As an enormous winter storm headed towards the US on Friday, US president Donald Trump again questioned human-caused climate change, by posting in block capitals on social media: “Whatever happened to global warming???,” reports the Associated Press. Posting on Truth Social, Trump asked “environmental insurrectionists” to explain why a “record cold wave” could be possible, the article explains. In response, the newswire says that “more than a dozen scientists” told it that the “president’s claims are wrong”. It adds: “They point out that even in a warmer world, winter and cold occur…[and] even as it is cold in the eastern US, more of the world is warmer than average. They also stressed the difference between daily and local weather and long-term, planetwide climate change.” The New York Times explains that the cold air hitting the US is usually held in place over the Arctic by the polar vortex. A weakened polar vortex allows the cold air to spill out, the article continues, and a warming Arctic is potentially contributing to these events becoming more frequent. The Guardian, CBS News and Grist all factcheck Trump’s claims, while Bloomberg has an explainer on the polar vortex.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, the severe winter storm swept across the south and east of the US, causing “mass power outages and the cancellation of thousands of flights”, reports the Financial Times. More than 870,000 people across the country are without power, with Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana the hardest hit states, it explains, adding that more than 40% of the country is under winter storm warnings. At least seven people have died, says BBC News. Bloomberg says the storm “may cost as much as $24bn in damages and economic losses”. Ahead of the storm, US fossil gas prices rose 75% in three days, says Semafor. Canada has also been hit, with Toronto receiving almost half a metre of snow, reports the New York Times.

The UK is set to join nine other European countries in what the Guardian describes as a “landmark pact” to build an offshore wind power grid in the North Sea. The newspaper explains: “The countries will build windfarms at sea that directly connect to multiple nations through high-voltage subsea cables, under plans that are expected to provide 100GW of offshore wind power, or enough electricity capacity to power 143m homes. The commitment, which will be set out in the ‘Hamburg declaration’, is expected to be signed [today] by energy ministers from the UK, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway.” Reuters quotes energy secretary Ed Miliband, who said that the push for clean energy would help the UK get “off the fossil fuel rollercoaster and give us energy sovereignty and abundance”. BBC News also has the story.

MORE ON UK

• Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and short-lived Conservative prime minister Liz Truss last week attended a “discreet lunch…organised by a climate-denying US thinktank”, reports the Guardian.
• An “epidemic” of cable thefts from electric car charging points “threatens [the] future of net-zero motoring”, says the Daily Mail. 
• The government has accepted that it wrongly granted planning approval for a data centre near the M25 motorway as it did not properly consider its energy demand or greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News. A full legal challenge is now expected, the article says.
• The UK is facing a “crunch decision” over a Russia-linked gas deal, reports Politico.
• Chancellor Rachel Reeves “has been urged to put the north of England at the heart of the UK’s net-zero strategy”, reports the Guardian.
• The Times reports on a survey suggesting that “two-thirds of heat pump users say they have been more expensive to run than their previous gas boilers”. The survey was commissioned by Green Britain Foundation, set up by Ecotricity founder Dale Vince.
• The Sunday Times runs an interview with Vince under the headline: “The eco-millionaire who now hates heat pumps.”

In a story from late last week, the Los Angeles Times reports that the Trump administration is cancelling almost $30bn of financing from the Department of Energy’s green bank that had been approved under the previous president Joe Biden. In a statement, the department said its Loan Programs Office – now called the “Office of Energy Dominance Financing” – also plans to revise an additional $53bn of funding, the outlet explains, adding: “The department said it has eliminated about $9.5bn in financing for wind and solar projects as part of the adjustment and plans to redirect the funding toward natural gas and nuclear projects.” The New York Times says the energy department “declined to provide a full list of the affected projects”, but many of the loan cancellations had been previously announced. The Hill and Reuters also have the story.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully suspended funding awarded for the expansion of electric vehicle charger infrastructure, reports Reuters. In a victory for the 20 states that had sued, the judge said the administration had “yanked” the programme’s “cord out of the outlet”, without working within the confines of established administrative law, the article says.

MORE ON US

• On Friday, California sued the federal government for approving a Texas-based company’s plans to restart two oil pipelines along the state’s coast, reports the Associated Press.
• Context, a media platform created by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, summarises “one year of Trump’s climate censorship”.
• A Bloomberg explainer looks at whether the Trump administration’s plans for Venezuela’s oil are “realistic”.
• The Washington Post explores the “threat” that Trump has said China poses to Greenland.

Reuters reports that Europe is expected to import a record amount of liquefied “natural” gas (LNG) this year with global supply also “expected to soar”. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Europe is expected to import 185bn cubic metres of LNG in 2026, up from a previous record 175bn in 2025, the newswire explains: “Global LNG supply is forecast to grow more than 7% in 2026, its fastest pace since 2019, with North America accounting for the vast majority of the 40bn increase.” Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Europe is “leaning more heavily on gas reserves this winter, with this month’s withdrawals running at the fastest pace in five years amid unusually cold weather”. It explains that “pipeline and LNG flows haven’t been able to meet higher energy needs”.

China’s commerce ministry has expressed “grave concerns” and “firm opposition” to an EU proposal to label certain Chinese tech firms as “high-risk suppliers” and restrict them from critical sectors, including energy, reports the state-run newspaper China Daily. [The proposal, part of revisions to the EU’s cybersecurity act, may include Chinese-made solar inverters, although this has not been confirmed.] An editorial by the state-supporting newspaper Global Times urges the EU to “seriously consider” closer cooperation, highlighting that China and the EU played a “significant leading role in addressing global challenges, such as climate change and biodiversity conservation”. Another China Daily article includes the EU-China high-level environment and climate dialogue as a “key event” in bilateral relations that took place in 2025. China and Finland have “vast cooperation potential” in clean-energy sectors, the Global Times reports ahead of a visit by the Finnish prime minister to Beijing.

MORE ON CHINA

• MEE head Huang Runqiu writes in New Industrialisation that China must reduce reliance on energy-intensive industries and “reject practices that sacrifice the environment for short-term economic gains”.
• The Paper interviews Song Yuyan, director at the Green Partnership of Industrial Parks in China, about the “challenges” of developing zero-carbon industrial parks, including the potential for “greenwashing”.
• Politico: “Davos offers a Trump-China energy splitscreen.”
• China’s wind industry generates “incredible amounts of revenue”, Money Digest reports, due to “favourable policies” and a focus on “more profitable” offshore farms.
• China Daily publishes an opinion article by the University of International Business and Economics’ Lü Yue and Zhang Yihua, saying China’s “new three” sectors have shifted from “policy-driven experiments” to being “commercially competitive”.
• China Daily also has a comment article from Hu Yong, a professor in the school of journalism and communication at Peking University, who says it is “time to fix responsibility for climate change”.

In Politico, UK energy secretary Ed Miliband and EU commissioner for energy Dan Jørgensen set out why “Britain and the EU are committed to building Europe’s resources of homegrown clean power”. They write: “Today, nine European countries, alongside representatives from Nato and the European Commission, are meeting in Hamburg for the third North Sea Summit to act on this shared understanding. Together, we can seize the North Sea’s vast potential as a clean energy powerhouse – harness its natural resources, skilled workforce and highly developed energy industries to lead the world in offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture technologies.” Relatedly, a group of Politico journalists explain why the summit will “really wind up” US president Donald Trump as it shows Europe is embracing the energy technology that he “hates the most”.

MORE UK COMMENT

• Analysis by Guardian journalists looks at how a “botched” insulation scheme under the Conservatives “looms over Labour’s warm homes plan”.
• In a full-page Daily Mail article on how Labour is “taking Britain backwards”, climate-sceptic commentator Andrew Neil criticises renewables and net-zero policies. 
• Also in the Daily Mail, climate-sceptic sketchwriter Quentin Letts warns, without evidence, of “blackouts” in an essay on “left-wing lunatics”.

Writing in the New York Times, John Kerry – US special envoy for climate change under former president Joe Biden, as well as secretary of state under Barack Obama – reflects on the “Greenland debacle” last week where Donald Trump “threatened allies over an Arctic island that Greenlanders made clear was never for sale and he came away empty-handed”. He warns that “obliterating long-revered relationships…isolates us, not our adversaries”, adding: “America needs relationships to tackle a wide range of big global issues…Individual nations going it alone cannot address challenges such as disease, climate change, energy security, critical mineral supply, migration flows or Russian and Chinese expansionism.” He notes that one year after Trump “insulted Canada and announced that he would bury the country in tariffs”, the country has “inked a deal to open its market to China’s electric vehicles, an agreement likely worth billions of dollars to Beijing, not Detroit”.

Making a similar point, the Guardian’s senior China correspondent Amy Hawkins says that “Trump’s tantrums push US allies closer to Beijing”. In the Financial Times “weekend essay”, Odd Arne Westad – a professor of history and global affairs at Yale University – writes that “given the extraordinary effects of global warming…it is not surprising that Greenland has been thrown into the geopolitical spotlight”. What is more surprising, he continues, “is the way this has happened, with a US president demanding the right to take over the country in order to prevent other Great Powers from doing so”. Meanwhile, there are multiple articles on Greenland’s mineral wealth, such as in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American and BBC News – all of which note that accessing those resources is less than straightforward. CNBC says that Trump’s push for Greenland’s mineral rights “could block China’s access to rare earths”. Finally, a Nature news article looks at how Greenland has “become a global centre for climate-change research”.

MORE US COMMENT

• Reuters US tech columnist Robert Cyran writes that “US energy dominance would make for a clumsy weapon”.
• Ken Girardin, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a US conservative thinktank with a history of downplaying global warming, explains in the Financial Times why “Québec’s green energy drive means more fossil fuels in New York”.
• An editorial in the climate-sceptic comment pages of the Wall Street Journal says: “Thank heaven for coal power in the cold.”

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

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