The United Arab Emirates has announced it will complete a new oil pipeline bypassing the strait of Hormuz by next year, reports the Guardian. Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, has “directed the UAE state oil company to fast-track the previously undisclosed project so that the pipeline can begin carrying oil from the emirates to the port of Fujairah by 2027”, the newspaper says, adding: “The new pipeline is expected to double the UAE’s export capacity.” The UAE and Saudi Arabia are the only Gulf producers with pipelines ​that export crude outside the strait, notes Reuters. Al Jazeera, Bloomberg and the Daily Telegraph also have the story. 

Meanwhile, ​energy minister Suhail Al Mazrouei has said that the UAE’s recent decision to withdraw from the OPEC oil cartel was “not based on any political considerations”, reports CNBC. Posting on Twitter, Mazrouei explained that the move was a “sovereign and strategic choice” based on the UAE’s “responsibility as a reliable energy supplier and its unwavering commitment to maintaining market stability”, the outlet reports. Reuters notes that Mazrouei said the decision does not “reflect any division between the UAE and its partners”. Finally, Bloomberg reports that India “will partner with” the UAE to “expand its strategic crude and gas reserves”.

MORE OIL NEWS

• The Canadian government and the province of Alberta reached a carbon-pricing deal on Friday that “opens the way for construction of a new oil pipeline starting as early as 2027”, reports Bloomberg
• Ahead of a G7 meeting of finance ministers today, a senior European official has said that opening the strait of Hormuz is of the “utmost importance” to limit the economic impacts of the Iran war, reports CNBC.
• The New York Times analyses the countries “profiting from the war” via their oil exports.
• Iraq’s new oil minister has said that the country exports 10m barrels of oil through the strait of Hormuz in April, down from a monthly total of around 93m before the war, reports Reuters.
• The New York Times reports that “oil prices climb on fears of broader energy crunch”, while the Financial Times says that the “energy crisis enters [a] new phase as peak summer season approaches”.
• A Bloomberg explainer asks whether Cuba’s regime can “survive” as the country runs out of diesel and fuel oil.

US president Donald Trump has said that he stopped short of asking China’s Xi Jinping to pressure Iran to reopen the strait of Hormuz during their summit last week, reports Bloomberg. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said: “I think he will. I think automatically he’d like to see it opened up…I’m not asking for any favours, because when you ask for favours you have to do favours in return. We don’t need favours,” the outlet reports. Trump said the pair did discuss lifting sanctions on Chinese companies that buy Iranian ‌oil and that he is “going to make a decision over the next ​few days”, reports Reuters. CNBC also has the story. At the same time, the Trump administration has allowed a waiver that encouraged sales of Russian oil to lapse, says Bloomberg. BBC News and Bloomberg both report on Trump’s comments that the “clock is ticking” on peace talks with Iran, which have caused oil prices to rise.

Meanwhile, rightwing outlets report on Trump’s social-media post on Saturday that declared “good riddance” to a scenario of very high emissions that has been used in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fox News, the climate-sceptic US media outlet, says the scenario, known as RCP8.5 and later as SSP5-8.5, is “being phased out after researchers concluded it no longer reflects the most plausible trajectory based on renewable energy growth, emissions trends and climate policies”. The New York Post misleadingly claims that the IPCC “had quietly adjusted” its framework of emission scenarios. Elsewhere, the climate-sceptic Australian has similar reporting. [The new scenarios, which are not created by the IPCC itself, were developed by researchers ahead of the next phase of global climate modelling, known as CMIP7, which will feed into the next IPCC assessment reports. For more on the RCP8.5 scenario, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.]

MORE ON US

• The Guardian: “Experts sound alarm as North America’s bees start swarm season unusually early.”
• A New York Times long-read reports from Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana on a “cautionary tale” of climate migration.
• US wind and solar projects are at risk “as tax credits expire”, reports the Financial Times.
• The New York Times reports on startup companies “drilling for hydrogen” in the US.
• Time: “The US still doesn’t have an answer to China’s EV dominance.”

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce this week that the government will postpone the end of a temporary 5p fuel-duty cut, reports the Sun on Sunday. Reeves is “poised to make the announcement as part of her plan to ease the cost of living crisis in the wake of the Iran war”, the article says. The fuel-duty cut – introduced in 2022 – was expected to end in September, the newspaper notes, adding: “It is politically toxic to increase fuel duty. The tax has been frozen for 15 years.” Picking up on the story, Bloomberg notes that the Sun on Sunday does not say “where it got the information”, while Reuters quotes a spokesperson from the Treasury, who said: “We do not comment on speculation.” The Times, which puts the story on its frontpage today, says the formal announcement will come on Thursday. It adds that the move is expected to cost £2.4bn. The Daily Telegraph also features the story on its frontpage. [Carbon Brief analysis has shown how successive freezes in fuel duty have substantially increased the UK’s CO2 emissions and cost tens of billions in lost tax revenue.]

Meanwhile, a group of climate and transport campaigners have called for the UK to lower speed limits and ban private jets and short-haul flights in order to avoid a “fuel crisis”, reports the Guardian. The Financial Times says that “European airlines and oil refiners are growing more confident the continent can avoid outright jet fuel shortages this summer after plants maximised output, boosted imports and governments tapped strategic reserves”.

MORE ON UK AND IRELAND

• More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, reports the Guardian, with “some potentially doing so permanently”.
• The UK government has “walked back a promise to banish forced labour” from the supply chains of its flagship clean energy company, GB Energy, says Politico.
• Experts on the UK animal welfare committee have warned that the “current spotlight” on reducing carbon emissions risked “negative consequences for animal welfare”, reports the Sunday Times. 
• Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has suggested that renationalising the energy and water sectors would be a key policy, if he succeeds Keir Starmer as prime minister, reports the Guardian. 
• In an interview with the Sunday Times, Ryanair’s climate-sceptic CEO Michael O’Leary has criticised the Irish government for “banning fracking and banning nuclear power”. On handling fuel protests, O’Leary says: “f***ing arrest them and impound their f***ing tractors”.
• The Daily Telegraph reports on how installing a domestic battery will help “beat a £300 surge in energy bills”, and also that energy secretary Ed Miliband has “approved a huge wind farm off the coast of Suffolk”.

Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has said during a speech in Beijing that China’s “climate leadership is more important than ever”, adding that the country’s leadership in climate multilateralism has “roughly halved projected global temperature rise over the past decade”, reports state-run newspaper China Daily. Stiell tells the Shanghai-based Paper that the more China does to accelerate “domestic climate action and energy transition effort”, the “greater momentum it can generate for global action”. Other countries should follow China’s path to a “green transition”, as the Iran war “shows the vulnerability of a fossil fuel-based economy”, reports Bloomberg, citing Stiell. Stiell’s comments “reflected broader international anxieties over energy security and the need for stable, long-term climate cooperation”, according to Lin Boqiang at Xiamen University, says state-supporting newspaper Global Times.

Meanwhile, Financial Times says that Stiell’s visit to China and his praise of China’s global climate leadership has come as the country is “braced for extreme rainfall to batter large parts of the country in the coming days”. China Daily reports that the country has activated a level-IV emergency response to flooding in Guangdong and Guizhou provinces amid forecasts of heavy rainfall that is expected to “affect a wide area and bring intense rainfall to some regions”. New research led by Chinese scientists suggests that if carbon emissions continue to rise, “compound extreme climate events” will become more common, adding that the current target aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5C and 2C may need to be “further reduced”, reports state-run news agency China News Service.

MORE ON CHINA

• Reuters reports that US trade representative Jamieson Greer has said that China still “drags its feet with some export licenses” for rare-earth exports.
• Chinese president Xi Jinping has called for China to foster new growth engines in areas including “green environmental protection”, according to Xinhua.
• A China Daily editorial says EU “protectionist actions” in low-carbon sectors have “prompted China to review its economic relations with the bloc”. Global Times says a German official’s call for a “more pragmatic approach to cooperation” with Chinese EV makers “deserves consideration” by the EU.
• HSBC has launched a dedicated $4bn credit facility to support the global expansion of Chinese companies involved in sustainable and transition technologies including clean power, data centres, electric vehicles and AI, reports Reuters.
• Bloomberg: “China burns more fossil fuels for power as coal production slips.”
• Shanghai Securities Journal reports that global orders for Chinese-made transformers have surged, driven by “power grid renovation” and energy transition. Yicai says power retail companies in several Chinese regions saw millions of yuan in losses.

A group of “leading international experts” has said that climate change should be declared a global public health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), reports the Guardian in an “exclusive”. A report by the independent pan-European commission on climate and health, which was convened by the WHO, has concluded that climate change is such a worldwide threat to health that the WHO should be deemed “a public health emergency of international concern” (Pheic), the newspaper explains. The report was presented to European ministers yesterday ahead of the WHO’s world health assembly, which starts today, the article says. It adds: “Pheics are the highest level of health alert. Previous declarations include infectious diseases such as Covid and Mpox. While declaring one would not on its own reverse climate change, it would trigger the kind of coordinated international response that the scale of the health crisis demands but has not yet materialised.”

A “crunch point” for fuel supplies is approaching and “governments, companies and consumers need to be ready”, argues a Financial Times editorial. While some reduction in consumption “has eased the squeeze up to now – along with some supply boosts”, global oil stocks “are still being drawn down at record pace”, the newspaper warns. Prices “will have to rise to suppress demand”, it says, and the “tightest markets are emerging not in crude but in refined products such as jet fuel and diesel”. Developing economies “may be worst affected”, the FT says, but European countries that have “prioritised supporting consumer demand through measures such as fuel tax cuts will also…have to take more robust steps to conserve energy”. The editorial concludes: “More countries are going to have to learn to live within their more limited energy means.”

Commenting on the Trump-Xi talks in recent days, Jonathan Watts – the Guardian‘s global environment writer – says that the “global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east”. He continues: “History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the US, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China.” But the “outcome remains contested and the process could be ugly”, Watts warns: “[T]he old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock.”

MORE UK COMMENT

• In a long-read, Financial Times associate editor and columnist Pilita Clark has the “inside story” on the recent Santa Marta conference on phasing out fossil fuels. [For more, see Carbon Brief’s reporting from the event.]
• In his Bright Spots Substack, the University of Oxford’s Prof Jan Rosenow looks at whether renewables make electricity cheaper or more expensive. His answer: “It depends on what you measure and where you look.”
• An Independent editorial argues that “closing down British production and importing more oil and gas” during a global energy shock “seems utterly wrongheaded”.
• An editorial in the climate-sceptic Sun attacks potential Labour leader Andy Burnham for his comments around renationalising the UK’s energy and water sectors, which, it claims, could “cost £1tn”. 
• In a column for the Sunday Express, shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho argues that Ed Miliband “will destroy our North Sea industry”. There are further attacks on Miliband in the climate-sceptic comment pages of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Express.

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.

Subscribe for free.