Analysis: UK climate aid to hit £11.6bn goal – but only due to accounting rule change
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The amount of foreign aid the UK spends on climate action reached a record high of around £3bn last year, according to government figures obtained by Carbon Brief. However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that more than £500m of this sum comes from controversial changes in the way the UK calculates its climate aid for developing […]
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Industrial Electrification: The Biggest Climate Solution You’ve Never Heard Of
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The post Industrial Electrification: The Biggest Climate Solution You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on Energy Innovation.
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Atlanta’s New Ordinance Raises the Bar on Cool Roofs
Photo by Steve Matthews on Unsplash Earlier this month, on June 2, 2025, Atlanta’s City Council unanimously passed a state-of-the-art ordinance to require cool roofs throughout the whole city, immediately propelling Atlanta to the forefront of local climate adaptation measures. The new requirements will help make Atlanta cooler, improve its air quality, and lower residents’ […]
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MIT and Mass General Brigham launch joint seed program to accelerate innovations in health
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Leveraging the strengths of two world-class research institutions, MIT and Mass General Brigham (MGB) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT-MGB Seed Program. The new initiative, which is supported by Analog Devices Inc. (ADI), will fund joint research projects led by researchers at MIT and Mass General Brigham. These collaborative projects will advance research in […]
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Using generative AI to help robots jump higher and land safely
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Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before. But did you know that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models are also making headway in creating […]
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Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2025 UN climate conference
Climate negotiators have wrapped up another two weeks of technical talks in the German city of Bonn, seeking to make breakthroughs on critical issues before COP30 in Brazil. Once again, the UN negotiations were marked by protracted “agenda fights” and calls for developed countries to provide more funding for climate action in developing countries. This […]
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DeBriefed 27 June 2025: Heat domes; Bonn comes to a close; Gender clash in climate talks
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change. This week Heat dome hits North America 100F: Temperatures in New York City reached 100F (38C) for the first time since 2013, as a heat dome “crushed” the eastern side of the US, reported the Associated Press. Baltimore, Philadelphia […]
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Decommissioning Offshore Oil & Gas Infrastructure: May 2 Workshop
In U.S. coastal and offshore waters, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, tens of thousands of oil and gas wells pose a growing environmental and financial liability. Of these, more than 7,300 offshore wells remain idled and await decommissioning, which could cost as much as $70 billion. Without cleanup, these wells risk becoming environmental hazards […]
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Squaring the circle: Making sense of the UK Industrial Strategy
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A seemingly bold prospectus for ensuring green growth, how well does the UK government’s Industrial Strategy respond to the challenges of the moment? The UK has the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world.1 It is also now setting the pace with some of the world’s most stringent carbon targets. Both facts seem central […]
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UK government body to deploy innovative robotics to manage radioactive waste
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Buildings at the Sellafield site in Cumbria (image credit: Tom Bastin, CC BY 2.0 license). The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) group has announced a partnership which will see innovative technology deployed for the first time on a nuclear site to remotely and autonomously sort and segregate radioactive waste. The NDA has committed to invest up […]
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China Briefing 26 June 2025: First UK-China climate dialogue; China-climate conference summary; Oil peak ‘in 2027’
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s China Briefing. China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here. Key developments First ministerial China-UK ‘climate dialogue’ UK-CHINA CATCH UP: On 16 June, Huang Runqiu, head of China’s Ministry of Economy and Environment (MEE), met Ed Miliband, the […]
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Make electricity cheaper for consumers, says CCC
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Policies to reduce emissions have improved since last year, concluded the Climate Change Committee (CCC), releasing its first assessment of the new Government’s progress on climate targets on 25 June. The statutory body also appealed to policymakers to “do more to ensure people see the benefits of climate action in their bills”. Interim Chair of […]
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‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ Threatens America’s Trucking Future
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The post ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ Threatens America’s Trucking Future appeared first on Energy Innovation.
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Merging AI and underwater photography to reveal hidden ocean worlds
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In the Northeastern United States, the Gulf of Maine represents one of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems on the planet — home to whales, sharks, jellyfish, herring, plankton, and hundreds of other species. But even as this ecosystem supports rich biodiversity, it is undergoing rapid environmental change. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster […]
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Net zero planning platform to unlock investment in the West of England
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A new collaborative project aims to deliver real-time, data-driven insights that will expedite the West of England’s transition to net zero Global engineering and consulting firm, Arup, in partnership with spatial analytics and software company Advanced Infrastructure, and consultancy Global City Futures (GCF), has been awarded a significant contract to develop the regional energy planning […]
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Microbes transform plastic waste into paracetamol, in new study
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A PhD student checks the growth of a culture of E. coli in the Wallace Lab (imagec credit: University of Edinburgh) Paracetamol production could be revolutionised by the discovery that a common bacterium can turn everyday plastic waste into the painkiller, a new study seems to show. The new method leaves virtually no carbon emissions […]
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Recycled plastic’s unknown constituents could be toxic
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Recycled plastic pellets from polyethylene (PE) can be used when making a water bottle for instance. But we can never have full knowledge of what chemicals will end up in an item made of recycled plastic. Therefore the item could contain toxic chemicals that can leach out (image credit: Olof Lönnehed). A single pellet of […]
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Microplastics are everywhere, but our methods to track them are all over the place
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A new study suggests citizen science holds untapped potential in measuring microplastic pollution, but chaotic research methods may be clouding the global picture The study from the University of Portsmouth has highlighted the growing role of citizen science in tackling one of the planet’s most pervasive pollution problems: microplastics and mesoplastics. While researchers often warn […]