A German energy firm has said that Donald Trump’s election victory has increased the risks of investing in offshore wind projects – but his return to the White House could help bolster Britain’s renewables sector, according to UK developer SSE.

Germany’s RWE has cut its spending plans and warned that, as a result of the US election, “the risks for offshore wind projects have increased”.

The company, which is behind a string of wind and solar projects, on Wednesday shaved €3bn from its spending plans for the next financial year to €7bn, down from €10bn in 2024. It will also delay its plans to invest €55bn in renewables before 2030.

Trump’s re-election last week sent a chill through the renewables sector, as investors dumped green energy stocks.

He has vowed to clamp down on Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which stands to inject about $433bn in grants, loans and tax incentives to healthcare, utilities and clean energy companies.

Separately, Alistair Phillips-Davies, the chief executive of Britain’s SSE, said a clean energy slowdown in the US could be “a real positive” for the UK even after Trump’s victory wiped billions from the market value of Europe’s largest renewable energy developers.

But Phillips-Davies told the Guardian that, while doubts surround the future of the US industry, the UK could seize the chance to secure a greater share of global supply chains and manufacturing opportunities.

“It’s not good news for US renewables but it could be helpful because it means the US will not be sucking up the global supply chain,” Phillips-Davies said.

Renewable developers have been forced to compete for supplies of products used for green projects in recent years as demand for new windfarms has taken off, raising concerns over project delays.

Siemens Energy, one of the world’s largest wind turbine makers, on Wednesday reported a net income of €1.3bn for its last financial year as it begins to emerge from a crisis in its wind turbine division which led to a historic loss of €4.6bn.

Phillips-Davies added that the UK could now get “ahead of the game” to secure its supply of materials and components and establish its own manufacturing capabilities. This would help the UK to deliver domestic projects at lower cost and increase exports to the rest of the world, he said.

It could prove to be “a real positive in terms of an industrial strategy story”, he added.

SSE, which is building the world’s biggest offshore windfarm in North Sea, was not directly affected by the sell-off in renewable shares as its focus is on the UK and Europe. It is planning to expand its portfolio into continental Europe.

Phillips-Davies used the company’s half-year financial results to announce his retirement as chief executive next year after 11 years in the role. SSE’s pre-tax profits climbed by 26.4% from last year’s half-year results to £714.5m, he said.

Michael Müller, the chief financial officer of RWE, which has multi-billion euro plans to develop windfarms in the US, said that its investment plans for the rest of the decade would “slip back” following the election result, and due to delays to Europe’s green hydrogen plans. “But we will have to wait and see how things develop in the future,” he added.

RWE reported earnings of €4bn in the first nine months of the year, down from €5.7bn in the same period in 2023 despite its growing renewable energy generation.

Its share price tumbled by more than 4% after the US election result, but its decision to take a more cautious approach to investment combined with a €1.5bn share buyback programme, helped its share price to climb back above pre-election levels on Wednesday.

Tancrede Fulop, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said: “The buy-back addresses investor demands from the substantial profits during the 2022-23 energy crisis, and management’s decision is supported by potential delays in US offshore wind projects and challenges in Europe’s hydrogen sector.”

• Location Burkina Faso

• Disaster Heatwave, 2024

Mariama, not her real name, is a Burkinabé musician who lives in Ouagadougou. During the heatwaves earlier this year she went into early labour, and lost her baby.

It was my first pregnancy. I had been trying to have a child since I was 26. Ten years now. Some doctors had told me it would be impossible to have children because of an operation on my fallopian tubes in 2018. In fact, I had stopped trying. But, voilà! The first month I thought I had my period, but it wasn’t, and by the second month, my pants didn’t fit anymore. So I went to the pharmacy to take a test. I couldn’t believe it – I was pregnant! I also went to the hospital to confirm it. I was two months along.

At that moment, I stopped everything and started taking care of myself. Everything was going well. My mother always said she wanted seven grandchildren, but since she said I was already too old, we agreed on just four! I followed all the gynaecological and medical visits at the Yalgado hospital. Up until six months, everything was fine. I had no problems, I could sleep, and I wasn’t in pain.

Then the heat came. At night, I’d wake up to get some air because I was so hot. I’d also take showers during the night. I’d wake up two or three times each night. When I woke up, I was exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept at all. Since it was my first pregnancy, I wasn’t sure if this was normal or not, so I assumed it was, even though I couldn’t sleep well due to the heat.

You feel suffocated at night, you can’t breathe well because on top of the heat, this year there was so much humidity. I even thought I had breathing problems, but doctors told me no, it was just the heat.

I was scared, because the doctors told me to stay in a cool place, but they didn’t understand my reality. What if there were power cuts? I had to wet a towel and lay it on my bed to lie down, and when it got warm, I’d go wet it again. So, I wasn’t sleeping well. I thought maybe the heat was because of the pregnancy, but the heat was real; it wasn’t just because I was pregnant.

During the day, it was infernal. My daily activities had to be done from 8-9am at the latest, or at night when the sun was down. But in the sun, it was unbearable– heavy, humid, and with my sinus issues, I couldn’t breathe. When it was heavy and dusty, I preferred to stay home.

It hurt a lot. My chest was swollen, and my back hurt. The heat made my back pain even worse, so it wasn’t good for me. I was always looking for a cool spot. I’d take showers, but it was so hot that when you came out, you felt even hotter because your fan was blowing hot air. The best thing was to aim the fan towards a corner to cool the air a bit. But it really wasn’t good; I felt nauseous, dizzy … mainly dizzy from the heat. That’s what was happening to me.

We’re in the Sahel, so we’re used to heat, but this year, people weren’t used to it anymore. I’ve never seen so many people sleeping outside or sitting by their doors. Before, there were power cuts, but never like this. It used to happen during the day; now it’s at night, too. In your neighbourhood, you feel safe because so many people are outside. Everyone’s out, everyone’s hot, nobody wants to go inside. They wait for the power to come back or to get so exhausted that they would finally go to sleep. Otherwise, it was impossible. Really.

About six months along, when I was at the market one day, I felt dizzy; I was so hot. I was walking, and at some point, I stopped because I felt a liquid running down my leg, and I thought, “Something’s wrong.” The next couple of days were a blur of pain and worry. I saw one doctor who told me that it wasn’t serious, and we’d see what was going on. I waited five hours to see him. He told me to get ultrasounds done. I had the first one, then a second, and they told me things were OK, that I had lost a little fluid, but there were natural ways to recover it.

I was sent to another hospital where they told me not to go home, that someone needed to see me. So I stayed there waiting in the car, lying down in the back. You can’t open the windows because of mosquitoes, so you have to sleep with the air conditioning, which uses up your fuel.

Finally, the next morning, they told me to go to another hospital. By the time I got there and someone saw me, the pain was so bad. They got me to lie down in a room. The pain was so bad that the doctor came, took my temperature, then brought a syringe with something in it. I asked, “What’s this for?” After the injection, I said, “I’m in even more pain, it’s contracting.” They didn’t say anything. Forty minutes later, the doctor came back and asked if I was still having contractions. I said yes, that it hurt. He explained that the drug they gave me was to help deliver the baby. I asked if my baby would survive and he said no.

In those two days of being passed around, nobody could explain to me what was going on. When they induced labour, I didn’t even know who I was. I had the impression that nobody saw me. I couldn’t even ask questions; my mouth wouldn’t react. They had just induced labour without me realising it … I didn’t know what to think. I felt defeated. I asked myself, ‘What did I do? Why is nobody looking at me?’ I thought, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me I was going to lose my baby?’ And there they were, sitting there, doing nothing. No explanation, no details, nothing.

It was like a slap in the face, a shock. I felt defeated. You go to the hospital to die. The heat, the power cuts, there’s no equipment. The heat – nobody even wants to talk about it. It’s the first thing everyone will tell you. It was extremely hot. And then, there are the specialists. When you go into their office, it’s so cold you start shaking, and when you step back into the hallway, you feel like fainting.

In the room where I had to push and push, there were no mosquito nets. We were six or seven in one room. Here, you learn not to be ashamed. You scream, you push, you scream, you push, you scream, you push. My husband was outside, panicking as he heard my screams without knowing what was happening. It’s a plastic mattress. Either you bring your own sheet, or you give birth where so many women have already done so. When someone has to push, they send out the women’s companions, but we women face each other; the ones in front of you see everything.

There was no air conditioning, and the fans are on either side of the room. The first person who arrives takes the bed under the fan, and others take the second fan. All the others, we get nothing. There are six beds here and six across. It’s packed, and you’re pressed up against other women. It’s so hot. It was unbearable there because of the heat. Everyone was looking for air. When I was screaming, it was my mother who fanned me. But I didn’t even want anyone to touch me anymore. When anyone touched me, I’d scream. I didn’t want anything. It’s true that it’s over now, but I can’t go three nights without thinking about it. It still lingers within me.

It was after six hours of contractions that the baby came out. The nurse asked if I wanted to throw it in the trash or bury it, I swear you. I took the baby home, wrapped in the cloth I had bought for its birth, and we buried it at the father’s house.

How did you start living again? No one pushed me. Afterward, I heard other similar stories. Here, they often link pregnancy problems to something the woman has done or eaten, but I know that it was the effect of the heat and the stress, with 40 to 41 degrees (celsius) of heat, going back and forth between hospitals. This year, the heat was something very unusual. I didn’t know if it was climate change or what, but we experienced a strange kind of heat. Throughout the entire ordeal, I was asking God to help me. Only Him. I felt like I was going crazy. I felt better talking to a deity than to a human being. Most people tend to judge before understanding what’s happening.

A few weeks afterwards, we planted a guava tree. It was important to have a place to go, to gather oneself and be at peace. I threw myself completely into my activities; I looked for work. Working is a way to release it. But every time I watch a movie and see a woman who just gave birth, that feeling returns, and I feel awful: “Imagine, I could have too.”

You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.

Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.

A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.

The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”

“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.

In response to Fuentes’s post, pro-Trump men have adopted the slogan en masse to troll women online. An analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the use of the phrase soared on social media in the days following the election, along with similar misogynist phrases like “get back in the kitchen”, and the use of sexist slurs directed at liberal and progressive women like Kamala Harris and Rachel Maddow. Female TikTok users reported a flood of such comments, with “your body, my choice” chief among them on the platform. And young girls in schools, along with their teachers and parents, reported incidents of the phrase being yelled out by boys in taunting jeers of harassment and intimidation in the days following the election.

“Your body, my choice” is a rejection of women’s rights to control their own bodies in more ways than one. In addition to the phrase’s sneering inversion of a pro-choice phrase, rejecting the abortion right and claiming the overturn of Roe as a victory for men, the phrase has a second, dual meaning: as a rape threat. The men and boys who use it are not merely taunting women with the threat of an unwanted, forced pregnancy. They are taunting them with the threat of forced sex.

It is not always a connection that the misogynist right has made so explicit. In other eras, the anti-choice movement has adopted an overtly religious attitude of sexual repression, aiming to restrict abortion as a means of restricting sexuality across the board. But this preacherly, sexually repressed masculinity is not the masculinity of today’s misogynist rightwing movement. Rather, the Maga right is one that sees sex not as something that must be rendered shameful and pushed out of the public sphere, but as a weapon that can be used to punish, humiliate and dominate women.

This new, avowedly and vulgarly sexual rightwing masculinity is what Fuentes was crystalizing in his snide little coinage of “your body, my choice”: it is one that aims to use physical and sexual force to coerce women into a degraded gendered role, one subject to men’s domination and only partial, limited and conditional in its citizenship and access to the public sphere. In this sense, their projects in joyfully celebrating rape and restricting women’s access to abortion are two sides of the same coin: the right seeks to dominate women and to commandeer the inside of their bodies so as to force them into a gendered role against their will, be that role as sex object or as mother.

This is why it is fitting that Trump, who was found liable for the rape of one woman and accused of sexual assault by two dozen others, was the president to secure the overturning of Roe v Wade; it is why it is fitting that two of the justices who voted to overturn Roe, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, each by more than one woman. It is because the sex politics of the right is not an anti-sex, puritanical politics. It is a politics of sexual domination.

There is no use pretending that this is not what the Trump movement is. And there is no use in pretending that this is not what many of the men who voted for Trump hoped to achieve when they supported him. Much of the pre-election coverage of the gender dynamics of Trump’s campaign has disappeared in the days following the election, and perhaps this unpleasant reality is why: most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist. For some of them, at least, that was not a liability, but an asset.

I am resisting the temptation to write a lamentation of anger and sorrow about Trump’s second victory. What is more useful is to think about what Europe can do to protect its environment, its people and its economy in a world where the Trump administration may act, in many ways, to undermine and even destroy it.

The EU’s first bold move to lead by example in the new Trump era should be to seize 200bn euros’ worth of frozen Russian central bank assets and transfer them to Ukraine as a form of pre-emptive reparations. The European Parliamentary Research Service and outside experts have proposed ways in which it could be done in full accordance with international law. But this alone won’t obviate the need for the EU to borrow more to boost its common defence and green infrastructure spending, even though it will increase its debt.

Part of the money raised should be earmarked for the European Space Agency to develop a crewed vehicle that can guarantee European astronauts independent access to orbit and beyond without having to turn to Elon Musk and SpaceX (or other US-based companies). Other spending might be used to boost research in ways that help Europe’s economy rebound and stay competitive.

But the real step the EU can take towards protecting its economy (and with it, its citizens’ wellbeing, optimism and faith in democracy) involves things that are less sexy than building a spaceship, such as finishing the capital markets union that could enable more European tech start-ups to borrow money. The EU has spent the better part of a decade wringing its hands over the absence of European substantial tech companies compared with the US and China. A big reason for this is that it’s simply easier to raise funds in the US because private and public pension funds allocate a greater part of their investments towards venture capital than European pension funds do.

As the former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta said on French radio recently, each year European savers send about €300bn to US stock markets, primarily because that’s where their banks focus their activities. This money helps boosts the valuation of US companies, which can result in them being able to finance buying out European firms.

Europe already exports tech-startup founders to the US rather than keeping them at home – which, according to a US-based French investor – has resulted in French tech in the US being worth far more than French tech in France. For instance, Snowcloud and Datadog, both founded by French entrepreneurs in the US, are many times more valuable than France’s largest unicorns or biggest recent stock market flotation. A situation where the continent is exporting founders, their startups, and the capital that is funding them makes absolutely no sense.

This matters because, as Stanford academic and author Mariejte Schaake argues in the FT, we need European tech to embody democratic values. On that front, the EU should feel vindicated that its attempt to regulate disinformation on social media is the correct strategy. Democracy is untenable when voters are subjected to algorithms weaponised to constrict their worldview and flood them with disinformation. In Musk’s hands, X is an extraordinarily dangerous tool for election engineering. Europe was already on the verge of fining X 6% of its global revenue (and potentially including Tesla and SpaceX in its calculation). Musk, who spent at least $130m to help elect Trump, is already seeing the return on his investment, with vice president-elect JD Vance suggesting the US might withdraw from Nato if the EU takes action against him. Whether through enforcement, some new type of regulatory agency or a future ban on X, this is not a fight the EU can back away from because the existence of European democracy itself is at stake.

The EU can also do something unexpected. Trump has made no secret of his desire for vengeance and retribution against his enemies: tens of thousands of civil servants ; universities, professors and students. He has fantasised and encouraged violence against journalists, protesters, judges, immigrants and political opponents, and has promised to set the justice department and even the military on them. It bears repeating: a second Trump administration will not have the guardrails of the first, where Mike Milley and Mike Esper ignored orders to “just shoot” antiracism protesters.

American dissidents abroad might one day be targeted as well. The EU should announce a principle of non-compliance with any US attempt to extradite or harass US citizens being targeted for political reasons or for civil disobedience – such as engaging in tax resistance against a Trump administration, as some Americans did in small numbers during his first time in office and which has its roots in opposition to the Vietnam war.

Finally, Europe has an opportunity to invert the transatlantic brain drain. This time really is different and Americans know it: searches for “move to Europe,” or for individual European countries are on a totally different scale than ever before. There is a unique chance for Europe to roll out a red carpet of special visas and ease the path for highly educated Americans who want to flee Trumpmerica (like climate scientists sure to have their funding slashed). Or perhaps to partner with US universities that might eventually seek to establish satellite campuses for students and staff who can no longer be located in the US.

Underlying all Europe’s failures to solve its collective action problems is the same phenomenon – sometimes it thinks and acts like a continent but too often actually behaves like a group of small, fragmented nations. In 2003, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposed that Europe might surpass this tendency by constructing European identity in opposition to the US. Two decades later, he may inadvertently get his wish.

Record numbers of business representatives and lobbyists had access to the UN’s latest biodiversity talks, analysis shows.

In total 1,261 business and industry delegates registered for Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which ended in disarray and without significant progress on a number of key issues including nature funding, monitoring biodiversity loss and work on reducing environmentally harmful business subsidies.

The number is more than double the 613 present at the UN’s previous biodiversity conference in 2022.

Overall, the number of attendees increased by 46%, making Cop16 the largest UN nature conference yet, although business and industry increased disproportionately. Industry groups working in pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, agrochemicals, food and beverage processing and tech all had more people registered to attend, according to the analysis by DeSmog.

Some question the influence that these companies might have had on the outcomes of the summit negotiations.

Sectors with the greatest increases included food and beverage processing (up 460%) and tech (up 333%). The presence of agrochemical, pesticide and seed companies increased by 40% and 24% respectively since Cop15. “We certainly saw a stronger lobbying push for policies that favour agricultural productivity, and that clashed with the conservation goals and the position of civil society,” said Oscar Soria, director of the Common Initiative thinktank.

There was also a 25% increase in biotech representatives, who Soria said were “aggressive in pushing back on progress related to digital sequencing information (DSI)”. This was the voluntary agreement to make companies share profits from commercial discoveries derived from nature’s genetics. “Seems all of a sudden the private and business sector woke up and now they’re trying to defend their interests,” he said.

Agrochemical and biotech industry trade group CropLife International sent 17 representatives. There were 10 representatives from Nestlé, and nine from ExxonMobil. This is more than some country delegations, including Belize which had seven delegates, Jamaica with six and the Bahamas with two.

Some groups appeared to have close state-industry relations, with more than a dozen business representatives registered with country delegations, rather than separate business delegations. These included CropLife, which had three members as part of Canada and Brazil’s country delegations. Three representatives from chemical manufacturing company Basf were registered with Mexico and Brazil, while one industry representative from crop company Syngenta entered with Switzerland. Eight representatives of Biotechnology Industry Association of Brazil, a biotech industry lobby group, attended with Brazil’s government delegation.

Country parties determine their own delegations and who is going to represent them, and it is not controlled by the UN, which holds the convention on biological diversity (CBD).

The number of sector-specific business and industry attendees are likely to be underestimates: DeSmog’s analysis counted a delegate as an industry representative if they were part of a top 10-20 market share company in a sector that used nature as a resource, or if they were brought in by a delegation representing the interests of these companies.

Rob Cooke, who is a member of the British Ecological Society and attended Cop16 as part of a team from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said he felt torn about the size of industry presence. “On the one hand, I optimistically see it as sign that nature is being taken seriously in terms of business and finance. We need these actors to be involved in discussions if we are to mainstream biodiversity across all sectors, and we need more money for biodiversity,” he said.

“On the other hand, the pessimist in me worries that industry representatives may use their influence to water down regulations or delay the necessary actions to halt biodiversity loss. Could their presence have contributed to the stalling and breakdown of implementation negotiations? It’s hard to tell, as these conversations likely happened behind closed doors.”

The UN says it is important to bring private interests to the negotiating table. “This is the greatest representation of business at a CBD Cop,” said David Ainsworth, head of communications for the UN’s CBD. “The increased presence of any groups to our meeting demonstrates the growing awareness of the importance of the biodiversity agenda. For business, it seems to me that it reflects the recognition that this area is becoming of interest for business.”

There is “no sign” of the transition away from burning fossil fuels that was pledged by the world’s nations a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.

The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.

The world’s nations agreed at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023 to “transition away” from fossil fuels, a decision hailed as a landmark given that none of the previous 27 summits had called for restrictions on the primary cause of global heating. On Monday, the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, told the summit in Baku: “History will judge us by our actions, not by our words.”

The rate of increase of carbon emissions has slowed over the last decade or so, as the rollout of renewable energy and electric vehicles has accelerated. But after a year when global heating has fuelled deadly heatwaves, floods and storms, the pressure is on the negotiators meeting in Baku to finally reach the peak of fossil fuel burning and start a rapid decline.

Cop29 will focus on mobilising the trillion dollars a year needed for developing nations to curb their emissions as they improve the lives of their citizens and to protect them against the now inevitable climate chaos to come. The summit also aims to increase the ambition of the next round of countries’ emission-cutting pledges, due in February.

The new data comes from the Global Carbon Budget project, a collaboration of more than 100 experts led by Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, at the University of Exeter, UK. “The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked. Time is running out and world leaders meeting at Cop29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions.”

Prof Corinne Le Quéré, at the University of East Anglia, UK, said: “The transition away from fossil fuels is clearly not happening yet at the global level, but our report does highlight that there are 22 countries that have decreased their emissions significantly [while their economies grew].” The 22 countries, representing a quarter of global emissions, include the UK, Germany and the US.

The calculation of 2024 emissions is based on the data available up to October and estimates for the final months of the year, which have been accurate in the past. More than 37bn tonnes will be emitted in 2024, about 4m tonnes a minute.

Gas emissions show the biggest annual increase, 2.4%, thanks to increased use in China and elsewhere. Oil burning increased by 0.9%, driven in particular by international flights, while coal emissions are expected to rise marginally by 0.2%.

The emissions of China, the world’s biggest polluter, are expected to rise slightly. “It has had another record year of growth in renewable power, but coal power also kept growing due to even faster growth in electricity demand from hi-tech industries and residential consumption,” said Jan Ivar Korsbakken, at Center for International Climate Research (Cicero) in Norway. Emissions from oil in China have probably peaked owing to the boom in electric vehicles.

Emissions from the second biggest polluter, the US, are expected to decline slightly, with coal continuing its decline to its lowest level in 120 years, but offset by an increase in gas burning. Coal emissions are falling even faster in the European Union, driving a 3.8% drop in emissions. However, coal burning is increasing in India as its economy grows strongly, leading to a 4.6% rise.

The Global Carbon Budget also calculates the emissions from the destruction of forests, some of which are compensated for by the regrowth of trees elsewhere. These emissions have declined by about 20% over the last decade. However, they rose in 2024 because of the drying effect of El Niño, which increased droughts and wildfires in key regions.

Most of the emissions from deforestation comes from Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Much of these emissions result from the export of goods to the global north, for example soya beans from South America going to China and to Europe,” said Prof Julia Pongratz, at the University of Munich, Germany.

Overall, the combined emissions from both fossil fuels and deforestation will reach another record high in 2024. “There is a feeling that a peak in global fossil CO₂ emissions is imminent, but it remains elusive,” said Dr Glen Peters, also at the Center for International Climate Research. “The world continually finds ways to burn ever more fossil fuels.”

Romain Ioualalen, at Oil Change International, said: “At Cop28, all countries pledged to transition away from fossil fuels but, on the ground, we have witnessed the opposite: new oil and gas projects are being approved around the world, in complete defiance of climate science.”

“At Cop29, we need to see countries come to the table with [commitments] that end fossil fuel expansion and accelerate renewable energy,” he said. The host of Cop29, Azerbaijan, is planning a major expansion in gas production in the next decade.

Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

Despite the name, the department will not be a government agency. Trump said in a statement that Musk and Ramaswamy will work from outside the government to offer the White House “advice and guidance” and will partner with the Office of Management and Budget to “drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before.” He added that the move would shock government systems.

Trump said the duo “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.

It is not clear how the organization will operate. It could come under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which dictates how external groups that advise the government must operate and be accountable to the public.

Federal employees are generally required to disclose their assets and entanglements to ward off any potential conflicts of interest, and to divest significant holdings relating to their work. Because Musk and Ramaswamy would not be formal federal workers, they would not face those requirements or ethical limitations.

Musk had pushed for a government efficiency department and has since relentlessly promoted it, emphasizing the acronym for the agency: Doge, a reference to a meme of an expressive Shiba Inu and the name of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk promotes. Trump said the agency will be conducting a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.

Trump said their work would conclude by 4 July 2026, adding that a smaller and more efficient government would be a “gift” to the country on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Ramaswamy, meanwhile, is a wealthy biotech entrepreneur whose first time running for office was for the Republican party nomination last year. After dropping out of the race, he threw his support behind Trump. He told ABC earlier this week that he was having “high-impact discussions” about possible roles in Trump’s cabinet.

He also has no government experience, but has pushed for cost-cutting in the corporate sector. After building a stake in the struggling online media firm Buzzfeed, he urged the company in May to cut staff and hire conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson.

Musk, speaking to reporters last month, stated a goal of reducing government spending by $2tn. Practically speaking, experts say those cost cuts could result in deregulation and policy changes that would directly impact Musk’s universe of companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX, X and Neuralink.

Trump had made clear that Musk would likely not hold any kind of full-time position, given his other commitments.

“I don’t think I can get him full-time because he’s a little bit busy sending rockets up and all the things he does,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan in September. “He said the waste in this country is crazy. And we’re going to get Elon Musk to be our cost-cutter.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for fiction.

Harvey’s tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist, according to judging chair, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. “Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share”.

“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”

She went on to dedicate her win to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace”.

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a “finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration”, wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

At 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest book to win the prize in its history; it is four pages longer than Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979. Asked whether the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said “absolutely not”, adding that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”.

Harvey said that she nearly gave up on writing Orbital because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.” She said that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel”, she said.

Orbital was bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, along with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. James was the favourite at Ladbrokes, and critics agreed that Everett was most likely to take home the prize. With Everett being the only man on the shortlist, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Taking home the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening, Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey said that she needs a new bike and would like to visit Japan.

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.

Shortlisted with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.

Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. “As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” said De Waal. “We wanted everything.”

“Orbital is our book,” he added. “Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”

The winner was chosen from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. To be eligible, books had to have been written originally in English by an author of any nationality, and published in the UK or Ireland. Before 2014, only books by writers from the Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe were eligible.

One of last year’s judges, the comedian Robert Webb, called the task of reading every submitted book “impossible”, adding that “you finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” However, De Waal said this year’s judges “read every single one fully”.

Last year, Irish writer Paul Lynch took home the award for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. Other recent winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart. The last time a woman was announced as winner was in 2019, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were named joint winners.