Good morning. It’s quite hard to visualise a number like 646 gigatons. That’s the amount of CO2 emissions which will be produced by 195 major fossil fuel projects currently in the works, and I can tell you that it’s about the same weight as 627bn Volkswagen Polos or 3,230bn Shetland ponies, but that probably isn’t a lot of help.
Luckily, there are more straightforward descriptions available. 646 gigatons in emissions is, on its own, 146 gigatons more than the entire carbon budget available if we are to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic global heating. And the projects that will produce those emissions are known as carbon bombs.
Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, knew that major oil and gas firms had a lot of these projects under way – but the data on the scale of the problem just wasn’t available. So, along with a number of other Guardian journalists, he set about finding it. The results are at the heart of a remarkable investigation published yesterday online and on the front of today’s print edition. For this morning’s newsletter, I spoke to Damian about the challenges of reporting the story, and what he made of the results. That’s right after the headlines.
Five big stories
Brexit | Liz Truss has been warned of a major rebellion over plans for a bill that could revoke parts of the Northern Ireland protocol. Ministers were said to be ready to resign rather than vote to support such a bill.
Cost of living crisis | The Treasury moved to dampen speculation on new measures to tackle the cost of living. Sources played down the possibility after Boris Johnson appeared to suggest that an announcement was imminent.
Defence | Finland and Sweden are both expected to announce bids to join Nato, with membership expected to be granted swiftly. Boris Johnson signed mutual security agreements with the two countries yesterday, promising mutual support against potential Russian threats.
Middle East | Veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has been killed by Israeli forces while reporting on a military raid. Al Jazeera said Abu Akleh was shot despite wearing a helmet and body armour that were clearly marked “press”.
Social media | Allowing Donald Trump to return to Twitter will prompt a backlash and clash with online safety laws, Elon Musk has been warned. Musk, who is in the process of buying Twitter, said Trump’s removal was “foolish in the extreme”.
In depth: What you need to know about the threat of ‘carbon bombs’
So let’s begin with a definition: a carbon bomb is an oil or gas project which will result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over its lifetimes. Massive though these projects are, Damian Carrington says, “getting hold of solid information about them is an absolute nightmare”.
“We’re talking about future projects, and that means you’re dealing with uncertainty. And the big oil and gas companies are … not all that open about it. There’s some information out there, but it’s not in the same format, or it’s hidden away, and a lot of it is extremely technical. Yeah, this was a big old thing.”
To achieve the big old thing, Damian led a team of Guardian reporters who hunted out the information wherever they could find it – working with thinktanks, academics, analysts, and retrieving what they could from private industry databases to piece it together.
“It was pretty messy,” Damian said. “Fortunately, we worked with some very big brains, people who spend their lives going through these things, who could help us wrangle 40,000 line spreadsheets into forms we could make sense of. And then we had to build the clearest view possible of this paradox – that the climate crisis is real, and accepted, but we are still planning to produce way more oil and gas than we can safely burn.”
The resulting stories are rich, detailed, worrying, but remarkably clear. Damian’s lead piece is well worth reading in full – but here are just a few of the takeaways:
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Oil and gas giants’ investment in renewables is relatively tiny
That 646 gigaton figure, remember, is far from a complete picture of future emissions: it ignores the production of cement and steel, deforestation, the ongoing burning of coal, and anything at all which isn’t CO2 produced by a carbon bomb. There was another figure in Damian’s story that has stuck with him: the dozen biggest players are on track to spend at least $103m a day for the rest of the decade on exploiting new oil and gas fields that cannot be burned if global heating is to be kept well below 2c, the internationally agreed target.
“More than $100m a day! That really made my eyes widen,” he said. “It’s an extraordinary sum.” And, whatever their rhetoric, it dwarves the amounts the same companies are committing to investments in renewable energy. If the press releases tell you one thing, and the financial statements tell you another, it’s not difficult to see which is the better guide.
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The US is a huge part of the problem
We’re used to seeing the Middle East and Russia as the leading enthusiasts for future oil and gas projects, but new research shared with the Guardian reveals that the US is the leading source of potential emissions through carbon bombs. Canada and Australia also feature high on the list.
A forthcoming study shared with the Guardian and reported by Nina Lakhani and Oliver Milman estimates that new fracking projects in the US will release 140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases over their lifetime if fully realised - four times more than the entire world produced last year. And domestic drilling is only expected to increase in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I was surprised that the US was number one,” said Damian. “It’s only a decade ago that the US was a big importer of fossil fuels. But the fracking revolution has really changed things. And that creates the very difficult situation of, on the one hand, John Kerry striding around the world trying to lead on climate action, and on the other the US OK-ing all of these projects and looking to expand on them.”
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Fossil fuel firms don’t believe governments’ carbon pledges
This is fairly straightforward: if these companies seriously believed that world governments were going to keep global emissions somewhere close to a 1.5C rise by 2050, they would not be pumping money into the projects that are bound to bust that target. Damian’s story puts it starkly: “These firms are in effect placing multibillion-dollar bets against humanity halting global heating.”
One reason for that problem: while companies like ExxonMobil and Shell are the most familiar corporate faces of fossil fuel extraction to most people in the West, about half of the industry worldwide is nationalised – “one and the same as their governments,” Damian said. “It’s hard to get governments to turn their noses up at profits which are just lying there to be taken.”
Even when they are not operated by state firms, these projects are sometimes seductive enough to governments to be forced through against the objections of local residents. To zoom in on one example of that, read Eleanor de Jong and Adam Morton’s report on a $12bn carbon bomb in Australia which protesters from the Murujuga First Nations community say will destroy unique local marine life and damage irreplaceable carvings dating back 50,000 years.
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The companies are too committed to change course on their own
Even if fossil fuel firms are persuaded of the seriousness of the global commitment to staving off the worst impacts of the climate crisis, Damian adds, they are already highly committed to their carbon bomb projects – with 60% already pumping and many others well on the way.
“There is only a relatively small amount of oil and gas that can be still be burned without disaster and they are all chasing the same prize - but they can’t all do it,” he said. “Somebody once made this nice analogy to me – it’s like they’re all on a train heading towards a broken bridge across a ravine, and they all say, I’ll be the last one off. But if they all try to get off at the same time, they’re going to get stuck in the door.”
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We have the technical capacity to turn this around – but very little time
“It’s not technicalities or the legal side that are stopping this from changing,” said Damian. “It’s the political will. That’s the good news, in a way: we know what the solution is. But that is as far as the good news goes. It’s not quite too late, but we have a very, very very small window of time to act.”
What else we’ve been reading
Matthew Katzman didn’t volunteer for the culture war - but when he became the target of right-wing fury over a stunningly trivial story about a picture of the Queen, the consequences were life-changing all the same. Aditya Chakrabortty’s written brilliantly about a small, but devastating, injustice. Archie
Guardian music critic Dave Simpson interviewed lauded New York City photographer Eric Johnson about one of the most iconic photos he ever took, of Biggie Smalls and his girlfriend Faith Evans. Johnson tells the interesting story behind the picture and his venerated career. Nimo
Danny Lavelle had lived at 21 addresses before he became homeless. “People with my background don’t normally make it into print,” he writes – and he argues that his success is not evidence of his own grit, but of how badly so many other young people are being failed. Archie
Every week there seems to be a new “straight talking” TV show, and the one thing they all have in common is that no one is watching. Stuart Heritage takes a look at the world of zero-rated television. Nimo
Two decades ago, Apple released the iPod, a one-of-a-kind device that gave users access to all the music they could ever desire. Dorian Lynskey takes a trip down memory lane and writes movingly about how this small metal box holds a little piece of him inside. Nimo
Wagatha Christie latest
Jim Waterson will be reporting from the high court for the duration of the trial in which Vardy is suing fellow footballer’s wife Coleen Rooney for libel. Rooney has publicly claimed that Vardy leaked three stories from a private Instagram account to the Sun newspaper, an allegation that Vardy says is false and defamatory.
Yesterday, Rooney’s barrister, David Sherborne, continued his cross-examination of Vardy, arguing that she regularly leaked information to the newspapers via her agent, Caroline Watt: “It’s not that you didn’t want to do the dirty, it’s that you didn’t want to be seen to be doing the dirty.”
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“Sherborne told the court that it was difficult to know for certain if Watt had sent messages to journalists because her phone – which he wished to search – had fallen over the side of a boat off the Scottish coast: ‘We will never know because her phone sits at the bottom of the North Sea.’”
Sport
Football | Kevin De Bruyne scored four goals to help Manchester City beat Wolves 5-1 and stay on course to win the Premier League. In Scotland, Celtic drew 1-1 with Dundee United and were crowned champions.
Cricket | The former New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum is set to be appointed England men’s Test coach. McCullum will work with new captain Ben Stokes to turn around the struggling side’s fortunes.
Football | Watford have appointed Forest Green Rovers manager Rob Edwards as their next head coach. The league two champions hit out at the relegated Premier League side for holding negotiations “behind our backs”.
The front pages
Special coverage dominates the Guardian’s front page today – “Revealed: ‘Carbon bombs’ set to trigger a climate catastrophe”. The Times has “UK troops will defend Scandinavia from Putin” – the Telegraph says of that “UK ‘would help Nordic nations fight the Russians’”. The Financial Times leads with “Brussels threatens retaliation if Northern Ireland protocol ditched”. “Tory: the poor can’t cook” – that’s the Mirror while the Metro summarises what Lee Anderson said as “Can’t cook, won’t cook”. The i has “Tories split over cost of living plan” while the Mail says “Now Rishi warms to energy windfall tax plan”. “Desperate cry for help we cannot ignore” – that’s the Express, about disabled families being “pushed to breaking point by bills crisis”. The Sun reports that jailed serial murderer Levi Bellfield wants to marry an admirer.
Today in Focus
Why are so many journalists being killed in Mexico?
The death of Mexican crime reporter Margarito Martinez shocked his friends and colleagues in Tijuana. Tom Phillips reports on how the Mexican president’s verbal attacks on the press are putting its country’s journalists at risk.
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Three years after attempting to take his own life, footballer Aaron Connolly has set up an initiative that combines sports with therapy. Connolly realised that football might be a perfect context for people to come and share their experiences in a safe and welcoming space – now there are two groups that meet up regularly, to get their blood pumping and to open up about their lives.
Connolly says that “it was our aim – and remains our aim to this day – to provide a welcoming, safe, non-judgmental environment for people to escape and talk about the pressures of life.”
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