News Feeds

Nurses are demanding that ICE or any federal immigration agents stay away from their hospitals and that their employers refuse to cooperate, that ICE get out of their communities, and ultimately that the agency be abolished.

Weaker rules for new wells would lock in years of increased methane pollution if Senate permitting bill passes

DENVER—President Donald Trump will roll out plans today to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 methane standards for oil and gas operations, according to reporting in The Hill and Bloomberg. The proposal would scrap the Super Emitter Program, which requires operators to investigate and fix leaks of 100 kilograms of methane per hour or more once satellites or certified third parties flag them. It would also create separate, looser standards for low-producing “marginal” wells and revisit the phaseout of routine flaring at new oil wells. The changes would apply to oil and gas wells nationwide, including those on public lands.

Marginal wells produce roughly 7 percent of U.S. oil and gas but account for about half of the industry’s methane from oil and gas production, and nearly 80 percent of oil and gas wells in the U.S. qualify as marginal. The 2024 rule Trump is proposing to weaken was projected to keep 58 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere through 2038, the climate equivalent of taking 28 million gas-powered cars off the road.

The methane giveaway comes as the Senate plans to take up the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act the week after the election. The sweeping permitting bill would make Trump-era approvals on public lands nearly impossible to revisit. Section 1401 of the bill bars agencies from taking any new action that would “revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter” a federal permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026. Agencies could do so only by proving an exception with “clear and convincing evidence,” and if they lost in court, taxpayers would owe the developer 25 to 50 percent of everything it had spent. The bill also explicitly shields every drilling permit that results from the 2025 reconciliation law’s mandatory oil and gas lease sales.

The Interior department is pursuing a parallel rollback. In June, the Bureau of Land Management proposed scrapping most of its 2024 methane waste rule, including the requirement that drillers file a waste minimization plan with each drilling permit application. Permits approved without those conditions would fall under Section 1401 of the Senate permitting bill. If it passes, a future administration that tries to add methane leak detection or flaring requirements to existing wells would have to prove an exception by “clear and convincing evidence” and could owe the operator 25 to 50 percent of its costs if it lost in court. Section 1401 of the bill also bars any agency action that would “interfere with or prevent the construction or operation at full capacity” of a permitted project, language that would likely block new pollution standards from reaching wells that are already permitted.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Executive Director Aaron Weiss:

“The Trump administration is giving oil companies a free pass to spew methane across the country, and the Senate permitting bill would make that pass permanent.

“Every drilling permit and stripper well that the Trump administration rubber-stamps over the next two years would be shielded from future safeguards, and the next president could be on the hook to compensate drillers just for asking them to fix their leaks. Senators should slow down and fix the permitting bill to avoid locking in decades of pollution allowed under the Trump administration’s assault on America’s air and water.”

Learn more:

• The Senate permitting bill would lock in data centers and nuclear waste on public lands. It only gets worse from there – Westwise
• Trump plans to loosen methane rules for low-producing, high-emitting oil wells – The Hill
• Trump Targets Methane Curbs on Oil and Gas in a New Climate Rollback – Bloomberg

The post Trump plans to roll back methane regulations for all oil and gas wells in the U.S. appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The BLM is using a shortcut that could come back to bite the AI industry

In June, the Bureau of Land Management approved the first AI data center on America’s public lands. It didn’t write a new rule, hold a public comment period, or prepare a new environmental review. It amended a right-of-way BLM granted in 2023 for a solar farm near Boulder City, Nevada, and let the developer, Townsite Solar 2, swap out its solar panels for an 80-acre data center with a substation, battery storage, and biodiesel backup generators—a very different project with different environmental impacts and energy needs. Boulder City had already voted not to approve the project on city land, so the developer attempted an end run around the community by pivoting to public land.

In September, an Interior department administrative judge froze the approval, finding BLM likely acted “arbitrarily or capriciously” when it treated a solar farm and a data center as substantially the same project. Weeks later, the BLM asked a judge to set aside the approval to allow the agency to reconsider the application. Meanwhile, the agency has received applications for at least 16 more data center proposals, following a July 2025 executive order directing the Interior department to identify national public land for data centers. The BLM is reportedly now considering approving one of those applications, a 3,700-acre data center campus on public land outside of Twin Falls, Idaho.

The legal problem with putting data centers on public lands runs deeper than one rushed review. BLM’s governing law, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, lists what rights-of-way on public lands can be used for: water systems, pipelines, electric generation and transmission, communications, roads, and railroads. Data centers aren’t on the list. To approve them, BLM would likely have to rely on a catch-all allowance in the law for “other systems or facilities which are in the public interest.” A warehouse full of servers primarily benefits private industry, not the general public. For industrial and commercial uses like that, BLM uses a different tool: leases under Section 302 of FLPMA. Marinas, recreation businesses, farms, and equipment staging yards are some examples of uses BLM authorizes with leases and permits.

Right now, the Trump administration is attempting to authorize data centers through right-of-way applications, which would require stretching a provision no court has ever applied to this type of project on public lands. What’s more, the BLM has yet to formally determine whether data centers are even a legal use of public land. This is clearly the wrong approach, but is there a right one? BLM has faced new technologies before, and history illustrates how this could work.

Geothermal

In the late 1960s, no one knew whether underground steam on federal land counted as water or as a mineral. Meanwhile, California’s Geysers field was already producing geothermal electricity. Pacific Gas and Electric built an 11-megawatt plant there in 1960, running on steam from geothermal wells on private land. Developers wanted to drill on public land too, but the Interior department said it had no authority to lease it, telling Congress that geothermal steam was water governed by state law. Congress responded by passing the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970, which made geothermal a leasable resource like oil and gas. Congress revised the law in 2005, making competitive lease sales the norm and creating a plan for splitting royalties generated from geothermal energy sales with states and counties.

BLM built its geothermal program on that foundation. Companies bid on leases at auction, pay rent and royalties, and need separate approvals to drill, build a power plant, and begin commercial operation—much like BLM’s oil and gas leasing process. In 2008, BLM and the U.S. Forest Service completed a programmatic environmental review that amended 114 land use plans to determine where geothermal leasing could occur.

Data centers have none of this authorization. Congress has not addressed whether they belong on public land, BLM has not done a programmatic review mapping where they should go, and there is no structure in place to ensure data centers pay out royalties to the federal government or to the cities, states, or counties that host them.

McGinness Hills, the largest geothermal complex in Nevada, has about 138 megawatts of capacity. Source: BLM/Flickr

Wind

Wind didn’t need its own statute, since FLPMA already lists “systems for generation, transmission, and distribution of electric energy” as a right-of-way use, and turbines clearly fit that description. BLM initially approved wind projects case-by-case, and by 2002 it was managing about 25 wind rights-of-way in California and Wyoming, generating roughly 500 megawatts. As interest grew, the agency issued an interim wind policy that year, then paused to create a permitting plan before allowing the industry to scale up.

In 2005, it finished a programmatic environmental impact statement that amended 52 land use plans in nine states and set rules to protect birds, bats, and other wildlife. Projects still require site-specific review, typically starting with short-term grants to test the wind before receiving full approval.

Unlike data centers, wind had a clear legal footing under FLPMA and BLM still paused to plan for it before approving projects at scale.

Solar

Solar is the closest parallel to today’s data center scramble. By 2008, about 130 applications for solar projects on BLM land had piled up and none had been approved. BLM briefly froze new applications while it studied the issue, then reversed course after industry objected, and went back to the drawing board.

That work became the 2012 Western Solar Plan, a programmatic review conducted by the Interior department along with the Department of Energy that amended 89 BLM land use plans. It sorted public land into three categories: 17 Solar Energy Zones where BLM steered development, about 19 million acres of “variance” land where developers could still apply and receive extra scrutiny, and areas closed to utility-scale solar energy development. In 2016, BLM adopted rules for competitively leasing land inside the Solar Energy Zones. An updated plan in 2024 eliminated the variance category, replacing it with more than 31 million acres open to applications, mostly near existing transmission lines. Congress set targets along the way for solar development on public lands but never had to authorize solar, because FLPMA explicitly names electric generation as a valid use of public lands.

In this case, BLM faced a flood of solar applications, then spent years doing planning and collecting public comment to figure out how to handle them. Data center applications are creating a similar pressure on the agency, and the Trump administration’s answer has been to approve the first one through a modified solar permit, a lazy strategy that quickly failed. If data centers are determined to be a valid—and appropriate—use of public lands under FLPMA, BLM must follow a similar planning process to develop a fair and responsible structure for them.

This solar array in California is similar to the approved Crimson Solar Project, located on BLM land in California. Photo courtesy of Recurrent Energy. Source: BLM/Flickr

Are data centers even a legal use of public land?

Wind and solar energy development each arrived on public lands with a clear legal basis under FLPMA, and BLM still paused to determine where each belonged and created processes before approving projects at scale. Congress authorized geothermal development on public lands, and BLM created a leasing system for it. Data centers have no congressional approval, no clear standing under FLPMA, and no permitting process in place. The administration would have to rely on a catch-all right-of-way provision written for “necessary” facilities “in the public interest” to approve private server farms, some powered by new natural gas plants or nuclear reactors. Whether AI data centers serve the “public interest” is an open question—but poll after poll suggests that Americans think they do not.

This raises two important questions. First, are data centers a legal use of public land under federal law? And second, are they an appropriate one? If the courts rule that data centers don’t fit FLPMA’s definition of a legal use, every approval issued by BLM would be invalid, and a future administration could revoke them.

Interior should pause new data center approvals until both questions are answered, and the public should have a real say in determining the appropriateness of putting data centers on public lands. BLM should conduct a programmatic review to determine this, with a robust public input process, that looks at the water, energy, and habitat impacts of putting data centers on public lands and asks whether data centers are a valid and appropriate use of public lands. If the answer is no, BLM should throw out the data center applications it has already approved and stop reviewing new ones.

If the answer is yes, BLM would still have to revise land use plans across the country before it moves forward with approving individual data centers. Each BLM field office has a Resource Management Plan that designates where pipelines, power lines, and energy projects can go. BLM would need to amend these individual land use plans to determine where data centers can go through a transparent public process before attempting to approve any more.

If the Trump administration begins revising land use plans before engaging in a high-level review to determine if data centers are a legal and appropriate use of public land, any data center approvals that follow would still be in legal limbo.

Aerial view of the Google Data Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Source: Chad Davis/Wikimedia

The permitting bill could lock it all in

Much of this may not matter if the Senate permitting bill passes. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is expected to come up for a vote on the Senate floor after the November election and would bar agencies from revoking, suspending, or altering any project, action, or federal authorization or permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026, except under extremely rare circumstances proven by “clear and convincing evidence.” What counts as a project, action, authorization, or permit under the bill is extremely broad, so a data center approved on public land under the current ad hoc process BLM is using could be locked in for good, unless it’s ruled by a court to be an illegal use of public land.

The permitting bill could also make a moratorium on data centers prohibitively expensive. As it’s written, if a future administration slows an entire category of projects, developers could collect 50 to 100 percent of their expected construction costs from the Judgment Fund, a Treasury account that pays out without a vote of Congress. A pause on data center application approvals while Interior weighs whether they belong on public lands is the kind of slowdown that could trigger those payments.

Finally, the bill would limit the public’s ability to push back against data centers. Challengers would have only 150 days to sue, and a court that finds a BLM environmental review for a data center is flawed could order it to be redone, but couldn’t halt construction from moving forward. The bill would also rewrite the National Historic Preservation Act so agencies like the BLM judge what counts as harm to sacred sites and consult Tribes only after reaching their conclusions.

The stakes are incredibly high, and things are moving quickly. Trump’s Interior department needs to stop all efforts to approve data centers until it determines whether they are an appropriate and legal use of public lands, and if so, how to assess and approve them responsibly, ensuring communities both have a say in whether data centers end up in their backyards and receive financial benefits from them. If the department fails to do so, it could face a massive wave of public backlash as Americans realize they can’t rely on the federal government to protect their communities or their national public lands.

Feature image: The Utah Data Center is a 1.5 million-square-foot National Security Agency facility located at Camp Williams in Bluffdale, Utah; Source: ParkerHiggins (Electronic Frontier Foundation)/Wikimedia

The post Is the Trump administration illegally authorizing data centers on public land? appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The Trump administration claims that repealing the Roadless Rule will bring timber jobs back to struggling small towns, but loggers and mill owners in Oregon say the policy won’t fix the industry’s biggest problems.

Oregon timber industry workers say diesel prices, the rising cost of equipment and parts, and a shortage of workers are bigger problems than access to roadless forests. Sean Smith, CEO of Starfire Lumber, supports the repeal but told NPR that record diesel prices and inflation are more pressing concerns. Jeff Brink, a second-generation logger, said that finding workers is a challenge. “Right now, there’s not a ton of people that want to wake up at 2 a.m. and drive a log truck for the same price that you could go work at McDonald’s for,” said Brink.

Industry experts project the repeal would raise federal timber sales by just five to 10 percent, and the Forest Service’s own analysis projects similarly modest gains. The agency’s draft environmental impact statement projects $5 million to $11 million a year in new timber revenue nationwide, and concedes that revenue “would not be sufficient to cover the costs of constructing and maintaining all new roads.” The Forest Service already has a $7 billion road maintenance backlog. The same analysis finds that “as the density of roads increases so does the probability, number, and frequency of wildfire ignitions.”

The public has already weighed in and is nearly unanimously opposed to the repeal. Of the 370,238 comments posted during the comment period that closed October 6, 99.1 percent opposed repealing the rule, according to a Center for Western Priorities analysis.

Quick hits The Trump administration wants to fill thousands of acres of public land with AI data centers

TechRadar

Opinion: Diné leaders demand the return of Bears Ears, fully intact

High Country News

Cut off from the Cutoff

RE:PUBLIC

Judge extends court-ordered block on Trump’s renovation plans for public golf course in Washington

Associated Press

Federal hunting order could aid corner-crossing case, stir lead ammo debate in Montana

Flathead Beacon

BLM evaluating pitch for second data center on public land in Idaho

Idaho Statesman

What Trump’s golf course plan takes away from D.C. residents

New York Times

Opinion: Go outside — there’s so much of the physical world left to explore

Deseret News

Quote of the day

The claim that they’re going to do all this new road building and logging in roadless areas on behalf of wildland firefighters, and make it more efficient for them, is just a big lie. Not in our name you don’t.”

—Timothy Ingalsbee, retired federal firefighter and executive director of FUSEE, NPR

Picture This @canyonlandsnps

Hoping to sneak a peak at some bighorn sheep?

Luckily for you, October is one of the best times of the year to spot one of these fascinating creatures. This month marks the beginning of their fall rut, or the season where male bighorn sheep come clashing together, battling one another for the opportunity to show off their strength and impress potential mates.

During these intense battles, male bighorn sheep will lower their heads and ram their horns together, delivering over 2,000 pounds of force! How crazy is that?! Luckily for these sheep, their skulls are well adapted to handle such forces. The keratin sheath that makes up these curled horns actually flexes slightly under impact to absorb some of this shock. On top of this, their thick, layered skulls also work to spread out these immense forces and minimize the chance of major head injuries.

Thanks to this increase in bighorn sheep activity, October is a great time to see one of these creatures in the wild – but don’t get too close! You don’t have the same headgear to handle a hit from one of these powerful animals.

NPS Photo/S Goodwin 

Featured photo: Logging on the Idaho Panhandle National Forest, USFS

The post Loggers say Roadless Rule repeal won’t solve their biggest challenges appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu

• What is driving high energy bills?
• What has been done to limit bills so far?
• What options are there for bringing down bills?
• Is there a ‘cheap power’ alternative if the UK slows down?
• Can electrification of homes and businesses help cut bills?

Energy bills in the UK have continued to soar in 2026, with intense debate raging about how to bring them down. 

In October 2026, the cap on household energy bills reached its highest level in three years, rising by £60 amid high gas prices driven by the Iran war.

The cap is forecast to jump by as much as another quarter in January 2027, pushing annual energy bills towards £2,200.

Energy bills have not been that high since 2022 when, in the fallout of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UK government spent more than £60bn on supporting consumers through the crisis.

While expensive gas is behind the lion’s share of the rise in bills since 2020, policy costs and investment in the gas and electricity grids are also putting some pressure on prices.

This has sparked conflicting calls to continue the clean-energy transition to get off the “fossil-fuel rollercoaster”, to move more slowly – or to abandon climate goals in favour of more gas.

Below, Carbon Brief looks at the real drivers of high energy bills in the UK, what has been done to address them to date and what options are available to cut them going forward.

These include taking more policy costs off electricity bills, boosting flexibility or shifting to more efficient technologies with lower running costs, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles (EVs).

• What is driving high energy bills?
• What has been done to limit bills so far?
• What options are there for bringing down bills?
• Is there a ‘cheap power’ alternative if the UK slows down?
• Can electrification of homes and businesses help cut bills?

What is driving high energy bills?

In October 2026, UK household energy bills reached their highest levels since 2022, with the price cap for typical homes hitting £1,723 per year, up 47% in real terms since October 2020.

Industrial energy users also face high costs, particularly for their electricity.

For households, another sharp increase is now all but guaranteed under the price cap for January 2027, which is forecast to rise by around 25% from current levels.

Wholesale costs for electricity and gas make up 44% of the current cap of £1,723 per year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of figures from thinktank Nesta, shown in the figure below.

The wholesale cost of both electricity and gas is tied to gas prices, due to the marginal pricing system used in power markets in the UK and most other countries.

Network charges make up a further 24% of bills and operating costs are another 17%, whereas policy costs only account for 7% of the total.

There has been increasing interest in the so-called “non-commodity costs” – those not related to wholesale energy – that now make up a significant portion of bills, as shown in the figure above.

Yet while these costs have been increasing – particularly those related to investing in energy networks – they are not the reason why energy bills have soared once again in recent months.

Indeed, Nesta analysis recently published by Carbon Brief shows that, contrary to widespread UK media and political narratives, a surge in wholesale costs driven by expensive gas is responsible for more than 80% of the rise in dual-fuel household energy bills since 2020, as shown below.

The second-largest driver of the rise in costs since 2020 is due to the cost of operating, maintaining and expanding gas and electricity networks, as shown in the figure above.

At the end of 2025, energy regulator Ofgem approved £29bn of upfront investment into the national gas and electricity grids, as well as the gas distribution network that connects to homes and businesses. This is part of a wider package of up to around £90bn of investment out to 2031.

As a result of these investment plans, network charges are expected to increase by around 50% between 2025 and 2030, from £222 a year to £330 for a typical dual-fuel household.

(This figure covers gas and electricity transmission and gas distribution, but not electricity distribution. A further package of increased investment in the electricity distribution network, for the period from 2028-2033, is due to be approved by Ofgem by the end of 2027.)

#gform_wrapper_7[data-form-index="0"].gform-theme,[data-parent-form="7_0"]{--gf-color-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-secondary: #fff;--gf-color-secondary-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-secondary-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-secondary-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-secondary-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-secondary-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-color-in-ctrl: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-radius: 3px;--gf-font-size-secondary: 14px;--gf-font-size-tertiary: 13px;--gf-icon-ctrl-number: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='8' height='14' viewBox='0 0 8 14' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M4 0C4.26522 5.96046e-08 4.51957 0.105357 4.70711 0.292893L7.70711 3.29289C8.09763 3.68342 8.09763 4.31658 7.70711 4.70711C7.31658 5.09763 6.68342 5.09763 6.29289 4.70711L4 2.41421L1.70711 4.70711C1.31658 5.09763 0.683417 5.09763 0.292893 4.70711C-0.0976311 4.31658 -0.097631 3.68342 0.292893 3.29289L3.29289 0.292893C3.48043 0.105357 3.73478 0 4 0ZM0.292893 9.29289C0.683417 8.90237 1.31658 8.90237 1.70711 9.29289L4 11.5858L6.29289 9.29289C6.68342 8.90237 7.31658 8.90237 7.70711 9.29289C8.09763 9.68342 8.09763 10.3166 7.70711 10.7071L4.70711 13.7071C4.31658 14.0976 3.68342 14.0976 3.29289 13.7071L0.292893 10.7071C-0.0976311 10.3166 -0.0976311 9.68342 0.292893 9.29289Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-select: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='10' height='6' viewBox='0 0 10 6' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M0.292893 0.292893C0.683417 -0.097631 1.31658 -0.097631 1.70711 0.292893L5 3.58579L8.29289 0.292893C8.68342 -0.0976311 9.31658 -0.0976311 9.70711 0.292893C10.0976 0.683417 10.0976 1.31658 9.70711 1.70711L5.70711 5.70711C5.31658 6.09763 4.68342 6.09763 4.29289 5.70711L0.292893 1.70711C-0.0976311 1.31658 -0.0976311 0.683418 0.292893 0.292893Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-search: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='640' height='640' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath d='M256 128c-70.692 0-128 57.308-128 128 0 70.691 57.308 128 128 128 70.691 0 128-57.309 128-128 0-70.692-57.309-128-128-128zM64 256c0-106.039 85.961-192 192-192s192 85.961 192 192c0 41.466-13.146 79.863-35.498 111.248l154.125 154.125c12.496 12.496 12.496 32.758 0 45.254s-32.758 12.496-45.254 0L367.248 412.502C335.862 434.854 297.467 448 256 448c-106.039 0-192-85.962-192-192z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-label-space-y-secondary: var(--gf-label-space-y-md-secondary);--gf-ctrl-border-color: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-size: var(--gf-ctrl-size-md);--gf-ctrl-label-color-primary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-label-color-secondary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-choice-size: var(--gf-ctrl-choice-size-md);--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-border-color-secondary: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-file-btn-bg-color-hover: #EBEBEB;--gf-field-img-choice-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-card-space: var(--gf-field-img-choice-card-space-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size-md);--gf-field-pg-steps-number-color: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.8);}

CommentsThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Free weekly newsletter

.preheader p{ margin-top: 0; font-family: 'PT Sans', sans-serif; font-weight: var(--type--3--font-weight--bold); color: var(--button--color); font-size: var(--button--font-size, inherit); } .newsletter-inline{ display: flex; border: solid 1px #333333; padding: 1em; background: #ffffff; } .inline-email{ display:inline-block; margin-right:1em; margin-top:0 !important; margin-bottom:0.5em; } #field_submit{ display:inline-block; margin-top:0 !important; } .gform_wrapper .gfield+.gfield{ margin-top:0 } Email gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 7, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_7').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_7');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_7').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_7').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_7').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_7').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gform_wrapper_7').offset().top - mt); }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_7').val();gformInitSpinner( 7, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [7, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_7'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}jQuery('#gform_wrapper_7').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gf_7').offset().top - mt);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [7]);window['gf_submitting_7'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_7').text());}else{jQuery('#gform_7').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger("gform_pre_post_render", [{ formId: "7", currentPage: "current_page", abort: function() { this.preventDefault(); } }]); if (event && event.defaultPrevented) { return; } const gformWrapperDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_wrapper_7" ); if ( gformWrapperDiv ) { const visibilitySpan = document.createElement( "span" ); visibilitySpan.id = "gform_visibility_test_7"; gformWrapperDiv.insertAdjacentElement( "afterend", visibilitySpan ); } const visibilityTestDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_visibility_test_7" ); let postRenderFired = false; function triggerPostRender() { if ( postRenderFired ) { return; } postRenderFired = true; gform.core.triggerPostRenderEvents( 7, current_page ); if ( visibilityTestDiv ) { visibilityTestDiv.parentNode.removeChild( visibilityTestDiv ); } } function debounce( func, wait, immediate ) { var timeout; return function() { var context = this, args = arguments; var later = function() { timeout = null; if ( !immediate ) func.apply( context, args ); }; var callNow = immediate && !timeout; clearTimeout( timeout ); timeout = setTimeout( later, wait ); if ( callNow ) func.apply( context, args ); }; } const debouncedTriggerPostRender = debounce( function() { triggerPostRender(); }, 200 ); if ( visibilityTestDiv && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent === null ) { const observer = new MutationObserver( ( mutations ) => { mutations.forEach( ( mutation ) => { if ( mutation.type === 'attributes' && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent !== null ) { debouncedTriggerPostRender(); observer.disconnect(); } }); }); observer.observe( document.body, { attributes: true, childList: false, subtree: true, attributeFilter: [ 'style', 'class' ], }); } else { triggerPostRender(); } } );} );

The increase in network costs is often attributed to the need to connect increasing levels of geographically dispersed renewable energy sources, particularly wind power.

However, a significant proportion of these increases relate to the need to update ageing infrastructure after decades of under-investment.

This package of investment represents a “once-in-a-generation renewal of our energy infrastructure”, Ofgem head Tim Jarvis told a recent conference attended by Carbon Brief.

Ofgem says some three-fifths of the £108 per household per year rise in network charges to 2030 is due to “business-as-usual” costs such as ongoing maintenance of the gas and electricity networks. It says only £30 is due to investing in expanding the electricity transmission grid.

Similarly, according to the Energy Networks Association, up to 80% of the investment in electricity grids is required to maintain existing assets, with the remainder going towards expansion.

Another point of contention is “constraint costs”, where windfarms are switched off if the network lacks the capacity to transmit their power – and gas plants are switched on to meet demand.

These costs sit within network balancing charges and – despite rising steeply in recent years, partly due to high gas prices – these still make up just £35, or 4% of typical annual electricity bills.

Today, rising constraint costs are partly a reflection of the decision in the 2010s to postpone network investments under a policy known as “connect and manage”. Ofgem says the investments it has now approved in the electricity grid would help limit constraints in the future.

Trade association RenewableUK’s head of policy Steven Agnew points to a recent review by the National Audit Office and says investment in the grid is “critical to avoid large rises in consumers’ bills as more of the country’s electricity is generated from clean sources”. He adds: 

“The current crunch is the result of inaction by successive previous governments to tackle this issue. Consumers are losing out on some of the benefits because low-cost wind has to be turned down and expensive gas turned up elsewhere.”

Projections from the National Energy System Operator (Neso) illustrate how constraint costs depend on the relative pace of expansion in new generating capacity and the electricity network.

It says balancing costs could rise from £2bn to £8bn by 2030, if the grid faces delays. However, its central projection is £3-4bn, with a range of options available to limit this increase.

Finally, following years of elevated energy bills, the cost of “bad debt” has increased. This is where unpaid bills are recovered by energy companies through a charge on all households.

These charges add around £60 to typical bills, according to Carbon Brief analysis of Ofgem data. This is an increase of around £40 since 2020 – more than half of the rise in “operating costs”. Trade association Energy UK says rising debt could add another £10-15 to bills by next year.

What has been done to limit bills so far?

The Labour government was elected in 2024 on a manifesto that pledged to cut bills by £300 per year by 2030, relative to levels in late 2023.

The government has taken a number of steps in this direction.

At the 2025 budget, it closed the “energy company obligation” (ECO) efficiency scheme and moved 75% of the “renewables obligation” support scheme for legacy renewables into general taxation.

Collectively, these two changes were expected to save a typical household £134 per year, or £154 when including households that use electric heating. (These savings only apply to households.)

Many groups, from industry to politicians, had long called for policy costs to be taken off electricity bills in an effort to bring down prices, but this had previously been resisted by the Treasury.

In addition, new prime minister Andy Burnham announced in July that his government would remove VAT from electricity bills for six months from 1 October, cutting bills by around £45.

Yet despite these efforts, bills have continued to increase.

Speaking to Carbon Brief, Dr Richard Carmichael, a researcher at the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) and research fellow at Imperial College London, says the impact of reducing policy costs and VAT has been “masked” by rising wholesale energy prices.

As a result, there are calls for the government to go even further in its efforts to reduce policy costs – or to take more radical steps to cut bills. (See: What are the options to bring down bills?)

One factor that is less well-appreciated is the impact that clean-power sources have already had on energy bills. Commentators tend to focus narrowly on the cost of support schemes for these projects, without considering the impact they have on the total cost of running the energy system.

Nesta research suggests that electricity bills are rising “much more slowly” than gas this year, despite the impact of the Hormuz crisis, due to the expansion of clean power. It says this is an early sign of electricity prices starting to “decouple” from gas prices.

In April, the government announced reforms that it hopes will help “break [the] link between gas and electricity prices, but analysts told Carbon Brief the impact was likely to be “modest”.

Nevertheless, the link between the two will continue to weaken as more wind and solar gets built, including projects supported by a record “contracts for difference” (CfD) auction earlier this year.

Since the start of the Iran war, the UK has avoided the need to import gas worth around £5.9bn as a result of record wind and solar output, according to previous Carbon Brief analysis.

RenewableUK’s Agnew tells Carbon Brief: “Put simply, every wind turbine we build is gas we don’t need to buy.”

In addition to directly displacing gas, the windfarms on the system cut wholesale power prices by around a third in 2025, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).

This is due to the “merit-order effect”, whereby windfarms push the most expensive gas plants off the system, reducing the average wholesale power price.

According to separate research published by University College London, UK wind energy cut consumer costs by a total of £104bn over 2010-2023, net of subsidy costs, through a combination of the merit-order effect and reduced gas demand, which lowered gas prices.

What options are there for bringing down bills?

With household and industrial prices remaining elevated for more than five years, countless ideas have been presented for bringing down the cost of energy.

These span from immediate but more modest tweaks that could have a rapid impact, through to longer-term changes in the energy system, the design of energy markets or retail tariffs.

Moreover, amid a collapse in the UK consensus, some politicians want climate goals to be abandoned in the name of cheaper energy. (See: Is there a ‘cheap power’ alternative if the UK slows down?)

Ahead of the budget on 28 October, the most widely shared request is for the chancellor to take more policy costs off electricity bills, either for households only, or for all energy users.

A September letter to the government from more than 120 trade bodies, businesses and charities calls for “hidden taxes” to be taken off energy bills for both businesses and households.

.cb-tweet img{ border: solid 1.25px #333333; border-radius: 5px; } @media (max-width:650px){ .cb-tweet{ width:100%; } }

It argues that a series of levies should be paid out of general taxation, in addition to the existing decision to take 75% of renewables obligation costs off household electricity bills.

This would include a levy supporting the Sizewell C new nuclear plant, the cost of the warm home discount scheme for fuel-poor households and feed-in tariffs for small-scale legacy renewables.

The group says that removing these additional policy costs from bills would “bring the total average domestic energy bill reduction achieved by this government to as much as £250 a year”.

It adds that this would bring down inflation, boost manufacturing and incentivise investment in the electrification of the economy, helping to “fully realise [the UK’s] economic potential”.

Speaking to Carbon Brief, energy consultant Kate Mulvany says bringing policy costs and bad debt into general taxation is “in all likelihood the fastest route” to reducing bills.

The main barrier to removing further policy and debt costs from bills is that the money would have to come from somewhere else – most likely the Treasury, which has resisted this in the past.

The decision to take 75% of the renewables obligation off household bills is seen as a breakthrough, with Energy UK head Dhara Vyas saying the Treasury should go a “step further”.

Alternatively, a report from parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee calls for policy costs to be moved from electricity onto gas bills.

This would help “rebalance” the cost of electricity relative to gas, encouraging consumers to switch to more efficient electric technologies, such as heat pumps and electric cars.

This is because it would reduce the “spark gap”, the ratio between electricity and gas prices. This ratio stood at 4.3 in the UK as of April 2026, although it has dropped to 3.3 under the latest price cap and could fall again to 3.0 in January 2027, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

Further options to bring down costs for consumers have been suggested by groups including Nesta, the “electricity bills taskforce” and many others.

Ideas include the government paying off household energy debt, instead of recovering it through bills, a permanent removal of VAT on electricity prices and boosting electricity system “flexibility” so as to maximise the use of existing network assets.

Carmichael tells Carbon Brief:

“Flexibility is a fairly obvious one that…would deliver bill reductions for people who can participate in flexibility, but it would also reduce system costs for everyone.”

Ashutosh Padelkar, research lead at Aurora, agrees that there is “more work to be done on improving network efficiency”. In addition to boosting flexibility, he points to innovations such as “dynamic line ratings”, where cables can be “overloaded a bit for a small amount of time”.

With bills set to leap by around a quarter at the start of 2027, there have also been calls for specific measures to offer households relief at the budget.

Many argue that this support should be targeted to limit costs, for example through extending the “warm homes discount”. However, Mulvany warns that this could increase costs for other households if it is paid for via energy bills, as is currently the case for the warm homes discount.

Another option is to introduce a “social tariff” for fuel-poor households. Dr Carmichael notes that while this has some positives, it also has “potential for a sort of a cliff edge where people are just missing out on it”. This can make them challenging to put together in an equitable way. 

Meanwhile, the New Economics Foundation thinktank – where energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh used to work – suggests a “rising block tariff”, where consumers pay lower rates for a set amount of “essential” energy use. However, there are fears this could discourage electrification.

Ahead of the budget, Burnham has asked ministers to look at developing a plan to remove standing charges from gas bills. The idea was put forward by Nesta, which says it would save typical households £27 per year, while helping encourage the shift to heat pumps and EVs.

Finally, separate proposals from thinktank Common Wealth and consultancy Stonehaven with Greenpeace, call for more radical changes that would see gas-fired power stations taken into a strategic reserve, in order to more completely break the link between gas and power prices.

Is there a ‘cheap power’ alternative if the UK slows down?

Some groups argue that the UK needs a fundamental shift in its energy strategy in order to tackle high bills. Such calls are often based on the idea that the government is “rushing” to meet its target for clean power by 2030 – and that slowing down would cut costs.

For example, a September 2026 report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) states that “continuing to push for rapid decarbonisation does risk increasing costs”.

Its argument rests on NESO modelling, published in 2024, which suggests it could be slightly cheaper to rely on more gas in 2030 than planned under the clean-power 2030 target.

Peter Levell, IFS deputy research director, tells Carbon Brief that gas prices have “risen significantly” since the NESO modelling was published, which “other things equal” would make it relatively cheaper to push for more renewables instead of relying on more gas power.

However, he adds that capital costs have also risen, arguing that this makes renewables relatively more expensive. (The cost of gas-fired power plants has risen even more steeply.) Levell adds that it is unclear how long the current disruption causing high gas prices will last.

Another prominent – and repeated – voice for slowing down the government’s push for clean power has come from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI).

In a February 2026 report, for example, the TBI argues that the government should set an objective of “cheaper power by 2030” instead of “clean power 2030”. It says this could be done “while maintaining a clear decarbonisation trajectory”.

In earlier versions of this argument, the TBI called for a slower expansion of renewables, in favour of greater reliance on nuclear power and carbon-capture and storage.

However, perhaps implicitly acknowledging that these are not cheap technologies, its latest report focuses more on calls for flexibility, optimised grid expansion and a push for electrification.

Perhaps the strongest push to abandon the government’s current approach has come from the opposition Conservative party, which now lobbies hard against clean power 2030, in addition to calling for the UK to scrap all of its climate targets and the legislation that underpins them. 

The party backed a report by thinktank Onward, which claimed that the UK could save “over £320bn” with a push for “cheap power” instead of “clean power”. However, a Carbon Brief factcheck found it relied on a series of questionable assumptions.

Ultimately, the report built its conclusions in from the start by assuming that gas and nuclear power would be cheap. As Tom Glover, head of energy firm RWE UK, put it at the time:

“There’s a difference between a useful scenario and a plan you’d build a system around. This report is the former presented as the latter. If you accept its assumptions, the results follow logically. The problem is the assumptions…built on a stack of optimistic inputs.”

Similarly, Johnny Gowdy, a director at thinktank Regen, argues in a paper responding to the Onward report that its gas-price assumptions are “very optimistic – and potentially reckless”.

Following the start of the Iran war, UK wholesale gas prices – which were already roughly three-times higher than before the Ukraine crisis – have more than doubled again.

According to RenewableUK, the UK is currently experiencing its ninth gas-price “spike” of the past decade. Mulvany tells Carbon Brief that such spikes are “normal”. She adds:

“Wars are fought over energy and resources – and this is the way things have always been…[T]his isn’t a blip. If you look historically, this is normal.”

(The total cost to the UK economy of higher energy prices in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amounts to £183bn over four years, according to the ECIU.)

NESO notes that under pathways with a larger role for gas plants, the nation’s energy system would remain “more exposed to volatile international gas prices”.

As such, the UK’s transition is about finding the right balance between the up-front cost of investment in clean-energy alternatives and the ongoing risk of exposure to volatile gas prices.

The IFS also notes that there are additional positives from moving away from fossil fuels, including improved local air quality, less price volatility and potentially greater security of energy supply.

Citing Carbon Brief analysis published in 2024, RenewableUK’s Agnew argues that the government should learn from past “mistakes”.

He points to the then-Conservative government decision from 2015 to “cut the green crap”, which ultimately added £22bn to bills by leaving the UK “more exposed to volatile fossil-fuel prices”.

UKERC’s Carmichael echoes these points, telling Carbon Brief: 

“If we’re not transitioning to clean power, which for the UK would mean more independence and more energy sovereignty, I don’t think there is an alternative…[and] if we don’t do it, then we’re still going to be vulnerable to volatility and fossil-fuel prices.”

Finally, many of the arguments against the clean power 2030 target are based on the idea that it will be extremely difficult to meet and that closing the gap would be costly.

Indeed, recent analysis by consultancy LCP Delta suggests that by 2030, the UK will only reach 83% clean power, with the 95% target unlikely to be hit until 2035.

Yet this reality is implicitly acknowledged by the government, which has said that it will not contract for more clean power towards the 2030 target unless it delivers lower bills.

Speaking at the Energy UK conference in October, Fahnbulleh said:

“We all know that one of the reasons we are seeing rising prices is because we are uniquely exposed to global fossil-fuel markets…There will be people that will say you should slow down…But I believe that we must seize the opportunity of this moment.”

Can electrification of homes and businesses help cut bills?

While there is political disagreement over the best mix of power supplies, there is far greater agreement on the need to expand the use electric technologies such as EVs and heat pumps.

For example, while the Conservative party opposes the government’s clean power plan, it argues that the UK needs to electrify its economy to ensure both “prosperity and a better environment”.

At the Energy UK conference in October, delegates listed “electrification” and “affordability” as the top-two energy related priorities for the government.

There is significant overlap between these two goals.

At present, most households pay separate bills for heating, power and transport. This means they are paying to run three separate energy systems for gas, electricity and petrol.

If the UK largely electrifies its economy, households will instead rely on a single system that heats and powers their homes, as well as fuelling their cars. By boosting consumption, electrification also spreads the fixed costs of upgrading the network across a larger base of demand.

Padelkar tells Carbon Brief that there “isn’t enough electrification in the system” at the moment:

“A significant amount of heating demand is gas-fired…[I]f that demand were to sit on the electricity side instead, it would allow for costs to be shared more fairly across a greater base of consumers.”

According to energy firm SSE, the shift from three “parallel” energy systems to a single one based on electricity would reduce consumer costs over time, as shown in the figure below.

Credit: SSE

In this context, the usual focus on “dual-fuel” household gas and electricity bills, in isolation, misses the potential for savings due to consolidating not only heat and power, but also car use.

Indeed, electric cars are currently up to nine times cheaper to run than petrol cars in the UK, according to Carbon Brief analysis.

The savings from electrification are partly a result of the far greater efficiency of EVs and heat pumps, relative to combustion cars and gas boilers. Reduced fossil-fuel imports also play a role.

Very similar arguments have been put forward by the UK government’s advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC), the International Energy Agency and others.

A recent CCC report, for example, said that faster electrification “would cut UK household bills”.

It outlined how electrification would not only reduce the cost of the UK energy system in the future, but is already able to cut household costs today, as shown in the figure below. Crucially, its analysis included the higher upfront costs of investing in electric technologies, such as heat pumps.

Household energy costs for heat, power and transport, £ per year. The upfront costs of purchasing cars, heating systems, chargers and solar panels are annualised. Source: CCC progress report 2026.

The government also supports this argument, having set out a £13bn “warm homes plan” that it said could cut household bills by up to £600 per year through investment in energy efficiency measures and clean technologies, such as heat pumps, solar panels and batteries.

Vyas told the Energy UK conference earlier this month: 

“The industry is clear that a system largely supplied by clean power and an electrified economy represents the way forward. This is not driven by ideology but by evidence.”

Related UK budget 2026: Key climate and energy announcements 28.10.2026 UK policy Analysis: How the UK spent more than £11.6bn on climate aid since 2021 28.10.2026 UK policy Revealed: UK relied on £2bn of ‘questionable accounting’ to hit its climate-aid goal 28.10.2026 UK policy Revealed: Expensive gas behind ‘nearly 90%’ of rise in UK electricity bills 21.10.2026 Oil and gas

The post Q&A: Why are UK energy bills so high – and how could they be lowered? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Dirty Dozen™ food chemicals: Artificial dyes Iris Myers October 27, 2026 EWG’s recommendation

Avoid or limit foods containing artificial dyes.

Human and animal studies suggest artificial food dyes may harm children’s behavior and brain development. Studies on laboratory animals and cells found certain dyes may cause cancer.

Seven petroleum-derived synthetic dyes – Blue Dye No. 1, Blue 2, Green Dye No. 3, Red Dye No. 3, Red 40, Yellow Dye No. 5 and Yellow 6 – are ingredients of concern. 

What are artificial dyes?

Artificial dyes are synthetic, petroleum-derived color additives added to processed foods to give them color, restore color lost during processing and make them more visually appealing. 

Six synthetic food dyes are authorized for general use in U.S. foods: Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. 

Red 3, another petroleum-derived dye, is being phased out, with food manufacturers required to reformulate products by January 15, 2027.

Which foods contain artificial dyes?

Artificial dyes are most commonly used in candy, but they’re also found in baked goods, breakfast cereals, soda, sports drinks and many snacks, among other products.

Look for artificial dyes in product ingredient lists, usually below or next to the Nutrition Facts panel, on the back of the package. They may appear by name (such as “Red 40” or “Yellow 5”) or by their technical names, such as Allura Red AC or Tartrazine. 

Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 account for most of the dyes in U.S. food products.

How are artificial dyes regulated?

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for overseeing food additives and other ingredients. In 2025 the FDA revoked the authorization for Red 3 in food and oral medication under the Delaney Clause, which prohibits approval of any additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. 

That same year, the FDA asked manufacturers to voluntarily phase out the remaining six petroleum-based synthetic dyes by the end of 2026 – a nonbinding target that has since slipped to 2027.

In 2026, the FDA revoked authorization for Orange B and proposed doing the same for Citrus Red No. 2. Both are less common artificial dyes, with limited use.

In the European Union, food containing Red 40, Yellow 5 or Yellow 6 must carry a label warning the dye “may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.” Green 3 is not approved as a food additive in the EU at all.

Several U.S. states have banned Blue 1, Blue 3, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 in food served in public schools. The states include Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia, and West Virginia has banned the dyes statewide. 

In 2025 EWG supported the Ban Harmful Food Dyes Act, federal legislation that would revoke approval for all six dyes.

Artificial dyes are prohibited in certified organic foods under USDA Organic standards, which bar synthetic substances.

What does the science say about artificial dyes?

Foods with artificial dyes are typically marketed to children, and the strongest, most consistent evidence about artificial dyes is about their effects on children’s behavior.

An assessment by the California Environmental Protection Agency links artificial food dyes to negative behavioral outcomes – including irritability, decreased attention span and sleeplessness – in children with and without preexisting behavioral disorders. 

The agency reviewed both human and animal studies and concluded the FDA’s current acceptable daily intake limits are not strict enough to protect children, because they are based on decades-old data not meant to assess behavioral effects.

Animal studies reinforce these concerns. A series of studies that exposed pregnant mice to a mixture of artificial dyes found lasting behavior and learning changes in their offspring into adulthood. 

Those changes included altered activity levels and anxiety-like behavior – in some cases at doses comparable to typical human exposure. 

Red 3 gives rise to carcinogenic concern: It has been shown to induce thyroid tumors in rats, which is what triggered the FDA’s 2025 ban. 

Separate research found Red 3 can interfere with hormone signaling and estrogen-related pathways in human breast cancer cells, raising questions about its potential to disrupt hormones. 

Yellow 5 has been linked to DNA damage in human cells and, even at levels established as safe, changes in gene regulation in mice linked to potential long-term cancer and neurological effects. Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 have also been linked to disruption of the gut microbiome, and Red 40 to colitis, or inflammation of the colon, in animal studies.

New research has also connected overall intake of food coloring additives – both natural and artificial – with Type 2 diabetes in humans, though the underlying reasons are not yet understood.

Find out more

Learn more about recommendations relating to artificial dyes – and the full EWG Dirty Dozen™ list of food chemicals – on EWG’s research page.

EWG’s Food Scores provides ratings for more than 150,000 foods and drinks based on nutrition, ingredients and processing concerns and flags unhealthy ultra-processed foods to help you identify alternatives.

EWG’s Skin Deep® cosmetic database helps to identify harmful chemicals in personal care and beauty products. EWG Verified® products meet the strictest criteria for transparency and health.

And EWG’s Healthy Living™ app lets you take these tools with you on the go.

Authors Sarah Reinhardt, MPH, RDN October 27, 2026

By Mariel Vilella, GAIA Climate Program Director

Methane emissions from the waste sector can be reduced with technologies that are already available. The harder question is often institutional and financial: how can cities build organic waste management systems that work over the long term, while including the workers and communities already providing essential waste services?

Over the past three years, GAIA and local partners YPBB in Indonesia, groundWork in South Africa and ANARCH in Chile have worked with municipalities and communities in Bandung, Durban and Valparaíso to answer that question.

Supported by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), the project set out to test and strengthen community-based models for diverting organic waste from disposal, reducing methane emissions and improving the financial sustainability of the organizations delivering these services. At its core was a simple proposition: municipalities frequently lack the resources to provide adequate waste services, while informal and community-based organizations already possess knowledge, infrastructure and relationships that can form part of a lower-cost and more inclusive pathway to methane mitigation.

The experience across the three cities points to an important conclusion: community-based organic waste management can deliver significant climate and social benefits, but it should not be expected to operate as a conventional profit-making business. Organic waste management is an essential public service. Scaling it requires sustained public investment alongside appropriate mechanisms for community participation and cost recovery.

Bandung: source separation is the foundation

In Neglasari, Bandung, YPBB has developed a decentralized system combining separate collection with Black Soldier Fly (BSF) bioconversion and composting. The system currently serves 1,777 households—around 9,700 people—and treats approximately 400–600 kg of organic waste per day.

One of the most important lessons from Bandung is that the technology was the relatively easy part.

Years of door-to-door engagement and support for the government’s organic waste segregation program increased household separation at source from 9% to 27%. This has improved the quality of incoming organic material sufficiently for it to be treated locally: approximately 75% through BSF bioconversion and 25% through decentralized composting. The resulting larvae, frass and compost can in turn support livestock and urban agriculture, creating a local circular system.

Community participation has been fundamental to this transformation. Through sustained door-to-door engagement, YPBB has helped households become active participants in the system, rather than simply recipients of a waste collection service. This experience demonstrates that source separation is not just a technical requirement but a social process that depends on building trust, changing practices and sustained collaboration with communities. The proposed institutional model builds on this foundation by creating opportunities for community cooperatives to participate in value-added activities and benefit from local resource recovery.

The climate implications are significant. Compared with the baseline, the current system is estimated to reduce methane emissions by around 15%. With full source separation, modelling indicates reductions could reach 74%.

But Bandung also demonstrates why these systems cannot be designed around the assumption that revenues from compost, larvae or agricultural products will cover the full costs of waste management.

The project proposes instead a two-part institutional model. Waste collection and processing are treated as an essential municipal service, with public funding covering the core infrastructure and operating costs. Value-added activities—including urban farming and livestock production—can then operate through community-based structures and recover part of the system’s costs.

This distinction matters. Trying to make organic waste processing entirely self-financing through product sales risks operational failure and underpaid labor. Public finance should pay for the public service; revenues from recovered resources should complement that finance rather than replace it.

Durban: making the economics of decentralized composting visible

In Durban, South Africa, groundWork has worked with eThekwini Municipality and local partners to demonstrate how organic waste from municipal markets can be diverted from landfill and transformed into compost for municipal parks and community food gardens.

The results are already tangible. The project has diverted 586 tonnes of organic waste from three municipal markets, producing 190 tonnes of compost distributed to municipal parks across eight of the city’s ten districts and to community food gardens. The initiative has served approximately 900 market traders, created employment for 10 composting workers and established three composting facilities. The project also reports an estimated 133 tonnes of methane emissions avoided.

The project illustrates how decentralized composting can be integrated into existing municipal systems while creating opportunities for local participation and employment. By engaging market traders and employing composting workers, the initiative connects waste generators, workers and local beneficiaries. Collaboration with municipal departments has helped embed organic waste diversion within existing public infrastructure, rather than developing a parallel service dependent entirely on external project funding.

Crucially, the project has generated evidence of the economic benefits of decentralized composting. A cost-benefit analysis covering two municipal markets found that diverting organic waste to composting could generate a net benefit of R18 million (approximately USD 1.09 million) over ten years, with a net present value of R14.1 million (USD 852,000). By comparison, continuing to landfill the same waste would generate an estimated net cost of R32 million (USD 1.93 million) over the same period.

The analysis also identifies potential annual municipal savings of approximately R2.9 million (USD 175,000), including avoided disposal fees, landfill airspace costs and purchases of compost for municipal parks. These benefits are distributed across different municipal departments, demonstrating why the economics of organic waste management cannot be assessed solely through revenues from compost sales.

The lesson from Durban is that decentralized composting can generate significant public value, even without operating as a conventional profit-making business. Its benefits include avoided disposal costs, reduced methane emissions, local employment and useful resources for urban green spaces. Recognizing these combined benefits can help municipalities make the case for sustained public investment and scaling up organic waste diversion.

Valparaíso: extending waste picker inclusion from recycling to organics

The experience in Valparaíso adds another dimension: a just transition in the waste sector requires expanding the role of waste pickers as waste systems evolve.

ANARCH’s network already demonstrates the scale at which organized waste pickers can operate. Its member organizations include 55 operational cooperatives across 14 of Chile’s 16 regions, with more than 1,000 waste pickers formalized and approximately 40,000 tonnes of materials recovered in 2025.

The Valparaíso pilot is now applying that experience to organics.

The region generates approximately 133,000 tonnes of municipal waste annually, with an estimated organic fraction of around 70%. With the useful life of the El Molle disposal facility projected to end in 2028, increasing diversion has become increasingly urgent.

The project has involved direct capacity building with grassroots waste pickers, including three training sessions totalling 12 hours for five participants, covering composting, safe operations, traceability and business-model development. Following collaboration with municipal and regional authorities, organic waste management began in September 2026 with direct participation from waste pickers. Building on ANARCH’s experience organizing waste picker cooperatives, the initiative seeks to extend their role beyond recyclable materials into organic waste management, creating opportunities for workers to participate in operations and potentially in the future governance of organic waste infrastructure.

The significance goes beyond a single composting project. It demonstrates a pathway through which workers who have historically recovered recyclable materials can become participants—and ultimately co-managers—in the infrastructure required for organic waste management.

ANARCH is already exploring how this approach could move from a pilot towards regional infrastructure, including a financing model combining preparation grants, public and international investment, and potentially results-based finance linked to verified organic waste diversion, methane reductions, livelihoods and traceability.

The conditions are critical: public co-management, appropriate permitting and waste picker leadership need to be designed into the investment model rather than added afterwards.

Five lessons for cities and funders

Taken together, the three experiences suggest several principles for governments, development finance institutions and climate funders seeking rapid methane reductions from organic waste:

1. Treat organic waste management as essential public infrastructure. Collection and treatment provide a public service and require reliable public financing, including operating expenditure—not only capital investment.
2. Invest in source separation before focusing on technology. Clean organic feedstock is fundamental to successful composting and biological treatment. Bandung demonstrates that sustained household engagement and separate collection are as important as the treatment technology itself.
3. Value the full range of benefits. Financial assessments should include avoided disposal and transport costs, reduced municipal purchasing, climate mitigation, employment and other local benefits—not simply revenues from compost or other products.
4. Build inclusion into the institutional model. Informal workers and community organizations should not merely be consulted or contracted at the end of the process. They can be operators, co-managers and partners in designing the system.
5. Finance operations, not just infrastructure. Land, labor, collection, maintenance and community engagement determine whether infrastructure continues functioning after a project ends. The Bandung analysis, for example, identifies labor as 77% of operating costs, while access to publicly provided land substantially changes project economics.

From local evidence to global methane action

These projects were never intended to remain isolated pilots. The objective has been to generate practical evidence that can inform policy, investment and replication.

Lessons from Bandung, Durban and Valparaíso are already feeding into national policy engagement, technical guidance and regional exchanges, as well as international discussions through the CCAC and UN climate processes. The pathway is deliberate: local evidence → policy change → replication → global impact.

The three experiences demonstrate different but complementary dimensions of inclusive organic waste management. In Bandung, sustained household engagement makes source separation and decentralized treatment possible. In Durban, collaboration between market traders, workers and municipal departments connects organic waste diversion with public services and local employment. And in Valparaíso, organized waste pickers are developing the skills and institutional relationships needed to participate directly in organic waste management.

Together, they show that scaling organic waste solutions does not primarily require new technologies. It requires building the institutional, financial and social conditions that allow existing solutions to become part of mainstream municipal waste systems. Inclusion cannot be an afterthought: communities and workers need meaningful roles in designing, delivering and benefiting from these services.

For climate finance, the implication is equally clear: finance needs to reach the local systems and organizations capable of turning methane commitments into measurable reductions on the ground.

That is how community-led projects move beyond pilots—and become part of the infrastructure of a low-methane, inclusive and zero waste future.

Read the case studies from Bandung, Durban, and Valparaiso here.

The post From pilots to public systems: what three cities teach us about financing inclusive organic waste management first appeared on GAIA.

As the State Water Board prepares to adopt the updated Bay-Delta Plan this week, San Francisco Chronicle reporting reveals significant flaws surrounding the proposal’s implementation and funding.  

The article points to the lack of buy-in from major water suppliers, including East Bay Municipal Utility District and Santa Clara Valley Water District, as a source of uncertainty for the viability of the updated Bay-Delta Plan. Water agencies that reject the updated plan could challenge the regulations in court, potentially leading to years of litigation. 

The article also notes that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has threatened non-participation in the voluntary agreements that underlie the plan, and has promised to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. Critics have long warned that the federal government cannot be relied upon as a partner in complying with state laws and regulatory decisions designed to protect Delta ecosystems, Tribes, and Delta communities. 

“It just doesn’t work,” said Barry Nelson, an advisor for the Golden State Salmon Association. “It’s like having a car with two steering wheels, two accelerators, and drivers wanting to go in opposite directions.”

Without federal participation, the state could lose roughly 25% of the needed funding for implementation of the updated plan. And given that initial estimates for the plan’s costs are likely understated, the financial burden that will fall on California taxpayers could grow enormously.

Read the full article here. 

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline.

Do nearby wind turbines decrease home values by an average of 75%?

Research has found much smaller effects on nearby home prices, and those effects fade with time and distance from turbines.

One 2024 study analyzing data from 1997 to 2020 found that visible turbines were associated with an average sale price decrease of about 1.1%, largely affecting urban areas. The effect disappeared within 10 years of installation and was not statistically significant for installations after 2017, indicating that the 1.1% average likely overstates future wind project impacts.

Another 2023 study examining half a million transactions across 34 states found that announcing a project within one mile could initially reduce nearby home values by up to 11% compared with homes 3-5 miles away. However, values recovered to within 2% of pre-announcement levels in 5 years of operation.

These effects have declined in recent years, which researchers suggest may reflect greater familiarity with turbines; responsible siting and community involvement can further reduce impacts.

Go to full rebuttal on Skeptical Science or to the fact brief on Gigafact

This fact brief is responsive to quotes such as this one.

Sources

U.S. Department of Energy Do Wind Turbines Lower Property Values?

PNAS The visual effect of wind turbines on property values is small and diminishing in space and time

Energy Policy Commercial wind turbines and residential home values: New evidence from the universe of land-based wind projects in the United States

American Clean Power Land-based Wind Turbines do not Affect Property Values

Center for Rural Affairs Wind energy and property values

Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles

Please use this form to provide feedback about this fact brief. This will help us to better gauge its impact and usability. Thank you!

About fact briefs published on Gigafact

Fact briefs are short, credibly sourced summaries that offer "yes/no" answers in response to claims found online. They rely on publicly available, often primary source data and documents. Fact briefs are created by contributors to Gigafact — a nonprofit project looking to expand participation in fact-checking and protect the democratic process. See all of our published fact briefs here.

Argentina’s experience unmasks the IMF’s liberal narrative and makes it clear that its sole objective is to subordinate countries through the extortion of foreign debt.

The post Argentina: The Impact of the IMF- No Future for Our Peoples Under the Extortionate Yoke of Foreign Debt appeared first on La Via Campesina - EN.

Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom made progress on two of its international reactor projects in recent weeks, bringing new generating units closer to commercial operation in Bangladesh and China. Yet the contrasting experiences of those two countries illustrate the uneven fortunes of Russia’s nuclear exports.

Meanwhile, efforts by Germany and the United States to reduce their nuclear sectors’ exposure to Russia have been complicated by existing commercial dependencies and political decisions that leave important channels of cooperation intact.

And new reporting on a Rosatom-owned carbon fiber plant in Tatarstan has raised further questions about the corporation’s involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine, including its access to Chinese industrial materials used in military drone production.

Together, these developments illustrate the competing pressures shaping Rosatom’s international business as it seeks to expand its overseas presence while facing sanctions, logistical obstacles and growing scrutiny of its military connections.

Two nuclear milestones, two very different experiences

On October 11, the first reactor at Bangladesh’s Russian-built Rooppur nuclear power plant reached minimum controlled power, a crucial step toward eventual electricity generation.

The milestone followed months of commissioning difficulties. During testing in July, engineers discovered that two of three pressure relief valves in the reactor’s primary cooling circuit were not functioning properly. Repeated tests failed to resolve the problem, forcing Rosatom to dispatch additional specialists. The malfunction delayed commissioning and affected work on the second reactor, after components originally intended for that unit were transferred to the first.

The project also encountered logistical problems in September when a shipment of Russian nuclear fuel was delayed because its aircraft lacked permission to cross Pakistani airspace. The shipment eventually reached Bangladesh in early October using an alternative route.

China, meanwhile, presented a markedly different picture. On October 8, Unit 7 of the Tianwan nuclear power plant, outfitted with a Russian-designed VVER-1200 reactor, was connected to China’s electricity grid. Construction there began in May 2021, making it the fastest Russian-designed VVER-1200 project to reach grid connection, including those built in Russia itself.

Bellona nuclear expert Dmitry Gorchakov attributes much of the difference to how the projects are organized.

“The key difference in Rosatom’s Chinese projects is the high degree of localization,” Gorchakov writes in the September Nuclear Digest. “The Chinese side takes responsibility for most of the construction, supplies, project management and financing, while Rosatom provides the main nuclear island equipment and technological support.”

In Bangladesh, by contrast, Rosatom bears responsibility for a far larger share of the project, making delays in equipment supplies, financing and logistics more difficult for the customer to overcome.

For Gorchakov, the contrast illustrates how the success of Russian nuclear exports increasingly depends on the capabilities of the countries purchasing them.

Western sanctions leave important gaps

Even as Rosatom advances its overseas projects, Western efforts to limit cooperation with the corporation remain inconsistent.

In Germany, environmental organizations have challenged a decision allowing Advanced Nuclear Fuels, a subsidiary of France’s Framatome, to expand its fuel fabrication plant in Lingen to manufacture fuel for Russian-designed VVER reactors using Rosatom technology.

The environmental organization BUND filed suit in September, citing concerns about security risks, Russian influence and shortcomings in the environmental review. Yet on October 5, authorities in Lower Saxony permitted the project to proceed immediately, despite the ongoing legal challenge.

Gorchakov sees the decision as evidence of a broader contradiction in European policy.

“The story of the nuclear fuel plant in Lingen shows the gap between political statements about the risks of cooperation with Russian companies and decisions that allow such cooperation to develop in practice,” he writes. The United States has displayed similar contradictions.

On September 18, President Donald Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which includes measures targeting Rosatom’s leadership and reaffirms restrictions on Russian uranium imports. But sanctions against Rosatom executives will not take effect until January 2028, and the legislation allows presidential exemptions on national security grounds.

The final law is also considerably weaker than earlier proposals, which contemplated sanctions against foreign purchasers of Russian uranium and sweeping tariffs against countries trading in Russian energy products. Gorchakov questions whether the measures will meaningfully reduce Rosatom’s international business.

“The weakening of the original proposals during the legislative process, together with the Trump administration’s unwillingness to use the available instruments of pressure on the Kremlin, calls into question the effectiveness of the new sanctions against Rosatom,” he says.

Chinese materials and Rosatom’s wartime connections

The question of Rosatom’s place in Russia’s war economy has become increasingly difficult to separate from its civilian nuclear business.

In September, Politico published two investigations based on internal Russian documents obtained by the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation concerning Alabuga-Volokno, a carbon fiber manufacturer in Tatarstan belonging to Rosatom’s UMATEX composites division.

According to the documents, China’s state-owned Jilin Chemical Fiber Group arranged shipments of up to 46 tonnes of polyacrylonitrile precursor, a raw material used to manufacture carbon fiber. Carbon fiber has numerous civilian applications, but it is also used in Russian attack drones.

The plant is already subject to Western sanctions and export restrictions. Rosatom has denied violating applicable laws.

A subsequent investigation revealed plans to expand Alabuga-Volokno’s production capacity by as much as 500 tonnes annually by 2029. According to Politico, internal project documents identified import substitution for dual-use products and supplying Russia’s aviation and defense industries among the reasons for the expansion.

The findings do not establish that every shipment of Chinese precursor is destined for military production. They do, however, highlight the difficulty of separating Rosatom’s civilian industrial operations from supply chains that support Russia’s armed forces.

Bellona expert Alexander Nikitin has argued that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fundamentally altered the place of nuclear infrastructure in international security.

“Nuclear energy facilities have become a factor in war,” Nikitin writes in his commentary on the Ukrainian nuclear situation. “They have begun to influence military planning, political decision-making, the nature of the use of force and assessments of the limits of acceptable risk.”

The Alabuga disclosures extend that concern beyond nuclear facilities themselves to the wider industrial activities of Russia’s state nuclear corporation.

Taken together, Rosatom’s overseas construction milestones, the limitations of Western sanctions and its connections to military supply chains reveal a corporation operating as an international nuclear supplier, an instrument of Russian industrial policy and a participant in sectors supporting the country’s war effort—all at the same time.

For governments seeking to reduce dependence on Russian nuclear technology, the challenge is no longer simply finding alternative reactor designs or fuel suppliers. It is determining how far Rosatom’s commercial relationships extend into the broader economic and strategic interests of the Russian state.

The post Rosatom advances nuclear projects abroad as sanctions gaps and wartime ties draw scrutiny appeared first on Bellona.org.

Hyperscalers’ interest in onsite and nearby energy storage has converted into firm orders this year, the global energy consultancy said last week in its latest industry outlook.

On the affordability crisis, petrochemicals, punishing polluters, forever chemicals, and the costs of climate change

Source

Print article Share Article Contents Expand menu

• Surface mass balance
• Total mass balance
• Surface melt
• Snowfall
• Iceberg calving 
• The impact of global weather
• Three decades of decline
• Greenland in the global sea level picture

This guest post is by:

Dr Martin Stendel, climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), part of the Polar Portal 

Prof Ruth Mottram, climate scientist at DMI and honorary professor at Aarhus University

Greenland has now marked the 30th consecutive year where it lost more ice than it gained. 

Over the 12-month period to August 2026, the world’s second-largest ice sheet lost around 135bn tonnes of ice. 

This major ice loss came as the region experienced a relatively cool start to summer and less surface melt than in previous years. 

In other words, it was not an “extreme” year for weather in Greenland – and, yet, the ice sheet ended firmly in the red.

Three decades of continuous ice loss in Greenland is significant, given that scientists typically need 30 years of data to separate the “fingerprint” of human-caused climate change from natural variations in the climate. 

In Greenland, the direction of travel has been the same – downward – every single year for 30 years.

These latest figures come as a new report highlights that ice melting processes seen for decades in Greenland are increasingly being replicated in Antarctica.

Greenland, therefore, is not only the largest present-day source of ice-driven sea level rise – but offers a preview of what is in store for the world’s largest ice sheet. 

(For our previous analyses of Greenland’s ice cover, see coverage in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)

Surface mass balance

One way that scientists track the health of the Greenland ice sheet is by tracking changes to its “surface mass balance”.

This is the difference between ice gains from snowfall and losses from melt at the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet.

Greenland’s annual ice cycle runs from 1 September through to the end of August. The surface mass balance at the end of this period has, to date, always been positive, because the surface accumulates more snow than it loses from melting ice.  

The ice sheet typically gains mass during the colder months of autumn, winter and spring. Then, as temperatures increase from around mid-June, the ice sheet begins to lose more ice through surface melt than it gains from snow. 

(Greenland also loses ice when icebergs break off – or “calve” – into the sea, as well when the front of glaciers melt when they meet warm sea water. These losses are included in the “total mass balance” – see below.)

Greenland ended 2025-26 with an overall surface mass balance of 519bn tonnes.

This is the sixth highest in a dataset stretching back 46 years and about 178bn tonnes above the 1981-2010 average of roughly 350bn tonnes.

The map below shows the difference between the surface mass balance in 2025-26 and the 1981-2010 average, where blue shows ice gain and red shows ice loss.

Map showing the difference between the annual SMB in 2025-26 and the 1981-2010 period in mm of ice melt. Blue shows ice gain compared to average and red shows ice loss. Credit: Polar Portal.

The blue lines in the charts below show the surface mass balance throughout 2025-26 for individual days (top) and cumulatively throughout the year (bottom). They highlight how Greenland gained ice between September 2025 and May 2026, before starting to lose ice from June onwards.

Daily (upper) and cumulative (lower) surface mass balance (SMB) of the Greenland ice sheet, in billions of tonnes. Blue lines show the 2025-26 surface mass balance year; grey lines and shading show the 1981-2010 average and variability. Red line shows the record-low year of 2011-12. Credit: Polar Portal.
Total mass balance

Another way scientists measure the health of the Greenland ice sheet is by looking at its “total mass balance”.

This calculation accounts for ice loss at the surface, as well as the calving of icebergs and the melting of glacier fronts where they meet warm seawater. The latter two components are known as the “marine mass balance”.

It also accounts for a small amount of ice melt at the underside of the ice sheet. This is known as the “basal mass balance”.

In recent decades, Greenland’s total mass balance at the end of the ice cycle year has been negative.

The 12 months to August 2026 were no different. Once all these factors are considered, Greenland lost around 135bn tonnes of ice.

We reached this figure using the same method featured in previous Carbon Brief analyses of Greenland ice cover. This approach is based on an average of three climate models. 

#gform_wrapper_5[data-form-index="0"].gform-theme,[data-parent-form="5_0"]{--gf-color-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-secondary: #fff;--gf-color-secondary-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-secondary-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-secondary-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-secondary-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-secondary-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-out-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-out-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-color-in-ctrl: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-contrast-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-darker: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-lighter: #FFFFFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary: #204ce5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-rgb: 32, 76, 229;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast: #fff;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-contrast-rgb: 255, 255, 255;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-darker: #001AB3;--gf-color-in-ctrl-primary-lighter: #527EFF;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.1);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-rgb: 17, 35, 55;--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-darker: rgba(104, 110, 119, 0.35);--gf-color-in-ctrl-light-lighter: #F5F5F5;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark: #585e6a;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-rgb: 88, 94, 106;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-darker: #112337;--gf-color-in-ctrl-dark-lighter: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65);--gf-radius: 3px;--gf-font-size-secondary: 14px;--gf-font-size-tertiary: 13px;--gf-icon-ctrl-number: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='8' height='14' viewBox='0 0 8 14' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M4 0C4.26522 5.96046e-08 4.51957 0.105357 4.70711 0.292893L7.70711 3.29289C8.09763 3.68342 8.09763 4.31658 7.70711 4.70711C7.31658 5.09763 6.68342 5.09763 6.29289 4.70711L4 2.41421L1.70711 4.70711C1.31658 5.09763 0.683417 5.09763 0.292893 4.70711C-0.0976311 4.31658 -0.097631 3.68342 0.292893 3.29289L3.29289 0.292893C3.48043 0.105357 3.73478 0 4 0ZM0.292893 9.29289C0.683417 8.90237 1.31658 8.90237 1.70711 9.29289L4 11.5858L6.29289 9.29289C6.68342 8.90237 7.31658 8.90237 7.70711 9.29289C8.09763 9.68342 8.09763 10.3166 7.70711 10.7071L4.70711 13.7071C4.31658 14.0976 3.68342 14.0976 3.29289 13.7071L0.292893 10.7071C-0.0976311 10.3166 -0.0976311 9.68342 0.292893 9.29289Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-select: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='10' height='6' viewBox='0 0 10 6' fill='none' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath fill-rule='evenodd' clip-rule='evenodd' d='M0.292893 0.292893C0.683417 -0.097631 1.31658 -0.097631 1.70711 0.292893L5 3.58579L8.29289 0.292893C8.68342 -0.0976311 9.31658 -0.0976311 9.70711 0.292893C10.0976 0.683417 10.0976 1.31658 9.70711 1.70711L5.70711 5.70711C5.31658 6.09763 4.68342 6.09763 4.29289 5.70711L0.292893 1.70711C-0.0976311 1.31658 -0.0976311 0.683418 0.292893 0.292893Z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-icon-ctrl-search: url("data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg width='640' height='640' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'%3E%3Cpath d='M256 128c-70.692 0-128 57.308-128 128 0 70.691 57.308 128 128 128 70.691 0 128-57.309 128-128 0-70.692-57.309-128-128-128zM64 256c0-106.039 85.961-192 192-192s192 85.961 192 192c0 41.466-13.146 79.863-35.498 111.248l154.125 154.125c12.496 12.496 12.496 32.758 0 45.254s-32.758 12.496-45.254 0L367.248 412.502C335.862 434.854 297.467 448 256 448c-106.039 0-192-85.962-192-192z' fill='rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.65)'/%3E%3C/svg%3E");--gf-label-space-y-secondary: var(--gf-label-space-y-md-secondary);--gf-ctrl-border-color: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-size: var(--gf-ctrl-size-md);--gf-ctrl-label-color-primary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-label-color-secondary: #112337;--gf-ctrl-choice-size: var(--gf-ctrl-choice-size-md);--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-checkbox-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size: var(--gf-ctrl-radio-check-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-font-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-padding-x-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-size: var(--gf-ctrl-btn-size-md);--gf-ctrl-btn-border-color-secondary: #686e77;--gf-ctrl-file-btn-bg-color-hover: #EBEBEB;--gf-field-img-choice-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-card-space: var(--gf-field-img-choice-card-space-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-size-md);--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size: var(--gf-field-img-choice-check-ind-icon-size-md);--gf-field-pg-steps-number-color: rgba(17, 35, 55, 0.8);}

FacebookThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Free fortnightly newsletter

.preheader p{ margin-top: 0; font-family: 'PT Sans', sans-serif; font-weight: var(--type--3--font-weight--bold); color: var(--button--color); font-size: var(--button--font-size, inherit); } .newsletter-inline{ display: flex; border: solid 1px #333333; padding: 1em; background: #ffffff; } .inline-email{ display:inline-block; margin-right:1em; margin-top:0 !important; margin-bottom:0.5em; } #field_submit{ display:inline-block; margin-top:0 !important; } .gform_wrapper .gfield+.gfield{ margin-top:0 } Email gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 5, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_5').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') >= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_5');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_5').length > 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') >= 0;var is_form = form_content.length > 0 && ! is_redirect && ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').offset().top - mt); }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_5').val();gformInitSpinner( 5, 'http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/plugins/gravityforms/images/spinner.svg', false );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [5, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_5'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}jQuery('#gform_wrapper_5').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).scrollTop(jQuery('#gf_5').offset().top - mt);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [5]);window['gf_submitting_5'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_5').text());}else{jQuery('#gform_5').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger("gform_pre_post_render", [{ formId: "5", currentPage: "current_page", abort: function() { this.preventDefault(); } }]); if (event && event.defaultPrevented) { return; } const gformWrapperDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_wrapper_5" ); if ( gformWrapperDiv ) { const visibilitySpan = document.createElement( "span" ); visibilitySpan.id = "gform_visibility_test_5"; gformWrapperDiv.insertAdjacentElement( "afterend", visibilitySpan ); } const visibilityTestDiv = document.getElementById( "gform_visibility_test_5" ); let postRenderFired = false; function triggerPostRender() { if ( postRenderFired ) { return; } postRenderFired = true; gform.core.triggerPostRenderEvents( 5, current_page ); if ( visibilityTestDiv ) { visibilityTestDiv.parentNode.removeChild( visibilityTestDiv ); } } function debounce( func, wait, immediate ) { var timeout; return function() { var context = this, args = arguments; var later = function() { timeout = null; if ( !immediate ) func.apply( context, args ); }; var callNow = immediate && !timeout; clearTimeout( timeout ); timeout = setTimeout( later, wait ); if ( callNow ) func.apply( context, args ); }; } const debouncedTriggerPostRender = debounce( function() { triggerPostRender(); }, 200 ); if ( visibilityTestDiv && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent === null ) { const observer = new MutationObserver( ( mutations ) => { mutations.forEach( ( mutation ) => { if ( mutation.type === 'attributes' && visibilityTestDiv.offsetParent !== null ) { debouncedTriggerPostRender(); observer.disconnect(); } }); }); observer.observe( document.body, { attributes: true, childList: false, subtree: true, attributeFilter: [ 'style', 'class' ], }); } else { triggerPostRender(); } } );} );

However, for the first time, this year’s update includes a separate estimate for Greenland ice loss, based on data from one climate model and automatic weather stations, satellites, GPS data and observations from planes.

This approach estimates that the ice sheet lost an even greater 173bn tonnes of ice over 2025-26.

(Scientific estimates for ice loss in Greenland vary because there is incomplete information about how thick the ice sheet is, how fast it is moving as well as the rate at which it is melting at the surface. Scientists use different approaches for accounting for these uncertainties.)

The chart below shows how Greenland’s total mass balance has changed since 1985, featuring the higher 173bn estimate for the last ice cycle year. 

It shows how 2025-26 was the 30th consecutive year of ice loss in Greenland, with 1996 the last year that saw an annual net gain of ice.

Labels on the x-axis denote the period 1 September to 31 August, where 1987 covers 1 September 1986 to 31 August 1987.

The chart below shows how Greenland’s surface mass balance, marine mass balance and basal mass balance have changed since 1985. All of these components are combined to calculate the ice sheet’s total mass balance (red). 

Labels on the x-axis denote the period 1 September to 31 August, where 1987 covers 1 September 1986 to 31 August 1987.
Surface melt

Winter and early spring in 2025-26 were unusually dry in the southern half of Greenland, leaving around 40bn tonnes less snow on the ice sheet than normal. 

Dry winters typically mean high ice melt rates later on, given that heavier winter snowfall often acts as a protective shield that prevents ice loss in the early part of summer.

However, the relatively dry winter was followed by a relatively cool start of summer. Frequent snowfall and extensive cloud cover limited the sun’s ability to warm the surface at the time of year when solar radiation is typically strongest. 

The onset of the melt season – the first of at least three consecutive days with melting over more than 5% of the ice sheet – occurred on 5 June, nine days later than the 1981-2010 average.

From the end of June, the weather in Greenland changed markedly, as warm, sunny conditions took hold. 

During the first 20 days of July, melting was well above the 1981-2020 average. At its peak on 22 July, melting covered 74.9% of the ice sheet. 

(For comparison, July 2025 holds the record for melt area in Greenland, when 81.2% of the continent was melting simultaneously.) 

However, the early season fresh snow in June helped to form a cold and bright buffer, reducing the subsequent summer ice melt and runoff.

The map below shows how roughly three-quarters of Greenland’s ice sheet – shaded in red – was experiencing surface melt on 22 July. The chart shows how surface melt on that date (blue line) outpaced the 1981-2010 average (grey line and shading).

Map showing areas of Greenland undergoing surface melt (shaded red) on 22 July 2026. Chart shows percentage of ice sheet area which saw surface melt on 22 July 2026 (blue) compared to the 1981-2010 average (grey). Credit: Polar Portal.
Snowfall

As mentioned above, snowfall is the only way for the ice sheet to gain mass.

Because the dry 2025-26 winter did not provide the usual thick layer of snow to act as a protective buffer, the ice sheet started the summer already “behind” on ice levels.

However, even though there was above-average melting during summer, the surface mass balance remained almost constant from mid-June to mid-July. It was only slightly smaller by the end of August.

This was because much of the melt trickled into the snow below and refroze.

South-east Greenland is typically the wettest part of the ice sheet and this year was no exception. Unlike other years though, there was also significant snowfall on the west coast north of Nuussuaq. 

Summer snowfall helps to preserve the ice sheet, as fresh snow is brighter than old glacier ice and reflects more of the sun’s energy back to space. 

Increases in both snowfall and melt are in line with what scientists expect in a warming climate. Warmer air holds more water vapour, bringing more snow and rain, while higher temperatures drive more ice melt. 

Iceberg calving 

The most dramatic ice loss of 2025-26 happened at Greenland’s edges.

On 4 August, a vast tabular iceberg – an “ice island” with nearly vertical sides and a flat top – broke away from the floating ice tongue of Petermann glacier in north-west Greenland. 

Sentinel-1 image sequence of the Petermann ice island, before and after the 4 August 2026 calving. Credit: ESA/Copernicus.

More than 76 square kilometres (km2) in size, with an estimated thickness of 150 metres, the amount of water frozen in this iceberg would be enough to submerge the entirety of greater London to a depth of 6.65m. 

This was the largest loss of floating ice at the Petermann glacier since 2012 and the biggest calving event by any Arctic glacier since 2020. 

Similar breakoffs occurred in 2010 and 2012 and the current one had long been expected, given growing cracks in the glacier for several years. 

Scientists anticipate more calving events at the Petermann glacier. Two further ice islands, with estimated areas of roughly 94 and 84km2, are expected to detach as existing rifts continue to cut across the ice tongue. 

Together, the three would remove about 22% of Petermann’s remaining floating ice.

Because the ice tongue is already floating, this calving does not directly raise sea levels. But Petermann is one of Greenland’s largest marine-terminating glaciers, acting as a brake on ice flowing from the interior to the ocean. 

The recent breakaway is a reminder that calving and glacier retreat continue apace in Greenland, even in years when the surface mass budget is unremarkable. (To date, calving and glacier retreat have driven roughly two-thirds of total ice loss on the continent.)

The impact of global weather

Greenland’s relatively high surface mass balance in 2025-26 can be explained, in part, by the hot summer in Europe.

Multiple heatwaves were observed across southern Europe and North America over the summer of 2026, with temperature records recorded in multiple countries.  

When high-pressure systems that cause heatwaves become blocked in place, the jet stream – fast-moving winds that blow from west to east high in the atmosphere – is shaped like the Greek capital letter Omega (Ω). This is the pattern that dominated this year.

Warm conditions settle near the cores of high-pressure systems, while cool, wet conditions can be found at the “feet” of the Omega. 

This year, Greenland was on the right side of the Omega-shaped jet stream and thus experienced cooler conditions. 

If the Omega pattern had been displaced by half a wavelength, Greenland would have likely seen warm temperatures that brought record levels of melt – and a lower surface mass balance. 

Three decades of decline

So, why does the milestone of 30 years of ice mass decline in Greenland matter? 

A single year, however dramatic, can be strongly influenced by the weather. An extreme melt summer – or an unusually cold, snowy one – says little on its own about the region’s  long-term trajectory. 

This is why climate scientists typically look at 30-year periods when distinguishing a change in climate from natural variability.

Thirty years of data shows that the annual ice budget in Greenland has ended in the red, without exception, since 1996. This applies to warm years, cold years and snowy years.

The largest single-year loss remains 2012, when around 458bn tonnes of ice disappeared from the ice sheet. 

The past two years have been moderate by comparison – yet even these “quiet” years produced losses of more than 100bn tonnes each.

Thirty years of data on ice mass decline means that scientists now can confidently say that Greenland mass loss is due to climate change. 

Greenland in the global sea level picture

A new assessment highlights how Greenland’s losses are the largest single contribution from the ice sheets to global sea level rise. 

The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE) combines 42 independent estimates of ice sheet mass change from satellite gravimetry, altimetry and the input-output method – including the Danish Meteorological Institute’s surface mass balance estimates detailed in this article – all into a single record.

The latest assessment, published in the journal Scientific Data in September, shows that Greenland and Antarctica together lost 11,309bn tonnes of ice between 1979 and 2023, raising global sea levels by around 32mm. 

The two ice sheets now account for almost one-quarter of observed global sea level rise.

Greenland dominates that record. It lost 6,215bn tonnes of ice between 1972 and 2023 – an average of 119bn tonnes per year. Two-thirds of the loss was driven by increased ice discharge and one-third by reduced surface mass balance due to increased melt. 

Annual losses from ice melt accelerated from around 60bn tonnes in the 1980s to 264bn tonnes in the 2010s.

In contrast, Antarctica lost 4,780bn tonnes over the same period, raising sea levels by around 13mm. 

All of Antarctica’s losses are due to discharge from the ice sheet, concentrated in west Antarctica. East Antarctica, on the other hand, has so far remained relatively stable, with record snowfall in recent years even producing a small mass gain. 

This division in sea-level contribution is expected to change. Greenland’s losses to date amount to only a few centimetres of sea level rise, but Antarctica’s ice sheet is roughly 10 times larger and therefore could lead to significantly more sea level rise in the future. 

The IMBIE assessment notes that Antarctica’s losses are dominated by marine-terminating glaciers whose stability is hardest to predict.

The processes now increasingly observed in Antarctica – increasing surface melt, shrinking sea ice, loss of ice shelves and seasonal patterns of retreat of outlet glaciers – have been seen in Greenland for decades. We call this the “Greenlandification” of Antarctica. 

Greenland, in other words, is not just the largest present-day source of ice-driven sea level rise – it is also a preview of what may come from the far larger ice sheet at the other end of the planet.

Related Q&A: How Trump is threatening climate science in Earth’s polar regions 20.02.2026 Antarctica Guest post: The challenges in projecting future global sea levels 17.02.2026 Greenland State of the climate: 2025 in top-three hottest years on record as ocean heat surges 14.01.2026 Climate modelling Guest post: How the Greenland ice sheet fared in 2025 15.12.2025 Greenland

The post Guest post: Greenland ice sheet shrinks for 30th year in a row appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Countries’ climate plans would cut global emissions only half as much by 2035 as the UN projected a year ago, its annual assessment showed, after the US exit from the Paris Agreement and weaker new pledges worsened the outlook.

Taking into account the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) of 154 countries, which cover about 71% of global emissions, and current policies in the rest of the world, global emissions would fall to about 6% below 2019 levels by 2035. Last year’s update, based on 113 countries, put the figure at 12%.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions need to go down by 60% over the same period to limit global warming to 1.5C – a threshold that is now inevitably going to be breached, at least temporarily.

The latest NDCs put the world on course for between 2.1C and 3.2C of warming by the end of the century, depending on what countries do beyond 2035. That is slightly higher than the 1.9C–3.0C range that the UN climate body estimated in last year’s update, published during COP30.

• Oct 23, 2026 News Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak Read more
• Oct 20, 2026 News Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs More than 30 countries have failed to submit an NDC, but only three have repeatedly ignored the committee’s efforts to engage with them Read more

US exit worsens picture

A major factor is the US, the world’s second-largest emitter. Last year’s UN assessment included the pledge to cut emissions by between 61% and 66% by 2035, made under the administration of former President Joe Biden. 

But, since the US has officially left the Paris Agreement, its NDC has been excluded from the tally and its emissions projections have now been derived from current policies, which point to far higher levels of pollution. 

US emissions grew significantly last year as a result of growing electricity demand and the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration, which has rolled back support for clean energy and backed the burning of fossil fuels.

Weak new NDCs

Another reason for weaker emission reduction projections is that the approximately 40 new NDCs submitted since last year’s update have been less ambitious than the earlier UN modelling had hoped for.

India, the world’s third-largest emitter, submitted its NDC in April. Its plan would let emissions climb to 6.3 billion tonnes by 2035, almost 64% above 2023 levels, according to analysis by Climate Action Tracker (CAT). Its targets are weaker than India’s current policies and it could meet them as early as 2030.

• Oct 21, 2026 Investigations Turkish giant sponsoring COP31 cut climate goals then cashed in on oil boom COP31 sponsors should be screened for “climate integrity”. Yet Koç Holding has become a top partner while its oil refiner runs flat out and its climate targets slip Read more
• Oct 23, 2026 News Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31 Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak Read more
• Oct 21, 2026 News UK approves gas drilling despite admitting blow to “climate leadership” status The government accepts that approving the Jackdaw field will weaken its climate reputation and downplays the legal weight of the International Court of Justice opinion Read more

Saudi Arabia’s plan, submitted at the end of last year, sets no 2035 target, but has only a 2040 goal to reduce, avoid or remove 335 million tonnes a year against an undisclosed baseline. CAT rates it “critically insufficient”, estimating 2035 emissions at between 13% below and 18% above 2019 levels.

About 30 countries, including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina, have still not produced an updated NDC, which all governments should have submitted more than a year and a half ago. 

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said this year’s assessment report demonstrates again that collective progress remains insufficient, that global transitions are very uneven and that many countries face substantial barriers to delivering their targets and pledges.

He added that COP31 in Türkiye can help address some of the key gaps highlighted in this year’s reports, through ambitious outcomes on emission-cutting efforts, adaptation, climate finance and just transitions, as well as presidency-led initiatives on electrification, curbing methane emissions and progressing towards zero waste.

The post National climate plans now promise half the emission cuts expected by UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

Canada’s already battered reputation on curbing climate emissions has become drastically worse under the leadership of Prime Minister Mark Carney according to a recent report card from Climate Action Tracker, approaching levels of inaction comparable to the “drill baby drill” Trump Administration.

“Prime Minister Mark Carney has so far been unwilling to recommit to either the 2030 or 2035 targets and has conceded that, under his energy plan, Canada’s emissions will be higher in the near term than previously projected,” warned the report. “If Canada were to officially abandon its 2030 and 2035 targets, it would be the first country after the United States to do so.”

The emissions watchdog didn’t mince words about the pace and scale of Canada’s climate rollbacks.

“What is shocking to us is the true extent to which Prime Minister Carney has rolled back climate policies, largely in favour of the fossil fuel industry,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, a CAT partner, said in a release.

“This Carney climate carnage, while not quite as bad as Trump’s, is rapidly heading in the same direction, despite the country being hit by record wildfires and other devastating climate impacts,” he added. 

While Canada’s planned policies were expected to cut emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 two years ago, since Carney has come into office Climate Action Tracker estimates this planned reduction has been cut in half. Current policies are on track to only deliver a 14 percent decrease in emissions.

Carney’s oil-friendly government has swept aside a suite of climate regulations aimed at reducing the massive and growing emissions from the oil sands, which have ballooned by 178 percent since 2005 and now almost equal the entire passenger transport sector.

Subscribe to Desmog

Get the weekly intelligence you need to hold polluters accountable

Email Address Sign Up Send me intelligence from: All US/Global team UK/Europe team Sign Up --> (function($){ $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-us').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619D07B21962C5AFE16D3A2145673C82A3CEE9D9F1ADDABE965ACB3CE39939D42AC9012C6272FD52BFCA0790F0FB77C6442'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-vdrirr-vdrirr'); }); $('.newsletter-container .ijkidr-uk').click(function() { $('.js-cm-form').attr('data-id', '2BE4EF332AA2E32596E38B640E905619BD43AA6813AF1B0FFE26D8282EC254E3ED0237BA72BEFBE922037EE4F1B325C6DA4918F8E044E022C7D333A43FD72429'); $('.js-cm-email-input').attr('name', 'cm-ijkidr-ijkidr'); }); })(jQuery);

Perhaps the single fig leaf remaining to cover this naked climate failure is the long-touted and still not-built Pathways carbon capture and storage (CCS) project.

But this project is nothing more than a boondoggle in waiting, with rapidly diminishing expectations of what Pathways would accomplish and growing estimates of what it would cost.

“These technologies are nowhere near the scale and commercial viability needed to deliver on the needed emission reductions,” Climate Action Tracker concluded.

Pathways was originally hyped by bitumen producers as the largest CCS project in the world that would eliminate 68 million tonnes (MT) of emissions a year, or three-quarters of the oil sands’ entire output. That dubious goal has since been quietly rolled back to 16 MT by 2050, a decline of 76 percent.

The first phase of the Pathways project was supposed to be completed by 2030 to store 22 MT per year, now revised down to 6 MT sometime after 2032. Dilling bravely characterized these massive decreases in sequestered emissions as “slightly smaller”.

Six years into this alleged climate saving megaproject, no design proposals have been made public and not a single shovel has been stuck in the ground. The only things that have tangibly changed are the steadily diminishing projections about what Pathways could achieve if it ever gets built, and the mounting costs of doing so.

Originally budgeted at $16.5 billion, the current costs of building a potentially dangerous 650 km CO2 pipeline to Cold Lake and injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir three times larger than Prince Edward Island have ballooned to as high as $30 billion. Guess what? The same companies that are on track to pocket $100 billion in war-related profits this year expect the Canadian taxpayer to foot most of the bill.

It is increasingly clear that the Pathways project is less about carbon sequestration and more about political leverage. The so-called grand bargain between Ottawa and Alberta explicitly links Pathways with a new pipeline approval to the west coast to further boost bitumen production that has already increased almost 40 percent since 2015, undoing any climate benefits.

“The Pathways project… will not come close to compensating for the new west coast oil pipeline, which could add up to 28 MTA of greenhouse gas emissions every year,” Aly Hyder Ali, Environmental Defence Canada’s senior program manager for oil and gas told DeSmog. “It will require tens of billions of dollars in public support, while capturing only a small portion of the emissions from oil sands production.”

Carbon capture and storage has long been held up as a way to slow down climate consequences while still burning fossil fuels. Despite much industry-funded hype and $40 billion so far spent around the world, CCS only sequesters a puny proportion of global greenhouse gases.

A recent peer-reviewed study of the technology warned, “continued reliance on CCS is a high-cost gamble that risks delaying the deployment of truly effective climate solutions… Despite decades of promotion and investment, [CCS] remains technologically constrained, economically inefficient, and strategically misapplied.”

Even if Pathways worked perfectly it would do nothing to mitigate the tailpipe emissions once bitumen is refined into transportation fuel, which are four times higher than production emissions.

The Pathways project is a diminishing technological fix for a problem that industry has refused to deal with. Alberta oil sands operators have repeatedly stalled taking action, demanded more taxpayer largess, and allowed their emissions to grow north of 92 MT per year – an increase of more than three percent over the previous year due to ballooning production.

The oil patch is Canada’s biggest climate laggard while banking massive profits. Alberta’s bitumen producers raked in $13.3 billion in the first three months of 2026. Yet such wealthy companies still expect the beleaguered Canadian taxpayer to foot most of the bill for another pipeline to the Pacific and the expensive CCS project that makes the pipeline politically possible. Perhaps oil patch lobbyists deserve a raise. To gaslight a country into shelling out billions in subsidies to a wildly profitable sector that is also fuelling an accelerating climate crisis is no small feat. Pathways’ diminishing targets and mounting costs make this outlandish accomplishment even more outrageous.

The post Carney Almost as Bad as Trump on Climate, Emissions Watchdog Warns appeared first on DeSmog.

By Valentina Figuera Martínez, GFC Gender Justice and Forests Campaign Coordinator

The original version of this article was published in Mongabay

As global leaders convene in Armenia this week for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference of the parties (COP17), it is difficult to ignore how women’s oppression is deeply intertwined with the exploitation of ecosystems. After almost two decades of pledges, biodiversity action remains underfunded, forest loss continues to be a growing threat, socio-ecological transitions are a low priority, and ecosystems are spiraling toward collapse.

The impacts of resulting climate disasters and biodiversity destruction are not felt equally, yet gender justice issues also remain unresolved within these international talks.

In Yerevan, Armenia, countries will consider the first global review of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), which was the first formal assessment to measure progress since its adoption in 2022. COP17 is also poised to advance efforts on biodiversity finance under the umbrella of common but differentiated responsibilities.

But progress cannot be measured only in targets, financial commitments and international mechanisms. We should also ask a more basic question: What can we learn from the people who are already protecting biodiversity in their territories?

Women leading agroecology and community conservation initiatives in Zambia. Image courtesy of Kapyanga Women Association & Zamsof.

While hundreds of policymakers spend long hours negotiating decisions to promote false solutions and powerful corporate actors lobby to continue profiting from biodiversity destruction and obstruct environmental regulations, women from the Global South continue working without big cameras or fancy social media presences to protect what is left of their territories. They are ensuring the continuation of life on Earth for you, me, and future generations.

The reality in the negotiation corridors will be very different from the violence, extortion, and environmental destruction in the mining areas surrounding El Callao, in Bolívar state, Venezuela, for example, which is one of the epicenters of the gold rush promoted after the U.S. military invasion of the country earlier this year. Being born and raised in Bolívar, it will be difficult for me to agree in Yerevan that governments are “taking action for nature.”

And after hearing over the last several months from friends and colleagues from the Global South about human rights violations and ecosystem destruction they confront, it is important to remind everyone of an incontrovertible fact: As long as governments fail to address the systemic drivers of biodiversity destruction — especially in the Global South — and continue using domestic policies to expand extractivist sectors while broadening status quo dependency, these failures will persist.

One of the most contentious topics is biodiversity finance. Biodiversity offsets and credits, debt-for-nature swaps, and nature-based solutions are just some of the flawed market-based instruments presented to mobilize finance toward Global South countries. Despite all the widely known controversies, poor performance and human rights abuses, they are increasingly dominating attention while urgent priorities — including allocation of direct resources for community-led conservation actions and giving communities full decision-making power in finance institutional structures — remain unaddressed.

Market-based schemes should be ruled out. They instrumentalize greenwashing and allow brokers, developers, intermediaries and large NGOs to extract funding that should be benefiting communities.

Indigenous women of the Ticuna community of San Francisco de Yahuma in Loreto, Peru, are breaking gender barriers and taking on leadership roles on conservation in their communities. Image courtesy of Joseph Zegarra/Rainforest Foundation US.

Women and youth making a difference

Over the last few months, I have been working with friends and colleagues from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia to understand what real solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises look like. We all have in common a deep reverence for life, respect for traditional wisdom, a great deal of technical forest knowledge, advocacy experience, and a strong commitment to defending territories. And, of course, a tireless stubbornness to fight for systemic changes to the current model of development.

Real solutions might look like an agroecological farming system rooted in traditional knowledge, or a community defending its territory from extractivist industries. They might be women organizing to protect forests, strengthen food sovereignty, or build more equitable forms of community autonomy. I’ve also seen women from Brazil, Colombia, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nepal plus researchers from Morocco and Zambia, a peasant from Uruguay, an Indigenous leader from Panama and legal activists from Bangladesh all showing resilience and concrete community-led conservation actions.

All of them remind us that the value of ancestral knowledge, community autonomy, and access to decision-making power cannot be replaced by money or “innovative schemes.” Their real community-led solutions cannot be separated from the political dimensions of life and stay only on the technical side, focusing on reformist approaches to delay urgent systemic changes. They cannot be “scaled up” like the top-down generic schemes presented in international talks.

Real women-led solutions are unique, as every complex ecosystem is, and demand putting power in the hands of environmental defenders. The ancestral ‘nainu’ agroforestry system in the Gunayala autonomous territory of Panama is a hopeful example capable of teaching us what biodiversity action actually looks like, as the Gunadule people create a shield of resistance with a concrete community-led solution centered on traditional knowledge and women’s leadership. The strong understanding of these Global South women about the interconnections between oppression and the exploitation of ecosystems is just as inspiring as the sophisticated strategies they have built to confront mining, agribusiness, colonial legal frameworks, and patriarchal policies.

Working with the women behind these initiatives has also shown me that documenting their solutions is only part of the task. The point is not to turn these communities into inspirational examples for an international audience, nor is it to extract their knowledge and package it into another global model. It is to recognize that these communities have their own knowledge, priorities and political agency, and that biodiversity policy needs to create the conditions for those solutions to flourish.

That means secure rights to land and territory. It also means direct, public and accessible finance. And, it means protecting communities from destructive extractive projects, recognizing traditional knowledge and women’s leadership, and giving communities meaningful power over the decisions and financial structures that affect them.

Working with this group of women and men on a Gender-Just Real Solutions Map for Territories and Communities is a learning path to find answers to a complex crisis. One thing is clear: We must support localized actions which are genuinely community-led solutions that uphold rights, autonomy, socio-ecological transitions and create conditions to fight social inequalities.

The question for COP17 is not whether these solutions exist. They do.

The question is whether governments are prepared to recognize them, resource them, and most importantly, listen to the people who are already putting them into practice.

Valentina Figuera Martínez is a feminist researcher and campaign coordinator at the Global Forest Coalition, where she works with communities and civil society organizations to advance gender justice, biodiversity protection and the rights of women and Indigenous and local communities.

People are drowning in eco-friendly swag—cloth tote bags, reusable water bottles, recycled notebooks, sustainable hotel toiletries, and on and on—distributed by organizations and companies eager to demonstrate their environmental bona fides.

What might be even more sustainable than manufacturing and distributing all these eco-friendly products is to just…stop. The trouble is that consumers have trouble giving brands credit for such restraint, a quirk of human psychology that researchers dub “sustainable additive bias” in a new paper.

“Companies that genuinely try to take eco-friendly actions, such as reducing packaging or promotional giveaways, are often not rewarded,” says study team member Linda Lemarié, associate professor of marketing at Audencia Business School in France. “What we don’t see is hard to take into consideration, and reduction leaves nothing visible, even though it’s often the best strategy from an environmental standpoint.”

In the paper, Lemarié and her colleagues conducted nine different studies to demonstrate how this bias works—and what companies can do about it.

The studies included a field experiment in which hotel guests rated the sustainability of the room they had stayed in, a lab experiment in which business school students chose gifts to hand out to trade show attendees, and seven online investigations in which a total of more than 2,900 participants were asked to evaluate complimentary hotel toiletries, hair care sets, music festival welcome bags, and other collections of products.

Overall, the studies show that consumers see businesses as more sustainable when they provide more eco-friendly items rather than when they remove unnecessary ones—even though subtracting can lead to lower waste and a smaller footprint.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:What seems most true: Information that confirms your beliefs...or information repeated over and over?

 

“We were first surprised by the robustness and consistency of the effect across different contexts and with different metrics,” Lemarié says.

For example, study participants judged a hotel room stocked with a large selection of eco-friendly toiletries as more sustainable than a room with a more modest set of eco-friendly products. They also judged a limited-edition tea box to which eco-friendly tea filters had been added as more sustainable than one from which they had been removed.

“Then we were also surprised by the bias’s resistance to knowledge,” Lemarié says. When items weren’t labeled as being environmentally friendly, participants identified bundles with more items as being less sustainable than those with fewer. “This means that people do indeed correctly associate ‘addition with ‘less environmentally friendly.’”

But when the question of sustainability comes into play, people seem to use visible components as indicators of companies’ effort. The more items, the more effort, and the more effort, the more sustainability—at least, according to our imperfect brains.

Several of the experiments suggest sustainable additive bias can be counteracted when companies prioritize highly recognizable items as sustainability signals (that is, a refillable water bottle counts more than biodegradable glitter). One hints that explaining when items have been removed for environmental reasons might help, too.

But accomplishing this in the real world could be tricky, Lemarié says. “The question our research leaves open is how to effectively demonstrate, without appearing hypocritical or making people skeptical, that reducing elements of a product offering, and thus offering less, is a genuine effort in favor of the environment.”

Source: Lemarié L. et al. “The more, the better? The sustainable additive bias.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine. AI-generated.

The chemical industry has known for decades that ingested microplastic particles can reach vital organs, an investigation has found.

Read more on E360 →