KYIV — The Russian army attacked Ukraine with more than 90 killer drones in the early hours of Thursday morning, causing complete blackouts in the key industrial regions of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv’s energy ministry reported. “While energy workers managed to restore power in the Zaporizhzhia region in the morning, some 800,000 households in the nearby Dnipro region were still without electricity and heating on Thursday morning,” Artem Nekrasov, acting energy minister of Ukraine, said during a morning briefing. In Dnipro, eight coal mines stopped working because of a power outage. All the miners were safely evacuated to the surface, Nekrasov added. Power outages were also reported in Chernihiv, Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Poltava and other regions. Freezing weather is coming to Ukraine over the next three days, with temperatures forecast to drop to minus 20° C during the night, when Russia often launches massive missile and drone attacks. Precipitation and cold could cause additional electricity supply disruptions due to snow accumulating on power lines, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Wednesday evening. “Ukraine’s energy system is under enemy attack every day, and energy workers work in extremely difficult conditions to provide people with light and heat. Deteriorating weather conditions create additional stress on critical infrastructure. We are working to minimize the consequences of bad weather,” Svyrydenko added. Local governors in the eastern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro reported that hospitals and other critical infrastructure had to turn to emergency power supplies because of the latest Russian attack. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Ukrainian energy workers for the speedy power restoration in Zaporizhzhia, and used the opportunity to remind Kyiv’s partners around the world they need to respond “to this deliberate torment of the Ukrainian people by Russia.” “There is absolutely no military rationale in such strikes on the energy sector and infrastructure that leave people without electricity and heating in wintertime. This is Russia’s war specifically against our people, against life in Ukraine — an attempt to break Ukraine,” Zelenskyy added.

President Donald Trump is no longer content to stand aloof from the global alliance trying to combat climate change. His new goal is to demolish it — and replace it with a new coalition reliant on U.S. fossil fuels. Trump’s increasingly assertive energy diplomacy is one of the biggest challenges awaiting the world leaders, diplomats and business luminaries gathering for a United Nations summit in Brazil to try to advance the fight against global warming. The U.S. president will not be there — unlike the leaders of countries including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, who will speak before delegates from nearly 200 nations on Thursday and Friday. But his efforts to undermine the Paris climate agreement already loom over the talks, as does his initial success in drawing support from other countries. “It’s not enough to just withdraw from” the 2015 pact and the broader U.N. climate framework that governs the annual talks, said Richard Goldberg, who worked as a top staffer on Trump’s White House National Energy Dominance Council and is now senior adviser to the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “You have to degrade it. You have to deter it. You have to potentially destroy it.” Trump’s approach includes striking deals demanding that Japan, Europe and other trading partners buy more U.S. natural gas and oil, using diplomatic strong-arming to deter foreign leaders from cutting fossil fuel pollution, and making the United States inhospitable to clean energy investment. Unlike during his first term, when Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement but sent delegates to the annual U.N. climate talks anyway, he now wants to render them ineffective and starved of purpose by drawing as many other countries as possible away from their own clean energy goals, according to Cabinet officials’ public remarks and interviews with 20 administration allies and alumni, foreign diplomats and veterans of the annual climate negotiations. Those efforts are at odds with the goals of the climate summits, which included a Biden administration-backed pledge two years ago for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. Slowing or reversing that shift could send global temperatures soaring above the goals set in Paris a decade ago, threatening a spike in the extreme weather that is already pummeling countries and economies. The White House says Trump’s campaign to unleash American oil, gas and coal is for the United States’ benefit — and the world’s. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda — which is focused on utilizing the liquid gold under our feet to strengthen our grid stability and drive down costs for American families and businesses,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” ‘WOULD LIKE TO SEE THE PARIS AGREEMENT DIE’ The Trump administration is declining to send any high-level representatives to the COP30 climate talks, which will formally begin Monday in Belém, Brazil, according to a White House official who declined to comment on the record about whether any U.S. government officials would participate. Trump’s view that the annual negotiations are antithetical to his energy and economic agenda is also spreading among other Republican officials. Many GOP leaders, including 17 state attorneys general, argued last month that attending the summit would only legitimize the proceedings and its expected calls for ditching fossil fuels more swiftly. Climate diplomats from other countries say they’ve gotten the message about where the U.S. stands now — and are prepared to act without Washington. “We have a large country, a president, and a vice president who would like to see the Paris Agreement die,” Laurence Tubiana, the former French government official credited as a key architect of the 2015 climate pact, said of the United States. “The U.S. will not play a major role” at the summit, said Jochen Flasbarth, undersecretary in the German Ministry of Environmental Affairs. “The world is collectively outraged, and so we will focus — as will everyone else — on engaging in talks with those who are driving the process forward.” Trump and his allies have described the stakes in terms of a zero-sum contest between the United States and its main economic rival, China: Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they say, are a complete win for China, which sells the bulk of the world’s solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle technology. That’s a contrast from the approach of former President Joe Biden, who pushed a massive U.S. investment in green technologies as the only way for America to outcompete China in developing the energy sources of the future. In the Trump worldview, stalling that energy transition benefits the United States, the globe’s top producer of oil and natural gas, along with many of the technologies and services to produce, transport and burn the stuff. “If [other countries] don’t rely on this technology, then that’s less power to China,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who served in the U.S. Transportation Department during Trump’s first term and is now director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. TRUMP FINDS ALLIES THIS TIME Two big developments have shaped the president’s new thinking on how to counteract the international fight against climate change, said George David Banks, who was Trump’s international climate adviser during the first administration. The first was the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed and Biden signed in 2022, which promised hundreds of billions of dollars to U.S. clean energy projects. Banks said the legislation, enacted entirely on partisan lines, made renewable energy a political target in the minds of Trump and his fossil-fuel backers. The second is Trump’s aggressive use of U.S. trading power during his second term to wring concessions from foreign governments, Banks said. Trump has required his agencies to identify obstacles for U.S. exports, and the United Nations’ climate apparatus may be deemed a barrier for sales of oil, gas and coal. Trump’s strategy is resonating with some fossil fuel-supporting nations, potentially testing the climate change comity at COP30. Those include emerging economies in Africa and Latin America, petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, and European nations feeling a cost-of-living strain that is feeding a resurgent right wing. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright drew applause in March at a Washington gathering called the Powering Africa Summit, where he called it “nonsense” for financiers and Western nations to vilify coal-fired power. He also asserted that U.S. natural gas exports could supply African and Asian nations with more of their electricity. Wright cast the goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas pollution by 2050 — the target dozens of nations have embraced — as “sinister,” contending it consigns developing nations to poverty and lower living standards. The U.S. about-face was welcome, Sierra Leone mining and minerals minister Julius Daniel Mattai said during the conference. Western nations had kneecapped financing for offshore oil investments and worked to undercut public backing for fossil fuel projects, Mattai said, criticizing Biden’s administration for only being interested in renewable energy. But now Trump has created room for nations to use their own resources, Mattai said. “With the new administration having such a massive appetite for all sorts of energy mixes, including oil and gas, we do believe there’s an opportunity to explore our offshore oil investments,” he said in an interview. TURNING UP THE HEAT ON TRADING PARTNERS Still, Banks acknowledged that Trump probably can’t halt the spread of clean energy. Fossil fuels may continue to supply energy in emerging economies for some time, he said, but the private sector remains committed to clean energy to meet the U.N.’s goals of curbing climate change. That doesn’t mean Trump won’t try. The administration’s intent to pressure foreign leaders into a more fossil-fuel-friendly stance was on full display last month at a London meeting of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization where U.S. Cabinet secretaries and diplomats succeeded in thwarting a proposed carbon emissions tax on global shipping. That coup followed a similar push against Beijing a month earlier, when Mexico — the world’s biggest buyer of Chinese cars — slapped a 50 percent tariff on automotive imports from China after pressure from the Trump administration. China accused the U.S. of “coercion.” Trump’s attempt to flood global markets with ever growing amounts of U.S. fossil fuels is even more ambitious, though so far incomplete. The EU and Japan — under threat of tariffs — have promised to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on U.S. energy products. But so far, new and binding contracts have not appeared. Trump has also tried to push China, Japan and South Korea to invest in a $44 billion liquefied natural gas project in Alaska, so far to no avail. In the face of potential tariffs and other U.S. pressure, European ministers and diplomats are selling the message that victory at COP30 might simply come in the form of presenting a united front in favor of climate action. That could mean joining with other major economies such as China and India, and forming common cause with smaller, more vulnerable countries, to show that Trump is isolated. “I’m sure the EU and China will find themselves on opposite sides of many debates,” said the EU’s lead climate negotiator, Jacob Werksman. “But we have ways of working with them. … We are both betting heavily on the green transition.” Avoiding a faceplant may actually be easier if the Trump administration does decide to turn up in Brazil, said Li Shuo, the director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington. “If the U.S. is there and active, I’d expect the rest of the world, including the EU and China, to rest aside their rhetorical games in front of a larger challenge,” Li wrote via text. And for countries attending COP, there is still some hope of a long-term win. Solar, wind, geothermal and other clean energy investments are continuing apace, even if Trump and the undercurrents that led to his reelection have hindered them, said Nigel Purvis, CEO of climate consulting firm Climate Advisers and a former State Department climate official. Trump’s attempts to kill the shipping fee, EU methane pollution rules and Europe’s corporate sustainability framework are one thing, Purvis said. But when it comes to avoiding Trump’s retribution, there is “safety in numbers” for the rest of the world that remains in the Paris Agreement, he added. And even if the progress is slower than originally hoped, those nations have committed to shifting their energy systems off fossil fuels. “We’re having slower climate action than otherwise would be the case. But we’re really talking about whether Trump is going to be able to blow up the regime,” Purvis said. “And I think the answer is ‘No.’” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zia Weise in Brussels and Josh Groeneveld in Berlin contributed to this report.

It’s been a decade since the U.S. and Europe pushed the world to embrace a historic agreement to stop the planet’s runaway warming. The deal among nearly 200 nations offered a potential “turning point for the world,” then-U.S. President Barack Obama said. Eventually, almost every country on Earth signed the 2015 Paris Agreement, a pact whose success would rest on peer pressure, rising ambition and the economics of a clean energy revolution. But 10 years later, the actions needed to fulfill those hopes are falling short. The United States has quit the deal — twice. President Donald Trump is throttling green energy projects at home and finding allies to help him undermine climate initiatives abroad, while inking trade deals that commit countries to buying more U.S. fossil fuels. Europe remains on track to meet its climate commitments, but its resolve is wavering, as price-weary voters and the rise of far-right parties raise doubts about how quickly the bloc can deliver its pledge to turn away from fossil fuels. Paris has helped ingrain climate change awareness in popular culture and policy, led countries and companies to pledge to cut their carbon pollution to zero and helped steer a wave of investments into clean energy. Scientists say it appears to have lessened the odds of the most catastrophic levels of warming. On the downside, oil and gas production hasn’t yet peaked, and climate pollution and temperatures are still rising — with the latter just tenths of a degree from the tipping point agreed in Paris. But the costs of green energy have fallen so much that, in most parts of the world, it’s the cheapest form of power and is being installed at rates unthinkable 10 years ago. World leaders and diplomats who are in Brazil starting this week for the United Nations’ annual climate talks will face a test to stand up for Paris in the face of Trump’s opposition while highlighting that its goals are both necessary and beneficial. The summit in the Amazonian port city of Belém was supposed to be the place where rich and poor countries would celebrate their progress and commit themselves to ever-sharper cuts in greenhouse gas pollution. Instead, U.S. contempt for global climate efforts and a muddled message from Europe are adding headwinds to a moment that is far more turbulent than the one in which the Paris Agreement was adopted. Some climate veterans are still optimists — to a point. “I think that the basic architecture is resistant to Trump’s destruction,” said John Podesta, chair of the board of the liberal Center for American Progress, who coordinated climate policy under Obama and former President Joe Biden. But that resistance could wilt if the U.S. stays outside the agreement, depriving the climate movement of American leadership and support, he said. “If all that’s gone, and it’s gone for a long time, I don’t know whether the structure holds together,” Podesta added. Other climate diplomats say the cooperative spirit of 2015 would be hard to recreate now, which is why acting on Paris is so essential. “If we had to renegotiate Paris today, we’d never get the agreement that we had 10 years ago,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom’s special climate representative. “But we can also look to these extraordinary data points, which show that the direction of travel is very clear,” she said, referring to growth of clean energy. “And most people who protect where their money is going to be are interested in that direction of travel.” THE PARIS PARADOX One thing that hasn’t faded is the business case for clean energy. If anything, the economic drivers behind the investments that Paris helped unleash have surpassed even what the Paris deal’s authors anticipated. But the political will to keep countries driving forward has stalled in some places as the United States — the world’s largest economy, sole military superpower and historically biggest climate polluter — attacks its very foundation. Trump’s attempts to undermine the agreement, summed up by the 2017 White House slogan “Pittsburgh, not Paris,” has affected European ambitions as well, French climate diplomat Laurence Tubiana told reporters late last month. “I have never seen such aggressivity against national climate policy all over because of the U.S.,” said Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “So we are really confronted with an ideological battle, a cultural battle, where climate is in that package the U.S. government wants to defeat.” The White House said Trump is focused on developing U.S. oil and engaging with world leaders on energy issues, rather than what it dubs the “green new scam.” The U.S. will not send high-level representatives to COP30. “The Green New Scam would have killed America if President Trump had not been elected to implement his commonsense energy agenda,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson. “President Trump will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.” Trump is not the only challenge facing Paris, of course. Even under Obama, the U.S. insisted that the Paris climate pollution targets had to be nonbinding, avoiding the need for a Senate ratification vote that would most likely fail. But unlike previous climate pacts that the U.S. had declined to join, all countries — including, most notably, China — would have to submit a pollution-cutting plan. The accord left it up to the governments themselves to carry out their own pledges and to push laggards to do better. An unusual confluence of political winds helped drive the bargaining. Obama, who was staking part of his legacy on getting a global climate agreement, had spent the year leading up to Paris negotiating a separate deal with China in which both countries committed to cutting their world-leading pollution. France, the host of the Paris talks, was also determined to strike a worldwide pact. In the year that followed, more than 160 countries submitted their initial plans to tackle climate change domestically and began working to finish the rules that would undergird the agreement. “The Paris Agreement isn’t a machine that churns out ambition. It basically reflects back to us the level of ambition that we have agreed to … and suggests what else is needed to get back on track,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, vice president for international strategies at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a negotiator for the United Kingdom during the Paris talks. “Whether countries do that or not, it’s essentially then a matter for them.” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister and a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement’s carbon crediting mechanism, called the deal an “incredible feat” — but not a self-executing one. “The problem is now it’s really up to countries as well as cities, regions, companies and financial institutions to act,” she said. “It’s not a treaty thing anymore — it’s now, ‘Do the work.’” WHEN GREEN TURNS GRAY Signs of discord are not hard to find around the globe. China is tightening its grip on clean energy manufacturing and exports, ensuring more countries have access to low-cost renewables, but creating tensions in places that also want to benefit from jobs and revenue from making those goods and fear depending too much on one country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former United Nations climate envoy, eliminated his country’s consumer carbon tax and is planning to tap more natural gas to toughen economic defenses against the United States. The European Union spent the past five years developing a vast web of green regulations and sectoral measures, and the bloc estimates that it’s roughly on track to meet those goals. But many of the EU’s 27 governments — under pressure from the rising far right, high energy prices, the decline of traditional industry and Russia’s war against Ukraine — are now demanding that the EU reevaluate many of those policies. Still, views within the bloc diverge sharply, with some pushing for small tweaks and others for rolling back large swaths of legislation. “Europe must remain a continent of consistency,” French President Emmanuel Macron said after a meeting of EU leaders in October. “It must step up on competitiveness, but it must not give up on its [climate] goals.” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in contrast, said after the same meeting that he felt vindicated about his country’s long-standing opposition to the EU’s green agenda: “In most European capitals, people today think differently about these exaggerated European climate ambitions.” Worldwide, most countries have not submitted their latest carbon-cutting plans to the United Nations. While the plans that governments have announced mostly expand on their previous ones, they still make only modest reductions against what is needed to limit Earth’s warming since the preindustrial era to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that threshold, scientists say, would lead to more lives lost and physical and economic damage that would be ever harder to recover from with each tenth of a degree of additional warming. The U.N.’s latest report showing the gap between countries’ new pledges and the Paris targets found that the world is on track for between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees of warming, a marginal difference from plans submitted in 2020 that is largely canceled out when the U.S. pledge is omitted. Policies in place now are pointing toward 2.8 degrees of warming. “We need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now in an ever-compressing timeframe and amid a challenging geopolitical context,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme. But doing so also makes sense, she added. “This where the market is showing that these kind of investments in smart, clean and green is actually driving jobs and opportunities. This is where the future lies.” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message Tuesday that overshooting the 1.5-degrees target of Paris was now inevitable in the coming years imploring leaders to rapidly roll out renewables and stop expanding oil, gas and coal to ensure that overshoot was short-lived. “We’re in a huge mess,” said Bill Hare, a longtime climate scientist who founded the policy institute Climate Analytics. Greenhouse gas pollution hasn’t fallen, and action has flat lined even as climate-related disasters have increased. “I think what’s upcoming is a major test for the Paris Agreement, probably the major test. Can this agreement move forward under the weight of all of these challenges?” Hare asked. “If it can’t do that, governments are going to be asking about the benefits of it, frankly.” That doesn’t mean all is lost. In 2015, the world was headed for around 4 degrees Celsius of warming, an amount that researchers say would have been devastating for much of the planet. Today, that projection is roughly a degree Celsius lower. “I think a lot of us in Paris were very dubious at the time that we would ever limit warming to 1.5,” said Elliot Diringer, a former climate official who led the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ international program during the Paris talks. “The question is whether we are better off by virtue of the Paris Agreement,” he said. “I think the answer is yes. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not.” GREEN TECHNOLOGY DEFYING EXPECTATIONS In addition, the adoption of clean energy technology has moved even faster than projected — sparking what one climate veteran has called a shift in global climate politics. “We are no longer in a world in which only climate politics has a leading role and a substantial role, but increasingly, climate economics,” said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. “Yes, politics is important; no longer as important as it was 10 years ago.” Annual solar deployment globally is 15 times greater than the International Energy Agency predicted in 2015, according to a recent analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a U.K. nonprofit. Renewables now account for more than 90 percent of new power capacity added globally every year, BloombergNEF reported. China is deploying record amounts of renewables and lowering costs for countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, which has seen solar installations skyrocket. Even in the United States, where Trump repealed many of Biden’s tax breaks and other incentives, BloombergNEF predicts that power companies will continue to deploy green sources, in large part because they’re often the fastest source of new electricity. Costs for wind and batteries and falling, too. Electric vehicle sales are soaring in many countries, thanks in large part to the huge number of inexpensive vehicles being pumped out by China’s BYD, the world’s largest EV-maker. Worldwide clean energy investments are now twice as much as fossil fuels spending, according to the International Energy Agency. “Today, you can actually talk about deploying clean energy technologies just because of their cost competitiveness and ability to lower energy system costs,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the research institution Energy Innovation. “You don’t actually even have to say ‘climate’ for a lot of them, and that just wasn’t true 10 years ago.” The economic trends of the past decade have been striking, said Todd Stern, the U.S. climate envoy who negotiated the Paris Agreement. “Paris is something that was seen all over the world, seen by other countries, seen in boardrooms, as the first time in more than 20 years when you finally got heads of government saying, ‘Yes, let’s do this,’” he said. “And that’s not the only reason why there was tremendous technological development, but it sure didn’t hurt.” Still, limits exist to how far businesses can take the clean energy transition on their own. “You need government intervention of some kind, whether that’s a stick or a carrot, to push the economy towards a low-carbon trajectory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary general of policy at the International Chamber of Commerce. “If governments press the brakes on climate action or seriously start to soft pedal, then it does have a limiting effect.” Brazil, the host of COP30, says it wants to demonstrate that multilateralism still works and is relevant to peoples’ lives and capable of addressing the climate impacts communities around the world are facing. But the goal of this year’s talks might be even more straightforward, said Guilanpour, the former negotiator. “If we come out of COP30 demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is alive and functioning,” he said, “I think in the current context, that is pretty newsworthy of itself.” Nicolas Camut in Paris, Zi-Ann Lum in Ottawa, Karl Mathiesen in London and Zia Weise in Brussels contributed to this report.

Disclaimer: POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is Polish Electricity Association (PKEE) * The advertisement is linked to policy advocacy on energy transition, electricity market design, and industrial competitiveness in the EU. More information here The European Union is entering a decisive decade for its energy transformation. With the international race for clean technologies accelerating, geopolitical tensions reshaping markets and competition from other major global economies intensifying, how the EU approaches the transition will determine its economic future. If managed strategically, the EU can drive competitiveness, growth and resilience. If mismanaged, Europe risks losing its industrial base, jobs and global influence.  > If managed strategically, the EU can drive competitiveness, growth and > resilience. If mismanaged, Europe risks losing its industrial base, jobs and > global influence. This message resonated strongly during PKEE Energy Day 2025, held in Brussels on October 14, which brought together more than 350 European policymakers, industry leaders and experts under the theme “Secure, competitive and clean: is Europe delivering on its energy promise?”. One conclusion was clear: the energy transition must serve the economy, not the other way around.  Laurent Louis Photography for PKEE The power sector: the backbone of Europe’s industrial future  The future of European competitiveness will be shaped by its power sector. Without a successful transformation of electricity generation and distribution, other sectors — from steel and chemicals to mobility and digital — will fail to decarbonize. This point was emphasized by Konrad Wojnarowski, Poland’s deputy minister of energy, who described electricity as “vital to development and competitiveness.”  “Transforming Poland’s energy sector is a major technological and financial challenge — but we are on the right track,” he said. “Success depends on maintaining the right pace of change and providing strong support for innovation.” Wojnarowski also underlined that only close cooperation between governments, industry and academia can create the conditions for a secure, competitive and sustainable energy future.  Flexibility: the strategic enabler  The shift to a renewables-based system requires more than capacity additions — it demands a fundamental redesign of how electricity is produced, managed and consumed. Dariusz Marzec, president of the Polish Electricity Association (PKEE) and CEO of PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, called flexibility “the Holy Grail of the power sector.”  Speaking at the event, Marzec also stated “It’s not about generating electricity continuously, regardless of demand. It’s about generating it when it’s needed and making the price attractive. Our mission, as part of the European economy, is to strengthen competitiveness and ensure energy security for all consumers – not just to pursue climate goals for their own sake. Without a responsible approach to the transition, many industries could relocate outside Europe.”  The message is clear: the clean energy shift must balance environmental ambition with economic reality. Europe cannot afford to treat decarbonization as an isolated goal — it must integrate it into a broader industrial strategy.  > The message is clear: the clean energy shift must balance environmental > ambition with economic reality. The next decade will define success  While Europe’s climate neutrality target for 2050 remains a cornerstone of EU policy, the next five to ten years will determine whether the continent remains globally competitive. Grzegorz Lot, CEO of TAURON Polska Energia and vice-president of PKEE, warned that technology is advancing too quickly for policymakers to rely solely on long-term milestones.  “Technology is evolving too fast to think of the transition only in terms of 2050. Our strategy is to act now — over the next year, five years, or decade,” Lot said. He pointed to the expected sharp decline in coal consumption over the next three years and called for immediate investment in proven technologies, particularly onshore wind.  Lot also raised concerns about structural barriers. “Today, around 30 percent of the price of electricity is made up of taxes. If we want affordable energy and a competitive economy, this must change,” he argued.  Consumers and regulation: the overlooked pillars  A successful energy transition cannot rely solely on investment and infrastructure. It also depends on regulatory stability and consumer participation. “Maintaining competitiveness requires not only investment in green technologies but also a stable regulatory environment and active consumer engagement,” Lot said.  He highlighted the potential of dynamic tariffs, which incentivize demand-side flexibility. “Customers who adjust their consumption to market conditions can pay below the regulated price level. If we want cheap energy, we must learn to follow nature — consuming and storing electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows.”  Strategic investments for resilience  The energy transition is more than a climate necessity. It is a strategic requirement for Europe’s security and economic autonomy. Marek Lelątko, vice-president of Enea, stressed that customer- and market-oriented investment is essential. “We are investing in renewables, modern gas-fired units and energy storage because they allow us to ensure supply stability, affordable prices and greater energy security,” he said.  Grzegorz Kinelski, CEO of Enea and vice-president of PKEE, added: “We must stay on the fast track we are already on. Investments in renewables, storage and CCGT [combined cycle gas turbine] units will not only enhance energy security but also support economic growth and help keep energy prices affordable for Polish consumers.”  The power sector must now be recognized as a strategic enabler of Europe’s industrial future — on par with semiconductors, critical raw materials and defense. As Dariusz Marzec puts it: “The energy transition is not a choice — it is a necessity. But its success will determine more than whether we meet climate targets. It will decide whether Europe remains competitive, prosperous and economically independent in a rapidly changing world.”  > The power sector must now be recognized as a strategic enabler of Europe’s > industrial future — on par with semiconductors, critical raw materials and > defense. Measurable progress, but more is needed  Progress is visible. The power sector accounts for around 30 percent of EU emissions but has already delivered 75 percent of all Emissions Trading System reductions. By 2025, 72 percent of Europe’s electricity will come from low-carbon sources, while fossil fuels will fall to a historic low of 28 percent. And in Poland, in June, renewable energy generation overtook coal for the first time in history.  Still, ambition alone is not enough. In his closing remarks, Marcin Laskowski, vice-president of PKEE and executive vice-president for regulatory affairs at PGE Polska Grupa Energetyczna, stressed the link between the power sector and Europe’s broader economic transformation. “The EU’s economic transformation will only succeed if the energy transition succeeds — safely, sustainably and with attractive investment conditions,” he said. “It is the power sector that must deliver solutions to decarbonize industries such as steel, chemicals and food production.”  A collective European project  The event in Brussels — with the participation of many high-level speakers, including Mechthild Wörsdörfer, deputy director general of DG ENER; Tsvetelina Penkova, member of the European Parliament and vice-chair of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy; Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, member of the European Parliament; Catherine MacGregor; CEO of ENGIE and vice-president of Eurelectric; and Claude Turmes, former minister of energy of Luxembourg — highlighted a common understanding: the energy transition is not an isolated environmental policy, it is a strategic industrial project. Its success will depend on coordinated action across EU institutions, national governments and industry, as well as predictable regulation and financing.  Europe’s ability to remain competitive, resilient and prosperous will hinge on whether its power sector is treated not as a cost to be managed, but as a foundation to be strengthened. The next decade is a window of opportunity — and the choices made today will shape Europe’s economic landscape for decades to come. 

The U.S.’s likely absence from the upcoming COP30 is a “watershed moment,” according to EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “We’re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world. It is the second-largest emitter,” Hoekstra told Bloomberg in an interview published Sunday. “So if a player of that magnitude basically says, ‘Well, I’m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,’ clearly that does damage,” he added, noting however that some U.S. mayors and governors remained committed to green policies. The COP30 climate conference will start on Nov. 10 in the Amazon port city of Belém. The Trump administration said it will not send “high level representatives,” amid Washington’s larger push against climate policies. U.S. President Donald Trump has already announced the U.S. would exit the Paris climate agreement for a second time. Last month, the American delegation to the United Nations International Maritime Organization negotiations in London also pressured countries to skip a vote on a proposed carbon emissions fee on global shipping. Overall, about 100 countries have failed to submit stronger carbon goals ahead of the COP30, and the EU is lagging behind too. Last year, a U.N. report found that even if nations delivered on their plans for 2030, carbon pollution would fall less than 3 percent compared to 2019 levels. That would likely not be enough to avoid major climate tipping points. Hoekstra said in the interview that he hopes the COP30 will push governments to “get concrete” about adaptation to the new climate reality and make progress on carbon markets, among other initiatives. The climate commissioner also expressed concerns about China’s push to build coal plants. “It would be very important for the world if they would actually refrain from that,” he said, adding that Beijing’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, known as nationally determined contribution (NDC), is too low. “Most experts were hoping for an NDC north of 30 percent,” Hoekstra told Bloomberg. “And then an NDC that is in all likelihood below 10 percent? I mean, even with all the diplomatic language I would love to wrap around that, it’s hard to see how that is enough.”

CLIMATEWIRE | A once-outlandish idea for reversing global warming took a major step toward reality Friday when Israeli-U.S. startup Stardust Solutions announced the largest-ever fundraising round for any company that aims to cool the Earth by spraying particles into the atmosphere. Its plan to limit the sun’s heat raised $60 million from a broad coalition of investors that included Silicon Valley luminaries and the Agnelli family, an Italian industrial dynasty. The disclosure, critics said, raises questions about involvement of venture capital firms in driving forward a largely untested, thinly researched and mostly unregulated technology that could disrupt global weather patterns and trigger geopolitical conflict. The investors were “putting their trust in the concept of, we need a safe and responsible and controlled option for sunlight reflection, which for me is [a] very important step forward in the evolution of this field,” Stardust CEO Yanai Yedvab said during an interview this week in POLITICO’s London office. He and co-founder Amyad Spector, who also flew in for the interview, are both nuclear physicists who formerly worked for the Israeli government. The startup’s fundraising haul was led by Lowercarbon Capital, a Wyoming-based climate technology-focused firm co-founded by billionaire investor Chris Sacca. It was also backed by the Agnellis’ firm Exor, a Dutch holding company that is the largest shareholder of Chrysler parent company Stellantis, luxury sports car manufacturer Ferrari and Italy’s Juventus Football Club. Ten other firms — hailing from San Francisco to Berlin — and one individual, former Facebook executive Matt Cohler, also joined Stardust’s fundraising round, its second since being founded two years ago. The firm has now raised a total of $75 million. It is registered in the U.S. state of Delaware and headquartered outside Tel Aviv but is not affiliated with the state of Israel. The surge of investor enthusiasm for Stardust comes amid stalled political efforts in Washington and other capitals to reduce the use of oil, gas and coal — the main drivers of climate change. Meanwhile, global temperatures continue to climb to new heights, worsening wildfires, floods, droughts and other natural disasters that some U.S. policymakers have baselessly blamed on solar geoengineering. The new influx of cash is four times the size of the startup’s initial fundraising round and, Yedvab argued, represents a major vote of confidence in Stardust and its strategy to land government contracts for deploying its technology at a global scale. It also shows that a growing pool of investors are willing to bet on solar geoengineering — a technology that some scientists still consider too dangerous to even study. Even advocates of researching solar geoengineering question the wisdom of pursuing it via a for-profit company like Stardust. “They have convinced Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] to give them a lot of money, and I would say that they shouldn’t have,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School and author of the book “Geoengineering: The Gamble.” “I don’t think it is a reasonable path to suggest that there’s going to be somebody — the U.S. government, another government, whoever — who buys Stardust, buys the [intellectual property] for a billion bucks [and] makes the VC investors gazillions. I don’t think that is, at all, reasonable.” Lowercarbon Capital did not respond to emailed questions. Stardust claims to have created a particle that would reflect sunlight in the same way debris from volcanic eruptions can temporarily cool the planet. The company says its powder is inert, wouldn’t accumulate in humans or ecosystems, and can’t harm the ozone layer or create acid rain like the sulfur-rich particles from volcanoes. It plans to seek government contracts to manufacture, disperse and monitor the particles in the stratosphere. The company is in the process of securing patents and preparing academic papers on its integrated solar geoengineering system. The startup would use the money it has raised to begin “controlled outdoor experiments” as soon as April, Yedvab told POLITICO. Those tests would release the company’s reflective particles inside a modified plane flying about 11 miles (18 kilometers) above sea level. The idea, Yedvab explained, is that “instead of displacing the particles out to the stratosphere and start following them, to do the other way around — to suck air from the stratosphere and to conduct in situ experiments, without dispersing essentially.” He said the company could have raised more money but only sought the funding it believes is necessary for the initial stratospheric testing. Stardust only took cash from investors who are aligned with the company’s cautious approach, he added. The fundraising round wasn’t conducted “from a point of view of, let’s get as much money as we can, but rather to say, this is what we need” to advance the technology, Yedvab said. Stardust’s new investors include the U.S. firms Future Ventures, Never Lift Ventures, Starlight Ventures, Nebular and Lauder Partners, as well as the British groups Attestor, Kindred Capital and Orion Global Advisors. Future Positive Capital of Paris and Berlin’s Earth.now also joined the fundraising round. Corbin Hiar reported from Washington. Karl Mathiesen reported from London.

BRUSSELS — After three years of reasoning, pleading and conceding, the EU has had enough. On Monday, the bloc’s 27 member countries are expected to back a new bill that will permanently cut Russian gas supplies to Hungary and Slovakia — whether they like it or not. Since Moscow launched its all-out war in Ukraine in 2022, the EU has weakened the Kremlin’s long-held grip over the bloc’s energy supply, all but eliminating its imports of Russian oil, coal and gas. But throughout that bitter energy divorce, Budapest and Bratislava have stubbornly refused to play ball. Repeatedly arguing that they have no real alternative, their Russia-friendly governments complained that quitting Moscow would mean exploding prices for consumers. Experts largely dispute those claims. And in any case, EU capitals are ready to overrule them. While Russia repeatedly pummels Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, “billions of euros have been paid … by Hungary and Slovakia to Russia,” said Lithuanian Energy Minister Žygimantas Vaičiūnas. “They are using this for their war machine … this is really not acceptable.”  “Now, it is time to demonstrate … political will on the EU level,” he told POLITICO. NO MORE EXCEPTIONS Since Vladimir Putin first ordered troops into Kyiv, Brussels has slapped an embargo on Russian crude, fuel and coal entering the bloc; it’s imposed a $47.60 per barrel price limit on Moscow’s global oil sales, below the market rate; and it’s whittled down the Kremlin’s share in the EU’s gas market from 45 percent to 13 percent.  But Hungary and Slovakia have repeatedly dug their heels in and held up sanctions, winning carve-outs that have allowed them to keep importing Russian crude via the Druzhba pipeline through Ukraine, and blocking efforts to target Moscow’s gas and nuclear sectors. In fact, the two countries are steadily increasing their fossil fuel payments to Moscow, according to Isaac Levi, Russia lead at the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air think tank. Budapest and Bratislava have paid Russia €5.58 billion for fossil fuel imports so far this year, he said, already beating the €5.56 billion they forked out last year. Realizing its consensual approach had hit a wall, the European Commission in June decided to change tack. The EU executive unveiled a legal proposal that would impose a ban on Russian gas, starting from next year for short-term contracts and ending in late 2027 for long-term deals. Unlike sanctions, which require unanimity from all EU countries, the proposal — billed as a trade measure — only needs a qualified majority of capitals to approve it, effectively removing Hungary and Slovakia’s veto power over the draft law. Since Vladimir Putin first ordered troops into Kyiv, Brussels has slapped an embargo on Russian crude, fuel and coal entering the bloc; it’s imposed a $47.60 per barrel price limit on Moscow’s global oil sales, below the market rate; and it’s whittled down the Kremlin’s share in the EU’s gas market from 45 percent to 13 percent.  | Contributor/Getty Images On Monday, EU energy ministers will rubber-stamp the bill, sending a signal that they are ready to override both nations before they enter final negotiations with the European Parliament. “We’ll reach an agreement despite their opposition,” said one senior EU diplomat, who, like others for this story, was granted anonymity to speak freely on closed-door discussions. “It’s not an easy subject, but I believe we’ll get there.” LANDLOCKED, NOT BLOCKED In the run-up to the vote, the two countries have pulled out all the stops in a bid to scupper a deal. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has vowed to block the EU’s 19th sanctions package against Russia unless he wins concessions on the gas ban, otherwise known as REPowerEU. But EU countries are holding strong. “That’s always the case, that they are finding ways to make their exit strategies,” Vaičiūnas said, “but now we have to really take a strong [stance] on … REPower.” In the meantime, the two countries have continued to argue the law threatens their energy security, will raise prices for consumers and hurt their heavy industry. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has vowed to block the EU’s 19th sanctions package against Russia unless he wins concessions on the gas ban, otherwise known as REPowerEU. | Contributor/Getty Images Hungary’s state-owned energy firm MVM currently has a long-term contract with Russia’s Gazprom until 2036, as well as shorter-term seasonal deals. Slovak firm SPP is bound by its deal with the Kremlin-controlled export monopoly until 2034.  After MEPs agreed on their negotiating stance on the bill last week, Budapest’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó called the text “a direct attack on Hungary’s energy security.”  It “sets back our economic performance, and threatens the low utility costs of Hungarian families,” he wrote on social platform X. “We won’t let this happen!!” “REPOWER IS A NONSENSICAL IDEOLOGICAL MOVE,” Fico fumed earlier this month. The Hungarian foreign ministry and the Slovak economy ministry did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for comment. But the industry isn’t as vociferous. The proposal is “probably not cataclysmic,” said one Hungarian oil and gas sector insider. “The government and politicians do cry wolf — let’s see if this wolf really comes.”  It is true the bill will likely raise prices in the region by “5 to 10 percent” in the midterm, said Tamás Pletser, an oil and gas analyst at Erste bank. But if the Commission works with countries to lower gas transit fees, that could eliminate “up to 40 percent” of the price hike, he added. Meanwhile, MVM is quietly signing new gas deals, Pletser added. Hungary can also find alternatives via liquefied gas from Western Europe and Greece, he said, as well as a new drilling project in Romania from mid-2027. The industry is “absolutely” ready, he said. The EU executive is nonplussed, too. “The measures have been designed to preserve the security of the EU’s energy supply while limiting any impact on prices,” said one Commission official. Whether or not it leads to price increases, EU capitals are ready to pull the trigger.  “They didn’t do much to diversify, sabotaged sanctions and had quite a lot of time,” said a second EU diplomat. “There is no other way [than] to make them.” “It’s not yesterday that we started talking about phasing out Russian gas,” said a third EU diplomat. “Russia is not a partner — it’s a problem. It’s time to stop pretending it is not.”

Quit stressing about climate change — it’ll all be fine. That was the message from two of U.S. President Donald Trump’s top government appointees during a trip to Brussels last week. Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright and finance cop Paul Atkins each dismissed the EU’s comparatively stringent approach to climate regulation during their visits, with the former saying the danger posed by global warming was “overhyped.” It comes as the EU faces increasing pressure to wind back its climate ambitions to compete with countries with looser standards, such as the U.S. and China. Atkins, whom Trump appointed to head U.S. finance watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year, said global warming posed no serious threat to financial stability, and insisted it was not the place of financial regulators to police the climate-related policies of businesses. “We’re not here to be environmental police or social police or whatever. That’s not our job,” he told POLITICO. That position contradicts the European Central Bank’s stance that climate change poses real risks to the financial system. As for whether he believes in the science of climate change, Atkins said: “It doesn’t matter what I believe.” Since moving into the White House in January, Trump has unleashed a barrage of domestic anti-green reforms, from winding back his predecessor Joe Biden’s massive tax breaks for low-carbon technology to withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to stop measuring the emissions of some of the U.S.’s top polluters, including coal plants, steel mills and oil refineries. Trump has also openly waged war on wind power, a key tool in weaning the world off fossil fuel-generated electricity. Wright, a former oil man, did not deny the existence of climate change, but said its effects had been exaggerated. “[T]oday your chance of dying from [an] extreme weather event is the lowest we have in recorded history, and 20 percent of kids record nightmares about climate change,” Wright said at a press conference on Friday, without citing the source of these statistics. “So we have got people very afraid of something that’s a real issue, but we overhyped it,” he said. He urged countries to stop subsidizing renewable energy because it was having little impact on emissions, but was costly for industry. In the U.K. earlier in the week he told the BBC artificial intelligence would help solve climate change by cracking the problem of harnessing nuclear fusion to generate electricity in a decade or so. The EU has among the most stringent stringent climate rules in the world, but is under pressure to wind these back, both internally and from other countries like the U.S. European industry is struggling with high energy costs and intense competition from China, and business groups and politicians from the center to the far right have argued green rules add additional costs that industry cannot afford. EU lawmakers are currently reviewing a proposal to slash rules requiring companies to report on their impacts on the environment, and member countries are struggling to reach an agreement on the EU’s 2040 emissions target.

BRUSSELS — Climate change supercharged last week’s European heat wave and tripled the death toll, a group of scientists said Wednesday.  Extreme temperatures baked large swaths of the continent in late June and early July, exposing millions of Europeans to dangerous levels of heat.  Looking at 12 European cities, the researchers found that in 11 of them, heat waves of the type that peaked last week would have been significantly less intense — between 2 to 4 degrees Celsius cooler — in a world without man-made global warming.  This climate-induced change in temperatures, the scientists said, led to a surge in excess deaths in those cities. Of the 2,300 additional fatalities linked to high temperatures, around 1,500 of them can be attributed to global warming, they estimated.  “Climate change is an absolute game changer when it comes to extreme heat,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, which co-led the research.  A construction worker in Italy and a street cleaner in Spain were among those thought to have died of heat stroke last week. But most heat-related deaths, particularly among the elderly, go unreported. The scientists said the vast majority of deaths they analyzed occurred among Europeans aged 65 or older.  As a result, heat is often dubbed a “silent killer,” though it’s no less deadly than other climate-related disasters. The scientists noted that last week’s heat wave killed more people than devastating flood events in recent years, which resulted in several hundred deaths.  “Our study is only a snapshot of the true death toll linked to climate change-driven temperatures across Europe, which may have reached into the tens of thousands,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, also a climate specialist at Imperial College London. Global warming, driven by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, is increasing the severity and frequency of heat waves in Europe and worldwide. An aging population also makes Europe more vulnerable to the health effects of extreme temperatures.  The European Environment Agency has warned that heat-related deaths are expected to increase tenfold if the planet warms 1.5 C, and thirtyfold at 3 C. The planet is already 1.3 C hotter than in preindustrial times and on track to warm 2.7 C this century.  THE TOLL OF EXTREME HEAT The rapid analysis published Wednesday — which uses methods considered scientifically reliable but has not undergone peer review  — was led by researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.  The scientists looked at deaths in Milan (where they estimated 317 fatalities were due to changes in the climate), Barcelona (286), Paris (235), London (171), Rome (164), Madrid (108), Athens (96), Budapest (47), Zagreb (31), Frankfurt (21), Lisbon (also 21) and the Sardinian city of Sassari (six) between June 23 and July 2.  “These numbers represent real people that have lost their lives in the last days due to the extreme heat. Two-thirds of these would not have died were it not for climate change,” said Otto.  Last week’s heat also drove up wildfire risk across Europe, with fires still raging in many parts of the continent. The analysis does not include deaths linked to fire or smoke. In Spain, for example, two farmers were killed trying to flee encroaching flames last week.  The Spanish government separately monitors heat-related excess deaths and found that between June 21 and July 2, more than 450 people died due to extreme temperatures — 73 percent more than in the same period in 2022, which saw record numbers of deaths.  WESTERN EUROPE’S HOTTEST JUNE The EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service, meanwhile, said Wednesday morning that last month was the third-hottest June on record worldwide.  For Europe, it was the fifth-warmest June, though the western part of the continent saw its hottest June on record, the scientists said — just above the 2003 record, which was followed by a summer marked by deadly heat.  The temperatures in Europe are further amplified by what Copernicus terms an “exceptional” marine heat wave in the Mediterranean Sea. The water surface temperatures have hit their highest level on record, not just for June but for any month.  “June 2025 saw an exceptional heat wave impact large parts of western Europe, with much of the region experiencing very strong heat stress. This heatwave was made more intense by record sea surface temperatures in the western Mediterranean,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.  “In a warming world, heat waves are likely to become more frequent, more intense and impact more people across Europe,” she added.  Cory Bennett contributed to this report. 

CARDIFF, Wales — At the edge of a sprawling wheat field on the outskirts of Cardiff, arable farmer Richard Anthony sticks a shovel in the ground and offers up a fistful of soil for a sniff.  “The first thing [I do when] I walk into a field: I catch a handful of soil,” he says. “[The] first thing I do is smell it, to see if it smells healthy.” His mind is on climate change. The clump in his palm is indeed healthy — but it’s dry. It comes at the tail end of an unusually hot spring. Anthony and his wife, Lyn, are planting crops in increasingly short “weather windows,” dodging the wet days of the previous fall. “It does worry me,” he told POLITICO, acres of wheat plants swaying behind him. “But we, as farmers, have always had to adapt. And we’re having to adapt to climate change.” Farmers like the Anthonys are looking for guidance from the Senedd — the Labour-led devolved Welsh parliament down the road in Cardiff Bay. “Farming is seen as the biggest problem with climate change, and we’re not. We’re the only industry that can actually do something about it,” Anthony said. But Welsh ministers’ key environmental plans are in disarray, delayed for over a year after farmers angrily rejected proposals they say would hit jobs and livelihoods. Annoying farmers is bad news for Labour in Wales, a country where 90 percent of land is given over to agriculture. And it has consequences in Westminster, too, for a U.K. government that can’t afford another political bloody nose. Welsh national elections next May will be a crucial mid-term litmus test for the appeal of Keir Starmer’s embattled Labour. The 2026 Senedd vote is seen by party leaders in London “as a staging post between now and [the general election in] 2029,” said one Welsh union boss in February. Labour is going backward in Wales.  Welsh polls published Tuesday show Labour, in charge at the Senedd since 1999, dropping to third place, losing support to both populists Reform UK and nationalists Plaid Cymru. The party is being punished, experts say, for its own perceived inertia and a far too cozy relationship with Westminster. “The Welsh government are in a very difficult situation, in that both they are unpopular as incumbents and they’re also paying a price for the unpopularity of the U.K. Labour government,” said Jac Larner, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “So at the moment there is a general resistance, I think, to taking any tough decisions.”  THE CLIMATE MOMENT Faltering climate policy contributes to the sense that Welsh ministers are “losing perceptions of competence,” Larner argued. The challenge is substantial. Within the next decade, agriculture could become Wales’ largest source of emissions. To hit a U.K.-wide target of net zero by 2050, most emissions cuts will have to come from high-polluting sectors like farming. The Welsh government’s solution is the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS) — a program designed to help farmers adopt low-carbon activities like planting more trees. The thinking is that with the offer of cash, farmers will dedicate more of their land to mopping up planet-wrecking emissions, making the most of its natural potential to sequester carbon and store it deep in the soil. Wales should reap the benefits of these “natural carbon sinks,” says the U.K.’s independent climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee.  But ministers paused the SFS roll-out after initial plans, published in December 2023, provoked protests and a backlash over a draft 10 percent tree-planting target, which farmers said would cost thousands of agricultural jobs. The Welsh government says details will now be finalized this summer, with the scheme up and running in 2026. With 90 percent of its land used for farming, Wales is seeing instability over climate and agriculture policy. | Abby Wallace/POLITICO “I think we’ve come from such a bad place, it’s going to be quite hard to lift it back up,” said Abi Reader, a dairy farmer and deputy president of the National Farmers Union Cymru.  Behind Reader, on her farm in the Cardiff town of Wenvoe, a large shed groans as rows of cattle diligently shuffle into the parlour, waiting to be hooked up to clinking machines for milking. “It’s difficult to say whether we should be signing up to it [the SFS] or not, because we’ve got no details of any of the costings,” Reader said.  “We’re all business people at the end of the day and, you know, we’ve all already done our budgets for next year. And there’s nothing to go to a bank manager with and say: ‘I want to borrow this, or can you support me for that?’” ‘BANG, BANG, KICK A MAN’ The SFS has caused unrest on another politically sensitive topic: livestock. A Welsh government estimate suggested the scheme could reduce livestock numbers by as much as 120,000. If ministers in Cardiff follow separate CCC advice published in May — on how to hit climate goals by 2033 — cattle and sheep numbers in Wales need to fall by nearly a fifth. Some of this will come from wider trends toward lower meat and dairy consumption — but it will also be driven by policies like the SFS, which incentivize farmers to rely less on livestock. The Welsh government must “engage with farmers and their communities, and support them to diversify their incomes,” the CCC said. This advice has spooked farmers, who see a threat to years of family-owned businesses. “Would that mean I’d have to move away from here?” asked third-generation beef farmer Tom Rees in his kitchen in Cowbridge, gesturing to the fields beyond the window where his father and grandfather also farmed. His farm slopes downhill toward a patch of land that often floods when a neighboring river overflows. It’s sliced up into rectangular fields by colorful hedgerows that act as corridors for local wildlife and as shelter for his cows on sunny days — but planting hedges isn’t how Rees wants to earn a living. “I went to college to study agriculture, to come on the farm because I wanted to produce food,” he said. “I don’t want to plant a woodland.” Rees hopes to pass the farm on to his 15-month-old son Henry — but is worried about uncertainty over the SFS, as well as issues around bovine tuberculosis and inheritance tax changes. He said: “Dad’s left the farm in a better place than when he took it on. We want to take it on a bit further, so we could leave it for Henry. … [But] with the government in Westminster and the government in the Senedd — you just really feel, Why are we bothering? “It’s bang, bang, kick a man while you’re down. That’s what it feels like, and that’s what a lot of farmers feel like in Wales.” The Welsh government refused to comment on the SFS, confirming only that details will be published this month. A spokesperson said the government is “reviewing” the CCC’s advice, which will inform decisions on a new climate goal for Wales before the end of the year. “We’re trying to take forward a future for agriculture in Wales, which is to do with thriving, living businesses and communities within Wales,” Huw Irranca-Davies, Wales’ cabinet secretary for climate change and rural affairs, told POLITICO in an interview last year. ANNOYING VOTERS Labour’s support has traditionally been low in rural Wales, where votes flow instead to the Conservatives or Plaid Cymru. But the mess over agricultural policies is deepening Labour’s woes, argued Cardiff University’s Larner. “By annoying these people, you kind of block off the possibility that any of these people at all will vote Labour,” he said, “So it’s just a kind of narrowing of the vote pool in which you can fish for extra voters come other elections.” Meantime, Plaid Cymru and Reform are making their pitches to rural voters. “You have to take the farmers with you on this journey. And that’s one lesson, I think, that the Welsh government has learned the hard way,” said Llyr Gruffydd, Senedd member for North Wales and Plaid’s agriculture and rural affairs spokesperson. Plaid will “reassess” the SFS when more details are published, Gruffydd said. His party is not about to announce plans to “plow a different furrow,” he said, but he didn’t rule out ditching the unpopular scheme either. When Plaid sees the plans, Gruffydd argued, it can decide “whether this is something that we can pursue, whether we feel we need to amend it — or, God forbid, whether we have to say, let’s get back to the drawing board.” Nigel Farage’s Reform, riding high in the polls and fresh from smashing Labour in local elections in May, wants to scrap net-zero targets altogether. “Farmers want lower costs to stay afloat. Net stupid zero adds costs for no benefit,” said Deputy Leader Richard Tice. Reform is set to benefit, too, from anger over the fate of Welsh steelmaking. Thousands of job losses loom at the Port Talbot plant as it shifts to a lower-emitting electric arc furnace, a political gift to Farage when he argues that climate-friendly policies wreck traditional industries. “That’s the one big example we’ve seen of net-zero related policy, and is one of loss of jobs with not very much put in place to support workers to do anything different,” said Joe Rossiter, co-director at the Institute of Welsh Affairs. “When it all shakes out, I do think the fight will be Labour vs. Reform for the top spot,” said one Labour insider who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. The U.K. government “has been completely focused on making sure the transition to green steelmaking is as good as it can be.” Asked about the example of Port Talbot, Reader, the dairy farmer, was nervous about the precedent it set for other climate policies. “If they damage Welsh agriculture in the same way [as steel], I think that’s really letting down Wales,” she said.  ALL IN IT TOGETHER The Welsh government’s other big problem? It has cuddled up so tightly to Westminster that Labour’s performance in Cardiff will rebound in London and vice-versa. “There’s no ‘other’ for them to blame, because they’ve tied themselves very closely, rhetorically as well, to the U.K. government,” Larner said. Some Welsh Labour MPs defend the U.K. government’s record. “If you look at the amount of money that the Labour Party is investing in the agricultural sector, that shows a huge commitment to the industry,” said Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Pembrokeshire. After months spent arguing the benefits of having Labour governments in both Cardiff and London, Senedd First Minister Eluned Morgan in May pivoted to emphasize the divide between them. Expect more attempts to put “clear red water” between the two camps, Larner said. Yet when Starmer addressed the Welsh Labour conference in north Wales last month, the old closeness was back. “Next year it’s a clear choice. Two Labour governments working together for the people of Wales … or risk rolling back all the progress we are making,” the prime minister said. As Starmer spoke, a clutch of farmers protested outside. ‘Starmer: farmer harmer,’ read one placard. Voters will say soon enough what they make of that bond between Labour in Wales and Westminster.