Earth Matters: Check out the nightmarish Emissions Gap Report 2025; Michael Mann slams Bill Gates over his climate situation is not-so-bad memo

For the past 16 years, the UN Environment Program has produced an annual Emissions Gap Report. This year’s edition shows a slight improvement in predictions from the 2024 report. However, even if every country lived up to the national emission cutting pledges they have set for themselves under the non-binding Paris Agreement, by the end of the century, warming could reach 2.3° to 2.5°C (4.14° to 4.5°F), the authors say.

While the latest UNEP prediction is better than last year’s, countries aren’t even on a trajectory to fulfill their own underwhelming pledges, and the world is headed for 2.8°C (5.04°F) of warming by 2100. That compares with a prediction of 3.1°C in the 2024 report, but that’s viewed as marginal and is partially a factor of methodological changes. Last year was already the world’s hottest on record, and the current situation is "leaving the world heading for serious escalation of climate risks," the report states.

Signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement agreed to try and limit warming to no more than 2°C (3.6°F) above the preindustrial world, with an aspirational goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F). Of the latest emissions report, UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said:

“Nations have had three attempts to deliver promises made under the Paris Agreement, and each time they have landed off target “While national climate plans have delivered some progress, it is nowhere near fast enough, which is why we still need unprecedented emissions cuts in an increasingly tight window, with an increasingly challenging geopolitical backdrop.

“But it is still possible — just. Proven solutions already exist. From the rapid growth in cheap renewable energy to tackling methane emissions, we know what needs to be done. Now is the time for countries to go all in and invest in their future with ambitious climate action – action that delivers faster economic growth, better human health, more jobs, energy security and resilience.”

In other words, the world is far off track from the Paris Agreement mandate to hold warming well below 2°C and aim for 1.5°C — and the room for maneuvering is closing fast.

The report places the required cuts in stark relief:

To align with a 2°C pathway, global emissions must be reduced roughly 35% by 2035 (relative to 2019 levels).
To align with the 1.5°C ambition, the reduction figure has to be about 55 % by 2035.

An increasing number of scientists see 1.5°C as an unobtainable. And current trajectories and pledged actions leave emissions far above those thresholds. The result: the “gap” is not simply a footnote — it’s a symptom of stalled global will.

Not closing the emissions gap is a geopolitical failing. Every fraction of a degree avoided matters: fewer heat-waves, less sea‐level rise, fewer refugees forced across borders by drought and flood, fewer ecosystems pushed past tipping points. It’s also a failure of justice. The nations least responsible for industrial-era emissions will bear the brunt of the damage. Meanwhile, many of the world’s highest‐emitting economies continue on business-as‐usual paths. The report warns that delaying action today will force heavy dependence on unproven technologies tomorrow. That’s gambling with fragile lives and ecosystems, since global warming is also a killer of biodiversity.

Progress since the adoption of the Paris Agreement,
including rapid growth in cheap renewable energy and
tackling short-lived climate pollutants like methane, means
that the international community has the opportunity to
deliver the necessary cuts to emissions. I call on nations,
particularly G20 members, to recalibrate their sights, aim
true, and remember the rewards for setting and hitting
stronger climate targets: faster economic growth, better
human health, more jobs, energy security and the fulfillment
of many other development needs. Climate action is not
philanthropy – it is national self-interest. — Inger Andersen, UNEP executive director

Here’s what the report says about why haven’t we grabbed the moment:

Many national pledge recalculations amount to marginal improvements rather than the transformative commitments required. Indeed, the improvement in the warming estimate is driven largely by methodological updates, not real cuts.
Major emitters carry the lion’s share of responsibility, yet systemic coordination of finance, technology transfer, and commitment to a just transition remains weak. The architecture of global climate finance needs a radical redesign, according to UNEP.
Many sectors remain “locked in”: coal, oil, and gas infrastructure, heavy industry, transport, and buildings continue to emit at high levels. Although the technological potential — renewables, efficiency gains, energy storage — is real and evolving, deployment is far too slow to meet the scale of required cuts.
Because action has been deferred year after year, the “low-hanging fruit” is largely picked; what remains to do will cost more, require more risk, and create more disruption.

The report calls for immediate, deep, multisectoral cuts, coupled with scaled-up support to developing nations and alignment with socio-economic justice. Among key actions:

Rapid phase‐out of coal and other fossil fuels, and accelerated deployment of renewable energy.
Massive improvements in energy efficiency across buildings, industry and transport.
Ambitious land‐use reforms: stopping deforestation, restoring degraded forests, and shifting agricultural practices.
Bridging the finance gap: significantly increasing climate finance flows to the Global South, enabling technology transfer and strengthening institutional capacity.
Embedding just-transition principles throughout — ensuring that workers and communities are supported, and that mitigation does not perpetuate or worsen inequalities.

That is a daunting list. Many people who have followed climate matters the past few decades may be eye-rolling over the likelihood these changes will be implemented. Given our Outlaw Prez’s malevolently ignorant withdrawal (again) from the Paris Agreement, given that nations aren’t meeting their too-weak pledges, given that ample finance for less developed nations to deal with climate change impacts isn’t being provided, and given that corporations are retreating on their own pledges and still investing hundreds of billions each year in fossil fuel development, those eye-rolls aren’t one bit out of line.

Perhaps the report’s strongest messages, as climate activists have saying for three decades, is that delay is exponentially costly. Every year of inaction compounds risk, leaves fewer options, and makes the technical, economic, and social challenges steeper. The timeframe for delivering effective results is rapidly shrinking. Meanwhile, companies and many governments keep working on extracting and burning every molecule of oil, natural gas, and even coal until they’re made to stop.

—Meteor Blades

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

A little upset with the billionaire’s climate downplaying

GREEN BRIEFS

White House pressured EPA for broad rollback of tailpipe rules

At ClimateWire, Mike Lee and Jean Chemick reported that “White House budget officials leaned on EPA to broaden its rollback of tailpipe regulations.” Instead of going solely after greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, documents showed that the Office of Management and Budget pressured the agency to retreat on other pollution too, including smog-forming chemicals and soot, the tiny particulates that are a particular health hazard to lungs, bladders, and esophaguses. The pushing was revealed in editing notes from documents at a meeting in July.

Ever since the Supreme Court said in 2007 that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases if it determines them to be a public health danger, which the EPA did in 2009, fossil fuel interests and their governmental puppets been trying to get that reversed. Their key argument for nearly two decades has been that the drafters of the Clean Air Act and its amendments did not intend carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases to be treated like pollutants. Turns out the endangerment ruling’s foes don’t want pollutants treated like pollutants either. The OMB staff wants regulation of smog and soot to go the way of greenhouse gases.

The EPA currently operates under car and truck regulations the Biden administration finalized in 2024 to curtail both greenhouse gases as well as smog and soot. The notes show unidentified EPA staffers told the OMB staffers they have no plans to eliminate smog and soot from regulation.

The OMB mindset is as clear as it is backward. Staffers argued, among other things, that pushing a transition to electric vehicles would lead to more pollution.

“The only way to reduce or eliminate CO2 emissions from new vehicles is to have consumers buy an entirely different substitute type of vehicle with an EV or hybrid EV drivetrain, and the higher cost of this alternative drivetrain technology will lead many consumers to choose to keep driving older and older used ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles, with all the negative environmental effects that would result,” an OMB staffer wrote.

You’ll be familiar with that argument if you’ve read Project 2025, a good portion of which was written by or under the auspices of Russ Vought, now in charge of OMB.

—MB

The EPA Let Companies Estimate Their Own Pollution Levels. The Real Emissions Are Far Worse

If you did an eye-roll while reading that headline, you’re surely not alone. Industry definitely prefers to police itself. And whether it’s pesticides or coal ash or methane leaks, if following the rules are voluntary, then you know who really rules — the cheaters. Lisa Song at ProPublica writes:

And for decades, the Environmental Protection Agency tracked those emissions not by monitoring the air but by relying on a kind of honor system. Companies were allowed to estimate their chemical pollution using methods that even the EPA conceded were often unreliable.

In 2023, the EPA received irrefutable proof that these estimates were highly flawed. The agency had required 20 industrial facilities to temporarily install air monitors around their perimeters — known as fence-line monitoring — to see how bad the pollution actually was.

ProPublica found that actual emissions were higher than the estimates. Not just by a little bit in many instances. A carcinogen at a steel plant was found to be 30 times higher than the company estimated under the “honor” system. Pollution levels at a chemical plant were 156 times higher than the estimate. Voluntary just doesn’t cut it.

Under the Biden administration, the EPA required more than 130 industrial operations to install permanent air monitors, starting as soon as this year. That meant, for the first time, vulnerable communities in the vicinity of heavy polluters would, as Song noted, “finally get a glimpse of what they were breathing. The monitors would act as a warning system: If pollution levels were to exceed new standards set by the EPA, the facility would have to find the source of the leaks and fix them.”

Then Donald Trump killed the program. Consequently, at least 5 million people living near plants that would have had to comply with the Biden rules, will continue suffering an increased risk of developing cancer and other health impacts. Song notes, however, that that tally is surely an undercount since the corporations’ emissions estimates have been so off the mark. Have companies been intentionally low-balling their pollution? Now why in the world would you think that?

—MB

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Sheep herding dogs at Hornet Solar. — Sheep-herding dog at Vester solar project

Vesper Solar 600 MW Texas project shows how an agrivoltaics mindset can unlock prime sites by Michael Puttré at PV Magazine. One way to open up greenfield acreage to solar is to demonstrate how well a project can fit with the life and commerce of the region. Last spring, Texas-based Vesper Energy commissioned its 600-megawatt Hornet Solar project, the first of a trio of projects that will bring 1gigawatt of new solar capacity along with 400 MW of storage to the Texas panhandle. In addition to providing renewable energy to the ERCOT grid, the project’s 3,800 acres is also hosting upwards of 2,500 sheep grazing among the rows of tracking PV modules. Zach Wald, vice president of engineering, procurement and construction at Vesper, said the key to success in rural solar development is to meet early and often with the community and stakeholders at all levels. “Our community affairs team really did a great job of going out, meeting individuals and spending a spending a lot of time explaining what solar looks like,” Wald said. “What’s the process like and what does it mean for them?”

There’s a $10 Trillion Antidote to Trump’s Climate Backlash by Laura Millan and Rachael Dottle at Bloomberg Green. A decade-long effort to steer the world away from the most severe impacts of climate change has seemingly flunked its most ambitious target and seen green momentum crumble. Yet an influx of at least $10 trillion in clean technology investment is offering promise that progress can still rapidly accelerate. Since the Paris Agreement was finalized in 2015 and triggered a wave of climate commitments from governments, companies and Wall Street, a combination of spluttering global growth, a rush for energy security and the backlash against science under US President Donald Trump has slowed, and threatened to reverse, the push to decarbonize. The pact’s most ambitious objective, to limit the rise in planetary warming at the end of the century to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, looks out of reach, with that threshold likely to be breached this decade, according to the United Nations Environment Program. And dozens of major nations have failed to meet this year’s deadlines to set new, more stringent emissions-cutting strategies.

Slow rollout throttled Biden’s big clean energy ambitions, former staffers say by at Politico. President Joe Biden’s agencies allowed bureaucracy, indecision and fear of repeating past mistakes to undermine their efforts to bankroll a historic green energy revolution, former administration officials wrote in a newly prepared autopsy of the ex-president’s energy agenda. Memories of Solyndra, a solar manufacturer whose 2011 collapse stirred political headaches for the Obama administration, also fed the Biden officials’ risk-aversion, the report concluded. The document said that even as administration officials worked to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to build battery plants, solar farms, electric vehicle factories and other clean energy projects, they underestimated how aggressively the incoming Trump team would seek to undo their programs. The slow rollout also made it harder for Biden’s programs to withstand those attacks, they signaled.“Three years after the first of [Biden-era] laws passed, only a handful of federally funded projects had broken ground,” the report said. “This meant the political theory animating the administration’s approach — that the economic development generated by clean energy projects and industries would create a durable bipartisan coalition — was never truly tested.”

NJ Sierra Club activists in front of the Mercer coal plant. — New Jersey Sierra Club activists in front of the Mercer coal plant.

Burning Money’: Dept. of Energy Directs $100 Million to Modernize Declining Coal Plants
by Anika Jane Beamer at Inside Climate News. The Department of Energy has announced up to $100 million in federal funding for projects modernizing the nation’s remaining coal plants, nearly half of which were slated to close by 2030. The investment, a fraction of what would be needed for a comprehensive upgrade, is unlikely to make coal power more affordable, energy experts and anti-coal advocates say. Energy Chris Wright issued the Notice of Funding Opportunity on Halloween, calling for applications to design, implement, or test refurbishments and retrofit systems that allow coal plants to “operate more efficiently, reliably, and affordably.” [...] The funding comes just a month after the department announced $625 million to “expand and reinvigorate” America’s coal industry. That investment already included $350 million to recommission closed coal power plants or modernize plants and $100 million for the three development areas outlined in Friday’s announcement.

Related:

The EPA Let Companies Estimate Their Own Pollution Levels. We Discovered Real Emissions Are Far Worse by Lisa Song at ProPublica. For decades, noxious, cancer-causing gases poured from some of the nation’s largest industrial polluters, seeping invisibly from cracks in antiquated pipes or billowing out of smokestacks in plumes that choked the communities nearby. And for decades, the Environmental Protection Agency tracked those emissions not by monitoring the air but by relying on a kind of honor system. Companies were allowed to estimate their chemical pollution using methods that even the EPA conceded were often unreliable. In 2023, the EPA received irrefutable proof that these estimates were highly flawed. The agency had required 20 industrial facilities to temporarily install air monitors around their perimeters — known as fence-line monitoring — to see how bad the pollution actually was. The results, compiled now for the first time by ProPublica, were shocking. In virtually every case, the actual emissions were higher — often much higher — than the estimates, ProPublica found. At one steel industry plant near Pittsburgh, a potent carcinogen was found at levels more than 30 times higher than estimated. In Louisiana, a chemical facility recorded levels of another toxic chemical that were 156 times higher.

The National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska (NPR-A) — A stretch of the National Petroleum Reserve

An “Energy Dominance” Agenda Puts Alaskan Wildlife at Risk by Lynda V. Mapes at The Seattle Times. This is the Western Arctic of Alaska, America’s Arctic. Much of it was set aside as a petroleum reserve by President Warren G. Harding in 1923. Congress in 1976 set limits on drilling here, intended to protect the land’s spectacular ecological value. The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), at 23 million acres, is the largest sweep of public land in the country, and it has remained largely undeveloped. Now President Donald Trump in his second term, just as in his first, is calling for full-on extraction of oil and gas here. The Trump plan would open about 82 percent of the NPR-A to oil and gas extraction, including 13 million acres in five designated Special Areas, where protections against drilling were strengthened under the Biden administration. By contrast, Trump, in one of his first executive orders, has called for maximum extraction in a quest for “global energy dominance.”

WEEKLY BLUESKY POST

ECOPINION

Bill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry's tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first Trump administration.

Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it by Michael E. Mann at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Bill Gates, who last week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly) the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history—climate-fueled Melissa—struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact. The very next day a major new climate report (disclaimer: I was a co-author) entitled “a planet on the brink” was published. The report received far less press coverage than the Gates missive. The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul than a sober assessment by the world’s leading climate scientists. Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!” That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis.

Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push by Emily Wilkinson and Avinash Persaud at Climate Change News. Many communities are vulnerable to climate shocks – from the urban poor in Brazil to smallholder farmers in Africa’s Sahel region. But few are more vulnerable than those living in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) around the world, from the Caribbean to the South Pacific. Storms and rising sea levels present an existential risk. They can wipe out annual incomes several times over. We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage wrought on Jamaica by Hurricane Melissa – the strongest hurricane to hit the island since records began – but they are expected to run into tens of billions of dollars, and recovery will take at least a decade. These nations are the “canaries in the coal mine”, signalling the dangers that lie ahead. In 2022, the world set out a plan to tackle the threat. Economists, nonprofits and nation states got behind the Bridgetown Initiative, spearheaded by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

How to Make People Want to Read About Climate Change, an interview conducted by Jackie Flynn Mogensen at Mother Jones. On a reporting trip in July 2023, science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert had an “amazing” stroke of luck. It was her last day in Dominica, in the Caribbean, where she’d been shadowing a group of scientists attempting to translate sperm whale vocalizations with the help of artificial intelligence. While out at sea, she and the research crew witnessed the birth of a sperm whale calf, a dramatic scene which Kolbert described in a piece for the New Yorker as “something out of a marine-mammal Lord of the Rings.” She watched from a boat as dozens of pilot whales and more than 40 Fraser’s dolphins flocked to the area—an event the scientists are still working to understand. For Kolbert, it was a blessing from the reporting gods. Before going into the field, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction says she typically has “a pretty good idea” of what she’s hoping to get. “And sometimes, honestly, you get lucky beyond all belief.” The spontaneous whale birth wasn’t Kolbert’s first fortuitous reporting event. Her new book, Life on a Little-Known Planet, a collection of long-form articles published over the last two decades, mostly in the New Yorker, is full of adventures, both big and small.

A Simple Fix to America’s Soaring Electricity Prices by Tyler H. Norris at The New York Times. Much of the grid sits idle most of the time. On a typical day, only about half of its capacity is in use, and the country’s most efficient gas plants run less than 60 percent of the time. Because the system must be able to handle its busiest hours — those moments during a heat wave or a cold snap when almost every air-conditioner, heater, factory and data center is running at once — those few peaks in demand end up determining everything, including the size of our power plants, the thickness of our wires and the bills we pay. Trim use during those peaks, and the cost savings ripple everywhere. The solution is simple: Ask the largest power users to draw a little less from the grid during the limited hours when it’s most strained. They can do that by running briefly on batteries, using electricity generated on site or shifting workloads. Average Americans would never notice — emails would still send, chatbots would still respond and websites would still load — but the grid would breathe a little easier.

Only 3% of international climate aid going to transitioning communities: ‘This is absurd’ at The Guardian. Less than 3% of international aid to slash carbon emissions is supporting a “just transition” for workers and communities away from polluting industries, according to a new report. Released one week before the start of major United Nations climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil, the analysis from the climate and development non-profit ActionAid warns that the world’s response to the climate crisis risks deepening inequality rather than addressing it. It also reveals a “hidden reason that we’ve not seen climate action at scale,” said Teresa Anderson, the organization’s global climate justice lead. “People are apparently being forced to choose between a safe job and a secure job and a safe planet,” she said. “These projects aren’t doing nearly enough to reassure people that they don’t have to make that choice.”

Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, appearing to have eaten the canary.

Alito’s Oil Investments Pollute Contractor Accountability Case by Freddy Brewster at The Lever. Justice Samuel Alito has a financial stake in a pending Supreme Court case that could have far-reaching implications on whether states can hold federal contractors accountable for environmental damage and other corporate malfeasance within their borders. The case involves oil and gas companies urging the high court to transfer state-based pollution lawsuits to the federal court system, where they may expect a more business-friendly legal venue. Alito holds stock in one of the fossil fuel companies that could benefit from the transfer, but he has so far ignored calls for his recusal from the case.The Supreme Court case, named Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, was originally brought to the high court in January by Chevron, The Texas Company, ExxonMobil, and Burlington Resources Oil & Gas Company, a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips. According to financial disclosures, Alito owns up to $15,000 of ConocoPhillips stock and has other fossil fuel holdings.

RESEARCH & STUDIES

Invisible, Skyscraper-Sized Waves Found to Be “Eating Away” at Greenland’s Glaciers. Scientists from the University of Zurich (UZH) and the University of Washington (UW) have, for the first time, used fiber-optic technology to measure how the impact and movement of falling icebergs stir together glacial meltwater and warmer seawater below the surface.“The warmer water increases seawater-induced melt erosion and eats away at the base of the vertical wall of ice at the glacier’s edge. This, in turn, amplifies glacier calving and the associated mass loss from ice sheets,” says Andreas Vieli, a professor at UZH’s Department of Geography and co-author of the study.

Recycling plastic increases the amount of toxic chemicals it contains. A recent study published in the Journal of Chromatography A, the recycling process increases the levels of toxic chemicals in polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a type of plastic commonly used for food packaging.

Terminal Trouble: Pollution Violations at America’s LNG Export Terminals. This report from EIP shows that all seven of the U.S. LNG export terminals that were fully operational at the end of 2024 violated the Clean Air Act over the last five years. The report also found that five of them exceeded their water pollution control permits over this period, dumping into waterways illegal amounts of suspended solids, bacteria, zinc, copper, oil and grease, among other pollutants.

New Data Shows Just Four Global North Countries Responsible for Derailing Oil and Gas Phase-out Progress since Paris Agreement. Oil Change International found that since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, just four Global North countries — the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Norway — derailed potential for global progress in phasing out oil and gas by collectively increasing their oil and gas production by nearly 40% between 2015 and 2024. In the rest of the world, combined oil and gas extraction dropped by 2% over this same period. Global North countries as a whole paid only $280 billion in climate finance to the rest of the world since 2025, a fraction of the needs-based estimates, while enabling oil and gas companies they headquarter to rake in profits of more than $1.3 trillion).

Poultry Plants Consistently Violate Salmonella Standards, Report Finds. The USDA sets standards for salmonella testing at processing plants, but when plants violate the standards, the agency can’t prevent companies from selling the chicken or turkey. Major brands—including Perdue, Butterball, Foster Farms, Koch Foods, Costco (Lincoln Premium Poultry), and Mary’s (Pitman Farms)—have been in violation of the standards for multiple years running, according to a new report from Farm Forward, an animal welfare organization.