Climate and Energy

How crucial will communication around COP26 be in determining its outcome?

The next annual United Nations climate conference, COP 26, will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, under the UK’s presidency in partnership with Italy, in early November. The conference takes place a year later than planned, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. International climate policy expert Stefan Aykut takes stock of the COP process since the Paris Agreement in 2015 and tells Benjamin Joyeux why the success of the upcoming conference should be judged on its capacity to foster connections rather than to establish binding governance.

What does the Chinese decision to stop investment in coal plants abroad mean for the wider energy transition?

Climate was an important feature of the Norwegian elections, but if this was indeed the first “climate election”, the results are disappointing.

An international energy agreement allows corporations to sue nation-states for phasing out fossil fuels.

What story will be told by the plastic, carbon, concrete, nuclear waste, and cities we leave behind?

A new type of denialism is taking hold in the fossil fuel industry, a bid to ward off systemic change and protect their business model.

After her Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, describes the world of “techno-fixes” to the damage we have inflicted on nature. Today, the world faces the dilemma that even the most well-intentioned interventions risk making matters worse, though we may no longer have the luxury of refusing them. In a century that will be shaped by the climate crisis, learning to navigate humanity’s “mixture of hubris and cluelessness” when dealing with nature will be essential.

Climate change will be high on the agenda in the first 100 days of Biden’s presidency. Here’s what he has promised and why a clean break with fossil is improbable.

The EU and national governments have gone to work on recovery plans to be deployed against the imminent economic crisis. But how green are they?