At least 1,773 coal, oil, and gas lobbyists have been granted access to the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, a new report has found, raising concerns about the planet-heating industry’s influence on the negotiations.

Those lobbyists outnumber the delegations of almost every country at the conference, the analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition shows, with the only exceptions being this year’s host country, Azerbaijan, next year’s host Brazil, and Turkey.

The finding comes during week one of the climate summit, known as Cop29. Days before the talks kicked off, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, was caught on film agreeing to facilitate oil deals at the negotiations.

Sarah McArthur, an activist with the environmental group UK Youth Climate Coalition, which is a member of the KBPO coalition, said: “Cop29 kicked off with the revelation that fossil fuel deals were on the agenda, laying bare the ways that industry’s constant presence has delayed and weakened progress for years. The fossil fuel industry is driven by their financial bottom line, which is fundamentally opposed to what is needed to stop the climate crisis, namely, the urgent and just phaseout of fossil fuels.”

The 10 most climate-vulnerable nations have only a combined 1,033 delegates at the negotiations. “Industry presence is dwarfing that of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” the analysis says.

Many fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to Cop29 as part of trade associations, primarily from the global north. The International Emissions Trading Association brought the largest number, with 43 representatives hailing from oil majors like TotalEnergies and Glencore.

Other lobbyists are attending as part of national delegations. Japan brought a representative from coal giant Sumitomo, while Canada brought representatives from Suncor and Tourmaline, and Italy brought employees of energy companies Eni and Enel. The UK alone brought 20 lobbyists, the report says.

“The fossil fuel industry has long manipulated climate negotiations to protect its interests while our planet burns,” said Dawda Cham of the grassroots groups Help Gambia and the Africa Make Big Polluters Pay coalition, who is also a member of the KBPO coalition.

The analysis also says the major oil producers Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Eni, which brought a combined total of 39 lobbyists to Cop29, are “linked to enabling genocide in Palestine” because their operations supply oil to Israel.

For the analysis, climate campaigners pored over the UN’s list of registered Cop29 attenders and noted their disclosed affiliations.

Last year’s climate talks in Dubai were attended by 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists – a record number which represented nearly 3% of the 85,000 total attenders. This year, turnout is lower, with about 70,000 people granted access, of whom 1.5% are fossil fuel-linked lobbyists.

Though the analysis covers only fossil fuel-linked lobbyists, it notes that representatives from other polluting sectors such as agribusiness and transit are also present.

Activists have for years urged the UN to ban representatives of polluting industries from climate talks. Last year, officials imposed a new rule requiring registrants to disclose their affiliations; they were previously able to attend without formally disclosing these relationships.

The US hosted a senior representative from the world’s second largest oilfield services company in its Cop29 pavilion on Thursday. In a panel about “industry climate solutions for global partners,” a Baker Hughes vice-president said “we’re not looking to tear down infrastructure” but rather were interested in “incremental change” in the fossil fuel industry.

Baker Hughes provides services and products for geothermal power and carbon capture and storage, yet its main business is providing products and services for onshore and offshore oilfield operations.

Coal, oil and gas are the top contributors to the climate crisis. To avert the worst consequences of global heating, the world must swiftly phase them out, top climate scientists have long warned.

UN climate negotiators did not agree to “transition away” from fossil fuels until their 28th summit in Dubai last year.

Future UN climate summits should be held only in countries that can show clear support for climate action and have stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying, according to a group of influential climate policy experts.

The group includes former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and the prominent climate scientist Johan Rockström.

They have written to the UN demanding the current complex process of annual “conferences of the parties” under the UN framework convention on climate change – the Paris agreement’s parent treaty – be streamlined, and meetings held more frequently, with more of a voice given to developing countries.

“It is now clear that the Cop is no longer fit for purpose. We need a shift from negotiation to implementation,” they wrote.

This year’s talks, known as Cop29, are nearing their halfway mark in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.

Azerbaijan is a controversial host for the conference, as it is a major fossil fuel producer, with oil and gas making up half of its exports. Last year’s conference was also held in a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, and the president of that edition, Sultan Al Jaber, kept his main job of heading the country’s national oil company, Adnoc.

Before Cop29 opened, one of the key members of the Azerbaijan government’s organising team was filmed appearing to offer help striking fossil fuel deals. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, also remarked at the opening ceremony that his country’s oil and gas were “a gift of God”.

“We need strict eligibility criteria to exclude countries who do not support the phase-out/transition away from fossil energy. Host countries must demonstrate their high level of ambition to uphold the goals of the Paris agreement,” the group wrote.

Figueres said: “At the last Cop, fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered representatives of scientific institutions, Indigenous communities and vulnerable nations. We cannot hope to achieve a just transition without significant reforms to the Cop process that ensure fair representation of those most affected.”

At least 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists have been granted access to Cop29, according to data analysed by the Kick Big Polluters Out activist coalition. That is more than all but three countries (Azerbaijan, Brazil and Turkey), and considerably more than the 10 nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis, who have a combined 1,033 delegates.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, also took aim at fossil fuel influence at the conference, particularly from Azerbaijan.

Gore said: “There’s an old country song from Nashville called Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. For a long time, lots of people bought the line that as the fossil fuel industry caused [the climate crisis] they would solve it for us. But they are not going to solve it for us. The global community has to organise a far more effective way to run these Cops [than to host them in petrostates]. The UN secretary general ought to have a role in who’s going to be host.”

The focus of Cop29 is how to supply enough cash to poor countries to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather.

Poor countries will need about $1tn a year by 2030 to fulfil the aims of the Paris agreement and limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Close to a third of that should come from developed countries, either through development banks such as the World Bank, or through direct funding, according to a report by leading economists, while most of the rest should come from the private sector.

But there is still little agreement from developed countries on how much they are willing to provide and on what terms, or over which other countries – including petrostates and major emerging economies such as China – should be asked to contribute to such funding.

Campaigners who took over the outside areas of the Cop venue – the Olympic Stadium in Baku – were in no doubt who should provide the money. “Make polluters pay” read the giant banner unfurled over the conference, as campaigners chanted the slogan.

The core talks on a new climate finance settlement – called the “new collective quantified goal” – moved slowly on Thursday, with a new draft text called “unworkable” by some countries. Negotiations will continue throughout next week, and are scheduled to finish next Friday evening.

Outside the negotiating rooms, some countries are looking for new sources of finance to plug the gaps. A report by a taskforce led by Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat and the current chief of the European Climate Foundation, found that new “global solidarity levies” could raise large sums towards the climate finance needed for the poor world.

Levying a charge on cryptocurrencies – which are energy-intensive to create – could be one option, the report found. Charging just $0.045 per kWh for the energy would produce $5bn, it said.

A plastics production levy, charged on producing plastics from polymers rather than from recycled material, could yield $25bn-$35bn a year if set at $60 to $90 a tonne. Even more effective would be a 2% wealth tax, an idea championed by Brazil, which could yield $200bn-$250bn a year.

Taxing frequent flyers and business class airline tickets could generate up to $164bn a year, depending on the design of the scheme.

Tubiana said: “One of the founding pillars of the Paris agreement is financial solidarity between developed and developing countries. Such solidarity makes it possible for all countries to gradually raise their national ambitions to achieve the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C. However, there can be no climate justice without fiscal justice, as all countries are facing the same challenge: how to fund the transition while ensuring that those with the greatest means and the highest emissions pay their fair share.”

She will present the final report of the taskforce, led by the governments of France, Barbados and Kenya, before next year’s Cop.

Fears that Donald Trump’s second presidency will be more extreme than his first have intensified amid a flurry of senior nominations that opponents have criticised as going from bad to worse.

Dismay over some of the president-elect’s early picks escalated to outrage after the far-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was unveiled as his selection to be attorney general – a position Trump has previously said he views as the most important in his administration.

The choice provoked disbelief, even among Republicans, and has fueled concerns that Trump is intent on carrying out mass firings at the Department of Justice in retribution for criminal investigations it instigated against him.

Trump reportedly chose Gaetz, 42, after the congressman – who himself was subject to a two-year justice department investigation into suspected sex-trafficking that ended without charges – told Trump: “Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”

Others considered for the post were dismissed as too concerned with legal concepts or constitutional niceties.

Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Trump’s first presidency, called Gaetz’s nomination “a big f… you to America”.

“Matt Gaetz is just simply unqualified … academically, professionally, ethically, morally and experientially,” he told CNN this week.

The nomination followed two other shock appointments: Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Fox News’s Pete Hegseth as defence secretary.

Gabbard, 43 – a former Democratic member of Congress turned Republican – would oversee America’s vast intelligence complex despite past accusations of being a Russian asset or spouting Kremlin talking points.

Her nomination followed repeated vows by Trump to purge intelligence chiefs who he considers to be part of a “deep state”.

Army veteran Hegseth, 44, has railed against “woke” leadership in the military. He was nominated following reports Trump was considering issuing an early executive order that would establish a “warrior board” empowered to recommend the removal of generals and admirals deemed to lack “requisite leadership qualities”.

And on Thursday, Trump announced that he had tapped the anti-vaccine crusader Robert F Kennedy Jr for the position of health and human services secretary, which will allow him to oversee the administration of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

Kennedy, who endorsed and campaigned for Trump after dropping his own third-party presidential bid, has established himself as an influential promoter of baseless conspiracy theories about vaccines and other public health staples, such as water fluoridation, which he opposes. Kennedy drew sharp rebuke in 2023 for remarking during an event that he believed the Covid-19 virus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and spare Jewish and Chinese people.

On the campaign trail with Trump, he adopted the slogan “Make America healthy again”, highlighting chronic illness as a top concern. In turn, Trump vowed to “let him go wild on health”, sparking fears among public health experts about Kennedy’s influence in the Trump administration.

Some observers saw these nominations as a deliberate challenge to Senate Republicans, who on Wednesday elected John Thune to replace the retiring Mitch McConnell as Senate leader after the party won a 53-47 majority in the chamber in last week’s general election.

The Senate is constitutionally responsible for vetting senior appointments in confirmation hearings. Forecasts have already rolled in noting that Gaetz in particular would struggle to win acceptance.

But Trump has urged the Senate to circumvent such hearings by allowing him to make recess appointments in what is seen as an early test of Thune’s independence.

“These choices seem designed to poke the Senate in the eye,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice – a non-partisan law and policy institute – told the New York Times. “[They] are so appalling they’re a form of performance art.”

The three latest nominees overshadowed concerns about Trump’s appointees on immigration, a key issue which he has highlighted by vowing mass deportations of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Tom Homan, a hardline former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been chosen as border czar, while Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who earned notoriety by admitting that she shot her own dog, has been nominated as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has chosen an even more immoderate figure, Stephen Miller – the architect of the child separation policy for migrant families in his first presidency – as his deputy White House chief of staff for policy, a brief certain to include immigration.

Trump had also raised eyebrows with his choice of Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, as US ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has previously championed internationally illegal Israeli settlements and has said Israel has a “title deed” to the West Bank, which the Palestinians want as part of a future state; he calls the West Bank by its Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria.

Steve Witkoff, a golfing partner who was with Trump at his West Palm Beach golf club at the time of a second failed assassination attempt in September, has been chosen as Middle East envoy.

Elise Stefanik, a New York representative whose pugnacious questioning about antisemitism brought down two female Ivy League university heads, will be ambassador to the UN, a body she has frequently criticised.

Some nominations are relatively uncontroversial, including Marco Rubio, a senator for Florida, as secretary of state, and Susie Wiles, a veteran Republican operative and senior campaign adviser, as White House chief of staff.

Global plastic production must be reduced to tackle the immense challenge of plastic pollution, according to an analysis published on the eve of crucial talks to hammer out the world’s first legally binding treaty on plastic waste.

Mismanaged plastic waste, which leaches into the environment and can be harmful to health, will double to 121m tonnes by 2050 if limits are not placed on the production of plastic, according to Samuel Pottinger, the lead author of the research.

Annual greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic system will increase by 37% over the same period if the world does not place some restrictions on plastic production.

But combining four measures; a global cap on plastic production, investing in waste infrastructure, using a packaging tax and a recycling mandate could reduce mismanaged plastic waste by up to 91% by 2050, and decrease plastics-related emissions by about a third, the research has found.

The study was published in the journal Science, before UN treaty talks in Busan, South Korea, which present the final chance for countries to agree on how to cut plastic pollution.

The talks are on a knife edge with lobbyists for plastic producers and some countries objecting to the treaty including a cap or cuts to production.

All four interventions highlighted as significant in the research are being considered in the draft treaty and will be part of the discussions on 25 November.

Pottinger, of the University of California, Berkeley, said: “The stated goal of the treaty is to end plastic pollution. The results of this new analysis and our interactive tool show very clearly that it will be nearly impossible to end plastic pollution without cuts to plastic production.

“This research truly laid bare to us the immensity of the global challenge of mismanaged plastic waste. It was an exciting and optimistic finding to see in this research that the treaty could very nearly solve this problem.

“But it is a very hard problem that will require a suite of very ambitious policies to solve. Without a production cap, the problem gets harder to solve and the ambition required for other policies goes up.”

More than 50 countries at the treaty talks, including the UK, have signed the Bridge to Busan commitment to ensure it addresses the full lifecycle of plastic, including introducing sustainable production of plastic polymers.

Most of the 547m tonnes of plastic created in 2020 – 32% – was used for packaging, the analysis showed.

Capping production at 2020 levels, when the world was making an immense amount of plastic, would alone reduce global mismanaged plastic waste by 2050 from approximately 121m tonnes to 72m tonnes.

The research spells out the immense harm caused by plastic production, which has increased relentlessly since 1950, and the pollution it creates.

“In the environment, plastic waste breaks into ever smaller pieces, including micro- and nanoplastics, and thus negatively impacts myriad ecosystems, from the Arctic to the deep ocean,” Pottinger said.

“Plastic pollution is associated with diverse human health impacts, such as elevated risk for cancers, cardiovascular disease, and reproductive health. The plastics system is also accelerating climate change, with emissions associated with the extraction and processing of oil and gas used to make plastic, plastic production and plastic waste management.”

The research separated global plastic production and consumption into four regions: North America, China, the EU and the remainder, referred to as Majority World. It examined consumption, waste generation and mismanaged waste.

Annual global plastic consumption reached 547m tonnes in 2020, 86% of which was virgin plastic and 14% recycled plastic. China was the largest consumer of plastics, accounting for 36% of consumption, followed by Majority World 28%, EU 18% and North America 18%.

But while China’s plastic consumption is likely to peak in 2030 then decrease, consumption in North America and Majority World is predicted to grow.

Without intervention to curb production, plastic consumption would increase to 749m tonnes by 2050, but interventions could have a significant effect, the report found. To tackle packaging waste, the creation of a packaging consumption tax would reduce waste, by 145m tonnes.

Introducing a ban on single-use plastic to tackle packaging waste would lower consumption by 98m tonnes, and a reuse mandate (like a deposit return scheme) could reduce plastic packaging by 74m tonnes by 2050.

The interventions on packaging would have huge environmental benefits, the report said, because leakage of often lightweight plastic packaging into the environment was estimated to be particularly large.

Four individuals in Los Angeles were arrested on Wednesday and charged with insurance fraud after claiming that a bear had damaged their cars, when the bear in question was actually just a person dressed in a bear costume.

The California department of insurance said that the suspects filed a claim in January of this year, stating that a bear entered their 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost while it was parked at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino mountains and caused interior damage to the vehicle.

The suspects submitted a video to the insurance company, which showed the alleged “bear” inside the vehicle.

However, upon further scrutiny of the footage, “the investigation determined the bear was actually a person in a bear costume”, the insurance department said in a statement.

Detectives also said that they discovered two additional insurance claims submitted to two more insurance companies, involving the same individuals, with identical dates of loss and location, but two different vehicles.

Those claims also included videos showing a “bear” damaging the cars.

To further verify that the figure in the videos was not a real bear, the insurance department said it took the footage to biologists with the California department of fish and wildlife to review. That agency also concluded that it was clearly a human wearing a bear suit, authorities said.

Detectives then discovered the bear costume in the suspects’ home after executing a search warrant.

The four suspects were identified as Ruben Tamrazian, 26, Ararat Chirkinian, 39, Vahe Muradkhanyan, 32, and Alfiya Zuckerman, 39. They have all been charged with insurance fraud and conspiracy.

The insurance companies were defrauded of $141,839, authorities say.

The California insurance department detectives were assisted by the Glendale police department and the California highway patrol in the investigation.

The San Bernardino county district attorney’s office is prosecuting this case.

The satirical news outlet the Onion has purchased Infowars, the rightwing media platform run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, at a court-ordered auction.

The news was confirmed on Thursday morning in a video by Jones himself, as well as the head of the Onion’s parent company.

“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the US trustee over our bankruptcy this morning, and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said in a video shared on X. “The Connecticut Democrats with the Onion newspaper bought us.”

The Onion plans to rebuild the website and feature well-known internet humor writers and content creators.

CEO Ben Collins confirmed this in a post on Bluesky on Thursday, writing: “The Onion, with the help of the Sandy Hook families, has purchased InfoWars. We are planning on making it a very funny, very stupid website. We have retained the services of some Onion and Clickhole Hall of Famers to pull this off.”

“I can’t wait to show you what we have cooked up,” Collins added.

In another post on Bluesky, Collins said that “part of the reason we did bought InfoWars is because people on Bluesky told us it would be funny to buy InfoWars” adding that “those people were right” this “is the funniest thing that has ever happened”.

The purchase includes the acquisition of Jones’s company’s intellectual property, such as its website, customer lists, inventory and certain social media accounts, and the production equipment, according to CNN. The amount of the bid has not been disclosed.

In the immediate aftermath of the news breaking publicly, Jones started streaming live on X, lambasting the sale of his site. Railing against the Onion, among others, Jones told viewers that it’s “a distinct honor to be here in defiance of the tyrants”. He emphasized that no one told him he couldn’t go live.

Jones also began to ramble about the upcoming Donald Trump administration, telling viewers things like: “This is the fight. If you think the deep state has given up, think again … America is awake now.”

The sale follows a judge’s order earlier this year for Jones to liquidate his personal assets, to help him to pay off the $1.4bn he was ordered to pay the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting that killed 20 first-graders and six educators when they took him to court for defamation after he falsely claimed that the shooting was a hoax, and that they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns.

Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2022.

In order to make the bid work, a lawyer representing the families told CNN that the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, enabling its success”.

“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’s hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, an attorney for the families.

In a post on social media earlier this week, Mattei added that “the breakup of Infowars this week is just the start of Alex Jones’s lesson in accountability” and that the families “will go after his future income and any new Infowars owner acting as a vehicle for Jones’s continued control of the business”.

The world’s largest known coral, visible from space, has been discovered in the waters of the Solomon Islands.

With a circumference of 183 metres, the gigantic multicoloured organism is an intricate network of individual coral polyps that have grown for between 300 and 500 years.

The sprawling coral was discovered in the region of the western Pacific known as the “coral triangle” by scientists belonging to the National Geographic Pristine Seas team during an expedition to the Solomon Islands.

Mostly brown, with highlights of vivid yellows, blues and reds, the Pavona clavus coral is a haven for a panoply of marine species including fish, crabs and shrimps.

“Just when we think there is nothing left to discover on planet Earth, we find a massive coral made of nearly 1bn little polyps, pulsing with life and colour,” said marine ecologist Enric Sala, explorer in residence for National Geographic and founder of Pristine Seas. “This is a significant scientific discovery, like finding the world’s tallest tree. But there is cause for alarm. Despite its remote location, this coral is not safe from global warming and other human threats.”

Unlike a coral reef, which is a network of many coral colonies, this is a standalone coral that has grown uninterrupted from polyps derived from larvae that settled on the seabed and multiplied into millions of other genetically identical polyps over the centuries.

When the team initially spotted the living organism, which is 34 metres wide, 32 metres long and more than 5 metres high, they thought it might be a shipwreck. The expedition’s underwater cinematographer dived more than 12 metres down to the coral and discovered it was a Pavona clavus. Despite its size, this individual coral had never been documented, with local fishers possibly having mistaken it for a boulder over the years.

Ronnie Posala, fisheries officer for the Solomon Islands fisheries ministry, said: “For the people of the Solomon Islands, this mega coral discovery is monumental. It reinforces the importance of our ocean, which sustains our communities, traditions and future. Such discoveries remind us of our duty to safeguard these natural wonders, not only for their ecological value but for the livelihoods and cultural identity they provide.”

Eric Brown, coral scientist for the Pristine Seas expedition, identified and measured the previous record-holding coral, located in American Samoa. “While the nearby shallow reefs were degraded due to warmer seas, witnessing this large healthy coral oasis in slightly deeper waters is a beacon of hope,” he said.

The United States’s blossoming emergence as a clean energy superpower could be stopped in its tracks by Donald Trump, further empowering Chinese leadership and forfeiting tens of billions of dollars of investment to other countries, according to a new report.

Trump’s promise to repeal major climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency threatens to push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the US up to $50bn in lost exports, the analysis found, surrendering ground to China and other emerging powers in the race to build electric cars, batteries, solar and wind energy for the world.

“The US will still install a bunch of solar panels and wind turbines, but getting rid of those policies would harm the US’s bid for leadership in this new world,” said Bentley Allan, an environmental and political policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, who co-authored the new study.

“The energy transition is inevitable and the future prosperity of countries hinges on being part of the clean energy supply chain,” he said. “If we exit the competition, it will be very difficult to re-enter.

“This was our chance to enter the race for clean technologies while everyone else, not just China but South Korea and Nigeria and countries in Europe, do the same.”

Under Biden, the US legislated the Chips Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, all aimed in varying degrees to deal with the climate crisis while also bolstering American manufacturing.

The IRA alone, with its major incentives for clean energy, is credited with helping create around 300,000 new jobs, with the vast majority of $150bn in new manufacturing investment flowing to Republican-held districts.

Trump, however, has called this spending wasteful and vowed to erase it. “I will immediately terminate the green new scam,” the president-elect said shortly before his election win. “That will be such an honor. The greatest scam in the history of any country.”

Doing this may be politically fraught, even with Republican control of Congress, due to the glut of new jobs and factories in conservative-leaning areas. But should Trump’s plan prevail then planned US manufacturing projects would be canceled, according to the new report, leaving American firms reliant upon overseas suppliers for components.

“Without these investments and tax credits, US industry will be hobbled just as it is getting going, ceding the ground to others,” the report states.

Exports would also be hit, the analysis predicts, allowing US competitors to seize market share. “These plans suggest a complete misunderstanding of how the global economy works,” said Allan. “If we don’t have a manufacturing base, we aren’t going to get ahead.”

Trump has talked of forging “American energy dominance” that is based entirely upon fossil fuels, with more oil and gas drilling coupled with a pledge to scrap offshore wind projects and an end to the “lunacy” of electric cars subsidies. The president-elect is expected to lead a wide-ranging dismantling of environmental and climate rules once he returns to the White House.

These priorities, coming as peak global oil production is forecast and pressure mounts to avert climate breakdown, could further cement China’s leadership in clean energy production.

“China already feels puzzled and skeptical of the Inflation Reduction Act,” said Li Shuo, a climate specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Throw in Trump and you deepen Chinese skepticism. This is political boom and bust. When it comes to selling clean energy to third country markets, China isn’t sweating at all.”

But even Trump’s agenda is not expected to completely stall clean energy’s momentum. Renewables are now economically attractive and are set to still grow, albeit more bumpily. Solar, which has plummeted by 90% in cost over the past decade, was added to the American grid at three times the rate of gas capacity last year, for example.

“We will see a big effort to boost the supply of fossil fuels from the US but most drilling is at full blast anyway,” said Ely Sandler, a climate finance expert at Harvard University.

“That’s quite different from demand, which is how power is generated and usually comes down to the cheapest source of energy which is increasingly renewables. If Donald Trump eases permitting regulations, it could even lead to more clean energy coming online.”

At the UN Cop29 talks in Azerbaijan, which started on Monday, countries are again having to grapple with a bewildering swing in the US’s commitment to confront the climate crisis. The outgoing Biden administration, which is trying to talk up ongoing American action at the talks, hopes its climate policies have enough juice to outlast a Trumpian assault.

“What we will see is whether we’ve achieved escape velocity or not and how quickly the booster packs are about to fall off,” said Ali Zaidi, Biden’s top climate adviser, at the Cop summit.

The Iranian state has said that it plans to open a treatment clinic for women who defy the mandatory hijab laws that require women to cover their heads in public.

The opening of a “hijab removal treatment clinic” was announced by Mehri Talebi Darestani, the head of the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. She said the clinic will offer “scientific and psychological treatment for hijab removal”.

Iranian women and human rights groups have expressed outrage at the announcement.

Sima Sabet, a UK-based Iranian journalist who was a target of an Iranian assassination attempt last year, said the move is “shameful”, adding that: “The idea of establishing clinics to ‘cure’ unveiled women is chilling, where people are separated from society simply for not conforming to the ruling ideology.”

Iranian human rights lawyer Hossein Raeesi said that the idea of a clinic to treat women who did not comply with hijab laws is “neither Islamic and nor is it aligned with Iranian law”. He also said it was alarming that the statement came from the Women and Family Department of the Tehran Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which falls under the direct authority of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

The news has since spread among the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest groups and female students, sparking fear and defiance.

One young woman from Iran, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison. We are struggling to make ends meet and have power outages, but a piece of cloth is what this state is worried about. If there was a time for all of us to come back to the streets, it’s now or they’ll lock us all up.”

The announcement about the opening of the clinic comes after state media reported that a university student who was arrested after stripping down to her underwear on a in Tehran, reportedly in protest at being assaulted by campus security guards for breaches of the hijab law, had been transferred to a psychiatric hospital. Human rights groups including Amnesty International say there is evidence of torture, violence and forced medication being used on protesters and political dissidents deemed mentally unstable by the authorities and placed in state-run psychiatric services.

Human rights groups have also expressed alarm at the crackdown on women who are considered to be in breach of Iran’s mandatory dress code, saying there has been a recent spate of arrests, forced disappearances and the shuttering of businesses linked to perceived breaches of the hijab laws.

Last week, the Center for Human Rights in Iran highlighted the case of Roshanak Molaei Alishah, a 25-year-old woman who it said was arrested after confronting a man who harassed her on the street over her hijab. The NGO said her current whereabouts is unknown.