The fossil-fuel era is drawing to a close, but at a pace far too slow for the planet’s good or a fair transition to a clean energy future
The weather in Belém, wrote the Guardian’s environment editor, offers a convenient metaphor for the UN climate talks being held in the Brazilian city. Sunny mornings begin in blazing optimism before the Amazon’s clouds gather and the deluge begins. Cop30 has followed the same pattern. It opened with sunshine – an agenda agreed on day one. The storms were deferred for later “consultations” on climate finance, carbon border tariffs and the question of how to close the yawning gap between national climate pledges and the Paris agreement’s safe pathway. These await Cop30’s second week.
They are likely to be more than mere squalls. The International Energy Agency confirmed last week that the fossil-fuel era is ending. Its annual report said the world will hit peak coal, oil and gas this decade and see declines thereafter. The economist Fadhel Kaboub, who advises developing nations on climate, argues this is not “because of political will, but because the economics of renewables is winning”. Africa, he says, can generate about 1,000 times the electricity it will need in 2040 – which could be exported. Globally, however, hydrocarbon use is easing far too slowly. The fight over money and a just transition matters at Cop30.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
11/14/2025 - 13:30
11/14/2025 - 12:53
Weaning ourselves off gas is the only way to reduce energy bills long term. Cutting support for this is exactly the ‘sticking-plaster politics’ Labour promised to end
After years of painfully high energy bills, diminishing household budgets and stalled investment, this year’s budget, on 26 November, should be the moment when the government finally starts to confront why the UK’s energy system is so expensive. And yet, if recent briefings suggesting that Labour will dramatically scale back the heat pump subsidy for households are to be believed, it is now repeating exactly the same mistakes as its predecessors.
People want relief from painful energy bills. In the long term, electrification is the only way to provide this. In practice, that means switching from gas boilers to heat pumps, shifting from petrol cars to electric vehicles: boosting access to technologies that are modern, cheaper to run, and are already becoming mainstream. At present, our energy system protects the legacy gas-based system, subsidising supply and penalising demand in ways that keep gas artificially cheap and electricity artificially expensive, even when electric technologies cost less to operate.
Camilla Born is the CEO of Electrify Britain, a campaigning organisation founded by EDF and Octopus Energy
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11/14/2025 - 11:23
Munduruku people demand to speak to Brazil’s president, saying they are never listened to
Cop30: click here for full Guardian coverage of the climate talks in Brazil
Protesters blockaded the main entrance to the Cop30 climate conference for several hours early on Friday morning, demanding to speak to Brazil’s president about the plight of the country’s Indigenous peoples.
About 50 people from the Munduruku people in the Amazon basin blocked the entrance with some assistance from international green groups, watched by a huge phalanx of riot police, soldiers and military vehicles.
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11/14/2025 - 09:40
Dozens of Indigenous activists blocked the entrance of the Cop30 summit venue on Friday, demanding that the Brazilian government halt all development projects in the Amazon, including mining, logging, oil drilling and the building of a new railway for transporting mining and agricultural products. The protesters staged a sit-in creating long queues and forcing delegates to use a side entrance to resume their negotiations on tackling the climate crisis
Cop30 – latest updates
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11/14/2025 - 09:06
Plastic pellets attract algae and smell like food so can be eaten by birds, fish and dolphins, which can prove fatal
Beads spreading on Sussex coast after ‘catastrophic’ spill, meeting told
Millions of toxic plastic beads were spilled on to Camber Sands beach, in East Sussex, a few days ago, putting wildlife at risk in what the local MP called an “environmental catastrophe”.
Southern Water, the local water company, has taken responsibility for the spill after a mechanical failure at one of its treatment plants, which caused the beads to be released.
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11/14/2025 - 09:05
Local people describe devastating impact of millions of toxic beads from Southern Water site near Camber Sands
What are bio-beads used for and how did they get spilled on to Camber Sands beach?
The massive spill of plastic beads at Camber Sands is devastating for local people, wildlife and tourism and the beads are dispersing along the coast, residents heard at an emotional public meeting on Thursday.
Millions of tiny, toxic plastic beads are thought to have escaped into the sea from Eastbourne sewage works in East Sussex about two weeks ago when a screen keeping them in broke. They began to wash up on Camber Sands beach last Thursday, with the situation worsening over the weekend.
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11/14/2025 - 09:00
Jonathan Jarvis, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017, laid out the dire consequences of not closing parks in shutdown
Americans should “raise hell” to protect US national parks through the “nightmare” of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a former National Park Service director, amid alarm over the impact of the federal government shutdown.
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency was now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
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11/14/2025 - 09:00
Senate inquiry hears how ‘propagandised misinformation’ is drowning out legitimate concerns in Australia’s regions over renewable energy
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Plans for a community battery in Narrabri had been going well – there was a $500,000 federal government grant, the shire council had agreed on a site and it had the necessary approvals to start building.
The battery project – in a council car park – was proposed by local not-for-profit Geni.Energy, with the idea to soak up solar energy during the day for use later.
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11/14/2025 - 08:00
Diane Wilson recognized Exxon’s playbook – and showed how local people can take on even the most entrenched industries
When ExxonMobil announced it would “slow the pace of development” on a $10bn plastics plant along the Texas Gulf coast, the company blamed market conditions. But it wasn’t just the market applying pressure; it was a 77-year-old shrimper named Diane Wilson who refused to stay silent. Her fight exposes big oil’s latest survival plan: ramping up oil and gas production to create plastic.
I first met Wilson back in 2019 while tracking her historic lawsuit against Formosa Plastics, the Taiwanese petrochemical giant accused of dumping toxic plastic waste throughout coastal Texas. Billions of tiny plastic pellets were contaminating waterways, shorelines and even the soil itself.
Shilpi Chhotray is the co-founder and president of Counterstream Media and Host of A People’s Climate for the Nation
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11/14/2025 - 07:00
Disease outbreaks from South America to Europe have been worsened by rising global temperatures, experts say
Surging cases of yellow fever and dengue in South America highlight the growing assault on people’s health from the climate crisis, with infectious diseases spread by mosquitoes and deadly heat also now pushing into temperate regions such as Europe, experts have warned at the Cop30 climate summit.
There have been 356 cases of yellow fever in South America and 152 deaths so far this year, largely in the Amazon region, according to Pan American Health Organization figures. Apart from a large spike in 2017 and 2018, this is the largest number of yellow fever cases for any year in the continent, bar one, since 1960.
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