The two biggest pension funds in California missed out on US$17 billion in income by holding onto their fossil fuel investments for a decade too long, Fossil Free California reports in a study released last week.

Chevron Corporation’s attempt to build a “moral case” for fossil fuels in a recent pamphlet for employees suggests the California-based colossal fossil is under ever-increasing pressure to justify its raison d’etre in the face of an escalating climate crisis, climate journalist Emily Atkin suggests in her daily climate newsletter, HEATED.

The sprawling private prison system in the United States is a direct beneficiary of a climate crisis that is putting millions of people at the mercy of a growing “border-industrial complex”, author and journalist Todd Miller writes in a recent opinion piece for Al Jazeera.

Two-thirds of Canadians want the country’s response to the climate crisis to continue or accelerate under Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal government, and nearly 60% were dissatisfied with the Conservative Party’s climate platform in the recent federal election, according to polling results released last week by Clean Energy Canada.

Alberta is on the hook for as many as 1,400 more abandoned oil and gas wells and associated infrastructure after the officers and directors of Calgary-based Houston Oil & Gas Ltd. laid off their staff and contractors, shut down the company, and walked away from their responsibility to clean up after themselves.

Countries are still increasing their greenhouse gas emissions and scaling back their investments in GHG reductions, making 2020 a crucial year to turn the tide on the climate crisis.

Next year’s federal budget must acknowledge the hundreds of millions of dollars Canadians are already paying due to climate change and its impacts, the 22-member Green Budget Coalition says in a set of recommendations released last week.

The accelerating decline of the U.S. fracking industry looked likely to claim its highest-profile victim to date as Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy, once the country’s second-largest gas producer, warned last week that a crippling, US$9.7-billion debt might prevent it from continuing as a viable business.

Virginia is on track to accelerate its drive for carbon-free energy and join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern United States, after Democrats took control of the state legislature in off-year elections last week.

Vancity Community Investment Bank has announced plans to acquire CoPower Inc., a Toronto-based green financing platform that offers green bonds to investors with as little as C$5,000 to spend.

Montreal’s Concordia University plans to divest about C$14 million in coal, oil, and gas companies and redirect its entire C$243-million endowment to sustainable investments by 2025.

As part of its pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2045, Scotland has begun an ambitious program to restore its degraded peatlands, stating that the boggy ecosystems, which at present cover 3% of the planet’s surface, store twice as much carbon as all of its forests combined.

The green economy and climate change are shaping up as a key focal point for the re-elected Trudeau government, with seven cabinet portfolios set to play “key roles in helping Canada adapt to the rapidly expanding global green economy and create jobs in clean energy,” the Globe and Mail reports, citing sources familiar with the government’s emerging priorities.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is acquiring a major North American wind farm operators, in what Greentech Media describes as one of the U.S. industry’s biggest mergers and acquisitions deals of the year.

A booming solar+storage sector is catching the attention of a major U.S. investment news service, with 85 projects totalling 8,921 megawatts of storage and 4,175 MW of storage either under construction or set to begin.

North Carolina-based Duke Energy is insisting that natural gas plants built today are critical lynchpins in its strategy to become 100% carbon-free by 2050, dismissing some stakeholders’ predictions that they will be stranded assets long before that date, with future generations left to pick up the tab.

Restoration of Tropical Forests places #5 on the Drawdown list of climate solutions, with potential to cut atmospheric carbon dioxide by 61.23 gigatons by 2050.

The United Kingdom has issued a temporary moratorium on shale gas fracking, citing the industry’s inability to “reliably predict and control tremors”.

The world’s seven biggest fossil companies, including ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell, must cut their oil and gas production 35% by 2040 to avoid driving average global warming above 1.5°C, according to a new analysis published last week by UK-based Carbon Tracker.

Years of lavish funding for new offshore fossil developments are on track to deliver little or no return to their investors due to low oil prices, although a more recent generation of projects may fare better, industry analysts Rystad Energy reported last week.

Alberta has reclaimed the dubious distinction of being the only North American jurisdiction with virtually no government support for energy efficiency programs, after mostly cancelling the rebate and incentive programs that had delivered C$692 million in energy savings, $850 million in economic impact, and 5.7 million tonnes of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions in their first two years of operation.

The lobby group representing CEOs of Canada’s biggest corporations is calling on businesses to disclose the long-term risks they face as a result of the climate crisis.

As the tide begins to turn against natural gas, with insurers thinking twice about underwriting projects and the industry’s social licence starting to evaporate, the industry is scrambling to salvage its reputation as a relatively low-carbon alternative to coal.

The overwrought grief that greeted Encana Corporation’s decision to move its Calgary head office to the United States shows Canada and Alberta at a crossroads, facing an increasingly obvious choice between yesterday’s energy options and tomorrow’s.

With insurance required at every stage in oil and gas industry projects, the companies that do the insuring have the power to stop the fossil business in its tracks. And some future insurance brokers say the industry has an ethical responsibility to do just that.

Alberta has introduced a new C$30-per-tonne carbon cap-and-trade system that covers most of its biggest industrial greenhouse gas emitters, but will cost them $330 million less next year because of looser compliance requirements.

Financial media are predicting a devastating run of corporate reports from some of the world’s biggest fossil companies, with low oil prices, weak customer demand, and shrinking profit margins on chemical production hitting an industry whose investors are looking for higher payouts on their shares.

Murray Energy, the U.S. coal mining company whose CEO was an early Donald Trump supporter and later begged his successful candidate for an industry bailout, has become the latest in a series of nearly four dozen mining firms to declare bankruptcy over the last decade.

More than 27 countries, excluding the United States, promised US$9.8 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund (GCF) by the end of a two-day pledging conference last week in Paris, aimed at beginning the process of replenishing the badly-depleted fund.

A destabilized climate could lead to a precipitous decline in property values, cutting communities off from the tax base they need to fund climate adaptation while banks stop lending in areas that experience repeated floods, according to an analysis released earlier this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Tesla Inc. has been making waves over the last week with the latest in a series of announcements for its long-promised, long-awaited solar roof. But one industry publication is declaring itself unconvinced.

The philanthropists backing the UK-based Extinction Rebellion and other street-level activist groups are looking at their investment as money well spent, based on what they see as a demonstrable need for street climate protests and a deep trust in the groups’ “very clear theory of change”, veteran climate writer David Roberts reports on Vox.

With production costs falling and green power policies on the rise, wind energy could soon be positioned to meet the world’s demand for electricity 18 times over, the International Energy Agency (IEA) concluded in an analysis released last week.

India is planning 55 gigawatts of new solar and wind development along its often contentious border with Pakistan, according to a dispatch last week by Agence France-Presse.

In the wake of last week’s federal election results, two different clean transition organizations are pointing to the climate policy problem now facing Conservative politicians in Canada, and the opportunity for governments to invest in the shift off carbon.

With more oil and gas wells abandoned than drilled in Alberta this year, decommissioning dead rigs is the only business showing any kind of growth in Western Canada’s struggling oilpatch.

Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, in what Climate Liability News says is the first case to accuse the colossal fossil of fraud against both consumers and investors over climate risks.

Greater community engagement, the imperative for national carbon budgets, and the need to recognize and harness the power of central and public banks are takeaways identified by British Columbia sustainability specialist Guy Dauncey in a recent analysis of 10 Green New Deals published in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada.

The Canadian climate community is taking a victory lap and getting ready for the hard work ahead, after this week’s federal election largely delivered on the hope that the climate crisis would emerge as a key issue setting the composition of the country’s new government.

Visits to the Wood Buffalo Food Bank in Fort McMurray are up 300% from 10 years ago, as the area’s fossil fuel workers and their families suffer the bitter consequences of trusting in the boom-and-bust economics of international oil and gas production.

As election results rolled in last night in downtown Ottawa, climate hawks assessed the results of the first campaign in Canadian history where climate change was at the top of the political agenda. Now, they say the next step is to hold a reconfigured parliament accountable for the domestic action and international commitments that will make the country a world leader in responding to the climate crisis.

After months of open advocacy, thousands if not millions of dollars in campaign spending, and direct collaboration with the federal Conservative Party that prompted a complaint to Elections Canada, the fossil industry is confronting the election outcome it feared most: a Liberal minority government.

As the rhetoric began to fly in the dying days of #elxn43, with some voices hinting at a new push toward western Canadian separation, one of Canada’s leading environmental thinkers warned that “Albertans can kiss their economic future goodbye” if extreme oil development became national policy.

While Canada has just concluded the first election in its history that focused in large part on climate change, the campaign still failed to produce a conversation about a future free of fossil fuels, reflecting the extent to which “oil is part and parcel of our political, economic, and cultural framework,” Corporate Mapping Project researcher Angela Carter told National Observer in a recent interview.

Canadian corporations are just beginning to catch on to a wider global trend and speed up their renewable energy purchases, and Alberta has the right mix of solar and wind resources and skilled work force to meet its share of the demand, CBC reports.

However hard they may be trying, Canada’s tar sands/oil sands aren’t moving far enough, fast enough to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, Maclean’s magazine writes, in a painstaking analysis that separates the industry’s genuine efforts to reduce its carbon emissions and carbon intensity from its spin about delivering a low-carbon energy source.

Market analysts at Fitch Solutions Macro Research are looking to the Midwestern United States to supply a large share of the 100 gigawatts of new solar capacity it sees the country adding over the next decade.

The first nine months of 2019 saw 7,000 fewer workers on Alberta’s oil and gas drilling rigs thanks to low commodity prices, full pipelines, and investors increasingly skittish to bankroll further expansion of the infrastructure necessary to get fossil fuels to market.

Two new wind farm developments are making headlines this week, with the Henvey Inlet First Nation announcing completion of the country’s biggest wind installation on Indigenous land and a company linked to U.S. mega-investor Warren Buffett putting C$200 million into a 117.6-megawatt project in Alberta.

The world’s renewable energy industries may be poised to overtake fossil fuels decades faster than forecast, as production prices plummet and renewables’ investment returns begin to dramatically outpace oil and gas.

Colossal fossil ExxonMobil will stand accused of misleading investors by masking tens of billions of dollars in climate-related costs when proceedings get under way next week in a civil case brought by New York State attorney general Letitia James.

Solar, wind, battery storage, energy efficiency, and demand flexibility can reliably replace coal in Alberta at less cost than new gas plants, according to “game-changing” new analysis released last week by the Calgary-based Pembina Institute.

The 70 unionized workers and dozen administrative staff who are about to lose their jobs at Alberta’s Highvale coal mine face “a lot of uncertainty” as the province’s latest budget approaches, with a change in government throwing their job transition plans into doubt.

Colossal fossil Royal Dutch Shell has “no choice” but to invest in new, long-lasting fossil projects, a defiant CEO Ben van Beurden told Reuters this week, in an interview in which he decried the “demonization” of oil and gas and “unjustified” worries that the company’s business model is unsustainable.

Major corporations have received a two-year ultimatum from Bank of England Governor Mark Carney to devise their own approach to reporting the climate risks they face, or have global regulators develop a set of rules and make them mandatory.

While consistently claiming to support political action to get global warming under control, Google has made “substantial” donations to “some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington,” The Guardian reports, as part of its multi-story exposé last week on the forces driving the climate crisis.

With climate scientists, the United Nations, and millions of #ClimateStrike protesters around the world demanding faster, deeper carbon cuts, the world’s colossal fossils are poised to increase their oil production by seven million barrels per day over the next 12 years, in a strategy to generate one last, big surge of profits and emissions before demand for their product collapses.

Unsubsidized renewable energy and battery storage are so much less expensive than conventional electricity generation that they will likely replace all coal generation in the United States within a decade, the head of the country’s biggest power utility told a conference last week.

Two of the biggest investment funds in the United States, BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group, are consistently voting against shareholder resolutions calling for faster, more effective action to address the climate crisis.

A Vancouver venture capital firm, Renewal Funds, has raised nearly C$145 million to invest in environmental technology and sustainable consumer products.

A group of nearly four dozen Canadian business leaders has sent the parties running in the federal election an eight-point plan that calls on them to “renew Canada’s climate leadership” if they are a part of the country’s next government.

Norway’s biggest pension fund, Kommunal Landspensjonskasse (KLP), has sold off US$58 million in stocks and bonds in Canadian tar sands/oil sands companies and declared it won’t back companies that draw more than 5% of their revenue from bitumen production.

The hotly-contested Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia may be in line for investment dollars from a multi-billion-dollar sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) is looking to carbon pricing as an option to reduce the otherwise “astounding” cost of bringing the state’s electricity system to zero emissions by 2040, though it says it won’t take action without a go-ahead from Governor Andrew Cuomo and state stakeholders.

U.S. utility Xcel Energy has announced a landmark, US$250-million deal to replace coal-fired electricity with a 240-megawatt solar power plant to power a steel mill in Colorado.

Six years ago, a group of about 30 “lionesses” of international climate diplomacy gathered at a country estate in the borders region of Scotland to lay the groundwork for the 2015 Paris Agreement.

While Canadian politicians and fossil executives haggle over national climate and energy policy, a global wave of technological disruption is emerging as a “real threat to Canadian economic health,” analysts Tom Rand and Mike Andrade argue in the Globe and Mail.

Big U.S. utility PacifiCorp is laying out a strategy that relies heavily on solar, energy storage, and wind and speeds up the phaseout of its economically fragile coal plants in a new integrated resource plan (IRP) covering investments through 2038.

The U.S. coal baron and avid Donald Trump donor who begged his influential friend for an industry bailout, after suing TV comedian John Oliver for calling him a “geriatric Dr. Evil”, has been given until October 14 to cover his company’s outstanding debt to its creditors.

German coal and power plant giant RWE, Europe’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, is promising to make its operations carbon neutral by 2040, prompting climate organizations to accuse the company of spinning an inevitable business transition as climate protection.

Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft may be taking promising steps to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions. But they’re a lot farther from severing ties with the fossil companies that take advantage of their products and services, The Associated Press reports.

The City of Toronto unanimously adopted a climate emergency resolution Wednesday morning and reaffirmed its plan to bring its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero before 2050.

At a time when 70 to 75% of Canadians are largely disengaged from a political arena often dominated by “unproductive partisan pot shots and misplaced accountability,” getting serious about climate solutions is one way for politicians to earn trust, two of the country’s leading environmentalists argue in a post for the David Suzuki Foundation (DSF).

With the latest trend report for fossil fuel consumption projecting higher carbon dioxide emissions through 2050, Canadian fossils are expressing the odd view that the million or more people who took to the streets for #ClimateStrike Friday are naïve to expect a rapid phasedown of fossil production.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau promised last week that a second-term government under his leadership would invest C$3 billion over 10 years to plant two billion trees across the country. But a Liberal Party backgrounder says the cost of the program would be “offset” by revenue from the controversial and financially fragile Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Week three of Canada’s federal election saw a flurry of climate, energy, and environment promises from the four national party leaders, coinciding with a major United Nations climate summit in New York, dozens of successful #ClimateStrike marches across the country, and the latest IPCC report laying out the devastating impacts the climate crisis is wreaking on the world’s oceans and ice cover.

The tepid results of last week’s United Nations Climate Summit pointed to the need for political will to match the urgency of the climate crisis, the opportunities in climate solutions, and rising public demand that governments take action, E3G co-founder and CEO Nick Mabey writes for Climate Home News.

News media should begin reporting companies’ greenhouse gas emissions alongside their stock market results to help people understand the connection between economic activity and environmental impacts, a Royal Roads University professor told CBC last week.

Mining and tar sands/oil sands producers Teck Resources, Suncor Energy, and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. took three of the four top spots in an annual listing of Canadian mining companies by gross revenues, raking in a combined C$36.1 billion in 2018—a year when fossils complained bitterly about how hard they were finding it to operate in Canada.

With 77 smaller countries pledging to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but the world’s biggest emitters largely failing to step up, UN Secretary General António Guterres’ much-anticipated Climate Action Summit is being cast as a missed opportunity to gain ground in the fight to get the climate crisis under control.

The world’s leading international climate science agencies are predicting 2.9 to 3.4°C average global warming by 2100 based on governments’ current climate commitments, “a shift likely to bring catastrophic change across the globe,” The Guardian reports.

A Montreal-based company is proposing to build a C$23-billion pipeline from Alberta to New Brunswick that it says can succeed where the controversial Energy East megaproject failed.

Legally binding, five-year milestones for greenhouse gas reductions, tax incentives for cleantech businesses, and a Just Transition Act to support workers caught in a transforming economy are elements of a plan unveiled yesterday by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau to bring Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050.

With the fossil industry gearing up to spend US$1.4 trillion to increase production over the next five years, climate hawks were at the Climate Action Summit in New York this week with the news that 530 organizations in 76 countries had signed the Lofoten Declaration, calling for an oil and gas phaseout to deliver climate security and a strong economy.

With delegates and protesters from around the world gathered to push toward faster, deeper greenhouse gas reductions, the president of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce was at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week to lobby for the Canadian fossil sector.

The University of California system has decided to drop all fossil fuel investments from its US$13.4-billion endowment and its $70-billion pension fund.

Just when they thought they were ready for the decline of gasoline- and diesel-fuelled cars, driven by surging electric vehicle sales, a mounting aversion to plastics is undercutting fossil producers’ latest plan to save their industry, according to market analysts at New York-based MSCI.

After months of preparations and arm-twisting, the United Nations is signalling that as many as 36 countries could announce more ambitious climate targets at today’s global climate action summit in New York City. 
But as delegates gather, the New York Times is pointing to a fundamental disconnect: the diplomats at UN headquarters and the four million protesters who thronged the world’s cities at last Friday’s #ClimateStrike live in separate worlds.

Global tech giant Google announced a cluster of renewable energy deals totalling 1.6 gigawatts last week, just days after an analyst report placed the “contracted pipeline” for new solar capacity in the United States at 37.9 GW, driven largely by corporate purchases.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is out with a detailed, exquisitely-designed and -illustrated look at the offshore wind boom now getting under way off the east coast of the United States.

The fossil industry that has poured millions of dollars into climate denial is now working to burnish its image with increasingly skeptical investors, just enough to convince them that the future of oil and gas in a warming world is…bright enough.

If the world ran on renewable energy, it would never be at risk of going to war for oil, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben argues in a post for The Guardian.

The City of Mississauga is going out for public comment on its draft of a 10-year, C$450-million climate plan aimed at cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050.

With the United Nations Climate Summit coming up in New York City next week, investor groups with tens of trillions of dollars at their command are calling for more effective government action on climate change and deforestation. But that isn’t stopping some of Wall Street’s biggest asset management companies from voting against climate change resolutions that would begin to bring colossal fossils like ExxonMobil and Duke Energy into the fight.

The wealthy economies whose contributions are expected to pay for climate action in developing countries are failing to fund efforts to adapt to the climate crisis, with just under one-fifth of the dollars secured in 2017 earmarked to help communities adapt to climate change impacts, according to a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Canada’s biggest oil refinery came in for some unwanted scrutiny and Alberta put itself forward as a more stable source of supply in the wake of the devastating drone strike on a Saudi oil production facility over the weekend. But within days of the attack, analysts were already talking down the impact the attack by Houthi rebels would have on global oil supplies or prices.

A steady stream of hurricane-force storms has Atlantic Canada rethinking its approach to electricity grids, shoreline defences, and even tree planting, while insurance companies brace themselves for damage claims that are set to double every five to seven years.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC)’s first green bond ever issued in Canadian dollars has generated C$750 million in investment capital, the agency reported earlier this month.

Enbridge Corporation is proposing to build a new natural gas liquids extraction plant and pipeline based near Chetwynd, British Columbia, at a cost of C$2.5 billion.

Construction challenges, steadfast opposition from landowners along the route, shocking safety and health risks at two tank farms, and the looming risk of construction “man camps” near B.C. Indigenous communities all call into question the federal government’s stated belief that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will open on schedule in 2022, Vancouver-based Stand.earth concludes in a blockbuster report released Wednesday.
The resulting delays could boost the project’s completion costs, undercutting its financial viability and turning the now publicly-owned pipeline megaproject into a “white elephant”, Stand says.

A new study is predicting that global oil demand will peak in 2022, hit a plateau until 2030, then decline sharply, in what the Reuters news agency is calling “one of the most aggressive forecasts yet for peak oil”.

Solar is on track to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2035 as renewable energy costs continue to fall, making it easier to electrify previously stubborn sectors like transportation and construction, according to the fourth in a series of annual analyses published by renewable energy company Statkraft.

The developing world will remember which rich countries kept their promises and which ones didn’t when it comes time to replenish the Green Climate Fund, the most important United Nations financing mechanism that will enable the majority of the world’s countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change impacts.

Countries must invest US$1.8 trillion in climate adaptation funding by 2030 to prevent a world of “climate apartheid”, in which the wealthiest pay to protect themselves from sea level rise and mounting food shortages while everyone else suffers.

Plummeting share values may soon drive up to seven small Canadian fossil companies out of the Standard & Poors/Toronto Stock Exchange Composite Index, a key listing that brings businesses to the attention of investors who might consider buying their stocks, according to a list of potential deletions published by analysts at AltaCorp Capital.

India’s coal sector faces a multitude of serious threats, as customers report they have more supply than they need, water supplies run short, and affordable renewable energy and hydropower increasingly undercut demand for their product, states a report released last week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) and the Applied Economics Clinic at Boston’s Tufts University.

One of Canada’s biggest commercial real estate companies, Oxford Properties, is planning to install a million square feet (92,900 square metres) of rooftop solar panels on its retail and industrial properties across North America by 2022.

The world’s most colossal fossils have invested US$50 billion in less than two years in new oil and gas projects that undercut the fight against climate change, according to a new analysis by the UK-based Carbon Tracker think tank, the first ever to assess whether individual fossil projects would be financially sustainable in a low-carbon world.

Global renewable energy investment is on track to hit US$2.6 trillion in this decade, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance study released last week by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Frankfurt School’s UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance.

The state government in Rajasthan, India has laid out a plan to install 50 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2025 and establish itself as a global solar hub, PV Magazine reports, in a post republished by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

Solar plus storage is already cost-competitive across much of southern and northern Europe, and will hit grid parity across the continent by 2025, according to a new study conducted by a solar photovoltaic researcher with support from industry.

A marathon, seven-hour climate forum on CNN Wednesday evening gave 2020 Democrats a first opportunity to debate their climate strategies and try to differentiate themselves on an issue on which many of the leading candidates largely agree.

The state government in Queensland, Australia has gone to the extraordinary length of extinguishing Aboriginal title over 1,385 hectares of land to permit construction of the mammoth Adani coal mine, even as financial analysis concludes the project would be “unbankable and unviable” without billions of dollars in subsidies.

Southern Alberta is drawing international attention after the province approved Canada’s biggest-ever solar-electric installation, the 600-megawatt, privately-financed Travers Solar project in Vulcan County.

The federal and British Columbia governments are getting mixed reviews for their plan to partly decarbonize the province’s emerging liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry by electrifying upstream fracking operations.

Denmark’s $20-billion MP Pension fund is selling off its shares in 10 of the world’s most colossal fossils, after concluding they aren’t serious enough about meeting their responsibilities under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

With parts of southern and eastern Australia suffering through a winter of intense heat and drought, and the Australian Medical Association declaring health emergency, former U.S. secretary of State John Kerry called for immediate action on the climate crisis and took what The Guardian called “veiled swipes” at governments that aren’t responding.

The east coast of the United States is on the verge of a 19.3-gigawatt boom in new offshore wind capacity by 2035 that would dwarf the 30 MW currently operating offshore across the country, according to analysis released last week by S&P Global Market Intelligence and S&P Global Platts.

Canada and the United Kingdom both announced new contributions to the United Nations Green Climate Fund (GCF) during last weekend’s G7 meeting in France, but Canada’s announcement brought immediate concern the level of funding would short-change the countries most affected by the climate crisis.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced plans to reboot his company’s lagging solar division by offering rooftop panels for rent in six U.S. states, just days before Walmart filed a lawsuit over seven fires it linked to Tesla rooftop installations between 2012 and 2018.

Turkey has either indefinitely postponed or officially cancelled an estimated 70 gigawatts of new coal capacity since 2009, as a faltering economy and a determined environmental movement all but permanently buried the country’s earlier plans to expand its thermal coal power plant fleet.

If Canada wants transit agencies to buy more electric buses, it should introduce the kind of simple, predictable, easily accessible funding that is jump-starting adoption of electric vehicles, Fernando Melo of Clean Energy Canada and Robert Parsons of the University of Manitoba argue in a post for Policy Options.

The latest in a series of offshore oil spills has roused the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (CNLOPB) to express some displeasure at fossils’ ability to meet their obligations for environmental protection.

Undaunted by 28% unemployment, and the fact that Marie Le Pen’s xenophobic National Rally party continues to appeal to a majority of his constituents, the Green Party mayor of an impoverished coastal town near Calais is determined to prove that strong environmental policy means a better life for working people.

The potentially devastating economic and financial impact of unrestrained climate change has been coming into focus in several recent news stories, with global GDP on track to fall as much as 7.2% by 2100, accountants and ratings agencies taking note, and an economic historian warning the United States Federal Reserve to take action against a risk that could trigger the next global economic crash.

The Calgary-based pipeliner that bought Kinder Morgan Canada this week says it isn’t keen to make a bid for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, given the “noise” associated with the now taxpayer-owned project.

The Trump administration is showing a distinct double standard in a series of decisions to deregulate fossil fuel development while slowing down the landmark Vineyard Wind offshore wind farm in Massachusetts.

There were sighs of relief in California earlier this month, after utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric confirmed it will honour all its contracts with renewable energy providers as it goes through bankruptcy reorganization.

Corporate renewable energy purchases are on track to set another all-time record in 2019, with the United States still driving a strong growth trend and China moving toward a more prominent role.

China is sending out decidedly mixed signals on its climate and energy strategy, with an influential think tank calling for the country to cap its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, five years ahead of schedule, but the country’s financial institutions delivering at least US$1 billion in “green” financing to coal-related projects in the first six months of this year.

The Royal Bank of Scotland is phasing out financing for tar sands/oil sands exploration and extraction, and limiting its funding for fossil projects in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage is declaring herself “disappointed” that her province lost 14,300 jobs last month, bringing the unemployment rate up to 7%, in spite of healthy second-quarter fossil profits driven up by a 1% corporate tax cut introduced by Savage’s boss, Premier Jason Kenney.

Four of the world’s leading emerging economies are calling on rich countries to meet their international targets for pre-2020 climate action and stepped-up climate finance, but pointedly pushing back on UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ call to all nations to arrive at his climate action summit next month with concrete decarbonization plans.

In the wake of the IPCC land use report earlier this month, with its urgent focus on food supplies, soil conservation, and natural methods of storing carbon, follow-up news stories in the United States and Canada are tracing the steps farmers are already taking to shift their practices.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) issued its first emergency alert since January 2014, after record demand driven by a summer heat wave last week pushed electricity prices above $9,000 per megawatt-hour and reduced the sprawling state’s electricity reserves from at least 3,000 to less than 2,300 MW.

Four years late and far over budget, Chevron Corporation has finally flipped the switch on a carbon capture and storage (CCS) system for the mammoth, $72-billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that has accounted for half of the annual increase in Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Wichita, Kansas-based conglomerate Koch Industries has sold off its substantial position in the Canadian tar sands/oil sands, selling thousands of hectares of land to Cavalier Energy Inc., a subsidiary of Calgary-based Paramount Resources Ltd., the Financial Post revealed Wednesday.

British Columbia is taking heat from two different news outlets for its avid support of natural gas fracking to feed its liquefied natural gas (LNG) boom, just as a new study reasserts the connection between fracking and a continuing increase in climate-busting methane emissions.

In a series of letters issued late last month, a group of 32 environmental, Indigenous, and citizens’ organizations led by Stand.earth is demanding commitments from more than two dozen major insurance companies to stop underwriting tar sands/oil sands projects, beginning with the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

ExxonMobil faced accusations last week that it pressured possible witnesses in a climate fraud case brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, just as analysts pointed to continuing business challenges in the colossal fossil’s earnings report for the second three months of 2019.

Subsidy-free solar is now less expensive than grid electricity in virtually every city across China, according to a paper published this week in the journal Nature Energy.

Oil and gas fracking producers in Texas and New Mexico will be looking for more than US$9 billion over the next decade, just to drill new wells to dispose of their polluted water, according to analysis published late last month.

India is planning to cut its coal imports by at least one-third over the next five years, while boosting domestic coal mining and renewable energy generation to take up the slack.

Australia is trying to water down references to the climate “crisis”, the long-term goal of 1.5°C average global warming, a ban on new coal-fired generation, and an end to fossil subsidies in the final declaration from this week’s annual Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Tuvalu, according to an annotated draft seen and reported by Climate Home News.

A stunning new international analysis shows increasingly affordable wind and solar power and electric vehicles crushing oil on price and efficiency—even as Canadian fossil analysts continue to predict future growth for tar sands/oil sands production, and industry boosters tout their “marathon” effort to convince investors to take their product seriously.

Energy Efficiency Alberta is earning praise at the national level, even as it faces an uncertain future in its home province, after reporting C$692 million in energy savings, $850 million in economic impact, and 5.7 million tonnes of potential greenhouse gas emission reductions over its first two years of operation.

In a move that Oil Change International is hailing as a “massive step forward in climate leadership”, the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced late last month that it will cut off the billions of euros per year that it invests in fossil fuel projects by the end of next year.

Natural resource giant BHP Group will link executive pay to reductions in the company’s greenhouse gas emissions, and will include downstream or “Scope 3” emissions in the calculation, in what the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis calls a “landmark commitment” that shows “leadership towards implementation of the Paris Agreement”.

In an exclusive interview with The Energy Mix, Tamara Vrooman, President and CEO of Vancity Credit Union, talked about the next steps the federal government could take down the road toward decarbonization, after getting at the short-term wins that she and Steven Guilbeault of Montreal looked into as co-chairs of the federal Advisory Council on Climate Action.

Alert to the steadily improving economics of wind and solar—and growing ever more wary of natural gas investments becoming stranded on the fossil slag heap—U.S. state regulators are increasingly pushing utilities towards renewables, with Republican states leading the transition.

With the federal election less than 100 days away, news reports last week focused on the financial action around the upcoming campaign, provinces’ mixed reaction to programs the Trudeau government wants to fund out of carbon tax revenue, the possibility of extreme fossil ideology uniting Canadians behind a more moderate alternative, and the prospects for a Liberal-Green-NDP coalition that would truly be those ideologues’ worst nightmare.

With a national think tank positioning energy efficiency as a kind of “all-of-the-above” strategy to deliver lower home energy bills, boost business productivity, and cut pollution, the industry’s newly-minted trade association is embarking on an initial campaign to help energy efficiency companies and professionals see their own place in the sector.

Minnesota is the latest U.S. state to consider grid-scale storage as a possible alternative to natural gas peaker plants, under a new state law that requires power companies to include storage in their long-range plans.

General Electric and BlackRock Real Assets, described by Greentech Media as an “asset management firm and heavyweight renewables investor,” have unveiled a joint investment in distributed solar and solar+storage projects for commercial, industrial, and public sector power consumers.

Offshore wind developers Ørsted and Equinor and industrial workers along the eastern United States coast were the biggest winners last week as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced contracts for 1.7 gigawatts of offshore wind while signing his state’s Green New Deal into law.

Demand for oil tankers will shrink by one-third by 2050 if countries stay on track to hold average global warming to 1.5°C, meaning that some existing ships may ultimately become stranded assets, according to an analysis released last week by consultants at Maritime Strategies International (MSI) for the European Climate Foundation.

Only about half of the 4.5 million people living in the Zimbabwe capital of Harare and four satellite towns have access to municipal water supplies, with some suburbs going weeks without water and reported cases of typhoid beginning to emerge, Climate Home News reports.

With utilities in two southern U.S. states resorting to planned outages to stop their equipment from sparking wildfires during dry, windy conditions, power users are looking for more reliable electricity—and solar and storage battery providers are stepping up to respond.

Calgary-based Pieridae Energy Inc., the company behind the C$10-billion Goldboro liquefied natural gas (LNG) development in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, has postponed the go/no-go decision on its investment by a year.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s recently-announced climate strategy would end up costing more than the current government’s policies and leave Canada farther from achieving its Harper-era carbon reduction targets for 2030, according to a report released last week by Clean Prosperity.

A new three-year projection from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), showing renewable energy growing 10 times faster than fossil-generated electricity by 2022, is being taken as official confirmation that the country’s shift to clean power is here to stay.

The southeastern U.S. state of Georgia has emerged as the country’s hottest new market for solar, driven largely by data centre demand from tech giant Facebook and regional reaction to the punishing, 30% tariff the Trump administration imposed on solar components from China in 2018.

The frequency of major climate disasters has reached one per week around the world, a top United Nations official warns, in a new report that calls for developing countries to prepare now for the “profound impact” they will continue to face.

Buildings, coastlines, and Northern communities in Canada face the most serious risks from climate change, according to a new report produced for the federal Treasury Board by the Council of Canadian Academies.

The mammoth Tennessee Valley Authority is planning to add up to 14 gigawatts (14 billion watts) of new solar capacity and five GW of storage by 2038, in a bid to draw business investors and data centres to the southeastern United States.

Climate change is set to surge to the top of the European Union agenda, at least temporarily, with Finland beginning its six-month term in the European Council presidency this month.

A federal export credit agency with a history of massively supporting fossil industry exports over clean technology is taking fire for failing to consider the environmental, human rights, and ethical implications of its financial support to Canadian businesses.

Undaunted by a premier avowedly hostile to renewable energy, communities across Alberta are embracing solar electricity as good business, with the small southern town of Raymond determined to be the first in Canada to power itself entirely by the sun.

The Indigenous-led Project Reconciliation is expected to announce a C$6.9-billion bid for majority ownership of the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline as early as next week, with the group’s leadership promising a proposal that will “work for all sides”.

One of the world’s biggest fossil companies is admitting that some of its “more complicated to extract” oil and gas resources will have to either be sold off or left in the ground.

The Trudeau government closed out the spring legislative season last week with the final version of a regulation that sets a carbon price for large emitters, includes a price break for steel and fertilizer companies, and creates incentives for emitters to invest in cleantech companies and support decarbonization projects overseas.

While the Trudeau government disappointed its climate allies with its much-anticipated decision to re-approve the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, it has also crafted a more complicated record on energy and carbon by committing to C$70 billion in low-carbon investment over a 12-year span, reporter Sandy Garossino writes in a provocative post last week for National Observer.

Methane leaks from liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other parts of the gas production chain are making the supposedly “clean fuel” a climate pollutant on par with coal, with the vast majority of the new development taking place in Canada and the United States, CBC reports.

Chubb Ltd. is becoming the first U.S. insurance company to refuse coverage or investment dollars to companies that draw more than 30% of their revenue from coal mining or coal-fired generation.

Oil and gas exploration companies are facing down a half-dozen simultaneous, overlapping threats to their financial success, according to two recent stories in the Rigzone industry newsletter.

Leaders of the G-20 industrial economies held their ground against Trump administration climate denial at the end of their annual meeting in Osaka, Japan Saturday, adopting a watered down statement on the climate crisis that fell short of what was needed but still committed to continuing action to implement that 2015 Paris Agreement.

A landmark report on 1.5°C pathways was forever dropped from formal consideration in United Nations climate negotiations, and Climate Action Network-International scorched countries for their “weak political positions on responding to the climate crisis,” as mid-year negotiations to implement and push beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement wrapped up yesterday in Bonn.

A group of 477 retirement funds and investors representing US$34 trillion in assets is calling on world leaders to adopt carbon pricing and phase out coal plants in a bid to hold average global warming to 1.5°C, in a statement released ahead of the upcoming G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.

Virtually all the leading candidates for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination are calling for mandatory disclosure of the climate risk fossil companies face. And fossils are beginning to feel the heat.

Citing an “outright disregard” for public consultation and a cavalier attitude to environmental protection, Kenya’s National Environment Tribunal has withdrawn the environment licence granted in 2016 to an East African investment firm that, together with General Electric, was looking to build the 1,050-megawatt, US$2-billion Lamu coal-fired power plant on the coast.

A new analysis this week identifies Canada as one of four countries that have declared climate emergencies after collectively spending US$27.5 billion per year on fossil fuel subsidies earlier this decade.

The world’s 23rd-largest insurance company, Zurich Insurance Group, has become the world’s first to withdraw insurance and investment from companies significantly involved with the tar sands/oil sands, including pipelines and railways, as well as coal developers, utilities, and oil shale developers.

Mapping flood zones, raising public awareness, and investing heavily in climate mitigation are necessary pre-conditions for making a proposed “high-risk” insurance pool (rather than the public purse) available to homeowners at risk of overland flooding.

Smart grid development is a low-carbon solution that Drawdown lists as a “coming attraction” that can help utilities accommodate the rise of renewable energy. It could also eliminate 0.7 to 2.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050.

More than a year after he promised it, and after weeks of mounting hype, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer released his party’s climate plan Wednesday, a glossy, 60-page document with no fixed carbon reduction target that he cast as Canada’s best shot at meeting its 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement.

In a move condemned by critics as the height of cynicism, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and several senior cabinet ministers announced re-approval of the C$9.3-billion Trans Mountain pipeline expansion Tuesday afternoon, not 24 hours after their government pushed a climate emergency resolution through the House of Commons.

Faster carbon reductions, an end to fossil subsidies, more support for international emission reductions, and a commitment to “leave no community, group, or worker behind” are the cornerstones of the comprehensive, accountable climate plan Canada will need after this year’s federal election, Climate Action Network-Canada (CAN-Rac) asserts in a policy paper released earlier this week.

While the industry’s growth in 2018 showed that “renewable power is here to stay”, countries around the world are falling short of the full benefits they could gain from the post-carbon transition and needlessly dragging out their dependence on fossil fuels, concludes the Renewables 2019 Global Status Report, released this week by the Paris-based REN21 Secretariat.

ExxonMobil, Amazon, and UK grocery retailer Tesco head the list of 707 major global companies with combined value above US$15 trillion that have failed to reveal their full impact on the climate crisis, water shortages, and deforestation, according to CDP, the non-profit formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Ontario would move toward a net-zero carbon economy by 2050 under an as-yet uncosted plan released by New Democrat leader Andrea Horwath during her party’s annual convention last Saturday in Hamilton.

China’s investment in building new coal and other thermal power plants hit a 14-year low last year, down to ¥78.6 billion (US$11.35 billion) across the fossil sector and ¥6.44 billion ($930 million) for the most polluting fuel of all.

With the Trudeau government widely expected to announce re-approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion tomorrow, news reports have excitement building in Calgary, and a former Liberal cabinet minister warning there’s no business case for the project.

While subsidies have helped ensure the expansion of national power grid systems around the world, using public money to finance solar mini-grids is less established—a situation that needs to change in sub-Saharan Africa, investors urge, where 573 million people still live without electric power.

Urgent alert to Jason Kenney and Vivian Krause! Another “foreign-funded radical” has just been identified, and the unity of our country will hang in the balance until you can direct all your taxpayer-funded investigative might toward…Alberta-based Rebel Media and its self-styled “Rebel Commander”, not-quite-disbarred former lawyer Ezra Levant.

Canada earned its share of international praise last month in a report that highlighted the country’s leadership in the global coal phaseout, shone a light on its slow uptake of renewable energy, and said nothing about the domestic pipeline battles that will likely dominate the news over the coming week.

Renewable energy employed 11 million people around the world last year despite slower annual growth in key markets like China, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) concludes in the latest edition of its annual jobs report.

Less than two months after fossil analysts celebrated a “Kenney bump” with the arrival of a new government in Alberta, the industry is still beset by the same host of economic, political, and regulatory programs it has faced for years—notwithstanding the new premier’s loud promises to make his province’s oilpatch great again.

The United States is on track to add 17,000 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity per year through 2022, according to analysis this week by Fitch Solutions, with plummeting technology costs and state-level programming offsetting the gradual end of federal subsidies and a continuing regulatory rollback by the Trump administration.

Legendary British rock band Radiohead came up with a climate-friendly solution when hackers threatened to release stolen tapes of the studio sessions for their venerated album, OK Computer: the musicians offered up the recordings online for about US$23 each, and directed all the proceeds to Extinction Rebellion.

Within hours of the official announcement that Canada would ban single-use plastics as early as 2021, the plastics industry was simultaneously claiming the initiative would have no impact on demand for petrochemical feedstocks and suggesting there are more effective ways to address plastic pollution than by banning products outright.

The latest in a string of project cancellations is opening up the possibility that California will never have to build another new natural gas plant.

Describing the climate crisis as the “third world war,” Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph E Stiglitz is urging critics of the Green New Deal to take a second look at an agenda that could avert catastrophe and usher in a new golden age for America.

The mounting global backlash against plastic pollution has fossil companies worried, as public opinion coalesces into a threat to businesses they’ve been counting on as a reliable source of demand for their own raw product.

Billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is donating US$500 million over three years to Beyond Carbon, a new push to phase out all remaining coal plants in the United States by 2030 and begin the process of shutting down the country’s natural gas plants.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announced the cost but few details of his much-touted, C$30-million oil and gas “war room” Friday, prompting immediate pushback from the environmental groups he vowed to target during the recently-concluded provincial election campaign.

Opponents of the ever-controversial Keystone XL pipeline are exploring “all available legal avenues” to halt the project, after a U.S. appeal court overturned a judge’s decision to reject its construction permit in Montana last November.

Joe Biden has promised to crack down on China’s coal power spree in other countries if elected U.S. president in 2020.

The federal government has tossed an emergency lifeline to Ontario’s 50 Million Tree Program, committing C$15 million over four years after the Ford government suddenly cut the non-profit initiative in its 2019 budget.

The fossil and transportation lobby groups that successfully defeated the American Clean Energy and Security Act, put forward in 2009 by then-U.S. senator Henry Waxman (D, CA) and then-Rep. Ed Markey (D, MA), cost their country US$60 billion in net benefits, a new analysis in the journal Nature Climate Change concludes.

More than 200 of the world’s biggest companies anticipate nearly US$1 trillion in business risk—more than half of it in the next five years—due to climate change, but $2.1 trillion in benefits from climate-friendly products and services, according to an analysis of thousands of corporate disclosures by CDP, the UK non-profit formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project.

With Japan chairing this year’s G20 meetings and its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, trying to position himself as a climate leader, Canada has an opportunity to encourage the country to “power past coal”, Climate Action Network-Canada Executive Director Catherine Abreu writes in a National Observer opinion piece.

The GNL Quebec liquefied natural gas megaproject would increase life cycle greenhouse gas emissions by more than 37 million tonnes per year, a group of more than 150 Quebec scientists is warning in an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier François Legault.

It may take more than 2,800 years to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells across Alberta, National Observer and Star Calgary reveal in an exclusive report this week, after obtaining a September 2018 presentation to a private industry gathering by a senior official with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER).

The Ford government’s new climate plan for Ontario will cost taxpayers half again as much as the federal carbon tax, according to a new analysis released yesterday by Canadians for Clean Prosperity.

Running an electric vehicle alongside rooftop solar can cut the payback period for the solar power system by more than half, according to a study by the Institute for Energy Economic and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) that gauged the impact of policy incentives—and disincentives—in the UK and Germany.

Ohio businesses and homeowners are a big step closer to picking up the tab for their utilities’ uneconomical power plants, after the state House passed a bill last week to subsidize existing coal and nuclear capacity while cutting back on renewable energy and energy efficiency programming.

Canada can get its energy system on track to meet its targets under the Paris Agreement and “zero out carbon pollution” by mid-century by adopting a menu of 10 technically feasible options to cut carbon emissions, the David Suzuki Foundation concludes in a report issued last week.

Pre-election commitments on climate action were in the air last week, with New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh releasing early snapshots if his party’s plan and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau making new promises to cities and small businesses.

One of the surest ways to improve air quality and extend lives shortened by pollution is for cities to ban non-electric cars, two opinion editors with Bloomberg News conclude in a recent post.

The world’s dirtiest air and its lowest prices for installed solar will be two of the influences shaping Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term of office in India, according to news reports circulating around the time of his swearing-in last week.

Efforts by activist investors to hold ExxonMobil and Chevron to greater climate account at their respective AGMs were a bust last week, with strong majorities of fossil shareholders voting against any climate-related proposals.

Canada became the first country to sign on to the Drive to Zero Pledge, an international effort to boost the number of zero- and low-emission vehicles in medium- and heavy-duty transportation, from box trucks to school buses to 18-wheelers, during the Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver earlier this week.

Renewable energy investment in Asia is set to edge ahead of oil and gas exploration by next year, according to international fossil analysts at Rystad Energy.

Though renewable energy investments stalled in 2018 while fossil dollars surged, legendary UK solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett believes a combination of public pressure and market forces will soon topple the fossil industry with a speed and conclusiveness comparable to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Ottawa will invest up to C$30 million in a public-private venture with mega-entrepreneurs Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others to help launch new, low-carbon energy technologies, Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi announced Monday, at the opening of the annual Clean Energy Ministerial in Vancouver.

The solar industry is expecting a continuing surge in the years ahead, according to two reports released earlier this month, though the rapid growth still falls short of what will be needed to keep average global warming below the minimum international target of 2.0°C.

Responding to rising seas and their attendant storm surges, Louisiana has developed a 1,500-page plan to keep its citizens as safe as possible under the circumstances.

In the spring of 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation—the hundred-year-old charitable organization started by Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—launched an ambitious program to help cities around the world adapt to the physical, social, and economic challenges of the 21st century. Known as 100 Resilient Cities, the initiative was designed largely to address challenges of urban population growth and the increasing threat posed by climate change.

Clean energy employs nearly 300,000 Canadians from coast to coast, and the sector’s job count was growing 60% faster than the Canadian average in 2017, according to a 10-province survey conducted by Navius Research and released today by Clean Energy Canada.

BP is supporting a shareholder resolution at its annual meeting today that calls for greater transparency about its greenhouse gas emissions, links between emission reductions and executive pay, and an indication of how its future investments will match up with the targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement.