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Tensions over EU petrol ban | UK to ‘stick’ with EV target | 10 years since Paris

15.12.25

News

Spain urges EU not to weaken 2035 combustion engine ban, letter shows

Reuters

The Spanish government has “urged the European Commission not to weaken the bloc’s 2035 ban on new CO2-emitting cars”, reports Reuters, citing a letter seen by the publication. It continues: “Governments, including Germany and Italy, have pressured the EU to weaken the 2035 ban, arguing this would protect automakers struggling with tough competition from China. In a letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, dated Thursday, [Spain] said weakening the policy would risk jobs and factory closures by undermining Europe’s attempts to transform its car industry into a powerhouse for manufacturing electric vehicles.” The newswire notes that an announcement on the policy is due tomorrow. A separate Reuters article says Volvo is also calling for the 2035 ban to remain.

Bloomberg’s “hyperdrive” newsletter says the EU is “preparing to soften ambitious rules that would have effectively banned new combustion-engine vehicles from 2035. While the situation is fluid, loopholes are under discussion that could lead to a five-year extension and even taking the ban off the table, according to people familiar with the discussions.” The Guardian has further coverage of the rumoured “water[ing] down”. The Financial Times reports that Volkswagen is to close a factory in Dresden in east Germany amid “weak China sales and demand in Europe as well as US tariffs weighing on sales in America”. The newspaper explains: “Volkswagen was facing ‘widespread’ challenges, with the expected longer lifetime for fossil fuel-burning engines requiring new investment, [an analyst] said.” 

MORE ON EU

  • Imports to the EU of aluminium, cement and certain other commodities could face “higher costs than previously expected” under the bloc’s “carbon border adjustment mechanism” that enters force in January, reports Reuters.
  • The Financial Times “moral money” newsletter describes last week’s decision to ‘weaken”, but retain a new EU directive on corporate reporting as a “telling late-night compromise”. It adds: “Brussels is prepared to make swingeing cuts to its green regulatory drive – but not to reverse course altogether.”
  • Bloomberg says that France is “seeking to delay” an EU vote on a free-trade deal with the “Mercosur” group of South American countries. The FT also has the story.
  • A Financial Times feature looks at the decline of EU regulatory ambition with the example of deforestation rules now delayed until 2026: “Six years ago the EU pledged to stem the destruction of the world’s forests – and, thus, take a major step towards halting climate change – by the sheer might of its regulatory power.”

UK to stick with EV targets as EU looks to water down petrol ban

Financial Times

The Financial Times reports that the UK government has “insisted it will not dilute plans to shift all new car sales to electric vehicles from 2035”, despite growing expectations that the EU will “soon relax its own targets”. It continues: “A Downing Street spokesperson on Friday said ministers remained committed to phasing out all non-zero emission car and van sales by 2035, despite industry pressure to slow down the transition…The UK will ban the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from 2030, although a small and diminishing number of hybrid sales will be allowed until 2035. The government also has an ‘electric vehicles mandate’ [ZEV] under which a certain proportion of new cars sold in Britain must be EVs, with that percentage climbing every year until 2035.” The Times cites “experts”, including a “senior source at one of the UK’s biggest car manufacturers”, saying the UK would have to “rethink” its targets, if the EU’s are amended. The Independent covers the Times’ coverage.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph reports on its frontpage that the opposition Conservatives, currently third in the polls on 17%, would “ditch the 2030 ban” on new petrol cars, if they were to win power in the next election due in 2029. The story is based on a comment article for the Sunday Telegraph by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in which she criticises and pledges to also scrap the ZEV mandate that became law in January 2024, when she was business secretary. The Guardian, BBC News, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express all cover the news. The Daily Telegraph says the Conservative have also pledged to “scrap millions of pounds of net-zero car subsidies if they win the next election”.

MORE ON UK

  • The government’s “warm homes plan” has been “pushed back into next year” and will now be published in January, reports the i newspaper. 
  • Drax, the former coal plant in Yorkshire, is “cutting more than half of [the staff at] its global division specialising in the controversial green technology known as carbon capture and storage”, reports the Times.
  • In an article trailed on its frontpage, quoting the opposition Conservatives and hard-right Reform UK, the Daily Telegraph says banks are “under fire” for having used modelling from the Network for Greening the Financial System, some of which was “based on an inaccurate paper that was recently retracted”.
  • The Guardian reports that Catherine Howard, a lawyer advising the government on planning reform, will leave her post when her contract ends in January, “despite having been asked to stay on indefinitely”. It says she is “understood to have disagreed” with the prime minister’s pledge to fully implement the recommendations of a review into building nuclear power stations more quickly.
  • A headline in the i newspaper claims: “The race for Britain’s EVs is poisoning water supplies – 6,000 miles away.”
  • The Daily Telegraph carries claims from the head of a ferry company that a diesel-powered ferry should not have to pay for the emissions it causes under the UK’s emissions trading system.

US: More atmospheric rivers coming for flooded Washington and the West Coast

CNN

More rain is forecast to fall this week in the flooded Pacific northwest of the US, reports CNN. It says: “Rivers are dangerously swollen after a days-long deluge from a powerful atmospheric river triggered historic flooding, tens of thousands of evacuations and dozens of water rescues.” Reuters says that towns along the flooded Skagit River in western Washington state were “braced on Friday for potential levee failures”. The Wall Street Journal said tens of thousands of people had been forced to evacuate. The New York Times says: “The force and speed of the flooding shocked people in a region used to heavy rains, prompting worries about future storms and the effects of climate change, which can supercharge the atmosphere with additional moisture and lead to increased flooding.”

The Guardian says in its coverage: “While such storms are not uncommon on the US Pacific coast, meteorologists say they are likely to become more frequent and extreme over the next century if global heating from the human-induced climate crisis continues at current rates.” The Associated Press says: “Climate change has been linked to some intense rainfall. Scientists say that without specific study they cannot directly link a single weather event to climate change, but in general it’s responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.” A Guardian feature on “atmospheric rivers” says: “Researchers have found that the human-caused climate crisis has contributed to the severity of weather events, including atmospheric rivers.”

MORE ON EXTREME WEATHER

  • The Guardian: “Ancient lake reappears in Death Valley after record-breaking rains.”
  • The Washington Post: “Why floods threaten [Oman] one of the driest places in the world.”
  • Bloomberg: “Fifth La Niña in six years to disrupt crops and supply chains.”
  • A feature from Reuters “sustainable switch climate focus” newsletter asks: “Do rising temperatures cause Asia’s deadly storms?”
  • The Guardian says “early season fires spook towns across Australia”.

Key meeting maps out plan for China’s economic work in 2026

Global Times

China’s “central economic work conference”, which concluded on Thursday, has outlined the country’s major economic tasks for the coming year, reports the state-supporting newspaper Global Times. Many Chinese news outlets have published analyses of the conference’s outcome. Shanghai Securities Journal publishes an article featuring various expert views, including Li Jinkai, professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, who tells the outlet that, for the first time, the conference has called for “building a strong energy nation”, indicating that both China’s strategic goals and measures for energy development will see “major changes” while its “international voice in global energy governance” will also rise. 

State news agency Xinhua also covers the story, saying that the conference calls for the strengthening of weather forecasting and early-warning systems, addressing “shortcomings” in flood control, drainage and disaster-resilience infrastructure in northern regions, plus improving the “capacity to respond to extreme weather events”. The newswire quotes Wang Yawei, a director at the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), saying that building a climate-resilient society is “particularly important” amid increasing “global extreme weather events”.

MORE ON CHINA

  • CCTV reports that China’s production and sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs) both increased more than 30% during the first 11 months of the year, with NEV exports showing a year-on-year increase of 100%, according to data released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).
  • People’s Daily publishes an article on the frontpage of its print edition, saying that, over the next five years, China should “actively” advance and achieve carbon peaking while promoting a “comprehensive green transition”.
  • Cailian Press reports that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the People’s Bank of China have jointly issued a notice calling for the “effective use of green finance policies to support the construction of green factories”.
  • Bloomberg: “China confronts the cost of dismantling the world’s biggest coal sector.”
  • The South China Morning Post publishes a comment piece by Hiba Malik from the National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, under the headline: “How China is cementing its central role as the architect of green tech.”

Comment

‘A shift no country can ignore’: where global emissions stand, 10 years after the Paris climate agreement

Fiona Harvey, The Guardian

A feature by the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey looks at progress since the passage of the Paris Agreement in 2015, saying: “It is easy to dwell on its failures. But the successes go less remarked.” She highlights data points including renewable energy “smash[ing] records last year” and clean-energy investment topping $2tn “outstripping that into fossil fuels by two to one”. Harvey also notes: “Roughly 90% of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the Paris Agreement has come from China. And yet those emissions tell only half the story. Last year, China added more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined and clean energy made up 10% of the country’s GDP, with similar figures likely this year. China’s manufacturing strength has sent the price of solar panels plunging by about 90% in the last decade.”

For Le Monde, Audrey Garric says the results of the Paris Agreement “remain mixed”. BusinessGreen editor James Murray says the agreement “is under greater threat than ever before, but it has already helped lay the foundations for a net-zero economy”. Climate Home News reports: “With global consensus over climate action faltering on the accord’s 10th anniversary, experts say ‘coalitions of the willing’ should move faster and with more ambition.” For the Guardian, columnist Rebecca Solnit writes under the headline: “The Paris climate treaty changed the world. Here’s how.”

MORE COMMENT

  • For Le Monde, Muyi Yang of thinktank Ember says: “China built the industrial spine of the global energy transition by leveraging its huge domestic market.”
  • Bloomberg columnist David Fickling reflects on recent water shortages in Tehran, Iran, concluding: “Iran’s future will only be truly secure when it starts cutting its own carbon footprint.”

‘UK is now an electrostate and, yes, this will mean lower bills’

Adam Vaughan, The Times

The Times interviews Chris Stark, the head of “mission control” for the government’s plan to decarbonise the nation’s power supplies by 2030. It says: “He thinks Britain has become an ‘electrostate’, the renewable energy equivalent of a petrostate such as Saudi Arabia. Stark sees electrostates as a big geopolitical shift and defines them as countries, like Britain and China, that are rolling out cheap wind and solar power while simultaneously stimulating demand for electricity from electric cars, heat pumps and industry. ‘Moving to that more electrified society is just straightforwardly good for Britain,’ he said.” The interview continues: “Stark is adamant bills will be lower by 2030. ‘What we are doing will slightly lower bills out to 2030 and then significantly after 2030,’ he said.” However, it quotes Stark adding: “I think we can accommodate that [data centres]. But I wish I’d had my crystal ball two years ago when I was planning this, to know that it was as big a problem and a challenge as it is now.”

MORE UK COMMENT

  • Editorials in climate-sceptic newspapers the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail welcome the pledge by the opposition Conservatives to scrap the 2030 ban on new petrol car sales if elected in 2029. An editorial in the climate-sceptic Sun calls on the UK government to delay the ban in light of an expected delay from the EU.
  • Conservative energy secretary Claire Coutinho makes a series of misleading claims about a recent report in an article for the Daily Telegraph. [See the Carbon Brief coverage of the report for more details on what it says.]
  • The Daily Mail republishes a Spectator article by climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley: “Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out.”
  • For the Sunday Times, director of free-market thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies Robert Colville describes government energy policy as “adolescent fantasy”.
  • Daily Telegraph columnist Liam Halligan calls government EV policy “nutty”.

Research

“Vehicle-to-home” charging for EVs can cut costs and greenhouse gas emissions across the US

Nature energy

Coralline algae reefs are already experiencing pH levels as low as those projected for the year 2100, where low pH indicates high acidity

Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences

High-resolution satellite observations detected 8m tonnes of methane emissions from more than 3,100 oil, gas and coal sites in 2023

Science Advances

 

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Simon Evans, with contributions from Henry Zhang. It was edited by Leo Hickman.

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