Throughout the UN climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, in recent days, US officials have maintained a studiously sunny disposition, saying that the Republican president-elect, Donald Trump, will not derail climate progress.

The US climate envoy, John Podesta, said the fight “for a cleaner, safer” planet will not stop under a re-elected Trump even if some progress is reversed. The energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said: “The absence of leadership in the White House does not mean that this energy transition is stopped.” And Joe Biden’s climate and energy assistant, Jacob Levine, told reporters that the president’s climate policies had sparked an unstoppable clean energy “revolution”.

In the absence of federal climate policy, they have argued, states will continue the push to zero out emissions. And the historic climate-related subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, they have said, will continue to spur decarbonization efforts from the private sector. On Monday, US officials reinforced this view with a plan for continued private sector-led emissions reduction in manufacturing.

“Climate change won’t be solved by one president, but climate action will not be stopped by one president,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey told reporters on Saturday.

Decarbonization, Markey said, was even taking place in Republican states, thanks to Biden’s green subsidies. “The green revolution is blue and red,” he said.

But Republicans have come to Cop29 with a different message. In a sometimes surreal Saturday press conference where they cracked jokes about US sports teams before an international audience, four Republican members of Congress aggressively argued for increasing oil and gas production; even coal, they argued, should maintain its place in the energy system.

“With technology, we can solve a lot of these problems without just banning fossil fuels,” said Representative Morgan Griffith, who represents a coal country district in Virginia. “An area that has natural resources should not be penalized for not looking at the opportunity to have a cleaner world.”

Representative August Pfluger, whose Texas district covers the oil-rich Permian Basin, said Trump’s re-election indicates an “overwhelming support” for the former president’s call to “restore America’s energy dominance and lead the world in energy expansion”.

And when asked by the Guardian in the halls of Cop29 if he would support Trump’s pledge to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, Pfluger responded by talking about energy: “We definitely want to see affordable, reliable energy provided throughout the world.

“Inflation has been very difficult on people, and we have to take a realistic look about the types of energy and the innovation for energy freedom throughout the world,” said Pfluger, who is leading the House of Representatives’ delegation to the UN climate summit. “Many countries would say that some of the tenets [in the accord] have actually been a massive competitive disadvantage and have pushed up prices everywhere around the world.”

In the weeks leading up to his second inauguration, Trump appears to have doubled down on his crusade against climate action. This week, he tapped a former fracking executive to head up his energy department, a Republican who arranged an infamous meeting between Trump and oil bosses to lead his interior department, and a former congressman who has a score of just 14% from the League of Conservation Voters to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Still, Democratic officials at Cop29 say that the Inflation Reduction Act’s hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy incentives and tax breaks are durable.

At Saturday’s press conference, Pfluger did indicate that Congress would probably preserve some of its provisions. “If there are pieces of the IRA that help support lowering American energy costs, helping Americans, helping our partners and allies have access to affordable, reliable energy, then I bet that those will stay in place,” Pfluger said.

But the US should include fossil fuels in a “best of the above” energy strategy, said Republican Michigan representative John James at the press conference. And the overall strategy, he said, should be “innovation, not regulation”.

Harjeet Singh, a director at the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, a proposed agreement for a concrete phaseout of coal, oil, and gas, attributed the Republicans’ message to a “toxic alliance between polluting corporations and complicit political leaders.”

A key aim for Cop29 negotiators is to establish a new and expanded global goal for climate finance to help poor countries cope with disasters and draw down their emissions. Over the weekend, the White House announced that the US surpassed its goal of providing $11bn a year in climate financing.

Trump during his first term proposed eliminating the US’s climate finance commitments, but was shot down by the Senate.

When asked on Saturday if he would support zeroing out US climate aid, Pfluger deflected, but did not rule out the possibility. “What we want to do … is to unleash American energy, to unleash innovation throughout the world that benefits in a connected world from affordable clean reliable energy,” he said.

Climate finance, he said, should only go to projects that focus on slashing energy costs. “If something is not congruent or not in support of lowering energy costs while reducing emissions, you can bet that this Congress is going to look at that,” he said.

International leaders at Cop29 have railed against Trump’s stance against climate action and his pledge to exit the Paris agreement. As the world’s largest economy and top contributor to historic emissions, the US had an “ethical responsibility” to lead the climate fight, said Ambassador Dr Pa’oleilei Luteru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small island countries.

“The US doesn’t live on a different planet,” he said.

Sherry Rehman, a member of the Pakistan senate and former Pakistan climate change minister, said the US pulling out of the Paris accord would be a “blow to the whole shape of the climate negotiations process”.

“The United States casts a huge geopolitical and development and leadership shadow still on the world,” she said. “It has a gravitational pull.”

But Trump cannot singlehandedly derail UN climate negotiations, leaders have said.

“The Paris agreement is a robust process,” Hilda Heine, president of the Marshall Islands, said in a Wednesday press conference.

Jacob Levine, a Biden climate adviser, told reporters this week that Biden had set into motion a “deeply shared and integrated vision” for the clean energy transition that has led countries such as the UK, Canada, and Australia to take “a page out of the US government playbook”.

But Trump’s vision also appears to have spread, with Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, reportedly considering removing his country from the Paris climate accord.

US officials’ relentless optimism at Cop29 has been a source of frustration for some. In an intimate meeting with reporters on Saturday, one journalist asked the Democratic Rhode Island senator and climate hawk Sheldon Whitehouse why it was difficult for officials to say that Trump’s presidency is a threat to climate action.

“The US election will have a negative climate impact,” Whitehouse said. “That’s not only easy to say, it’s obvious.”

Some of the earliest examples of purpose-built social housing in the UK can still be found tucked away along central London’s more affluent streets. Built in Edwardian baroque style, the Sutton Dwellings in Chelsea are perhaps an unlikely site for an innovative scheme at the new frontier of Britain’s low-carbon journey.

This winter more than 80 of the estate’s flats will be warmed by heat pumps that tap the warmth of the earth well below the streets of central London.

The scheme’s 27 boreholes burrow deep into the ground directly beneath the estate to where piped water is warmed and fed to a network of “shoebox” heat pumps in a cupboard in each flat. Here, each heat pump – roughly the size of a gas boiler – tops up the heat of the water pipes so that each household can control their own heating, setting it to their preference or using thermostats.

The scheme was completed in late autumn as part of a refurbishment of the more than 100-year-old block of flats, confounding the myths around the UK’s heat pump roll out, such as claims that they do not work in older buildings. It aims to show that heat pumps are not only for newer buildings and that ground source heat pumps are not only for homes with extensive outdoor space.

The developer, Kensa, has completed schemes across the south-east of England, installing shoebox heat pumps in 273 flats across multiple 1960s tower blocks in Thurrock, Essex, and in more than 400 flats across eight tower blocks owned by Enfield council. The Sutton Dwellings project proves that prewar housing can benefit, too.

“Often you see claims heat pumps don’t work, they aren’t suitable for older buildings, there isn’t enough space to install ground source heat pumps in cities,” said Stuart Gadsden, a commercial director at Kensa. “Hopefully, this project can serve as a blueprint for other social housing providers with properties that need decarbonising.”

Heating the UK’s 28m homes accounts for almost a fifth of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, and as temperatures drop this winter, ministers will face rising questions over its plan to tackle this area of the economy. The government is expected to set out the full details of a major funding plan in the coming weeks.

Air source heat pumps are expected to play a big role; according to some forecasts, the outdoor heating units will replace gas boilers in more than 40% of homes. A fifth of homes could have a ground source heat pump for heating and hot water. Kensa believes its network approach may help to upgrade social housing and tower blocks across the country, and could even be adapted to meet the heating needs of entire streets, with boreholes prepared in advance for homes to connect to when they choose to upgrade their heating system.

Making low-carbon heating an affordable – and desirable – alternative to traditional gas boilers will be key to the success of the government’s ambition to create a net zero economy by 2050.

Less than two miles from Sutton Dwellings at the Lillington Gardens estate in Pimlico, residents are deeply sceptical. Here, leaseholders have been warned by Westminster city council that they could face bills of between £30,000 and £66,000 each to replace its buckling heat network. The council has proposed a low-carbon scheme that would cost up to £185m and help the local authority reach its target of becoming net zero by 2030.

In the 1960s, the Lillington heat network was once at the vanguard of low-carbon home heating, making use of the waste heat emitted by miles of underground pipes from the nearby Battersea power station. Since then the network has come to rely on centrally located gas boilers and has fallen into disrepair, leaving residents to battle burst pipes, hot water leaks and sewage spills.

The Labour-led council has blamed “historic underinvestment” for the failure of the heat network and said it is costing £3.5m a year in insurance to manage the “constant leaks that have negatively affected the lives of residents”. The councillor Liza Begum said the council was working with residents to urgently find a long-term solution, and reduce the costs for residents and leaseholders.

The council has joined the Greater London Authority and London councils in a pan-London consortium bid for government funding that aims to help provide low-carbon heating projects and heating upgrades to low-income homes in England.

Huge funding opportunities have been promised by the Labour government but the details of how such schemes will work are not known. The Treasury used its first budget since Labour came to power to promise £3.4bn for the warm homes plan; it is considered the first phase of an ambitious £13.2bn commitment over this parliament to increase the grants available to homes that choose to swap their gas boilers for heat pumps and to upgrade the energy efficiency of Britain’s draughtiest housing stock.

Households connected to communal or district heat networks are often paying twice as much for their heat as those with their own gas boiler, according to Heat Trust. The consumer champion for heat network users has urged the government to help lower their costs by bringing in two reforms: first to extend the energy price cap to include homes connected to a heat network, and second, to provide support to help cover the costs of repairing old heat networks.

Stephen Knight, the chief executive of the Heat Trust, said: “Heat networks will have an increasing role to play in how we heat our homes in cities and towns in the coming decades, as we move away from a reliance on gas boilers. However, we currently see too many examples of poorly designed, inefficient heat networks that generate heat using expensive commercial energy contracts. This often results in high heating bills for their residents as the end consumers.”

Residents in the UK town with the country’s highest identified concentration of “forever chemicals” have instructed lawyers to investigate the possibility of a first-of-its-kind legal claim against the firefighting foam manufacturer located in the centre of Bentham.

In May this year, an investigation by the Ends Report and the Guardian revealed that the rural North Yorkshire town is the most PFAS-polluted place known to exist in the UK. The town is home to the firefighting foam manufacturer Angus Fire.

PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and commonly known as “forever chemicals” owing to their persistence in the environment, are a family of about 10,000 chemicals that have been linked to a wide range of serious illnesses, including certain cancers. They are used in many consumer products, from frying pans to waterproof coats, but one of their most common uses is in firefighting foams.

The Law firm Leigh Day has informed Angus Fire that, acting on behalf of residents, it has been instructed to investigate a case against the firm as a result of “alleged PFAS pollution in Bentham”.

A spokesperson for Angus Fire said: “We have been advised by Leigh Day that it is under instruction to investigate a potential claim on behalf of one residency. We have not received notice of any legal action.”

In the past 25 years, nearly 10,000 court cases have been filed in the US alleging harm from PFAS exposure. Some of these cases have already resulted in multi-billion dollar settlements. The case against Angus Fire would be be the first ever PFAS-related legal case in the UK.

Charlotte Armstrong, a senior associate solicitor at Leigh Day, said: “Angus Fire state that they no longer manufacture or test any PFAS-containing foam products in Bentham, but that doesn’t help the people of Bentham. PFAS are ‘forever chemicals’, and unfortunately that means that the chemical pollution in the area is anything but a historic issue. Our clients and the wider community in Bentham are entitled to fully understand the extent of PFAS pollution in their community, so that those allegedly responsible can be held to account in terms of financial compensation and remediation.”

After the initial investigation, Bentham town council asked Angus Fire to test the environment on Duke Street – a narrow residential road next to the factory – for PFAS.

The test results, which were made available in October, revealed that soil adjacent to gardens on Duke Street was contaminated with elevated levels of PFAS. The land is owned by Angus Fire and is made available for use by residents, who use it to grow food. Residents were advised by Angus Fire to wash and peel vegetables grown on the land, to clean their homes of dust regularly, and to remove shoes before entering their homes.

Residents of Duke Street have said that since finding out about the contamination they felt “trapped”.

“At any point of buying a house, you would want the option to sell it, depending on what you want to do in your life,” said one person, who asked to remain anonymous. “At the moment, that would be a significant challenge. And with the uncertainty over how long it will take to remediate the land, we are essentially trapped in this situation.”

Angus Fire has offered residents on Duke Street a series of financial “goodwill gestures”.

A spokesperson for Angus Fire said it had “presented a number of options to residents whose properties border the legacy foam manufacturing and testing areas, which we believe could offer a constructive way forward and which also underscores our commitment to addressing the situation responsibly.

“We recognise the concerns about potential environmental impacts from historic operations at our facility and regret the inconvenience and worry that this has caused.”

Duke Street residents have expressed concern about the risk of the contamination to their health.

Dr Anna Watson, the director of policy and advocacy at the Chem Trust charity, said that while it was welcome that Angus Fire was “admitting responsibility for the irreversible PFAS pollution near their site in Bentham”, it was “heartbreaking to think of people being uprooted from their community, as well as having to deal with the anxiety of potential long-term health impacts from these toxic chemicals”.

“The UK government needs to take urgent action to ban the use and manufacture of these chemicals as a group and be at the forefront of a global PFAS-free economy,” she said.

Residents said they had had no correspondence with local or government officials over the contamination.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We are working with North Yorkshire council and looking into historic PFAS contamination from the Angus Fire site. Our primary focus is to assess the risk to the environment and provide support to our partners on risk to residents.”

North Yorkshire council’s assistant director for regulatory services, Callum McKeon, said: “We continue to work with partner agencies to assess historic PFAS contamination from the Angus Fire site at Bentham. Our key priority is to identify and address the risk to residents and continue to support our partner agencies with their ongoing investigations.”

The Angus Fire spokesperson said: “Angus continues to work closely with independent industry-leading environmental consultants and in cooperation with our UK regulator, the Environment Agency, to better characterise the Bentham site and surrounding areas. These further investigations will help us better understand the extent of any PFAS contamination and assist in determining the remediation required.”

The internationally agreed goal to keep the world’s temperature rise below 1.5C is now “deader than a doornail”, with 2024 almost certain to be the first individual year above this threshold, climate scientists have gloomily concluded – even as world leaders gather for climate talks on how to remain within this boundary.

Three of the five leading research groups monitoring global temperatures consider 2024 on track to be at least 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than pre-industrial times, underlining it as the warmest year on record, beating a mark set just last year. The past 10 consecutive years have already been the hottest 10 years ever recorded.

Although a single year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan.

“The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5C is deader than a doornail. It’s almost impossible to avoid at this point because we’ve just waited too long to act,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.”

Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused “some soul-searching” among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels.

“It’s going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm it’s a worrying sign,” he said. “Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and it’s a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.”

Climate scientists broadly expect it will become apparent the 1.5C target, agreed upon by governments after pleas from vulnerable island states that they risk being wiped out if temperatures rise further than this, has been exceeded within the coming decade.

Despite countries agreeing to shift away from fossil fuels, this year is set to hit a new record for planet-heating emissions, and even if current national pledges are met the world is on track for 2.7C (4.8F) warming, risking disastrous heatwaves, floods, famines and unrest. “We are clearly failing to bend the curve,” said Sofia Gonzales-Zuñiga, an analyst at Climate Analytics, which helped produce the Climate Action Tracker (Cat) temperature estimate.

However, the Cop29 talks in Baku have maintained calls for action to stay under 1.5C. “Only you can beat the clock on 1.5C,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, urged world leaders on Tuesday, while also acknowledging the planet was undergoing a “masterclass in climate destruction”.

Yet the 1.5C target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. “I never thought 1.5C was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. “I’m totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip.

“But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldn’t ask scientists how to galvanize the world because clearly we don’t have a fucking clue. People haven’t got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5C, but we have got to keep trying.

“What matters is we have to reduce emissions. Once we stop warming the planet, the better it will be for the people and ecosystems that live here.”

The world’s decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04C to the world temperature.

Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal, when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4C or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.

“Meetings like these are often perceived as talking shops,” said Alexander De Croo, the Belgian prime minister, at the Cop29 summit. “And yes, these strenuous negotiations are far from perfect. But if you compare climate policy now to a decade ago, we are in a different world.”

Still, as the world barrels past 1.5C there lie alarming uncertainties in the form of runaway climate “tipping points”, which once set off cannot be halted on human timescales, such as the Amazon turning into a savanna, the collapse of the great polar ice sheets, and huge pulses of carbon released from melting permafrost.

“1.5C is not a cliff edge, but the further we warm up the closer we get to unwittingly setting off tipping points that will bring dramatic climate consequences,” said Grahame Madge, a climate spokesman at the UK Met Office, who added that it would now be “unexpected” for 2024 to not be above 1.5C.

“We are edging ever closer to tipping points in the climate system that we won’t be able to come back from; it’s uncertain when they will arrive, they are almost like monsters in the darkness,” Madge said.

“We don’t want to encounter them so every fraction of a degree is worth fighting for. If we can’t achieve 1.5C, it will be better to get 1.6C than 1.7C, which will be better than getting 2C or more.”

Hausfather added: “We aren’t in for a good outcome either way. It’s challenging. But every tenth of a degree matters. All we know is that the more we push the climate system away from where it has been for the last few million years, there be dragons.”

Chinese online marketplace Temu has enjoyed explosive international growth off the back of an eye-catching and often absurdly cheap range of products, but those cut-price tactics have met increasing roadblocks as it seeks to conquer new markets in south-east Asia.

Indonesia ordered Temu to be taken down from app stores in October, a move it said would protect the country’s smaller merchants. Last week, Vietnam threatened to ban Temu and fellow Chinese-owned fast-fashion outlet Shein by the end of the month, saying they had not been approved to do business in the country.

The flood of cheaper Chinese-made products – often with minimal import taxes – has damaged local vendors and manufacturers, who cannot beat the speed, quality or prices offered online, according to Simon Torring, co-founder of market insights firm Cube.

“Temu has become the lightning rod for every regulator, everywhere now getting worried about whether cross-border import rules should be changed,” he said.

Poom Chotikavan, director of operations at Taksa Toys in Thailand, has struggled to find a local manufacturer to make children’s toys because so many suppliers have gone out of business. Nearly 2,000 Thai factories across all industries closed and more than 50,000 workers lost their jobs in the last financial year, Reuters reported, in part due to greater Chinese competition and higher costs.

“It’s never been easier to source products from China [so] their sales have just been obliterated,” Chotikavan said. “How will they survive in this landscape where their clients can just reach out to [Chinese] factories?”

Temu’s Chinese equivalent, Pinduoduo, has operated since 2015, with the global platform launching in the US in 2022 and sweeping European markets the following year. Temu has been expanding its presence in south-east Asia, starting with the Philippines and Malaysia in 2023 then Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam this year.

Rising consumerism from south-east Asia’s burgeoning middle class has made the region an ideal market, with online shopping sales nearing $160bn in 2024, according to Bain & Co analysis published in November.

That boom came at the right time for Temu to chase international growth, as a slowing Chinese economy saw domestic customers cut back on Pinduoduo purchases, according to Jianggan Li, chief executive at venture firm Momentum Works.

“In China, the growth is stagnant compared to 2010s and yet it’s very competitive, so players need to find other avenues to grow [such as] overseas markets,” he said.

But the slowdown has also left Chinese factories with spare capacity, pushing Temu’s main suppliers to sell at high volumes and low costs and giving the marketplace a boost as it pushed its way in.

‘Mind-blowing how cheap it is’

Just as it has in western markets, Temu paired those cheaply produced goods with massive discounts and an increasingly aggressive advertising campaign, while keeping shoppers hooked through a gamified experience of prize wheels and countdown timers.

It has reached hundreds of thousands of customers, including Chotikavan, who bought a MagSafe iPhone holder for his car on Temu for $3, less than a seventh of the price it would have cost otherwise.

“The products are getting way cheaper, but the quality is quite decent,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing how cheap it is.”

It’s the same story across south-east Asia. Woven straw satchels available for $3 on Temu are sold by local vendors in Indonesia for six times the price. Jackets sold in Vietnamese markets for $15 are available on Temu at the same price and with free shipping.

While consumers enjoy the increased access to cheap goods, local businesses want their governments to act.

Indonesia has taken the firmest stance, boosting taxes and banning e-commerce on social media platforms in 2023, which forced TikTok Shop to buy into a struggling local competitor to continue operating. While a ban would protect local manufacturers and higher taxes would add to government coffers, Temu would seek to push its way in regardless, Torring said, pointing to the platform’s repeat applications to enter Indonesia despite constant refusal.

“It’s signalling to other markets: ‘if it’s easy, we will come. If it’s hard, we will still come. You show us the rules, you show us what we need to do, but we will come,’” he said.

“Their mandate is ‘take the world’.”

A California-based farm is recalling its carrots, including whole and baby organic carrots, following an E coli outbreak that has infected multiple people across the country.

In a statement on Saturday, Grimmway Farms in Bakersfield said that it has issued its recall of the carrots “that should no longer be in grocery stores but may be in consumers’ refrigerators or freezers”. The recall comes amid 39 reported E coli infections across 18 states, including 15 hospitalizations and one death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The majority of the infections are in New York, Minnesota, Washington, California and Oregon, the Associated Press reports.

Grimmway Farms said that its carrot products may have been contaminated with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, or E coli, a bacterium that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, elderly people and those with compromised immune systems.

Grimmway Farms’ recalled products include its organic whole carrots which were available for purchase at retail stores from 14 August through 23 October 2024, as well as organic baby carrots with best-if-used-by dates between 11 September and 12 November 2024.

The carrots, which were shipped directly to retail distribution centers across the US, Puerto Rico and Canada, have been sold under various labels including 365, Bunny Luv, Cal-Organic, Nature’s Promise, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, as well as O Organics.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, E coli infections can cause severe bloody diarrhea conditions or the development of high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease, and neurologic problems. Symptoms include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever, nausea and vomiting.

The incubation period for E coli in humans can range from 24 hours to up to 10 days, with an average incubation period of three to four days.

Grimmway Farms’ recall comes amid McDonald’s E coli outbreak that has infected at least 104 people – and hospitalized at least 34. The outbreak, which has been tied to onions served on its Quarter Pounders, has been detected in 14 states.

McDonalds has said that it is investing $100m to “accelerate recovery and support the most heavily impacted franchisees” following the outbreak, CBS reported on Saturday.

“A total of $65m will be invested into supporting franchisees who have lost business, targeting those in the states that were most affected,” McDonalds added.

Keir Starmer has vehemently defended the imposition of inheritance tax on farms, as a new analysis suggested farmers are being increasingly squeezed out of the market for agricultural land by wealthy investors.

Amid an battle between the government and the National Farmer’s Union (NFU) over what proportion of farms could be affected by the change, announced in last month’s budget, Starmer said he was “absolutely confident” that the overwhelming majority of farmers would be exempt.

But the prime minister, speaking to reporters on his way to the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, suggested this message may not be getting through, adding it was “important for us to keep communicating how that works”.

Ministers have argued that the change will prevent some investors from avoiding inheritance tax by investing in farmland, much of which is often then barely used to produce anything.

A new Labour analysis has shown a big recent growth in wealthy individuals and institutions buying up farmland across England, with a parallel drop in the amount of agricultural land actively used for farming.

While in 2010, such non-farmers were responsible for less than a third of farmland purchases, by last year this had risen to 56%, according to data collected by the property consultants Strutt & Parker.

According to official statistics for agricultural land use, in the last year alone, 400,000 hectares (988,422 acres) was taken out of use for farming. The analysis is linking this to financial advice that recommends the potential tax breaks of investing in farmland.

A Labour source said the party was “asking rich estates and farms with the highest values to pay their fair share”, with the money used to pay for public services that rural communities relied on.

Starmer will be at the G20 summit when farmers protest in central London against the plans, with Tom Bradshaw, the NFU’s president, saying on Sunday that his members felt “betrayed”.

Asked about the anger, Starmer noted what he said was significant government investment in farming, adding: “Obviously, there’s an issue around inheritance tax and I do understand the concern.

“But for a typical case, which is parents with a farm they want to pass on to one of their children, by the time you’ve taken into account not only the exemption for the farm property itself, but also the exemption for spouse to spouse, then parent to child, it’s £3m before any inheritance tax will be payable.

“That’s why I am absolutely confident the vast majority of farms and farmers will not be affected by this. It’s important for us to keep communicating how that works. Over the £3m, it’s then 20% rather than the usual rate and it’s payable over 10 years.”

Bradshaw told Sky News that he had “never seen the united sense of anger that there is in this industry today” and that he expected thousands of farmers to protest on Tuesday.

He said: “The industry is feeling betrayed, feeling angry. The government said that this wouldn’t happen.”

Bradshaw said farming families who were liable would often be unable to raise the money because of the need to reinvest any profits in production, which would be undermined, harming long-term food security.

There was also, he said, the effect on farmers, particularly older farmers who would struggle to adapt to the new regime: “Unfortunately, there are many who already have lost a spouse, that are in the twilight of their careers, that have given everything to producing this country’s food, and they have absolutely no way to plan through that. That is the betrayal that I’m talking about. The human impact of this is simply not acceptable.”

Some farmers have raised the prospect of refusing to supply supermarkets in protest, which Bradshaw said his union did not agree with.

“That is not an NFU tactic,” he said. “We do not support emptying supermarket shelves. But I do completely understand the strength of feeling that there is amongst farmers.”

The NFU has warned farmers attending the protests not to bring heavy machinery to the protest, emulating farmers in other countries who have blocked roads with tractors. Starmer said those protesting were entitled to express themselves – but said the police would respond appropriately.

“They are entitled to express their views. I do understand their concerns. It’s important I reiterate the support that is going in, it is quite considerable,” he said. “As to how the protest takes shape and what the response is, that will be a matter for them and the police for how they respond to it.”