There is widespread global media coverage of the torrential rains that, according to the Associated Press, “slammed South Korea for five days and have left 17 people dead and 11 others missing”. The Daily Telegraph notes that the nation’s national weather agency has described the extreme rainfall as a “once-in-a-century” event. Singapore’s Straits Times says that the rains triggered landslides that killed at least three people. Reuters says: “South Korean president Lee Jae Myung ordered a swift assessment of the damage and the prompt designation of special disaster zones to increase state support.” South Korea’s JoongAng Daily says that the southern county of Sancheong “has accounted for six deaths and seven missing”. BBC News reports: “Thousands of roads and buildings have been damaged and submerged by raging floodwaters, with reports of damage to farmland and the widespread death of livestock. Across the region, nearly 10,000 people have evacuated their homes since the downpour began on Wednesday, while more than 41,000 households have temporarily lost power, local media reported…The rainfall is expected to end late on Sunday, but will be followed by an intense heatwave.”

MORE ON EXTREME WEATHER

• Euronews: “Is climate change fuelling Europe’s early, extreme wildfire season?”
• CNN examines why “climate catastrophes are creating a ‘new market reality’ for insurance carriers”.
• The Financial Times, Guardian and Bloomberg cover a new study showing how extreme weather is driving food price surges across the globe. Carbon Brief has mapped the study’s findings.
• In CNN, senior reporter Andrew Freedman explains that “this is the summer of flooding across the US – and scientists know why”.

China’s premier Li Qiang has announced that construction has begun on “what will be the world’s largest hydropower dam, on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, at an estimated cost of at least $170bn”, reports Reuters, citing state news agency Xinhua. Bloomberg adds: “A new company called China Yajiang Group was also officially unveiled on Saturday. It will be responsible for constructing the hydro project, consisting of five cascade dams and located in the city of Nyingchi in the south-east of the autonomous region of Tibet. The power generated will be mainly transferred outside of Tibet, while also used for local consumption needs, Xinhua said, without providing details on the project’s capacity. The total investment would make the dam one of the costliest infrastructure projects ever and a likely boon to Beijing’s efforts to revive economic growth.” The South China Morning Post, BJX News, International Energy Net, the China Daily and the People’s Daily also cover the story. 

UK energy minister Michael Shanks has claimed that the “war on net-zero” by the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party will cost almost one million jobs, reports the Press Association, adding: “Shanks and Labour stepped up their attacks on Nigel Farage’s party by saying Reform’s opposition to net-zero amounted to a ‘war on jobs’. He added that working people ‘would lose jobs and opportunities if Farage’s party was ever allowed to impose its anti-jobs, anti-growth ideology on the country’.” BusinessGreen also covers the story: “[Labour has] released a new analysis based on figures from CBI Economics, which details how the clean energy economy supports around 950,000 jobs across the UK, including 100,700 in Scotland, 70,500 in Yorkshire and the Humber, and 67,450 jobs in the East Midlands. The intervention comes on the same day new data from the Office for National Statistics showed the number of ‘green jobs’ rose by over a third between 2015 and 2023, while direct employment in the renewable energy sector more than doubled over the same period. Labour said these jobs and the £40bn of investment in clean-energy industries announced since last summer would be put at risk by Reform, given the party has vowed to block renewables projects, introduce new taxes on clean-energy generators, and ‘strike down’ clean-power contracts.” BusinessGreen also notes how Shanks has described Reform’s net-zero plans as “clown-car economics” following its climbdown after Reform’s Richard Tice conceded during an interview that a “legally binding contract is a legally binding contract”. The Daily Express says that Farage was in a “fiery clash with BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg over net-zero” during an interview on her Sunday politics show yesterday. The Daily Mail says Farage used the interview to “distance himself from Reform mayor and ex-Tory MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who this week said she did not believe climate change existed”. London’s Evening Standard says that Jenkyns has falsely claimed that “climate change does not exist”, as parts of England “swelter in a third heatwave of the summer”. The Scotsman has an article under the headline: “SNP says Nigel Farage’s renewable energy ’sabotage’ will ’turn Aberdeen into Detroit’.”

MORE ON UK

• The Financial Times reports that the UK government is “set to admit for the first time” that the Sizewell C nuclear plant will cost £38bn to build, as it “reveals the terms of an expected deal for private investors to fund a small portion of the bill”. Relatedly, the costs of new UK nuclear plants should be cut by reducing “red tape and bureaucracy”, according to “pro-growth” thinktank Britain Remade, reports the Times.
• Fuel duty “looks set to be frozen again in autumn’s Budget to ease the strain on struggling households”, says the i newspaper in a frontpage “exclusive”. [In 2023, Carbon Brief analysis revealed that fuel-duty freezes since 2010 have increased UK CO2 emissions by up to 7%.]
• Politico reports that “the Lib Dems have a plan to start banging on about the climate”.
• Farmers in England are warning that, following the driest spring for 132 years, an “intensifying drought affecting several regions is having a devastating impact on their ability to produce food, while ‘perilously low’ water levels are endangering river wildlife”, reports the Financial Times.
• The first schools in England to install what the government described as “Great British Energy solar panels” bought them from Chinese firms, claims BBC News.
• British Gas CEO Chris O’Shea tells the Daily Telegraph that a proposal to move green levies from electricity to gas in a bid to encourage the adoption of heat pumps would be an “abomination”. The Sun also picks up the story.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that it will “eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so”, reports the New York Times. The newspaper quotes Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238 – a union that represents thousands of EPA employees – who says the science office “is the heart and brain of the EPA…without it, we don’t have the means to assess impacts upon human health and the environment. Its destruction will devastate public health in our country.” The Washington Post says the office “had about 1,155 employees at the beginning of Trump’s tenure”, adding that “the agency did not confirm how many staffers would be cut”.The story is also covered by outlets including CNBC, Reuters and the Guardian. Separately, the Guardian has a feature on how the Trump’ administration’s “assault on science – particularly climate science – has led to unprecedented funding cuts and staff layoffs”. It opens with a quote by Sally Johnson, an Earth scientist who has spent the past two decades helping collect, store and distribute data at NASA and NOAA: “Our ability to respond to climate change, the biggest existential threat facing humanity, is totally adrift.”

MORE ON US

• The US president is using an “invented” national energy “crisis” to justify expansion of coal, oil and gas, scholars and watchdogs have told the Guardian, adding: “It’s an agenda that in only its first six months, has put back environmental progress by decades.”
• The Financial Times reports that Sabine Mauderer, deputy governor of the Bundesbank, has defended the banking sector’s work on climate change following attacks from the US administration and warned officials at central banks have previously ‘completely underestimated’ the risks rising temperatures pose to the financial system”.
• The Guardian: “BP agrees to sell US onshore wind business as it shifts back to oil.” 

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) has called for supporting the buildout of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure construction in a slew of measures to progress in developing the country’s rural areas, International Energy Net reports. Other tasks emphasised by the NEA included “enhancing rural power supply”, strengthening “distributed renewable energy in rural areas” and continuing “promoting clean heating” to progress in developing the country’s rural areas, the energy news outlet adds.The Economic Daily reports that China’s “two new” trade-in policy for EVs and other goods is accelerating the “use of green production methods” in China’s manufacturing industry. An editorial in the state-supporting newspaper Global Times covers new research by energy thinktank Ember saying that the “two new” programme could reduce electricity use for “residential cooling during peak summer months” by as much as 4%. 

MORE ON CHINA

• Vice-president Han Zheng met with the UK-based Sustainable Markets Initiative, saying China has “firmly implemented” its plan for climate action, Xinhua reports.
• Reuters reports that China has “quietly” issued its first 2025 rare-earth quotas, another “sign of Beijing tightening its control over the crucial sector”.
• International Energy Net notes that, although China’s renewable pricing reforms cancelled mandatory energy storage installations, local governments are still “encouraging new energy storage” in policy documents.
• The Guardian: “Caught between a fossil fuel past and a green future, China’s coal miners chart an uncertain path.”

Germany approved a record 7,851 megawatts (MW) of new wind turbines in the first half of 2025  – equal to the capacity of seven nuclear plants, Die Welt reports. Since last year, approval times have fallen from 23 to 18 months on average, with Bavaria, “a laggard in wind energy”, approving projects in just 7.8 months, notes the outlet, describing it as a “national record”. However, the newspaper adds the industry fears this pace might not last, while “anxiously awaiting” the monitoring report from the new economy ministry on the status of the energy transition, which could impact renewables expansion targets, financing and regulations. 

MORE ON GERMANY

• In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the CEO of European energy provider Vattenfall warns against a slowdown in Germany’s energy transition and calls for a “determined” move away from fossil fuels. 
• Der Spiegel reports that the German federal audit office “sees significant risks” for the climate and transformation fund (KTF) as a “reliable” financing instrument. There will be “little financial leeway” for the fund in 2025 and the following years, notes Handelsblatt. 
• German chancellor Friedrich Merz has “reaffirmed his preference” for carbon capture and storage technology, arguing Germany would only reach its climate goals by pursuing the “most modern technology”, reports Montel.
• Deutsche Welle: “How Germany manages extreme heat and climate change.”

The veteran environmentalist and author Bill McKibben argues in the New York Times that the Trump administration’s efforts to attach clean energy will fail because of “price”. He explains: “For the past three or four years, we’ve lived on a planet where the cheapest way to generate energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The world also now has great ways to use that electricity: the electric vehicle and the electric bike to get around, the heat pump to warm or cool your home, the induction cooktop to replace the open gas flame in your kitchen. We’re at the point where human beings could dispense with burning fossil fuels, sparing us from not only the worst of the climate crisis but also the roughly nine million deaths a year that come with breathing the pollution from all that combustion. We would save money – most estimates of the cost of the recent legislation include more than $100 a year in extra electricity costs for American families because we stay dependent on natural gas.”

MORE ENERGY COMMENT

• Javier Blas in Bloomberg: “Winter is coming for oil – and not in a positive way.”
• The UK’s climate-sceptic newspapers, such as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, continue to fill their comment pages with screeds under headlines such as: “The truth about Britain’s taxpayer cash-soaked wind farm industry”; “Reform is right to target Miliband’s outrageously expensive wind subsidies”; “The rush to EVs is causing real damage”; “The dark side of Labour’s solar energy crusade”; and “Everyone else is scaling back green targets – why can’t we?”. An editorial in the Sunday Telegraph says “net-zero should be scrapped”.
• Gavin Maguire’s latest column for Reuters: “Trump’s push for a comeback in coal may turn to ashes.”
• An editorial in the climate-sceptic comment pages of the Wall Street Journal claims that “power shortages are coming [to the US] thanks to wind and solar subsidies”.

Cass Sunstein, who is the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard and author of the upcoming book “On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom”, writes in the Financial Times that “research suggests that personal experience and prior beliefs interact in complex ways”. He adds: “Our brains are wired to react to what we have seen and heard. In some domains, including climate change, political ideology does damp those reactions. But as weather-related tragedies become more numerous and more salient, we should expect an increasingly intense public demand that officials prepare in advance – and, very possibly, a significant increase in the percentage of people who think that climate change is both serious and real.”

MORE COMMENT

• In his latest column for Bloomberg, David Fickling examines the global supply of milk and how climate change is making current stresses on the system “worse”. He writes: “Rising temperatures will mean it is even harder for tropical and subtropical countries to be self-sufficient: extreme heat can cut milk production by as much as 10%…Milk is also a major culprit in global warming, as well as a victim of it.”
• In the Calgary Herald, four Canadian researchers pen an article under the headline: “It’s time to change the conversation about the economy and climate change.”

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Leo Hickman, with contributions by Anika Patel and Henry Zhang, and edited by Robert McSweeney.

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