Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change. This week EU easing up HITTING THE BREAKS: The EU “walked back” its target to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2035, “permitting some new combustion engine cars”, reported Agence-France Presse. Under the original plan, the bloc would have had to cut emissions entirely by 2035 on new vehicles, but will now only have to cut emissions by 90% by that date, compared to 2021 levels. However, according to the Financial Times, some car manufacturers have “soured” on the reversal. ADJUSTING CBAM: Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that the EU is making plans to “close loopholes” in the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) before it goes into effect in January. CBAM is set to be the world’s first carbon border tax and has drawn ire from key trading partners. The EU has also finalised a plan to delay its anti-deforestation legislation for another year, according to Carbon Pulse. Around the world NCAR NO MORE: The Trump administration is moving to “dismantle” the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said USA Today, describing it as “one of the world’s leading climate research labs”. DEADLY FLOODS: The deadliest flash flooding in Morocco in a decade killed “at least” 37 people, while residents accused the government of “ignoring known flood risks and failing to maintain basic infrastructure”, reported Radio France Internationale. FAILING GRADE: The past year was the “warmest and wettest” ever recorded in the Arctic, with implications for “global sea level rise, weather patterns and commercial fisheries”, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2025 Arctic report card, covered by NPR. POWER TO THE PEOPLE: Reuters reported that Kenya signed a $311m agreement with an African infrastructure fund and India’s Power Grid Corporation for the “construction of two high-voltage electricity transmission lines” that could provide power for millions of people. BP’S NEW EXEC: BP has appointed Woodside Energy Group’s Meg O’Neill as its new chief executive amid a “renewed push to…double down on oil and gas after retreating from an ambitious renewables strategy”, said Reuters. 29 The number of consecutive years in which the Greenland ice sheet has experienced “continuous annual ice loss”, according to a Carbon Brief guest post. Latest climate research Up to 4,000 glaciers could “disappear” per year during “peak glacier extinction”, projected to occur sometime between 2041 and 2055

Nature Climate Change The rate of sea level rise across the coastal US doubled over the past century

AGU Advances Repression and criminalisation of climate and environmentally focused protests are a “global phenomena”, according to an analysis of 14 countries

Environmental Politics (For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.) Captured The latest coal market report from the International Energy Agency said that global coal use will reach record levels in 2025, but will decline by the end of the decade. Carbon Brief analysis of the report found that projected coal use in China for 2027 has been revised downwards by 127m tonnes, compared to the projection from the 2024 report – “more than cancelling out the effects of the Trump administration’s coal-friendly policies in the US”. Spotlight What climate scientists are curious about This week, Carbon Brief spoke to climate scientists attending the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Louisiana, about the most interesting research papers they read this year. Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity. Dr Christopher Callahan, assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington The most interesting research paper I read was a simple thought experiment asking when we would have known humans were changing the climate if we had always had perfect observations. The authors show that we could have detected a human influence on the climate as early as the 1880s, since we have a strong physical understanding of how those changes should look. This paper both highlights that we have been discernibly changing the climate for centuries and emphasises the importance of the modern climate observing network – a network that is currently threatened by budget cuts and staff shortages. Prof Lucy Hutyra, distinguished professor at Boston University The most interesting paper I read was in Nature Climate Change, where the researchers looked at how much mortality was associated with cold weather versus hot weather events and found that many more people died during cold weather events. Then, they estimated how much of a protective factor in the urban heat island is on those winter deaths and suggested that the winter benefits exceed the summer risks of mitigating extreme heat, so perhaps we shouldn’t mitigate extreme heat in cities. This paper got me in a tizzy…It spurred an exciting new line of research. We’ll be publishing a response to this paper in 2026. I’m not sure their conclusion was correct, but it raised really excellent questions. Dr Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central This year was when we saw source attribution studies, such as Chris Callahan‘s, really start to break through and be able to connect the emissions of specific emitters…to the impact of those emissions through heat or some other sort of damage function. [This] is really game-changing. What [Callahan’s] paper showed is that the emissions of individual companies have an impact on extreme heat, which then has an impact on the GDP of the countries experiencing that extreme heat. And so, for the first time, you can really say: “Company X caused this condition which then led to this economic damage.” Dr Antonia Hadjimichael, assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University It was about interdisciplinary work – not that anything in it is ground-shakingly new, but it was a good conversation around interdisciplinary teams and what makes them work and what doesn’t make them work. And what I really liked about it is that they really emphasise the role of a connector – the scientist that navigates this space in between and makes sure that the things kind of glue together…The reason I really like this paper is that we don’t value those scientists in academia, in traditional metrics that we have. Dr Santiago Botía, researcher at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry The most interesting paper I’ve read this year was about how soil fertility and water table depth control the response to drought in the Amazon. They found very nicely how the proximity to soil water controls the anomalies in gross primary productivity in the Amazon. And, with that methodology, they could explain the response of recent droughts and the “greening” of the forest during drought, which is kind of a counterintuitive [phenomenon], but it was very interesting. Dr Gregory Johnson, affiliate professor at the University of Washington This article explores the response of a fairly coarse spatial resolution climate model…to a scenario in which atmospheric CO2 is increased at 1% a year to doubling and then CO2 is more gradually removed from the atmosphere…[It finds] a large release of heat from the Southern Ocean, with substantial regional – and even global – climate impacts. I find this work interesting because it reminds us of the important – and potentially nonlinear – roles that changing ocean circulation and water properties play in modulating our climate. Cecilia Keating also contributed to this spotlight. Watch, read, listen METHANE MATTERS: In the Guardian, Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley wrote that the world must “urgently target methane” to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. CLIMATE WRAPPED: Grist summarised the major stories for Earth’s climate in 2025 – “the good, the bad and the ugly”. COASTING: On the Coastal Call podcast, a biogeochemist spoke about “coastal change and community resilience” in the eastern US’s Long Island Sound. Coming up 27 December: Cote D’Ivoire parliamentary elections 28 December: Central African Republic presidential and parliamentary elections 28 December: Guinean presidential election Pick of the jobs BirdLife International, forest programme administrator

Salary: £28,000-£30,000. Location: Cambridge, UK World Resources Institute, power-sector transition senior manager

Salary: $116,000-$139,000. Location: Washington DC Fauna & Flora, operations lead for Liberia

Salary: $61,910. Location: Monrovia, Liberia DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected]. This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here. DeBriefed 12 December: EU under ‘pressure’; ‘Unusual warmth’ explained; Rise of climate boardgames DeBriefed

12.12.25 DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out DeBriefed

05.12.25 DeBriefed 28 November 2025: COP30’s ‘frustrating’ end; Asia floods; UK ‘emergency’ climate event DeBriefed

28.11.25 COP30 DeBriefed 21 November 2025: ‘Mutirão’ text latest; ‘Roadmaps’ explained; COP finish times plotted COP30 Belém

21.11.25 The post DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading appeared first on Carbon Brief.

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