The European Commission is set to propose a scheme to certify removals of CO2 from the atmosphere as part of a push to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, according to a leaked proposal seen by EurActiv. The outlet continues: “On 30 November, the European Commission is expected to table a legislative proposal to establish a carbon removal certification scheme. According to a leaked draft of the text, ‘the EU is not on track to deliver’ the removals needed to reach net zero emissions, which amount to several hundred million tonnes per year. To tackle this, the proposal aims to boost removals by ensuring they are genuine, long-lasting and monitored, using a credible and transparent assessment to give certainty to public bodies and private operators…According to the European Commission, reaching climate neutrality by mid-century will require “both natural ecosystems and industrial activities”. The proposal looks at three methods of carbon removal and storage: permanent removal, carbon stored in products and carbon farming. These vary in terms of maturity, cost-effectiveness and monitoring costs. But the inclusion of carbon stored in products and some types of carbon farming has drawn criticism from environmental activists.”

BusinessGreen reports that Labour leader Keir Starmer has “showcased the party’s ambitious climate policy plans to business leaders”, telling the CBI conference in Birmingham yesterday that he views climate change as an economic opportunity, rather than a risk. The outlet adds: “Starmer unveiled a three-pronged economic strategy which he said a Labour government would deliver economic stability, high skills policies, and green growth so as to ‘drive Britain forward’ following years of flatlining economic performance. Starmer said the ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ could combat the ‘vicious cycle of stagnation’ and soaring energy bills that have been allowed to take hold of the UK economy under the Conservative government…Starmer’s speech comes in stark contrast to prime minister Rishi Sunak’s address to the CBI conference when he failed to mention the net-zero transition.” (During his speech, Starmer cited Carbon Brief analysis showing that UK renewables have been nine times cheaper than gas for generating electricity.)

In other UK news, the Guardian says “BP declined to reveal how much windfall tax it would have paid without an investment ‘loophole’ when being questioned by MPs on Tuesday, while fellow energy group SSE raised concerns the levy ‘favours; oil and gas drilling over renewables projects”. The Press Association focuses on the same hearing, but reports the comments made by Will Gardiner: “The boss of Drax – which collects hundreds of millions of pounds in renewable energy subsidies – has denied the firm is the fourth largest carbon emitter in the European Union.” The newswire continues: “Gardiner said emissions from his power plant, which burns wood pellets, are different from those of fossil fuel sites. ‘It’s a different type of emission, which needs to be recognised as important,’ he said during examination by Darren Jones, who chairs the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy select committee. Quizzed by Jones on whether Drax is the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the country, Gardiner repeatedly refused to answer the question.”

Separately, Bloomberg reports that the “UK grid [has] issue[d] a power supply alert as wind generation drops”. The Independent covers new research by the Centre for Economic & Business Research and pump and water efficiency company Grundfos which shows that “UK homes and businesses are losing out on a massive £3.1bn worth of savings every year due to various barriers to implementing energy efficiency improvements”. BusinessGreen also covers the research. Additionally, BusinessGreen reports that “the government has announced the launch of a new green artificial intelligence (AI) innovation programme and is inviting applicants to apply for funding for projects that can help enable emission reductions across the UK”.

There is continuing media focus on the topic of loss and damage, following the conclusion of COP27. Climate Home News says scientists are warning that a “lack of weather data in much of Africa means that loss and damage funds can not be dependent on a disaster being proven to be caused by climate change”. The outlet adds: “A shortage of weather monitoring stations in places like West Africa’s Sahel region make it difficult to prove a disaster was caused by climate change. But that shouldn’t stop people affected by disasters like droughts from getting money to rebuild their lives when their livestock die, scientists Friederike Otto and Joyce Kimutai told Climate Home.” Meanwhile, the Hill says that the “newly agreed ‘loss and damage’ fund in which developed countries would pay for climate damages suffered by vulnerable developing counterparts lacks both details and actual funding, raising question about whether it’s merely a symbolic breakthrough”. The Hill quotes Morgan Bazilian, a public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines: “A loss and damage fund has been established and that’s important on its own, but it’s an empty vessel.” The outlet adds: “Despite such scepticism, some advocates voiced optimism, arguing that getting to this point represents major progress after years of stalemate.”

The establishment of a “loss and damage” fund mechanism can be considered the “only outcome” of this year’s climate conference, but “many important details have not been finalised”, China Energy News writes, adding that it will “take some time before it actually comes out, and the most controversial decisions related to it will be postponed until next year”. The state-run industry newspaper notes that UN secretary general António Guterres said the move is “not a foolproof solution, but a much-needed political signal to rebuild the broken trust”.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic says that “the two weeks of intense haggling at COP27 may focus the attention of the climate-activist community on the US and China more than ever”. It adds that the summit left “unresolved some of the thorniest issues, including how exactly the new fund will work, and many experts believe that the progress necessary to repair a warming world will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, without close collaboration between these two great powers”. Lauri Myllyvirta, the lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, is quoted saying: “There has been a lack of initiative [from China].“ Scott Moore, the director of China programs at the University of Pennsylvania, is quoted saying the US may “need a new climate strategy that is less focused on cooperation with China”. The Diplomat has a comment piece by Nima Khorrami, titled: “Can China and the US cooperate on climate change.” He writes that in spite of the US and China’s “alleged agreement to isolate the climate dossier from the wider, and highly contentious, context of their bilateral relations, their status as technological rivals, coupled with the significance of technological supremacy for power projection capabilities, will severely hinder the prospect of a common Sino-American approach to climate change”.

In other China news, the Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by William P Barr, titled: “America can’t depend on China for its electric vehicles.“ He writes: “Using massive subsidies and an array of predatory and unlawful tactics – including industrial espionage, dumping, tariffs, and quotas – Beijing has muscled aside American companies in critical industries.” The Financial Times has an article, titled: “West could end reliance on Chinese batteries by 2030, says Goldman Sachs.” Finally, Climate Home News has an article, titled: “UN nature pact nears its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ moment.“ It says that “big forested countries such as China, Brazil and Indonesia are yet to join the coalition” of “more than a hundred nations calling to protect 30% of all land and ocean ecosystems by 2030”.

Indonesia will continue building new coal-fired power plants, despite a recent $20bn deal with the G7 group of industrialised countries to help it transition to clean energy, reports Mongabay. It adds: “Activists say this puts the deal, known as the Just Energy Transition Partnership and signed at the G20 summit that Indonesia hosted earlier this month, on the brink of collapse before it even takes off…Under the deal – the single largest climate finance partnership to date – Indonesia will aim to cap its emissions from the power sector by 2030, faster than the initial target of 2037, and to generate 34% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. But the Indonesian government will still allow the construction of new coal plants, with a combined capacity of 13 gigawatts, that have already been tendered out. The plan is laid out in the country’s 10-year energy plan for 2021-2030. Crucially, a 2022 regulation issued by President Joko Widodo greenlights the construction of what’s known as captive coal plants, which are built specifically to supply certain industries and not to feed into the grid.”

Separately, Bloomberg covers a development in the Just Energy Transition Partnership that South Africa signed at COP26 in Glasgow with the US, UK, Germany, France and the European Union: “South Africa, having secured $8.5bn in climate finance from some of the world’s richest countries, is in talks with additional nations to help it cut reliance on coal, environment minister Barbara Creecy said.” She is quoted saying: “We’ve had some bilaterals where there’s been additional interest shown…we are now going to make the circle bigger and other countries that would want to contribute to the JET Investment Plan, we are going to include them as well.”

Meanwhile, Reuters says that “executives at companies across 20 major economies see the Ukraine conflict speeding up the pace of the transition to cleaner energy, rather than slowing it down, a survey by Britain-based law firm Ashurst found”.

Australia’s climate conditions will worsen in the years ahead, according to two national agencies, reports Reuters. It says the Bureau of Meteorology and national science agency CSIRO warn in a biennial climate report that the nation will experience quicker changes in weather patterns and more frequent extreme climate events. “We’re expecting to see longer fire seasons in the future for the south and east, and an increase in the number of dangerous fire weather days,” Karl Braganza, the bureau’s manager of Climate Environmental Prediction Services is quoted saying. The Guardian also covers the story, saying: “The continent is now 1.47C hotter than it was in 1910 and sea levels around the coastline are rising at an accelerating rate, according to the 2022 State of the Climate report, a series released every second year…The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the report was ‘sobering reading’ and the science minister, Ed Husic, said it ‘reinforces the urgent need for action on climate change’. Research director of the Climate Science Centre at CSIRO, Jaci Brown, said: ‘There are no surprises here and the story hasn’t changed. It’s happening, it’s serious and we need to do something about it.’”

There is still a flurry of comment pieces being published reacting to the outcome of COP27. The Daily Telegraph’s world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes: “Humanity was on track for a 4C world less than a decade ago. The Sino-American deal at the Paris Accords in 2015 brought that down to 3.2C. By the time we reached Glasgow last year, renewable energy had already undercut fossil energy on pure price for two thirds of the globe, and electric vehicles were already coming. Low-carbon shipping, steel, cement, and fertilisers, were no longer science fiction. The US Energy Department was already targeting green hydrogen at $1 a kilo this decade…The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that this year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh – thin gruel though it may be – has trimmed it a little further to 1.7C, chiefly by eating into future coal emissions and by mobilising satellites and the latest remote sensors to control methane leaks. Pledges are not delivery, of course, but you could argue that such a rapid change in potential planetary fortunes is something of a miracle. For that we can thank Western technology, free market enterprise, and Asian manufacturing at scale, together acting in response to political signals.” He adds: “Those who dismiss the UN’s exasperating COP27 process as empty theatre are too easily distracted by media noise. The political journalists who cover these events have a pathological urge to seek out conflict – easy to find – and the environmental journalists rarely deem any outcome to be good enough. Business journalists almost never attend and that distorts the coverage…So yes, the COP process is deeply irritating and increasingly prone to anti-Western agitation. But it has not yet become a net negative.”

Elsewhere, Green MP Caroline Lucas lays out in the Independent the “good, the bad, and the exceedingly ugly” from COP27. She concludes: “COP27 represented a tiptoe forward, when we desperately needed a giant leap. We simply don’t have time for timid dawdling, and modest progress. The transformation of our economy to align with a liveable future is going to happen – our government should be leading the way on a managed and orderly transition nationally, not taking us down the path to more climate chaos.” Katie Kouchakjiin at EnergyMonitor says that “aside from the historic agreement on loss and damage, the Sharm el-Sheikh climate talks outcomes are underwhelming and were rightly met with weak applause from weary negotiators”. Reuters has published analysis by Simon Jessop and Aidan Lewis under the headline: “Drops of climate finance start to fill an ocean of need.” New Scientist’s Madeleine Cuff has two pieces. The first says “a sense of stagnation pervaded the summit…as negotiators failed to reach agreement on key issues such as fossil fuel financing”. The second concludes that “until high-income nations can demonstrate that going green pays off, pushing for faster emissions cuts will be an uphill struggle at COP summits”. BusinessGreen‘s James Murray lists “10 things businesses have learnt from the Sharm el-Sheikh summit”. Finally, the Guardian carries the views of human rights and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger under the headline: “Make ecocide an international crime and other legal ideas to help save the planet.”

In the Financial Times, chief economics commentator Martin Wolf asks “how close…are we to making renewables the dominant technology for energy supply?” He responds: “The answer is that we have made remarkable progress. But it is not fast enough to be transformative within the relevant timescale, one that has become ever shorter as a result of the past decades of delays.” Wolf continues: “Yet, if the 1.5C limit is to be kept alive, total emissions have to fall sharply by 2030, particularly in electricity generation…Nothing happened [at COP27] in Sharm el-Sheikh to suggest this is likely…Delaying everything is sheer inertia.” He adds: “With market forces increasingly pushing in the right direction, the question is how to accelerate them.” Wolf then sets out his view of how to do this: “Broadly speaking, five policy changes do still need to be made, or strengthened: increase investment in scientific research; increase subsidisation of the application of new technologies, with a view to accelerating learning-by-doing in each, as well as speeding up investment in complementary technologies; cease subsidisation of fossil fuels, which amounted to $700bn in 2021, other than in carbon capture and storage; introduce carbon pricing in one of several possible ways, perhaps by preventing prospective declines in energy prices from working their way fully into the market; and de-risk finance especially in developing countries.” In conclusion, Wolf writes: “None of this is new. But the politics just might be. Yes, the world has talked far more than it has acted. Yes, it is far behind where it needs to be. And no, the market is not going to deliver the needed transition fast enough. But there is now a significant chance of delivering safe, secure, clean and cheap energy to all. Moreover, the possibility might, properly supported, generate a global investment boom that would absorb excess savings for an extended period. The energy transition should no longer mean hair shirts forever, but an opportunity that politicians can sell. They should try to do much harder.”

Meanwhile, in the Sun, climate-sceptic motoring campaigner Howard Cox writes another breathless piece for the Sun on the subject of fuel duty, which he believes should be significantly cut. (The article is based on a misreading of the autumn statement and accompanying Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts. Successive planned inflation-linked hikes in fuel duty have been cancelled for more than a decade.)

Scientists document changing conditions in southeast Greenland in a new study, revealing that changes in water temperature and sea-ice cover have resulted in shifting ecosystems in the region. The team uses data on sea ice, a range of oceanic properties and fish and marine mammal abundance to examine the shifts in this part of the north Atlantic. They find that parts of the ocean in the region have warmed “significantly” over the past several decades and document a “20-year period with low or no coastal sea ice [that] is unique in the 200-year history of ice observations in the region”. They write: “The lack of pack ice in summer together with a warming ocean generated cascading effects on the ecosystem.”