The Guardian reports that the US has formally left the Paris climate agreement for the second time, one year after president Donald Trump announced the intention to exit. The newspaper says: “The move leaves the US as the only country to have withdrawn from the pact, placing it alongside Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only countries not party to the agreement. While it will not halt global climate efforts, experts say it could significantly complicate them.” BusinessGreen says the move “spark[ed] fresh warnings the Trump administration is undermining the country’s long-term economic competitiveness by turning its back on booming clean tech industries”. The New York Times, Politico and others also cover the story. 

MORE ON US  

• E&E News reports that Congress “quietly adopted a much-touted carbon trade bill last week” as part of a spending package. 
• The Guardian says more than 40 people have died and hundreds of thousands remain without power amid the major winter storm in many states in recent days. A Washington Post map highlights areas where “snowfall reached extreme levels and broke records”.
• A judge has ruled that a “nearly completed” offshore wind project in Massachusetts can continue after its work was halted by the Trump administration, reports the Associated Press. 
• Trump has signed an executive order permitting the federal government to “preempt state and local regulations in the recovery efforts of last year’s Los Angeles wildfires”, says Bloomberg. 
• The New York Times says a lawmaker in California has put forward a bill that would “set a statewide, science-based standard for how to determine whether a home is safe to inhabit following a wildfire”. 
• Another New York Times article reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is surveying part of the Pacific Ocean to “aid companies prospecting the sea for rare-earth elements”. 

On Tuesday, India and the EU agreed a trade deal that will “eliminate up to €4bn of tariffs on EU exports”, with Brussels also “promis[ing] €500m to support Indian industry’s efforts to decarbonise”, the Financial Times reports. Reuters quotes EU officials saying that the landmark trade deal “will not trigger any changes” to the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) despite India’s concerns, adding that the EU “declined to change the levy, or offer more flexible rules to Indian companies”. Instead, they tell the newswire that “Brussels and New Delhi agreed to hold talks on technical questions around the carbon levy, and the EU committed that it would not grant other countries more favourable treatment than India” under the scheme. The Hindu BusinessLine, Economic Times, Business Standard, NDTV, Deccan Herald, Deutsche-Welle, Indian Express, Mint, Euronews, BBC News, Guardian and other outlets also report on the story. 

Down to Earth quotes Avantika Goswami at Delhi-based thinktank the Centre for Science and Environment saying: “India rightly made CBAM a red line in its discussions with the EU,” adding that while the EU “has not offered all the concessions India sought, early statements on financial assistance and targeted support for decarbonisation are a promising sign”. Moneycontrol says that this “does not shield Indian exports from the levy itself…requiring exporters to accelerate their transition towards lower-carbon production”. It quotes India’s commerce secretary Rajesh Agrawal as saying: “There is also an understanding that India’s future carbon trading system will be recognised under CBAM, so that carbon costs paid domestically by Indian companies are accounted for.” Carbon Copy, meanwhile, describes the deal as a “deliberate move to stitch climate and trade into a stable, rules-based alternative”, “buffer[ing] India against protectionist headwinds from the US” and “offer[ing] the EU a blueprint for climate-integrated trade”.  

MORE ON INDIA

• At the ongoing India energy week in Goa, Bloomberg reports that Canada “committed to ship” more crude oil and gas to India, while New Delhi “will send more refined petroleum products” to Canada.
• Bloomberg also reports that US exchange regulators “want a [Brooklyn] judge to clear a way for the agency to advance with its fraud case” against energy giant Adani for “helping drive a $250m bribery scheme to lock in solar-power contracts” in India.
• A Mint opinion piece by Soumya Sarkar argues that while India has “formally estimated its climate finance needs at about $2.5tn by 2030”, union budgets show a “stubborn gap between recognition and resourcing”. [India’s finance minister will announce the country’s national budget on Sunday.]

The ongoing heatwave in Australia has seen record temperatures of almost 50C while authorities “urged caution as three forest fires burned out of control”, reports the Associated Press. Bloomberg says the Australian Open tennis tournament “rescheduled matches and activated extreme-heat protocols”. The Guardian notes: “Australia is experiencing its second major heatwave for January, off the back of another earlier in the month, which analysts said was made five times more likely due to global heating. The climate crisis has increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves and bushfires.”

The world’s largest “compressed-air power storage plant” has started operating in China’s Jiangsu province, “marking a major step in the country’s efforts to expand energy storage to support its green transition”, reports Bloomberg. The outlet says that the plant, which features 2,400 megawatt-hours of capacity, can generate 600 megawatts of electricity, equivalent to the annual power demand of 600,000 households. It cites BloombergNEF as saying that compressed-air storage technology is becoming the “most cost-effective, long-duration solution to storing energy”. The publication says the opening comes as the Chinese government aims to build more than 180 gigawatts of new-energy storage capacity by 2027, which has been “fostering a boom” in technologies such as compressed air.

MORE ON CHINA

• The People’s Daily reports that, by the end of 2025, there were 44m “new energy” vehicles (NEV) in China, accounting for 12% of total vehicles. Yicai says that China’s NEV exports reached more than 3m units last year.
• China will “encourage” using land for windfarm development, reports BJX News, “prioritising” the use of land in deserts, the Gobi or other arid regions.
• Ideacarbon publishes the full text of MEE head Huang Runqiu’s speech at the ministry’s annual meeting held in mid-January. The outlet also publishes the full speech of MEE party secretary Sun Jinlong.
• China and Finland will deepen cooperation in the “energy transition” and climate change, says Xinhua.
• China will establish a committee to develop standards for carbon capture, utilisation and storage, according to BJX News.
• Xiamen University professor Lin Boqiang writes in China Electric Power News that China should enhance power grid stability by developing “clean retrofits of coal-fired power plants“, energy storage and hydrogen energy.

Wholesale gas prices are the reason for two-thirds of electricity bill increases in the UK in recent years, according to analysis covered by the Press Association. The newswire says the assessment from the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) “found that typical electricity bills surged by £169 in real terms between 2021 and 2025, a period marked by soaring energy costs following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”. It adds that 66% of this increase has been attributed to “heightened wholesale gas prices”. [Coverage in Carbon Brief notes that this “flatly contradicts widespread media and political narratives that misleadingly seek to blame climate policies for high bills”.]

MORE ON UK 

• The National Wealth Fund plans to invest up to £5bn annually in “green energy and growth”, reports the Times. 
• The Times says there is “hope of progress” on clean energy and other issues during prime minister Keir Starmer’s trip to China, but a “formal trade deal is off the table”.  Business secretary, Peter Kyle, tells the Guardian that the “UK’s strengths increasingly align” with China’s economy on the energy transition and other issues. 
• Starmer has “delayed plans to announce China’s first wind turbine factory in Britain” during his China visit, according to the Times. The Financial Times reports that the chief executive of Octopus Energy’s power generation arm “says Britain should embrace Chinese technology in its energy market”.  
• The Financial Times says the UK needs to “more than double” electric vehicle charger installations each year to meet demand estimates by 2030. 
• An “energy giant boss” in India has “urged” the UK and Europe to “stop relying on China by turning to India to meet their net-zero targets”, says the Daily Telegraph.
• The Financial Times reports that “UK energy company Drax’s ambitions of becoming a significant wood pellet supplier to Asia are in danger of faltering”, after Japanese policymakers pulled back support for biomass subsidies.

The president of the COP30 climate summit held in Brazil last year believes that global cooperation should move to a “two-speed system, where new coalitions lead fast, practical action alongside the slower, consensus-based decision-making of the UN process”, according to Climate Home News. The outlet details a letter from André Aranha Corrêa do Lago in which he says that COP30 “shed light” on climate diplomacy limitations. Climate Home News says: “As the focus shifts away from rule-making, the COP30 president said that climate action on the ground cannot wait for unanimity on every step…He suggested that formal negotiations should now sit alongside an ‘implementation’ tier that would unlock ‘open coalitions’ and enable ‘capable actors’ to move faster by coordinating the rapid rollout of resources that are currently fragmented.”

Guardian Australia’s climate and environment editor, Adam Morton, writes in the newspaper that although climate change is “now a key part of the story of heat across the continent and beyond”, it is “remarkable – and a win for fossil fuel companies and climate change-denying vested interests – that it is rarely mentioned in daily news of heatwaves and other extreme weather events”. He notes that “limiting and responding to the climate crisis should be at the centre of decision-making and national discussion…in a way it still isn’t” in Australia. Morton adds that the focus this year is “increasingly likely to turn to the nation’s huge fossil-fuel exports, an area where the government – which declares it is committed to trying to limit global heating to just 1.5C, a goal rapidly fading from view – remains blatantly hypocritical”. 

MORE COMMENT 

• Guardian columnist George Monbiot writes that a UK national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, which was originally due to be published last year, “provides a powerful vindication of certain messages that, when voiced by environmentalists, have been greeted with hatred, fury and denial”. 
• On his Substack, the Crucial Years, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben writes that it is “time for some courage in the climate fight too”. 
• This year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos was a “far cry from the recent past, when climate change and nature loss were seen as central”, Eliot Whittington, the executive director of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, writes in BusinessGreen. 
• The Daily Telegraph chief foreign affairs commentator, David Blair, writes that Keir Starmer is correct for believing China is “essential” to achieving UK net-zero targets – “though with potentially calamitous consequences”. 
• An editorial in the climate-sceptic Sun newspaper criticises the “madness of buying tens of thousands of Chinese solar panels built using electricity from coal-fired power stations, while banning new drilling for North Sea oil here at home”. [Analysis for Carbon Brief found Chinese solar panels pay off their “carbon debt” in four months.]

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Orla Dwyer, with contributions from Aruna Chandrasekhar, Henry Zhang and Anika Patel. It was edited by Simon Evans.

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