Syria has decided to sign the Paris agreement on climate change, the world’s final party to do so. The surprise decision, taken at the COP23 climate summit in Bonn, will leave the US as the only country outside the agreement if it follows through on President Donald Trump’s vow to leave. The announcement was made by a Syrian delegate at a plenary session of the conference yesterday morning, reports Climate Home News. The move comes on the heels of Nicaragua signing the accord last month, notes The Hill. Separately, lawmakers in Damascus last month “approved a draft law on ratifying Syria’s accession to the Paris Climate Agreement”, says the Washington Post. The Paris climate talks in 2015 “coincided with some of the fiercest fighting in Syria’s civil war”, the BBCsays, and international sanctions made it difficult for officials to attend – “meaning the country was in no position to sign” at the time. Syria’s decision has not caused a change in the position taken by the US, reports the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Kelly Love pointed reporters to a statement the administration made when Nicaragua joined the pact. “As the president previously stated, the United States is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms the are more favourable for our country,” the statement said. The Independent, Telegraph, Politico, Think Progress, BusinessGreen and Time all have the story.

US President Donald Trump is “for the time being” not invited to a climate change summit due to be held in Paris in December, an official in President Emmanuel Macron’s office said. More than 100 world leaders have been invited to the “One Planet Summit”, on the two-year anniversary of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, reports the Associated Press. A French diplomatic official said the countries whose heads of state are being invited are those who are “especially committed” to implementing the agreement. An invitation will soon be sent to invite the US “at a diplomatic level,” the official said. The event, co-organised with the UN and World Bank, is expected to see around 2,000 participants, including non-governmental organisations, foundations, banks, startups, local governments, city mayors and others. The Hill also has the story.

Prince Charles campaigned on climate change agreements without disclosing his private estate had an offshore financial interest in what he was promoting, the “Paradise papers” have revealed. The documents show the Duchy of Cornwall in 2007 bought shares worth $113,500 in Sustainable Forestry Management Ltd (SFM), based in Bermuda, which traded in carbon credits. The company’s director was a friend of the prince’s since his university days. The prince later made speeches calling for the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) and the Kyoto Protocol to include carbon credits from tropical and subtropical forests for maintaining old forest growth. “Despite his high profile campaign, the environmental agreements were not changed,” notes the BBC. A Clarence House spokesman said the Prince of Wales had “certainly never chosen to speak out on a topic simply because of a company that it may have invested in…Carbon markets are just one example that the prince has championed since the 1990s and which he continues to promote today.” In June 2008, the prince sold his shares in SFM for $325,000 and SFM is no longer in existence. Labour MP and tax campaigner Margaret Hodge tells the Guardian that the disclosures confirmed the need for more transparency. “It seems clear to me that Prince Charles could not have known or understood the nature of the investment in his friend’s company,” she said, adding: “What is clear is that…the Prince of Wales should not be involved in investment decisions and that the Treasury should monitor the investments to ensure that the reputation and integrity of our royal family is protected.” The Times, Associated Press, Express and CBC News and Carbon Pulse all cover the story.

Developers behind a £2bn offshore windfarm planned for a site off Scotland’s east coast will press ahead with the scheme next year after a long-running battle with the wildlife charity RSPB Scotland came to an end. The charity had applied to the Supreme Court to appeal a decision by the Scottish Courts in May of this year to allow the project – plus three others – citing the threat posed to seabirds such as puffins, gannets and kittiwakes. The Supreme Court yesterday refused the RSPB’s application, bringing to an end nearly three years of legal wrangling. Because of advances in wind turbines during that time, the project will now involve a maximum of 54 turbines compared to the 125 originally envisaged. The Telegraph, Times and Scotsman all cover the news.

Slow demand growth and a resurgent American shale industry could inhibit attempts to eliminate a global supply glut, Opec says. In its annual World Oil Outlook report, the cartel of 14 oil-exporting countries acknowledged that restoring balance to the global market was likely to be a long-term challenge. Opec predicts the that American shale output would peak after 2025, at which point demand for Opec crude oil would start rising again. The cartel expects a larger-than-expected boom in electric vehicle sales could cause global oil demand to peak and flatten out in the late 2030s, reports Bloomberg. “In just a few years, electric vehicles have gone from being completely unaffordable, impractical and not particularly nice to representing a valid option for a niche pool of customers,” the report says. Meanwhile, Reuters analysis of clean energy investments and forecasts by oil majors, along with exclusive interviews with top oil executives, “reveal mostly token investments in alternative energy”.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that [climate change] does not need to be all bad news,” writes Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, “a series of fast-moving global megatrends, spurred by trillion-dollar investments, indicates that humanity might be able to avert the worst impacts of global warming.” Carrington looks into the detail of each of these trends, which include renewable energy, mass-market electric cars and plant-based alternatives to meat. “These trends show that greenhouse gas emissions can be halted,” he says.

“As climate diplomats gather this week in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd Conference of the Parties…I would like to point their attention to a different, perhaps gloomier statistic: the world’s carbon intensity of energy,” says Eduardo Porter, who writes on economics for the New York Times. “The term refers to a measure of the amount of CO2 spewed into the air for each unit of energy consumed.” “It offers some bad news,” he says because it has declined just 4% in highly industrialised nations over the last 20 years. “This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps renewables are not the answer.” The solution isn’t just about investing more money in renewables, Porter concludes: “Building a zero-carbon energy system requires broader thinking about the technological mix”.

“With the news that Syria has officially joined the Paris climate agreement, the United States, under President Trump, will stand as the lone dissenting country,” writes Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University. “The problem is that the Republicans who are currently in power in Washington, DC are stuck debating the ‘knowns’,” he says. “They have grown more intransigent, raising questions that were literally answered decades ago.” “Continuing to argue about what’s causing the planet to warm is the moral equivalent of arguing over whether wood burns while a fire is climbing up out of the basement of your house,” Mann concludes. “It’s time Republicans stop arguing and got out the hoses instead.”

Projects aimed at protecting people from future climate change in Bangladesh may actually be causing damage to both marginalised people and the environment, according to a new study. Based on a series of interviews conducted in Bangladesh, the research claims that climate adaptation projects have “marginalised stakeholders”, “contributed to environmental degradation” and “aggravated the disempowerment of women and minorities”. “In the case of Bangladeshi, climate change policies implemented under the country’s National Adaptation Program of Action have enabled elites to capture land through public servants, the military, and even gangs carrying bamboo sticks,” writes researcher Benjamin Sovacool. “Most egregiously, community coping strategies for climate change have entrenched class and ethnic hierarchies ultimately trapping the poor, powerless, and displaced into a predatory patronage system that can aggravate human insecurity and intensify violent conflict.”

Emissions caused by urban households’ purchases of goods and services from beyond city limits could be much larger than previously estimated, a new study finds. These “upstream” emissions typically occur all over the world and are roughly equal in size to the total emissions originating from a city’s own territory, the research says. “We show that upstream emissions from urban household consumption are in the same order of magnitude as cities’ overall territorial emissions and that local policy leverage to reduce upstream emissions is larger than typically assumed,” the researchers say.