Climate
All Climate coverage
Europe's Carbon Border Tax Started Charging This Year. Here Is Who Pays.
After a two-year reporting phase, the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism entered its definitive period on 1 January 2026. Importers of steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser, electricity and hydrogen now owe for the carbon in what they bring in.
Half the World's Power Capacity Is Renewable. That Is Not the Same as Half Its Electricity
IRENA counts machines; the IEA counts output. The two datasets describe the same energy transition and produce very different-looking numbers, because a gigawatt is a ceiling and a terawatt-hour is a result.
The Paris Agreement's Compliance Committee Is Non-Punitive by Treaty Design — and in 2025 It Opened Consideration of 171 Parties at Once
Article 15 requires an "expert-based and facilitative" committee that functions in a manner that is "transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive". Its annual report shows what that looks like in practice: hundreds of missing documents, a round of notifications, and a guide to where help can be found.
The IPCC Does Not Carry Out Any Research. The Document Everyone Quotes Is Agreed Line by Line With Member Governments in the Room.
In the Panel's own procedures, “approval”, “adoption” and “acceptance” are three different acts with three defined meanings. The thousands of assessment pages beneath the famous summary are accepted, not approved — they never go through the line-by-line stage at all.
A Kyoto Protocol Amendment Set Targets for 2013 to 2020. It Entered Into Force on 31 December 2020.
The Doha Amendment created a second round of legally binding emission targets for the years 2013 through 2020, and became law on the last day of that period. The delay was not an accident of politics so much as a mechanical consequence of how the Kyoto Protocol wrote its own amendment clause.
Every Country on Earth Joined the Ozone Treaty. Twenty-Four Have Not Joined Its Climate Amendment.
The Montreal Protocol is the rarest object in international law: a treaty with 198 parties and a measurable result in the sky above Antarctica. In 2016 it was rewritten to control a family of gases that do nothing to the ozone layer at all — and that amendment, nine years after adoption, still has fewer parties than the treaty it amends.
Eight Datasets, One Number: How the World Settles on the Global Temperature
The WMO put 2025 at 1.44 C above the 1850-1900 average by consolidating eight independent records. The method, and the long-term warming level - typically over 20 years - that the Paris 1.5 C goal actually refers to, explain most of the confusion.