The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: Trump’s Energy Deal With the E.U. Will Further Sink Our Climate
Dear Diary. As we all know, Trump is trying to let America’s oil and gas spigots flow unimpeded by any regulations. To that end, threats of high tariffs have sealed a deal with the European Union, which will sell planet killing natural gas and oil at amounts that are more than the big block of countries can use.
The only positive developments that I can think of is that the E.U. will get weaned off of Russian gas and oil, and in the short term that block of countries will benefit economically from this deal. We all will eventually suffer even more as the use of these fossil fuels inch global temperature averages to and then above +1.5°C above preindustrial conditions tick by .1°C tick.
Here are more details from the New York Times:
Trump’s E.U. Trade Deal Comes With Impossible Energy Promises
The European Union pledged to buy billions of dollars’ worth of energy resources from the United States. Experts say that’s unrealistic and could hurt Europe’s climate goals.
President Trump and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, meeting Sunday at the Trump Turnberry golf course in Scotland .Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
By Somini Sengupta and Max Bearak
July 29, 2025
When the Trump administration reached a trade deal with the European Union this week, the tariffs got much of the attention. But the agreement also includes a remarkable provision that could more than triple the amount of oil and gas America sells to the European Union.
Under the trade deal, the 27-country bloc says it will buy $250 billion in energy resources from the United States every year through the end of President Trump’s term. That’s a huge jump from the $70 billion it now buys, mainly in the form of crude oil and liquefied natural gas.
Analysts say it would be almost impossible to meet that sales target. Nevertheless, the terms, even if realized only in part, could have far-reaching effects on Europe’s economy and politics.
A significant change in fossil fuel use in Europe, one of the world’s biggest economies, could affect how quickly the Earth’s atmosphere continues to heat up, and thus, the fate of billions of people around the world. The burning of fossil fuels has raised global temperatures and aggravated heat waves, fires and floods, including in the United States and Europe.
Fossil fuels have shaped America’s interests abroad for decades. But rarely has an American administration used fossil fuel exports so aggressively as a political and economic tool in the energy choices countries make.
“This will strengthen the United States’ energy dominance, reduce European reliance on adversarial sources, and narrow our trade deficit with the E.U.,” the administration said in a fact sheet, referring to the European Union’s stated objective to reduce, if not eliminate, its purchasing of fuel from Russia.
A deal to buy so much energy from one country flies in the face of Europe’s other worry: energy security. Europe has been succeeding at weaning itself off Russian gas.
But the Trump deal could risk locking in dependence on the United States, and that’s not the only question surrounding the details of the agreement.
Could Europe even buy that much?
No, according to energy industry analysts. The dollar figure is “so far away from what is really possible that it has the hallmarks of something said just to get an agreement over the line,” said Chris Aylett, a research fellow at Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank based in London.
The European Union’s official statistics show that it imported an estimated $70 billion of oil and gas from the United States and $26 billion from Russia last year. So even if the European Union replaced all its Russian imports with American ones — which is a tall order on its own, given that U.S. fuels are shipped rather than piped — it wouldn’t make it halfway to the agreement’s target.
Europe is also rapidly adding renewable energy infrastructure. The countries of the European Union together are the leading importers of Chinese-made solar panels, and China now sells one in five electric vehicles bought in Europe. The European Union has adopted a law to have renewable energy sources make up at least 42.5 percent of its energy consumption by 2030, up from a quarter currently.
“Europe is well on its way to independence, thanks to the rapid growth of renewables,” said Laurence Tubiana, a former French climate diplomat who now heads the European Climate Foundation, an advocacy group. “It doesn’t need more high-price, high-risk L.N.G.,” she added, referring to liquefied natural gas.
There’s another hitch. It’s unlikely that E.U. political leaders have authority to dictate whom private companies buy energy from.
The agreement says it could also include the export of American nuclear technology to Europe. But analysts said the most promising technologies around a new generation of reactors were still years away from being ready to deploy.
Could the Trump administration slow down Europe’s climate ambitions?
It could, in two ways.
First, if Europeans end up buying more oil and gas over the next three years, it would increase Europe’s climate pollution. Second, U.S. gas is in liquefied form, and its carbon dioxide emissions are 10 times that of an equivalent volume of piped gas from Russia and elsewhere. That’s because more energy is required to liquefy it, transport it by ship and turn it back into gas.
The Trump deal could also bolster the president’s far-right political allies in Europe, who have sought to scuttle the European Union’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions over time. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has proposed reducing the bloc’s planet-warming emissions by 90 percent by 2040, compared with 1990 levels. The European Parliament has yet to agree on the proposal.
This isn’t just about Europe
Fossil fuels were a central focus of the United States’ other recently announced trade deals. Japan, for instance, agreed to invest billions of dollars in the United States, including on a major expansion of U.S. energy imports, according to the White House.
The Trump administration has been pressuring Japan, South Korea and other Asian nations for months to finance a $44 billion liquefied natural gas project in Alaska. The project has been stalled for many years over questions of who will pay for it and whether Asian demand will last long enough into the future to justify it.
Most liquefied natural gas projects have an estimated life span of 40 to 50 years, and countries like Japan and South Korea have pledged to make their economies carbon-neutral by 2050.
Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)