China's concrete progress and other stories this week

There's a lot of climate news to catch up on. With this edition of the newsletter, I'm trying an experiment to curate the stories that caught my attention. Please send feedback and reply in comments with links to stories that you found interesting.

2024 is very likely to be the hottest year, beating the record set in 2023. And that means extreme weather is on the rise. Over the past week, excess rainfall has ravaged India, from southern Wayanad to Delhi, and Himalayan hill stations. With hundreds killed in floods and landslides and many still missing, India’s myopic infrastructure planning is in the spotlight.

The UK has a new government and a new aggressive target: zero-carbon electricity by 2030. And the Labour party has already followed through with a bunch of policies to get started on that goal in earnest.

China's cement boom is over. That's a huge deal, given cement is a very carbon-intensive material and China consumes it in the billions of tons. That's like "if France, or Taiwan, or the United Arab Emirates eliminated their carbon dioxide emissions in a couple of years," writes David Fickling .

Climate change is the silent spectator at the Paris Olympics, says Tzeporah Berman. As athletes and spectators fight to beat the heat with cooling breaks, hose-downs, and hand-held fans.

In January, Australia will introduce mandatory disclosures on climate affecting 6,000 companies in the country. Thousands more outside Australia will have to comply too.

A classic case of bad rules holding back climate solutions. In the US, opting for regenerative farming means losing access to crop insurance that uses outdated rules to account for lower yields and pushes "industrial, monoculture practices".

The watchdog rules against offsets. Science-Based Targets initiative published a review of third-party studies that showed that using offsets to reduce corporate emissions is "ineffective".

Cheap Chinese electric cars are winning and no one can do anything to stop them. Uber signed a deal with BYD for 100,000 EVs that will start to be deployed in Europe and Latin America, followed by Middle East, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (China is winning on robotaxis too!)

The future of deep-sea mining hinges on a contentious election. That will decide the leader of the International Seabed Authority, which recently learned in an extraordinary discovery that polymetallic nodules -- the thing mining companies are vying for -- can produce oxygen.

Chart of the week

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