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A Latin American airline group has agreed to buy 400,000 carbon offsets over 10 years to help protect 22,000 hectares in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes of Brazil.

Corporates would be left off the hook for climate targets if the VCMI’s new ‘flexibility’ claim idea for Scope 3 emissions is given the green light, warns a report that finds some companies could even increase their climate pollution up to 2030 as a result.

Mining giant BHP Billiton has completed a joint pilot project with China Baowu Steel Group that focuses on reduced emissions from mined iron ore used in the production of mining car wheels, and using carbon credits to offset the residual greenhouse gases.

An emerging markets hedge fund has made an investment into a prominent climate financier in the voluntary carbon market.

The UK government’s announcement this week on its plans to set up a competitive carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) market was full of references to imports, opening up a way for the green transition to bring the UK and EU closer together in the wake of Brexit. 

A fund focused on conservation in the ‘jaguar corridor’ area of Latin America aims to raise between $100 million and $130 mln by mid-2024, Carbon Pulse has learned.

Sales surge as cities and states look to cut pollution from cars and improve options for Americans to get around

After several years of false starts, electric bikes are finally entering the American mainstream, amid booming sales of a multiplying number of models on offer and as more states offer incentives for people to ditch their cars and shift to two, motor-assisted, wheels.

This year could be considered “the year of the ebike”, according to John MacArthur, a transport researcher at Portland State University. Ebike sales in the United States leaped by 269% between 2019 and 2022, with the market size expected to have grown further in 2023, to be worth $2.59bn.

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A decision by the EU to keep rebalancing tariffs on US steel and aluminium products on stand-by this week may be a sign that tension between the two sides is easing after a years-long dispute, the EU's industry hopes.

Voluntary carbon credit retirements have almost reached the same level as a year earlier with just days remaining in 2023, boosted by a surge in activity by an oil major early on Friday.

A fund created as an alternative to carbon offsetting by a EU-based climate project platform has launched a three-pronged call for proposals ahead of its fourth round of allocations of grants and pre-purchases in Q2 2024.

The Secretariat of the ART carbon credit standard on Friday announced that it has approved a listing for Burkina Faso under its TREES jurisdictional certification programme.

A cross-party group of British MPs has urged the UK government to consider demand management measures for the aviation sector and to account comprehensively for the carbon footprint of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) to ensure its 2050 net zero emissions goal is met.

Large Indian industries will be unable to escape the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) announced by the UK earlier this week, according to some trade experts, who further added that soon all value-added products will be included under the mechanism.

EUAs extended their week-long rally in a shortened session on Friday before the four-day Christmas break, shrugging off an initial dip in response to the 22% increase in auction volumes scheduled for the first eight months of 2024 as traders continued to trim short positions ahead of the holiday.

Climate-related equity indices should still be subject to EU oversight, according to a position agreed by EU member states this week that endorsed a proposal that most benchmarks should not remain under the scope of regulation.

Despite a typical suburban upbringing – and two PhDs – Jonathan Cornford and his family decided to restrain their consumption

• Change by Degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
• Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com

When my wife, Kim, and I got married in 1995 we decided, in our youthful idealism, that we would try to “live simply so that others might simply live”. It turns out that living simply can sometimes be quite complicated. Nevertheless, from the outset it was clear to us that living simply should involve living on a lower income than the Australian norm. We were sort of downshifters, except we had never shifted up in the first place.

The bulk of our married life has been spent living at an income level that put us in the bottom 20% of Australian households. We now have two older teenagers, and for most of their lives our family technically hovered around the Australian household poverty line. But “poverty” has been very far from our experience.

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EVs made up just 2% of new car sales in May 2022, but now 8.3% of new car sales in 2023 are battery powered

The climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has welcomed a boom in electric vehicle sales, revealing the number of fast-charging sites has nearly doubled in the last year.

National strategies on electric vehicles are expected to more than double the number of charger stations again within three years, as the federal government seeks to incentivise the use of cleaner cars. New fuel efficiency standards, expected to be outlined in early 2024, are likely to further discourage the sale of higher-emitting vehicles, making electric cars more attractive.

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As a Quantitative Carbon Market Analyst in Veyt you will contribute to developing our modelling framework for the European emission trading system (EU ETS) as well as predictive models for a growing number of emission trading systems around the world.

A marine charity will reportedly apply to take the government to court next month to argue that it ignored the advice of an independent scientific body to set more stringent limits on fishing in 2024.

Around the world, the people fighting for the survival of our planet are being shamefully silenced and villified

Injustice is easy to oppose after it has receded into the past, and there is no cost to imagining yourself as a hero long after the event. Everyone celebrates the suffragettes now, but at the time they were vilified as hateful spinsters and terrorists. McCarthyism is a pejorative political label on right and left alike now, but at his peak, more Americans approved of Senator Joseph McCarthy than frowned on his witch-hunt. Most people would like to believe they’d have stood up against the homophobia of 1980s Britain – yet, by 1987, only 11% of the British public believed same-sex relations to be “not wrong at all”.

Which takes us to climate activism. This year has seen a global onslaught against people agitating for more action to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. Courts can issue stern judgments, but so can history, and you have to wonder its future verdict on how the persecution and silencing of those raising the alarm only escalated when the scientific evidence had become so cast-iron, and when extreme weather events hammered home the imminent danger facing the human species. Here in Britain, a government which is reneging on its climate commitments – not least by expanding oil and gas licences – is simultaneously introducing repressive legislation to silence those holding them to account.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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