In 2022, the United States Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), appropriating an unprecedented amount of money for climate spending programs. One of the IRA’s flagship investments was the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a $27 billion program comprised of the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA), and Solar […]

The UK government has set out a long-awaited plan explaining how it will cut emissions in the 2030s, on its legally bound path to net-zero by the middle of the century.   Under the Climate Change Act, the government must lay out “carbon budgets” that set limits on the UK’s emissions over five-year periods. In 2021, […]

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 China’s next ‘five-year plan’ NEW PLAN: The Chinese Communist party held its fourth plenum meeting, reported the Guardian, which described it as a “key meeting in […]

Amid the Trump administration’s cancellation of billions in federal funding for climate action, the Sabin Center has covered the numerous cases that have been brought in federal district courts to challenge federal grant cancellations. Among those cases is Climate United Fund v. Citibank, a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) unlawful termination of $20 […]

Feeding the 8.2 billion people who inhabit the planet depends on healthy soils. Yet, soil health has been declining over the years, with more than one-third of the world’s agricultural land now described by scientists as “degraded”. Furthermore, the world’s soils have lost 133bn tonnes of carbon since the advent of agriculture around 12,000 years […]

China’s surging electric vehicles (EVs) ownership – now exceeding 25.5m – is opening the door to a new technology that can help to enhance the flexibility of electricity supply.   EVs connected via “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) technology can function as “batteries on wheels” that charge and discharge according to the needs of the wider electricity system.  The […]

Developing countries are receiving just a fraction of the international finance they need to prepare citizens and adapt infrastructure for escalating climate impacts. That is according to the latest adaptation gap report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which calculates that developing nations will need more than $310bn annually between now and 2035 to prepare […]

A now-familiar playbook for climate-denying state attorneys general is to launch burdensome investigations of climate-minded corporate enterprises based on inchoate antitrust claims (often conspicuously lacking a profit motive for the alleged antitrust violations). These enforcement tactics crystallize two challenges for corporate climate initiatives seeking to steer clear of antitrust liability. First: in order to prevent […]