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The global landscape of energy investment is experiencing a significant shift, with coal-fired power plants receiving unprecedented attention despite international climate commitments. Global approvals for coal-fired plants have reached their highest level since 2015, marking a dramatic reversal of the anticipated decline in fossil fuel investments.

China stands at the forefront of this coal renaissance, having commenced construction on approximately 100 gigawatts of new coal plants in 2024 alone. This massive expansion represents a capacity equivalent to the entire existing coal fleet of countries like Germany and Japan combined.

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In 2024, a “resurgence” in construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s clean-energy progress”, says a joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

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This surge in coal investment presents a stark contradiction to global climate goals. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal remains the largest source of energy-related emissions, accounting for a staggering 45% of the global total. The continued expansion of coal capacity threatens to undermine international efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

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Archived

China needs to cut steel output from the coal-powered blast furnace process by more than 90 million metric tons from 2024's level to achieve its green steel target this year, researchers said in a report published on Tuesday.

The global steel industry is responsible for around 8% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions and China accounts for more than half of global steel output.

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China has lagged far behind its global peers in terms of electric arc-furnace steel share. The average share is around 30% globally, 71.8% in the United States, 58.8% in India and 26.2% in Japan, [a report by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air] said.

From 2021 to the first half of 2025, China's blast furnace capacity utilisation rose from 85.6% to 88.6%, while electric-arc furnace utilisation fell from 58.9% to 48.6%, it added.

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"A credible strategy to curb emission-intensive production and rein in excess capacity would not only tackle the sector's structural issues but also ease global tensions," said Belinda Schaepe, an analyst at the Helsinki-based centre.

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Climate science deniers are flooding social media with false claims during extreme weather events, drowning out reliable information and putting lives at risk.

A new report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which researches and campaigns against online hatred and disinformation, finds that anti-climate figures are increasingly spreading false information about wildfires and hurricanes fuelled by climate change.

Authoritarianism is not a genetic destiny. It’s a psychological response to fear, uncertainty, and social threat, a reflex born from the very human desire for order, cohesion, and identity when the world feels unmoored. People don’t wake up yearning to silence others, tear down institutions, or cheer for strongmen. They gravitate toward authoritarianism when they feel the social contract has failed them, and when the tools of democratic deliberation feel powerless to protect what they value.

(the rest of the article / blog is also good)

South Korean cabbage, Australian lettuce, Japanese rice, Brazilian coffee and Ghanaian cocoa are among the many foods that have been hit by price hikes following extreme climate events since 2022, a team of international scientists has found.

The research released on Monday cites, among other examples, a 280 percent spike in global cocoa prices in April 2024, following a heatwave in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and a 300 percent jump in lettuce prices in Australia after floods in 2022.

by "Garys Economics"

tl.dw. the rich are buying it all

Microplastics are present in all beverages, but those packaged in glass bottles contain more microplastic particles than those in plastic bottles, cartons or cans. This was the surprising finding of a study conducted by the Boulogne-sur-Mer unit of the ANSES Laboratory for Food Safety. The scientists hypothesised that these plastic particles could come from the paint used on bottle caps. Water and wine are less affected than other beverages. These findings have highlighted a source of microplastics in drinks that manufacturers can easily take measures to address.

Up until a disastrous day earlier this month, more than 150 trucks crossed daily over a border bridge between Nepal and China. Known by locals as the Miteri Pul (Friendship Bridge), the Rasuwagadhi crossing served as the main trade route between the two countries, with over $50m of goods passing over it last year alone.

But on the 8 July, floodwaters tore through northern Nepal’s Rasuwa district, sweeping away parts of this critical border highway. According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction & Management Authority, seven people lost their lives, and 20 were missing, including six Chinese nationals.

The Chinese nationals were working on a 200 megawatt hydro project in the Tirsuli River, which was also damaged by the floods. Initial estimates suggest Nepal has sustained losses of over $100m in the incident as a whole.

Scientists have determined that the cause was an outburst from a glacial lake. According to Jakob Steiner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz (Austria), and Amrit Thapa, a PhD student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the glacial lake had formed in March, approximately 35km upstream from the border inside Chinese territory.

Glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) have become increasingly common in Nepal, driven by rapid warming in the Himalayas. Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology reports that temperatures in the Himalayan region have increased by 0.42C per decade between 2008 and 2018 – nearly double the global average.

Nepal lost 24 per cent of its glaciers due to global warming between 1977 and 2010, the most recent data available, contributing to a substantial decline in freshwater reserves in the Himalayas. In the Himalayan region, the number of glacial lakes and their area are rapidly increasing.

More than 14 million children did not receive a single vaccine last year — about the same number as the year before — according to U.N. health officials. Nine countries accounted for more than half of those unprotected children.

In their annual estimate of global vaccine coverage, released Tuesday, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said about 89% of children under 1 year old got a first dose of the diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough vaccine in 2024, the same as in 2023. About 85% completed the three-dose series, up from 84% in 2023.

Officials acknowledged, however, that the collapse of international aid this year will make it more difficult to reduce the number of unprotected children. In January, U.S. President Trump withdrew the country from the WHO, froze nearly all humanitarian aid and later moved to close the U.S. AID Agency. And last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said it was pulling the billions of dollars the U.S. had previously pledged to the vaccines alliance Gavi, saying the group had “ignored the science.”

Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, has previously raised questions the diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough vaccine — which has proven to be safe and effective after years of study and real-world use. Vaccines prevent 3.5 million to 5 million deaths a year, according to U.N. estimates.

The mega-drought is considered the most prolonged and widespread in a century, and the local population and mining companies are fighting for the right to water in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth, where the world’s largest copper and lithium deposits are located.

The lack of rainfall has had profound effects on Chile’s water resources, agriculture and ecosystems and is severely depleting its freshwater reserves in the Atacama region. Even mining operations have occasionally been forced to stop due to water shortages.

Lithium is critical for electric vehicle batteries, while copper underpins most renewable energy technologies and infrastructure. The global green transition is projected to substantially increase demand for copper and lithium. For Chile, this implies escalating water requirements for mining operations.

Despite advances in desalination, mining remains a major consumer of fresh water, accounting for about 50% of regional reserves in the north. Chile’s ministry of mining projects that total consumption of water will go up by about 20% by 2034.

Desalination and transporting seawater inland also come with environmental costs. These are energy-intensive processes, and studies forecast that CO2 emissions from Chile’s desalination plants could reach up to about 700,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent annually by 2030 – about the same as Antigua and Barbuda.

Desalination may also transfer environmental risks from the desert to the ocean. In Antofagasta, a coastal town in northern Chile near where Escondida’s desalination plant and port are located, local fishers have already noticed changes.

“We’re losing 120 calories per person, per day, for every degree of global warming.” That stark data point from a 2025 Nature study signals more than a threat to food security, it points to a growing risk to global financial security.

Food system instability exposes markets to cascading shocks: inflation, trade disruption, insurance losses and sovereign credit stress. Yet these risks remain largely unaccounted for in core financial systems. Despite mounting exposure to climate-driven volatility, financial systems, from asset pricing models to fiscal and monetary policy frameworks, still treat food risk as peripheral.

This disconnect is no longer sustainable. As climate extremes intensify, the next financial crisis may not come from housing or tech, but from a climate-driven breakdown in the global food system.

A growing number of climate groups are campaigning for the introduction of a wealth tax to ensure the transition to a sustainable economy is not done “on the backs of the poor”.

Last week campaigners from Green New Deal Rising staged a sit-in outside the Reform UK party’s London headquarters as part of a wave of protests targeting the offices, shops and private clubs of the super-rich across the UK.

The Pay Up campaign – backed by more than 20 civil society groups including Friends of the Earth, the National Education Union and Tax Justice UK – is calling on the government to bring in a series of wealth taxes as an alternative to spending cuts. It is one of a number of campaign initiatives focused on overhauling the tax regime being run by climate groups who say the revenue from the ultra-rich could fund investment, restore crumbling public services and help tackle the climate emergency.

Britain's climate is changing rapidly, with records regularly being smashed and extremes of heat and rainfall becoming the norm, the Met Office has warned.

In an updated assessment of the UK's climate, the forecaster says heatwaves and periods of flood or drought are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband called the findings "a stark warning" to take action on climate and nature.

"Our British way of life is under threat," Mr Miliband told the PA news agency.

"Whether it is extreme heat, droughts, flooding, we can see it actually with our own eyes, that it's already happening, and we need to act."

Uncle Paul Kabai and Uncle Pabai Pabai are afraid for the future of their ancestral homelands. Their country on the outer islands of Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait), less than 10km off Papua New Guinea, is under siege from the impacts of the climate crisis.

The two men fear the loss of their islands, their culture and their way of life, forcing their families and communities to become Australia’s first climate refugees.

The uncles have taken the federal government to court in the landmark Australian climate case, seeking orders that would require the commonwealth to undertake steps to prevent further harm to their communities.

They are arguing that the commonwealth owes a duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders to take reasonable steps to protect them from harm.

During on-country hearings in 2023, witnesses described how devastating their loss of culture due to climate change had been.

“We don’t want to be climate refugees,” Uncle Pabai, who has spent his life on the low-lying island of Boigu, says.

• Water tests from the Kok and Sai rivers near Thailand’s border with Myanmar have revealed elevated arsenic levels, leading Thai officials to warn citizens to avoid contact with river water.
• The pollution is widely believed to be linked to unregulated mining in Myanmar’s Shan state.
• Extraction of gold in Shan State has surged in the years since the 2021 military coup in Myanmar; more recently, mounting evidence suggests rare earth mining is also expanding across the state.
• Elevated arsenic levels have also been found at testing points in the Mekong, which is fed by both the Kok and Sai rivers.

Sand and dust storms affect about 330 million people in over 150 countries and are taking an increasing toll on health, economies and the environment, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization says.

“About 2 billion tons of dust are emitted yearly, equivalent to 300 Great Pyramids of Giza” in Egypt, the organization's U.N. representative, Laura Paterson, told the General Assembly.

More than 80% of the world’s dust comes from the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East, she said, but it has a global impact because the particles can travel hundreds and even thousands of kilometers (miles) across continents and oceans.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38356665

Twenty-five rivers in southwestern China exceeded safe levels on Thursday, state media said, after more than 10,000 people were evacuated as the remnants of former typhoon Danas converged with East Asian monsoon rains.

Extreme rainfall and severe flooding, which meteorologists link to climate change, increasingly pose major challenges as they threaten to overwhelm ageing flood defences, displace millions and wreak havoc on a $2.8-trillion agricultural sector.

Heavy rains also hit the capital, Beijing, with one area in the sprawling Chaoyang district receiving 68.2 mm (2.7 inches) of rain in a single hour on Thursday morning, the state-run Beijing Daily said.

Ten southwestern rivers, including the Longyan, which flows through the densely populated region of Chongqing, could burst their embankments and levees at any time, broadcaster CCTV warned, citing the water resources ministry.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/3506750

Archived version

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Climate-related risks are an immediate concern for financial stability and economic growth. Yet until very recently, there have been no tools to systematically assess their short-term effects. The innovative short-term scenarios devised by the NGFS – the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System which brings together central bankers and supervisors from around the world to work on climate-related issues – fill this gap. The new scenarios offer financial institutions a comprehensive framework for quantifying the impacts that transition and physical risks could have on the economy by 2030. They reveal that a series of extreme climate events could cause euro area GDP to fall by up to 5% – a downturn similar in magnitude to the economic impact of the Global Financial Crisis. This blog post provides a deep dive into the results of new NGFS short-term scenarios for the euro area.

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The NGFS short-term scenarios focus on a five-year horizon, which aligns closely with the decision-making horizons of central banks, financial institutions and supervisors. The scenarios show how natural hazards and climate policies affect the economy and inflation. They also account for the reaction of the financial system by assessing how financing conditions might change, and which economic sectors could face pressure to adjust to climate shocks.

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A major innovation of the scenarios is their approach to modelling physical risks. For the first time, the NGFS captures the impact of compounding extreme weather events and how they propagate across borders through international supply chains.

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• In the Disasters and Policy Stagnation scenario, a series of natural hazards affects all European countries, starting with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in 2026, followed by a combination of floods and storms in 2027. The compounding effects of these hazards could lead to a decline in euro area annual GDP of up to 4.7% by 2030. As production is disrupted and borrowing gets more expensive for vulnerable industries, inflation increases.

• In the Highway to Paris scenario, carbon tax revenues are invested effectively in green technologies, and euro area GDP and employment slightly increase. The green transition has limited inflationary effects. The euro area position in this scenario stands out because it has previously adopted ambitious climate policies, particularly the European Green Deal, which targets a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 compared with 1990 levels.

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As the Texas flooding death toll reached 95 on July 6—at least 27 of them children—and Tropical Storm Chantal prompted dozens of water rescues in North Carolina, some Floridians were reminded of the disastrous "rain bomb" in 2023 that hit faster and harder than any hurricane in living memory.

Though no one died from the 2 feet of rain that deluged Fort Lauderdale in a single day in April two years ago, the relentless rain forced hundreds to flee to Red Cross shelters, covered airport runways, filled the tunnel that runs under the New River and turned downtown streets into raging rivers.

And, despite the sheer speed with which these floods took people by surprise, they have another thing in common: Climate change made them even more catastrophic.