Fwd: The IPCC’s turbulent life after Trump

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Apr 10, 2026, 11:53:46 AM (22 hours ago) Apr 10

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The IPCC has a Trump-sized hole in its budget. The group responsible for the world’s foremost climate report is running short on cash after the US president stopped providing funding and pulled the country out of the group.

Today’s newsletter looks at the financial concerns as well as how the US scientific pullback could impact the reports slated to be published starting next year. Plus, a big clean tech bankruptcy, Chinese EV exports hit a record, and a wild start to US wildfire season.

Scientific struggles

By Eric Roston

The impacts of the Trump administration’s move to pull the US out of a major United Nations climate report became clear at a meeting late last month in Bangkok.

With the US absent, dozens of governments discussed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next series of influential reports. The meeting previewed some of the challenges the group faces without substantial US involvement, notably a budget shortfall. But it also showed where other countries can play bigger roles, including European nations and China.

The US has long been the world’s scientific powerhouse. But the Trump administration has shuttered key programs and slashed funding. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump also pulled the US out of dozens of international agreements and groups, including the IPCC.

An AI-powered meteorology warning booth at the Shanghai New Expo Center. Photographer: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/Getty Images — An AI-powered meteorology warning booth at the Shanghai New Expo Center.

On the IPCC’s sixth and most recent assessment — published in stages between 2021 and 2023 — the US led all countries with 74 researchers. That’s double China’s representation, which tied for fourth with Australia. More than 70 US scientists are working on the next report, largely through a network organized by the nonprofit American Geophysical Union, which stepped in after the government withdrew its support.

Other nations have been working to increase their scientific capacity, though. The European Union is investing $100 million this decade in its Horizon Europe program to boost research and innovation, with about 15% of that funding projects in climate, energy and mobility. China has plowed even more money into its scientific enterprise, and the investments are starting to pay off. For the seventh set of IPCC reports, more than half of the contributing scientists come from developing countries and new market economies.

Within two years, China is expected to pull ahead of the US in publicly funded research, according to the Frontiers in Science and Innovation Policy program at the University of California at San Diego.

While the group does not separate climate-related funding data, it’s an area where Beijing has made gains.

“China’s academic input has really grown massively. They have published some fantastic work in the past few years” and the volume is growing, said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, who has worked on previous IPCC reports.

But there are areas where US science — and particularly data — could be harder to replace. The Trump administration’s shutter of the US Agency for International Development, for example, effectively defunded the Emergency Events Database (known as EM-DAT), a rigorously maintained “vital global public resource” ever more necessary as extreme weather worsens, according to an open letter signed by hundreds of researchers calling for the dataset to continue. The project has carried on but is rethinking its operations and calling for ideas to maintain the database after USAID support vanished.

“If EM-DAT were to cease operations, the consequences would not be abstract; they would be practical, immediate and damaging,” according to an open letter signed by hundreds of researchers around the world.

Blocking action

$10 billion

The amount of money a carbon tax on shipping was expected to raise annually before the Trump administration successfully pressured the world’s shipping regulator to punt on implementing it.

A clear focus

“Really consistent with the anti-science agenda.”

Erin Graham

Professor of global affairs, University of Notre Dame

The Trump administration’s pullback from the IPCC is part of a bigger pattern.

This week on Zero

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Iran War Will Reshape the Future of Energy

Since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global energy markets have been frenetic, prices swinging up and down with each new headline. Even with the prospect of the Strait of Hormuz reopening, prices of oil and gas have risen around the world, and we’re starting to see impacts on local economies, particularly in Asia. This week on Zero, Bloomberg opinion columnist David Fickling explains what those impacts are, and how they may reshape Asia’s energy systems for decades to come.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Clean tech bankruptcy

By Coco Liu

Battery recycling startup Ascend Elements has raised more than $1.1 billion in equity and grants since its founding in 2015. But “the financial difficulties were insurmountable,” and the company has voluntarily initiated a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, Chief Executive Officer Linh Austin said in a statement.

The Ascend Elements EV battery recycling facility in Covington, Georgia is one of North America’s largest lithium battery recycling facilities. Credit: Ascend Elements. — The Ascend Elements EV battery recycling facility in Covington, Georgia is one of North America’s largest lithium battery recycling facilities.

The company is the latest among a growing list of climate startups that raised large amounts of capital before running into challenges over the past year. Battery startup 24M Technologies Inc. told employees that it was shutting down in March, The Information reported. That same month, green cement startup Sublime Systems laid off two-thirds of its workforce after the Trump administration canceled a crucial grant that would have supported the company’s first major manufacturing facility.

Ascend similarly saw a $316 million grant canceled by the administration last October. Both awards were made under former President Joe Biden.

Chinese EVs hit a record

China’s exports of electric vehicles and hybrids more than doubled in March to a record as the global energy shock stemming from the Iran war renewed interest in EVs.

BYD electric vehicles bound for export in China.

Overseas shipments jumped 140% from a year earlier to 349,000 units, according to data from China Passenger Car Association released on Thursday. BYD Co., the world’s largest EV maker, accounted for about a third of the total, with Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd. and Chery Automobile Co. rounding out the top three exporters for the month, it said.

BYD’s Hong Kong-listed shares gained as much as 3.1% on Friday, while Geely and Chery also rose, with uncertainty about a ceasefire continuing to cause energy market turmoil.

A fire burns along Turner River Road in Florida on February 24. Source: Inciweb — A fire burns along Turner River Road in Florida on February 24.

An unusually hot, snowless winter has fueled a fast start to the spring fire season across large swaths of the western, central and southeastern US, disrupting businesses and upending daily life.

Nearly 19,000 have ignited nationwide since Jan. 1, about 6,900 more than normal compared to the past decade. In recent weeks, flames have scorched nearly 1 million acres of cattle grazing land and prairie in the Great Plains and dampened tourism in parts of the Everglades.

The escalating cost of wildfires now adds $41 to the average monthly power bill for residential customers of California’s largest utility, according to a government report that calls for a systemic overhaul of how the state responds to conflagrations as climate change-driven disasters threaten its economy.

That surcharge accounts for 19% of the average Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. bill, and along with spiking homeowners’ insurance premiums, is another way Californians are paying the price for more destructive and frequent wildfires. Those impacts are lowering home values and local tax bases, and destabilizing mortgage and insurance markets, according to the study.

Novo Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk, is topping up an investment in a Danish company specialized in superconductor technology, as part of an effort to accelerate new energy resources in Europe.

Chile is studying ways to curb electricity rate hikes while promoting electric vehicles, two weeks after the new government stoked inflation by delivering the biggest fuel price increases in decades.

The European Union will soon offer flexibility to companies on both penalties and tracing energy imports to help ensure that its landmark law to tackle methane emissions in fossil fuel imports doesn’t put its supply at risk.