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TODAY'S CLIMATE AND ENERGY HEADLINES
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European energy prices are “surging as a scorching summer boosts demand while natural gas supplies from Russia remain limited”, Bloomberg reports. It says: “Europe is engulfed in an energy crisis fanned by Russia’s war in Ukraine, a climate emergency on one of its key rivers and recovery from the global pandemic.” Reuters reports that several European power price contracts “reached record highs” that it says are “connected to a similar rise in gas prices, as well as a large jump in coal future prices”, citing Rystad Energy. Reuters reports that the average price for Russian gas exports will more than double this year, according to a Russian government document “seen by Reuters”. The Financial Times says a second European aluminium smelter is “to halt production as energy costs bite”. The New York Times says: “Europe’s scorching summer puts unexpected strain on energy supply.” It continues: “The dry summer has reduced hydropower in Norway, threatened nuclear reactors in France and crimped coal transport in Germany. And that’s on top of Russian gas cuts.”
In a comment for the Financial Times, energy editor David Sheppard says: “It’s time for Europe to ask Norway to cut the price of gas.”
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the Czech government is to “cap housing, energy costs at 30% of income”. Another Reuters article says: “Swedish PM pledges billions to offset soaring energy bills as election nears.” A third Reuters piece reports Spain “has used less power since ordering energy saving, minister says”.
The river Loire in France is seeing “unprecedented low water levels” due to drought, Reuters reports, adding that four nuclear plants depend on its water flow for cooling. It quotes Eric Sauquet, head of hydrology at France’s National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, saying: “Climate change is underway, it’s undeniable…All users will have to re-think their behaviour with respect to water resources.” Another Reuters article says some villages in southern France are getting water deliveries by truck due to drought. Meanwhile, BBC News reports under the headline: “UK drought: Why we need to get used to wonky vegetables.” It adds: “Scientists say that heatwaves and drought will increase with climate change and that we must adapt to how this affects agriculture and our food.”
Separately, Reuters reports that low water levels on the Danube have “slow[ed] coal supplies for power plants” and cut output from Serbia’s hydro plants. Reuters also reports that traffic has built up along the Rhine in Germany “where low water levels have already impeded shipping this summer, after a vessel’s engine failure closed part of the waterway, authorities said on Wednesday”.
A comment for the Financial Times by columnist Helen Thomas is titled: “Climate is a supply chain problem that can’t be ignored.” She writes: “The waterborne infrastructure of global trade could dry out or shut down as the world heats up.” For Politico, a feature looks back to the drought of 1540: “As Europe risks its worst drought in 500 years, here’s what happened the last time around.”
Major companies have suspended operations in south-west China “as the region is buffeted by hydropower shortages caused by droughts and heatwaves”, the Financial Times reports. It says Sichuan province “announced it would suspend energy supplies to factories in a number of cities as it braced for a week of temperatures that were forecast to hit highs of more than 40C, according to a government statement”. The piece adds: “The Yangtze River, China’s largest and most important waterway, last week hit its lowest level on record for this time of year, according to the water resources ministry.” The Times reports: “Unprecedented heatwaves this summer have prompted several Chinese provinces, including Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui, to ration electricity use amid surging power demands for fans and air conditioning.” It adds: “Dong Xiucheng, an expert on carbon neutrality, told state media that such abnormal weather could become a new norm. ‘Climate change needs high attention from all countries, and the measure of all measures is to reduce carbon use,’ Dong said.”Reuters says Sichuan province relies on hydro power for 80% of its electricity. It adds: “Analysts said if the heatwave persists the power crunch could spill over to eastern provinces like Zhejiang and Jiangsu which have relied partly on buying electricity from Sichuan.” Reuters also reports that China’s drought “could last until September as it races to protect harvests”. Bloomberg says the power outages in Sichuan “pose a new threat to clean energy supply chains already pressured by high costs of raw materials”.
Another Reuters piece says China has launched cloud seeding programmes and that the farm ministry “warns of impact on crops, livestock”. Citing state media reports of the National Climate Centre it says: “Heatwave, at 64 days, is the longest since records began.” The newswire adds: “China has repeatedly warned that it faces a proliferation of extreme weather events in coming years as it tries to adapt to climate change and rises in temperature that are likely to be more severe than elsewhere.” The Independent reports that flash floods have killed 16 people in China’s Qinghai province.
In a frontpage “exclusive” on figures from the University of York – reported last week by Carbon Brief – the Guardian says “45m people will struggle to pay energy bills this winter with predicted rises in [the] price cap”. The figures show an estimated 18m households, equivalent to 45 million people, will be in fuel poverty by January, the paper says. (The threshold is defined as spending more than 10% of their net income on energy.) The Press Association follows up the Guardian story. Another Press Association article covers a warning from consumer group Citizens Advice saying one in three will be unable to afford their energy bills by January, even after existing government support measures. The Financial Times reports: “Time ‘running out’ for new schemes to help British households with energy bills.” It says smaller energy suppliers are urging the government to extend existing support schemes because it is “too late” to come up with alternatives. The Daily Telegraph says: “Working from home to cost £175 in energy bills this winter.”
Meanwhile, the Times reports: “A director of [energy regulator] Ofgem has quit in protest at its decision to add hundreds of pounds to household bills this winter by changing the way it calculates the energy price cap.” BBC News, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph also have the story. A separate Times article says UK consumers could face £420m in costs to keep old coal-fired power stations open in case of an electricity supply crisis this winter, citing system operator National Grid. It explains: “The coal plant extensions come at the request of the government, which is attempting to increase energy security in case there is a shortage of gas from Russia curtailing supplies to Europe.” A Reuters feature is titled: “Echoes of dire 1970s in today’s Britain.”
The world lost “16 football pitches of trees per minute” to forest fires in 2021, BBC News reports, citing the latest data from Global Forest Watch. It says the amount has “nearly doubled in the past 20 years” and that “climate change is a key factor in the increase”. It quotes an analyst behind the research saying: “What’s most concerning is that fires are becoming more frequent, more severe and have the potential to unlock a lot of the carbon that’s stored in soils there.” The Independent also has the story.
Meanwhile, Reuters reports that “at least eight people were killed” in wildfires in Algeria yesterday, according to state radio. Another Reuters article is titled: “Spanish fire crew’s brush with death as Valencia wildfire rages.” EurActiv carries a comment from Prof Sten B Nilsson saying forest fires in the EU this year are four times higher than average. He concludes: “It will take a concerted effort on multiple fronts to avoid a future in which the devastation that fires have wreaked on Europe’s forests this summer becomes the norm. Instead of being a victim of climate change, our forests should be a vital tool in fighting it.”
Germany will run out of gas in less than three months if Russia’s Vladimir Putin cuts off supplies completely, the president of the country’s energy regulator warned, reports the Daily Telegraph. Klaus Mueller, president of the Federal Network Agency, is quoted by Bloomberg saying: “We are a little bit faster than what we used to be in terms of filling up storage, but it is not a sign we can relax…I cannot promise you that all storage facilities in Germany will be 95% full in November, even under good supply and demand conditions. In the best-case scenario, three-quarters of them will meet the target.” Reuters adds that “Germany is in the second phase of a three-stage emergency plan to reduce its dependence on Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine”. Elsewhere, Die Welt reports that the first two German terminals for importing liquefied gas should be ready for use in just a few months.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that Uniper, the German energy company which owns the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station in Nottinghamshire, has posted a €12bn (£10bn) loss weeks after agreeing on a bailout package with the German government, in a set of results that signal the deepening energy crisis across Europe. The paper details that Uniper received a €15bn lifeline from the German state in return for a 30% equity stake in a deal agreed on in July. Uniper’s chief executive, Klaus-Dieter Maubach, is quoted: “Uniper has for months been playing a crucial role in stabilising Germany’s gas supply – at the cost of billions in losses resulting from the sharp drop in gas deliveries from Russia”. The Financial Times says the company has said it is on the “brink of insolvency”. Reuters reports: “How Russian gas crisis took toll on Germany’s Uniper.” Deutsche Welle adds that the company’s losses also included €2.7bn in impairments due to the cancelled Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which Uniper financially backed. Germany has not yet allowed energy suppliers to pass on the higher prices of gas to customers, leaving the companies sitting on the losses, reports the New York Times. But, it says the government recently agreed to collect a surcharge on household electric bills that will be distributed among energy suppliers to spread the pain among citizens and suppliers. In addition, another German power company, RWE, has turned to the debt market for funding, reports Bloomberg.
The MetService of New Zealand has issued a “red alert” for flood risk, the Times reports, adding: “Recent days have brought bucket-loads of rainfall across the west of the South Island…The situation is highly likely to get a lot worse.” Reuters reports that hundreds of people have evacuated their homes.
Separately, an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald says the state of New South Wales in Australia “must spend big to end the suffering for residents of flood plains”, following major floods earlier this year.
Press Association reports that “bees have become increasingly stressed by climate change over the past 100 years, museum collections indicate”. It says an analysis of bumblebee wing asymmetry “shows signs of stress linked to conditions getting hotter and wetter”. The Times says the research involved specimens of four UK bumblebee species, collected since 1900 and kept in museum archives. The Guardian and MailOnline also have the story.
A comment for City AM by Cameron Smith of the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) says: “Our reliance on fossil fuels is to blame for the energy crunch…The next prime minister will need to Britain’s energy policies on a war footing.” Smith continues by pointing to measures such as insulating homes and expanding heat pump grants. He adds: “When the problem is rocketing wholesale gas prices, doubling down on net-zero is the answer. Despite claims from a minority of sceptics, net-zero isn’t at odds with conservatism; it’s a conservative mission we must continue.” Analysis from BusinessGreen says leadership contenders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have “step[ped] up their net-zero and nature rhetoric – but will the next PM deliver?” (Truss and Sunak have each provided information on their environment plans to CEN.) For the Guardian, associate editor Martin Kettle writes: “Truss talks about axing the so-called green levies, while Sunak wants VAT to be cut from energy bills for a year. Both are hostile to solar panels and onshore windfarms. Several key Truss backers are net-zero delayers and some are full-on climate sceptics.”
A Guardian editorial on news that UK inflation has reached a 40-year high says: “Unless the government acts on energy bills, when the cap rises by a predicted 80% on 1 October, inflation will soar again. Analysts expect prices for gas and electricity to keep on increasing well into the new year. And where energy prices go, so go the costs for everything else, from food to clothes to transport.”
Meanwhile, for the Times, columnist Iain Martin writes on the gas crisis under the headline: “‘Net-zero’ groupthink got us into this mess.” He argues that “successive governments…bet the house on getting to net-zero quicker than anyone else…[a]nd look where it has landed us”. (Of 128 countries with net-zero targets covering 83% of global emissions, 117 are aiming for 2050 or earlier.) Martin continues that the “too-fast race to net-zero was a mistake” and adds: “What was needed was an urgent national effort to build more gas storage, to source more of every scrap of energy, and to tell us, the public, all year to get used to conserving energy to keep bills, and the expensive bailout, down.” Another Times comment from Ryan Bourne, of the libertarian thinktank the Cato Institute, is titled: “Carbon pricing will bring salvation from the energy disaster.” (He does not explain how this would happen.) Bourne writes: “Carbon taxes get near-universal approval from economists in polls and are backed by 28 economics Nobel laureates…In politics, though, economists are being routed.”
In a comment for Foreign Policy, columnist Jason Bordoff writes of the US climate bill signed into law this week: “Whether the law can live up to its historic promise will now depend on whether its massive clean energy subsidies can be deployed quickly and at scale.” But he adds: “The White House’s crowning domestic policy achievement can’t reach its full potential without engaging the world…Its success will now depend not just on US actions at home, but on how the nation’s diplomats, national security leaders, and international economics officials implement US foreign policy around the world.”
In related news, Climate Home News says: “China responds coolly to US climate bill, rejecting a call to resume cooperation.” Bloomberg reports that China’s ministry of foreign affairs tweeted: “Can the US deliver?”
Meanwhile, columnist David Wallace-Wells writes for the New York Times under the headline: “The green transition is happening. The climate bill will only speed it up.” RealClimate looks at the climate impacts of the bill. Related news from the Hill says renewables are expected to make up 22% of US electricity in 2022.
A new study that reconstructs rainfall changes in the central Mediterranean as the Earth emerged from its last ice age shows how a changing climate in the Arctic can have a significant impact on rainfall in the Mediterranean. The authors produce a high-resolution reconstruction of rainfall changes using proxy data derived from a southern Italian stalagmite. The study finds that ice-sheet decline in the Arctic promoted a higher intensity of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, and resulted in a “relatively wetter” climate in the Mediterranean. The authors say the findings emphasise “the role of high-latitude climate changes in causing rainfall variation in highly populated Mediterranean areas”.
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