers already exist in the form of electric heat pumps.” The Guardian notes that “a ban on gas boilers in new homes comes into force in 2025, although uncertainty remains over the timeframe for the phase-out of fossil gas in existing homes”.

In more UK news, the Guardian reports that levelling-up minister Michael Gove’s claim that carbon credits could be used to claim carbon neutrality on the planned new coal mine in Cumbria has been dismissed as “nonsense” by the chief executive of the Gold Standard carbon-credit organisation.

Measures to help households in the UK save energy, such as information campaigns, have been a “critical gap” in the government’s response to soaring energy prices, according to a new report from the UK Energy Research Centre’s (UKERC), reported by the Press Association. According to the newswire, the UK is “unique in Europe in that its response to the energy crisis has focused almost entirely on supplies such as boosting new renewables – which will not deliver savings straightaway – and subsidies”.

However, according to an “exclusive” story in the Guardian, a “long-awaited” public information campaign to people to cut their energy use and save money this winter will finally launch over the coming weekend with the strapline “it all adds up”. Separately, the Guardian reports that the UK Green Building Council (UKGCB) has laid out a three-point plan for the government to consider to help insulate homes and cut both energy use and emissions.

Finally, chancellor Jeremy Hunt has said the energy support scheme to help people with their bills will be extended in April, with details to be set out “very shortly”, according to the Press Association.

Farmers in the Republic of the Congo say that they are no longer able to access their land because French oil giant Total Energies and the Congolese government have decided to use it for a carbon offsetting project, according to a new investigation by Unearthed. Trees will be planted across 40,000 hectares of land, which the fossil fuel company says will sequester more than 10m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) over 20 years, the piece states. Source Material, which carried out the investigation with Unearthed, notes that each year the project will generate $4m of offsets carbon credits, which Total Energies will use to offset its fossil fuel emissions. Sky News and France’s Mediapart also participated in the investigation.

Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, Reuters reports that at least 120 people have been killed in the capital Kinshasa after “heavy rains unleashed floods and caused landslides”. The article states that “poorly regulated rapid urbanisation has made the city increasingly vulnerable to flash floods after intense rains, which have become more frequent due to climate change”. The International Rescue Committee has warned that climate change is set to fuel further humanitarian crises in 2023, another Reuters article reports.

Another Reuters piece has an explainer about US intentions for investment in Africa, including plans announced since January 2021, for “at least $1.1bn to support African-led efforts to support conservation, climate adaptation, and energy transitions”. This comes as African leaders gather in Washington for a US-Africa summit, where the Guardian reports that many “have come with their own agendas, such as seeking help with high debt repayments, the devastating legacy of the coronavirus, climate change, or military assistance”. The South China Morning Post says that China has warned against turning Africa into a focus of China-US rivalry, noting that both nations have pledged significant investments in the continent.

An editorial in the Financial Times reflects on this week’s breakthrough in nuclear fusion. It says that proponents of this technology have long had to live with “the taunt that a commercial fusion plant always seems to lie 30 years in the future”. It adds that “the chances that the timescale might become considerably shorter rose” this week, with the news that “net energy gain” had been achieved at at Californian lab. “The challenge will be to balance excitement about a symbolically important moment with realism about the gigantic technical and engineering challenges required to translate its promise into a power station,” the editorial says. The article points out that recent hype risks “subsequent disenchantment”, adding that the energy produced in the lab was far off what would be needed in practice. Nevertheless, while it notes that the tens of billions of dollars spent so far over decades on fusion research are “substantial when viewed in isolation”, they are “tiny” compared “not only with other forms of energy…but also with the huge potential rewards from having a new power source that is almost carbon-free in its operations and does not depend on limited raw materials or the vagaries of wind and sunshine”.

Arthur Turrell, author of a book on nuclear fusion, writes in the Guardian that the news is “in many ways, what every fusion scientist has been waiting for”. He continues: “Before this, they couldn’t even claim the scientific principle was empirical fact. That made it hard to build momentum behind turning fusion into a power source.” In contrast with the more measured tones seen in some commentary, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle describes the news as “potentially the biggest news of the decade”. The New York Times’ Climate Forward newsletter also examines what the news does and does not mean.

Taking an inward view of the US announcement, a Daily Telegraph editorial is titled: “Britain is in prime position to commercially exploit this week’s nuclear fusion breakthrough.” The newspaper says the UK “has been in the vanguard of this research since the Joint European Torus (JET) opened at Culham near Oxford in 1984”, adding that, so far, the nation “has been poor at commercially developing inventions that began life here”. It concludes that “we are a world leader in this technology – now the government needs to ensure that we remain so”. In the same newspaper, world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that the UK is “rather good” at nuclear fusion. He says the challenge now will be “how soon the first commercial start-up can crack the engineering and metallurgy challenges of fusion”.

The flagship US Inflation Reduction Act authorises $370bn in subsidies to promote a clean energy transition in the US, with one “ostensible purpose” being a block on China from dominating the green energy market, a Washington Post editorial notes. However, it adds that one side-effect of the measures is to disadvantage Europe as well, by encouraging European companies to move their operations across the Atlantic. The newspaper notes that US president Joe Biden “got an earful about the issue” from French president Emmanuel Macron during a recent state visit to Washington. “The Europeans have a point,” the editorial states, noting that the US measures “violate the spirit, and maybe the letter” of international trade laws the US “did so much to create and pledged to follow”. The editorial concludes that, faced with the threat of Russian aggression, the US and Europe “have to move from talking about their shared values – to acting on them”.

Writing in the New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman says “I’m not sure how the Biden administration will defend the policy if challenged, but it might say that protecting the environment is a national security issue”. He concludes that while international trade rules are important, they are “not more important than protecting democracy and saving the planet”.

New research estimates that over 2010-20, heatwaves caused more than 13,000 pre-term births in China. The authors combine health impact and economic assessment methods to find the impacts of heatwaves on pre-term births. They estimate that one-quarter of pre-term births were due to climate change, resulting $1bn in costs from “human capital losses” per year. The findings “provide additional impetus for introducing more stringent climate mitigation policies and also call for more sufficient adaptations to reduce heatwave detriments to newborn”, the paper adds.