Post Category → Climate Change

Watch ‘Freshwater’, a mini-documentary by dream hampton

In case you missed it when when it was featured on NYT Docs and PBS POV in 2023, this is ‘Freshwater’ by dream hampton, an evocative short taking on memory, loss and displacement in Detroit communities after devastating floods in 2021. And likely the most beautifully poignant nine minutes you’ll experience today.

One of the the most thoughtful capsule reviews I read was by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who writes:

‘Freshwater’ is “a meditative, intimate, quietly devastating piece that uses the language of memory, water, and place to make climate change feel personal. dream narrates, talking us through flooded basements of homes in her home city of Detroit, Michigan.”

And in the film notes, hampton explains:

“Freshwater is a portrait of remembrance, of flooded Midwestern basements and maintaining connection in the wake of ongoing displacement, abandonment and climate catastrophe. This film was meant to be small in every way–lingering shots that seem like photographs until the wind blows a leaf or a raindrop disturbs a puddle. Similarly the intentionally small production was meant to be healing. It was a retreat into a cadre of like-minded community of Detroit artists after doing work on three projects that were at major studios. I made Freshwater to remind myself I’m an artist, but also to reinforce the organizing principle about the power of small, local organizing.”

Oxfam: Fossil fuel companies projected to earn almost $3,000 a second in 2026

Oxfam: Fossil fuel companies projected to earn almost $3,000 a second in 2026.

From a report released on the eve of the first global conference on ‘Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels‘, which takes place in Santa Marta, Colombia:

Six of the biggest fossil fuel companies are projected to earn $2,967 a second in profits in 2026, new Oxfam research finds, ahead of the first global conference this week on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This marks an increase of almost $37 million a day compared to the 2025 profits of these six corporations – Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and TotalEnergies. Their total projected fossil fuel profits of 2026 are $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.

Link.

T&E: Flawed booking systems are preventing passengers from travelling by rail

T&E: Flawed booking systems are preventing passengers from travelling by rail.

Booking multi-country connecting flights is a snap. But booking rail connections on the same journeys is not. Research released today from the Brussels-based advocacy organization Transport & Environment (T&E) illustrates.

Europe’s rail renaissance will never reach its full potential unless passengers are able to book connecting and international trains in a few clicks. That’s the conclusion of new research by T&E which finds that on almost half of the EU’s busiest international air routes, booking the same journey by train is difficult or impossible.

T&E looked at the 30 busiest international air routes within the EU to see if the rail alternative was easy to book. On 20% of these routes, none of the rail operators allowed passengers to buy tickets for the whole journey. On a further 27% of the routes, passengers could only obtain such tickets from one of the train operators involved. Similar trends were found on a broader set of 50 international routes.

This finding is concerning as rail passengers tend to primarily buy tickets on the booking engine of their national incumbent operator. The convoluted booking experience is deterring all but the most committed. A recent YouGov poll for T&E found that 61% of long distance rail travellers have at least once avoided journeys because the booking process is a hassle.

And, according to a research team at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten in Austria, on average it takes people 70% longer to book a train ticket than a flight.

And the fix:

The EU now has an opportunity to address these shortcomings. T&E calls on the European Commission’s forthcoming Single Ticketing Package to require major rail operators to display and sell other willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions and to share their own tickets with other operators and independent platforms. Independent platforms must also be required to sell willing operators’ tickets under fair conditions.

The proposal for the new Single Ticketing Package is due to be published by the European Commission on 13 May.

Link.

Lake Erie’s Eroding Shoreline Raises a Bigger Question: Who Pays for Climate Risk?

The Energy Mix: Lake Erie’s Eroding Shoreline Raises a Bigger Question: Who Pays for Climate Risk?

I spent more than 25 years living within a 15-minute drive from a southern shore of Lake Erie, so this caught my attention.

Walking along the shoreline of Erie Shore Drive, a narrow stretch of road along Lake Erie in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, the signs of climate change are hard to miss. Aging breakwaters, patchwork protection barriers, and empty lots where homes once stood, all point to its growing impacts. The area has become a visible example of what happens when climate impacts outpace planning, infrastructure, and policy responses, and when responsibility for those impacts remains unclear.

While this community is far from alone, Erie Shore Drive offers a stark view of how climate risk is reshaping communities and raising a more difficult question: who is responsible for the costs when changing environments put infrastructure and human lives at risk?

Link.

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

Guardian: Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought.

This is bad. As others have already pointed out, likely the biggest climate-related story at the moment.

The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Scientists spotted warning signs of a tipping point in 2021 and know that the Amoc has collapsed in the Earth’s past.

How catastrophic?

The Amoc is a major part of the global climate system and brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. A collapse would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50-100cm to already rising sea levels around the Atlantic.

Link.

CarbonBrief Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas

CarbonBrief Factcheck: Nine false or misleading myths about North Sea oil and gas.

CarbonBrief factchecks claims made in the UK by opposition politicians, newspapers and other public figures who are using the fossil fuel energy crisis triggered by the US-Israel war on Iran to argue in favour of opening the North Sea to more oil and gas drilling.

Link.

AP: Energy fallout from Iran war signals a global wake-up call for renewable energy

AP: Energy fallout from Iran war signals a global wake-up call for renewable energy.

It’s a simple equation: more renewables, less shocks. Reporting for the AP, Aniruddha Ghosal, Anton L. Delgado and Allan Olingo write:

The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on fragile fossil fuel routes, lending urgency to calls for hastening the shift to renewable energy.

And

Unlike during previous oil shocks, renewable power is now competitive with fossil fuels in many places. More than 90% of new renewable power projects worldwide in 2024 were cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.

It’s obvious, but bears repeating: countries that have built out or invested in renewables have also invested in a cushion from oil shocks, which are a trait of the fossil fuel-based energy system. These include China and India, and other Asian countries, too, including:

Pakistan’s solar boom has preempted more than $12 billion in fossil fuel imports since 2020

And

Vietnam’s current solar generation will help the country save hundreds of millions of dollars in potential coal and gas imports in the coming year, based on current high prices.

NYT: E.P.A. Moves to Weaken Limits on a Cancer-Causing Gas

NYT: E.P.A. Moves to Weaken Limits on a Cancer-Causing Gas.

Another thing that 49.9% of Americans voted for in 2024 – weakening the limits on emissions of the cancer-causing gas ethylene oxide. From the New York Times report:

The agency’s proposed rule would loosen limits on ethylene oxide emissions from around 90 commercial sterilization facilities across the country. Roughly 2.3 million people live within two miles of these facilities in what are often low-income neighborhoods or communities of color, according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.

The proposal is the E.P.A.’s latest move to relax pollution limits in an effort to lower costs for industries. In recent months, the agency has also weakened restrictions on mercury from coal-burning power plants and repealed a scientific finding that allowed the government to regulate planet-warming pollution from cars and trucks.

Link.

NYT: Don’t Look Now, but the Green Transition Is Still Happening – Gift link

NYT: Don’t Look Now, but the Green Transition Is Still Happening – Gift link

As I often tell anyone within listening distance, the transition to renewables continues to grow and expand, and is unstoppable. That’s not to say that the lies, rhetoric and strong-armed tactics of the Trump administration and its climate change dismissive acolytes aren’t reversing some of the momentum and influencing policies around the world, or that the transition is happening fast enough, because it’s not, even in the remotest sense. But it’s not all doom and gloom either. David Wallace-Wells writes:

In January, a total of seven gas-powered cars were sold in all of Norway. This year, Pakistan expects that parts of the country will get more electricity from decentralized rooftop solar than from its entire electricity grid during parts of the day. In the United States, where we often tell ourselves we are in the grips of climate backlash and fossil fuel retrenchment, Texas has been setting new solar records through frigid February, around 90 percent of all new power capacity installed anywhere in the nation last year was green, and the share of renewables is expected to be even higher next year. The new “breakout star” of the battery world is the notorious petrostate Saudi Arabia, the countries with the biggest growth in solar power are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia’s breakneck pursuit of clean energy too cheap to meter is so far along that electricity prices in some regions have fallen by a third in a single year. 

Gift link.

It might just be the sun shining outside today, which always manages, even if only briefly, to renew a sense of optimism. Today, like Wallace-Wells, it’s transition optimism.

Euronews: Portugal tops EU leaderboard as over 80% of electricity in January came from renewables

Euronews: Portugal tops EU leaderboard as over 80% of electricity in January came from renewables

Fossil fuel merchants can keep throwing hurdles in the way, but the transition to renewables can’t be stopped.

Portugal has topped the EU leaderboard for renewable electricity thanks to surges in hydro and wind power. According to the Portuguese Association for Renewable Energies (APREN), a staggering 80.7 per cent of electricity generated in January 2026 came from renewable energy.

It marks the best record in nine months, since Portugal suffered a mass blackout that triggered nationwide chaos, and bumps the country up to second in Europe overall. Non-EU Norway came first, with 96.3 per cent renewable electricity production last month, while Denmark dropped to third place with 78.8 per cent.

Link.

Mother Jones: Putin Tried to Freeze Ukraine. Instead, He Sparked an Energy Revolution

Mother Jones: Putin Tried to Freeze Ukraine. Instead, He Sparked an Energy Revolution

Russia is bombing fossil-fueled power plants, so the country is building solar and wind. From the story:

Wind and solar arrays with independent transmission lines are scattered over the landscape, which makes them harder to hit and easier to repair. “A coal power station [is] a large single target that a single missile could take out,” says Jeff Oatham of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy company and its largest private energy investor. “You would need around 40 missiles to do the equivalent amount of capacity damage at a wind farm.” 

“Attacking decentralized solar power installations is not economically rational,” says Ukrainian energy expert Olena Kondratiuk. “Missiles and drones are expensive, and significantly disrupting such systems would require a large number of strikes, while the overall impact on the energy system would remain limited.”

Link.

Yale Environment 360: Europe to Ramp Up Offshore Wind in Push for Energy Independence

Yale Environment 360: Europe to Ramp Up Offshore Wind in Push for Energy Independence

A group of European leaders pledged Monday to build 100 gigawatts of offshore wind,enough to power more than 50 million homes. As Europe faces a hostile Russia and an increasingly bellicose U.S., experts see deepening risks in its reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“Historically, interferences by the U.S. government in gas markets to exert pressure on Europe were considered unthinkable,” said Raffaele Piria, of the Ecologic Institute, a think tank based in Berlin. “In the current geopolitical context, this assumption is questionable.”

Link.

Ember Report: Wind and solar overtook fossil fuels for EU power generation in 2025, for the first time

Ember Report: Wind and solar overtook fossil fuels for EU power generation in 2025, for the first time

We’re winning.

A study by the energy think tank Ember found that the EU’s electricity transition reached a new milestone in 2025 with wind and solar generating more power than fossil fuels for the first time. From the Guardian report:

Turbines spinning in the wind and photovoltaic panels lit up by the sun generated 30% of the EU’s electricity in 2025, according to an annual review. Power plants burning coal, oil and gas generated 29%.

EU solar generation reached a record 369 TWh in 2025, 20% higher than in 2025 and wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels in 14 of the 27 EU countries.

The report, Ember’s 10th annual, is here.

Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms, study shows

Guardian: Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms, study shows.

Guardian report on the Carbon Majors annual review of the CO2 emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuels.

Just 32 fossil fuel companies were responsible for half the global carbon dioxide emissions driving the climate crisis in 2024, down from 36 a year earlier, a report has revealed.

Saudi Aramco was the biggest state-controlled polluter and ExxonMobil was the largest investor-owned polluter. Critics accused the leading fossil fuel companies of “sabotaging climate action” and “being on the wrong side of history” but said the emissions data was increasingly being used to hold the companies accountable.

State-owned fossil fuel producers made up 17 of the top 20 emitters in the Carbon Majors report, which the authors said underscored the political barriers to tackling global heating. All 17 are controlled by countries that opposed a proposed fossil fuel phaseout at the Cop30 UN climate summit in December, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and India. More than 80 other nations had backed the phaseout plan.

Saudi Aramco was responsible for 1.7bn tonnes of CO2, much of it from exported oil. If it were a country, Aramco would be the world’s fifth biggest carbon polluter, just behind Russia. ExxonMobil’s fossil fuel production led to 610m tonnes of CO2 – it would be the ninth biggest polluter, ahead of South Korea.

More.

T&E Study: Avoiding contrails on night and winter flights is aviation’s fastest climate win

T&E Study: Avoiding contrails on night and winter flights is aviation’s fastest climate win

A new analysis by European clean transportation NGO T&E shows that 25% of European aviation’s contrail-related global warming comes from night flights in autumn and winter, which make up just 10% of European air traffic.

Contrail warming is highly seasonal and concentrated in time: in 2019, 75% of European contrail warming occurred between January to March, and October to December and 40% during late evenings and nights. Combined, night flights in autumn and winter accounted for 25% of European contrail warming, with only 10% of air traffic. These periods create ideal conditions to adjust a small number of flights with minimal effects on air traffic and major climate benefits.

Contrails, the white lines left by planes in the sky, can spread and persist in certain atmospheric conditions. This traps heat and warms the planet at least as much as aviation’s CO₂ emissions, contributing between 1% and 2% to global warming. Yet only 3% of flights caused 80% of this warming in 2019. Reducing contrails and the warming they cause could be easily achieved by adjusting the flight paths of just a few flights at specific times of the day and year.

Yale Environment360: Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout

Yale Environment360: Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China’s Wind and Solar Buildout

Astounding photos by Chinese photographer Weimin Chu.

Last year China installed more than half of all wind and solar added globally. In May alone, it added enough renewable energy to power Poland, installing solar panels at a rate of roughly 100 every second. The massive buildout is happening across the country, from crowded eastern cities increasingly topped by rooftop solar panels to remote western deserts where colossal wind farms sprawl across the landscape.

“From the ground, it’s hard to grasp the scale of these power plants,” said Chinese photographer Weimin Chu. “But when you rise into the air, you can see the geometry, the rhythm — and their relationship with the mountains, the desert, the sea.”

Copernicus: Global Climate Highlights 2025 report

Copernicus: Global Climate Highlights 2025.

The 25th edition from the Copernicus Climate Change Service was released this morning. Key messages:

  • 2025 ranks as the third warmest year on record, following the unprecedented temperatures observed in 2023 and 2024
  • 2025 was only marginally cooler than 2023, while 2024 remains the warmest year on record and the first year with an average temperature clearly exceeding 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level
  • Globally, January 2025 was the warmest January on record. March, April and May were each the second warmest for the time of year.
  • In 2025, annual surface air temperatures were above the 1991–2020 average across 91% of the globe, the same fraction as in 2024. Nearly half of the globe (48%) experienced much warmer than average annual temperatures.
  • All regions –Arctic, Northern mid-latitudes, Tropics, Southern mid-latitudes and Antarctic– show a clear long-term warming trend.
  • The global sea surface temperature remained historically high throughout 2025, despite the absence of El Niño conditions.
  • The annual average sea surface temperature for 2025 was +0.38°C above the 1991–2020 average. It ranked as the third-highest on record.
  • February saw the lowest global sea ice cover since the beginning of satellite observations in the late 1970s.
  • In 2025, half of the globe experienced more days than average with at least strong heat stress (a feels-like temperature of 32°C or above)

Guardian: Mapped: How the world is losing its forests to wildfires

Guardian: Mapped: How the world is losing its forests to wildfires.

A story based on a recent World Resources Institute study illustrated with great maps.

Wildfires have always been part of nature’s cycle, but in recent decades their scale, frequency and intensity in carbon-rich forests have surged. Research from the World Resources Institute (WRI) shows that fires now destroy more than twice as much tree cover as they did two decades ago. In 2024 alone, 135,000km² of forest burned – the most extreme wildfire year on record.

Experts warn that climate change is making wildfires bigger, longer and more destructive. Hotter, drier conditions are extending fire seasons and fuelling more extreme blazes. 2023 and 2024 had the most forest area burned by wildfires on record. They were also the two hottest years on record.