Daily Briefing: US energy permit reform | Glacier melt ‘explosion’ | Brazil election

01.10.26

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News

US senators hit deal on energy project permitting bill, vote seen after November

Timothy Gardner and Nichola Groom, Reuters

US senators have reached a deal to reform laws on the permitting of large energy and infrastructure projects, reports Reuters. The news outlet says the bill, set to be voted on after the US midterm elections, aims to “speed up federal approvals by setting deadlines for environmental reviews, limiting court challenges and making it harder for permits to be overturned once issued”. It also “places emphasis on the electric grid, creating new processes for approval of transmission lines and upgrades” and “includes provisions to accelerate renewable energy projects and explicitly covers both onshore and offshore wind”, according to the newswire. The Associated Press reports that the bill would “ensure AI data centres are forced to pay for the increased electricity they use and would mark a significant change to a landmark environmental law [the National Environmental Policy Act] that critics say slows the process of building energy projects”.

The New York Times says the Trump administration has announced that South Korea would invest up to $200bn in power projects in the US, including a gas plant in Texas, eight nuclear power plants and a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Alaska. The Hill notes that South Korea is committing $54bn toward the Alaska LNG project, which it notes is an 807-mile pipeline that would carry natural gas from Alaska’s north slope to the southern part of the state for export to Asian markets. It adds that the “project has faced years of questions over its cost and commercial viability”. Reuters notes South Korea’s investment package is “designed to secure critical exemptions from punishing US import tariffs”. The Financial Times, Le Monde and CNBC also cover the energy deal.

MORE ON US

Politico says US president Donald Trump is still considering a diesel export ban to bring down prices, despite “fierce pushback from the oil and gas industry”. The Times notes that the administration has briefed UK officials about possible disruption to diesel supplies.
The Financial Times: “US oil industry warns diesel prices will not return to normal for a year.”
Senate Democrats blocked legislation intended to offset the impact of data centres on consumer electricity bills, according to the Guardian.
The Associated Press: “Senate punts bill to permanently ban Chinese cars until after midterm elections.”
The Hill and Reuters look at the upcoming Supreme Court case brought by Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil against Boulder, Colorado. Reuters says the case could “determine the fate of dozens of climate-related lawsuits by state and local governments against fossil-fuel companies”.
Power use by electric vehicles in the US is increasing at the slowest pace in at least three years, according to Bloomberg.

Africa’s richest man launches Kenya oil refinery despite land protests

Nkechi Ogbonna, Waihiga Mwaura, Peter Mwangangi and Ondiro Oganga, BBC News

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote and Kenya’s president William Ruto have broken ground on a $16bn oil refinery in Lamu Kenya’s northern coast, reports BBC News. Upon completion, the refinery is expected to process 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day, making it East Africa’s “largest industrial project by capacity”, according to the news outlet. BBC News notes that protests from local residents demanding compensation for land used for the refinery ahead of the launch were dismissed in an interview by Dangote as “games played by local marketers and international players”. The Financial Times notes the refinery is going ahead after a court delayed the launch over a dispute. Specifically, the newspaper adds that the court ordered “the status quo prevailing” be maintained at the site until a hearing in October. Reuters says the project is “aimed at lowering East Africa’s fuel costs” but “faces opposition from environmental campaigners, who fear it could affect Lamu old town, a world heritage site hosting fragile marine life”.

UK regulator abandons mandatory climate disclosures for listed companies

Phoebe Seers, Reuters

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has dropped plans to require listed companies to inform investors about their climate risks, after firms raised concerns about implementation ‌costs and competitiveness, reports Reuters. FCA proposals in January set out plans to require listed companies to meet a new UK climate standard, which covered climate-related risks and opportunities, climate targets and the potential impact of climate change on their ⁠business, according to the newswire. However, the article notes that final rules allow companies to instead maintain a “comply or explain” approach. The newswire adds that the move comes after the EU took steps to “water down” its flagship corporate climate disclosure regime and the US “ditched plans for any rules”. The Financial Times similarly notes that regulators have been “retreating from strict climate reporting requirements”. While such rules had been seen as “key to helping investors and lenders gauge the risks from climate change”, they have been “called into question” since Trump was re-elected, reports the newspaper.

MORE ON UK

The Guardian covers a report that finds UK banks are Europe’s “biggest coal financiers”.
The Daily Telegraph reports that UK prime minister Andy Burnham said he would look at measures that could reduce high energy costs this winter.
The CEO of energy company EDF has urged Burnham to greenlight the Jackdaw and Rosebank fossil-fuel projects, according to the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile, the boss of the Offshore Energies UK trade group said approving the projects would amount to “climate leadership”, reports DeSmog.
Green party leader Zack Polanski has written to foreign secretary Ed Miliband, asking him to block development of the Rosebank oil field over the project’s ties to Israel, according to the Daily Telegraph.
In a story trailed on its frontpage, the Daily Telegraph says the UK’s “diesel crisis” is “expected to deepen” after the country’s biggest refinery shuts for “up to 10 weeks”.
Two million people in the UK are “unaware” of the flood risk to their properties, according to the Guardian.

‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

Ajit Niranjan, The Guardian

The Guardian is among a raft of outlets to cover an annual monitoring report from Swiss glacier monitoring service Glamos which finds the country has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years. The newspaper adds that Swiss glaciers “shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026…after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow”. It says that this reduction in ice volume “falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%”. The Associated Press covers a statement from Glamos and the Swiss Academy of Sciences which said: “Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions”. It also quotes Glamos’ Matthias Huss as saying: “The warming that we are experiencing now can be attributed 100% to anthropogenic climate change. It’s as simple as that.” BBC News and Reuters also cover the research.

MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGE

The Guardian covers a report from the EU’s Copernicus climate change service that found a record-breaking 23 zettajoules of heat was sunk into the oceans last year.
India has recorded its lowest monsoon rainfall in more than a decade, according to Reuters.
Sea levels off southern California are expected to begin rising by half a foot or more and then stay elevated for months, as an enormous pulse of wave energy generated by El Niño travels up the coast, reports the Guardian.
El Niño has stymied storm formation in the north Atlantic “even more than expected”, says Scientific American.
The Guardian looks at how El Niño-driven wildfires are “overwhelming” Indonesia’s orangutan population.

China extends two trade-barrier probes into US until December 2027

Shi Bu and Liz Lee, Reuters

China’s commerce ministry has decided to extend two probes into US trade practices that “disrupt global ⁠supply and industrial chains” and “hinder trade in green products” by three months until December, reports Reuters, citing a statement issued by the ministry. The newswire adds that the announcements came days after China and the US agreed to a “two-month extension of their trade truce” through to January and tariff cuts on $60bn of ⁠products. State news agency Xinhua says that the two probes were launched in March this year. Meanwhile, China has also vowed a “resolute response to safeguard its industries” if the EU pushes forward with a “tool to tackle unfair trade and take ⁠more forceful measures against China” proposed by some member states, according to Reuters.

MORE ON CHINA

Analysts are cutting forecasts for China’s oil demand recovery as tight Middle East supplies keep prices too high for private refiners, reports Bloomberg.
China’s coal prices rose for an 11th straight week as the government looks to boost domestic mining and “major supplier Indonesia struggles with output”, reports Bloomberg.
Another Bloomberg report says uncertainty over future battery demand has sent Chinese lithium futures prices plunging.
A total of 60.6m green electricity certificates were traded in China in August, up 25.2% year on year, according to the NEA, reports Ideacarbon.
MEE head Huang Runqiu met Canada’s minister of environment and climate change Julie Dabrusin in Beijing to discuss climate cooperation, according to Idearbon.

Comment

The Guardian view on Lula v the Bolsonaros: the decision of Brazilian voters will affect us all

Editorial, The Guardian

The Guardian looks ahead to Sunday’s presidential election in Brazil, where incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face off against Flávio Bolsonaro, the “son and champion” of former president Jair. The newspaper says Trump’s more “ruthless and reckless” second term “offers an alarming vision of how another Bolsonaro presidency might look”. The first Bolsonaro presidency, it continues, “showed historic levels of deforestation in the Amazon, as well as a surge in illegal resource extraction and the invasion of Indigenous people’s lands”. The editorial concludes: “A Bolsonaro presidency would be bad for women, the poor and minorities. Democracy would probably be its first, local victim. But the climate would surely be another – with consequences for us all.” (For more information, see Carbon Brief’s recent analysis suggesting that an area of Amazon forest roughly the size of the US state of New Jersey has remained standing due to Lula’s leadership of Brazil.)

MORE COMMENT

An editorial in the Times argues that Trump’s threat to ban diesel exports “exposes Britain’s energy vulnerability”. Meanwhile, a Daily Telegraph editorial warns the UK is “dangerously exposed” to a “diesel crisis”.
In the Times, industrial editor Robert Lea looks at the growth of Chinese car sales in the UK, noting that plug-in hybrids are the “fastest rising part of the trade”.
In the climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph editor Allistair Heath claims that Andy Burnham wants to “double down” on a “post-1997 Leftist strategy…to resocialise the economy quietly through tax and spend, red tape, nationalisations and the weaponisation of net-zero as a system of central planning”.
Simon Mundy, moral money editor at the Financial Times, says that China has no “strategic incentive” to interfere in the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to “resist the decline of coal”.
Climate Home News editor Megan Rowling writes that Nepal’s disaster has “laid bare the world’s adaptation accountability gap”.
Georgina Woods of the Lock the Gate Alliance writes in the Guardian that the approval of New South Wales’ biggest ever coal project is “shocking proof” that governance systems are “betraying Australians”.

Research

The Antarctic ice sheet is “committed” to mass loss by 2100, even under “aggressive” emission-reduction scenarios | Nature Geoscience
North-west Greenland lost ice five times faster in the 2010s than the 1970s | JGR Earth Surface
Climate change has implications for healthcare because it increases disease burden and affects the effectiveness and safety of medicines | PLOS Climate