AFP UK

President Joe Biden will on Thursday unveil a target backed by the Detroit automakers for half of all cars sold in the United States by 2030 to be zero-emission vehicles, the White House announced.

The move is the latest reversal by Biden of former President Donald Trump’s climate and environmental policies, and aims to promote a transformation of American transportation, the biggest source of the country’s carbon emissions.

“The president will sign an executive order that sets an ambitious new target to make half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles, including battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, or fuel cell electric vehicles,” a White House statement said.

The order will position “America to drive the electric vehicle future forward, outcompete China and tackle the climate crisis,” it added.

News of the announcement drew modest praise from environmentalists, who stressed the need for additional measures given the worsening climate situation.

The Sierra Club’s Katherine Garcia called the move a “meaningful signal to manufacturers,” but said the target should be raised to 60 percent and be supplemented with “the strongest clean car standards possible.”

Signficantly increasing electric vehicle (EV) usage in the United States — which accounted for only about two percent of 2020 car sales — is expected to depend on expanding charging stations and other infrastructure, as well as convincing Americans to buy the cars.

Top US automakers General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have all significantly expanded their EV investments, making the target “most likely achievable” by 2030, Executive Director of Insights at auto website Edmunds.com Jessica Caldwell said.

“But what’s possibly the biggest hurdle ahead is consumer acceptance: what will it take for Americans to be willing to change their car ownership habits to go electric?” Caldwell said.

– Infrastructure debate –

In a joint statement, the “Big 3” automakers expressed their “shared aspiration to achieve sales of 40-50 percent” of the vehicles, but said the shift “can be achieved only” with initiatives such as consumer incentives to buy EVs and new infrastructure like a charging network.

Some of these measures are not included in the current infrastructure bill pending in the United States Senate, or are not funded at levels sought by the Biden administration.

The manufacturers BMW, Honda, Volkswagen and Volvo — whose electric vehicles are often considered more advanced than their US competitors — issued their own statement applauding the initiative.

One of America’s largest unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), also rallied behind the move. 

“The members of the UAW, current and future, are ready to build these electric cars and trucks and the batteries that go in them,” President Ray Curry said in a statement released by the Biden administration.

The White House made no mention of Tesla, Elon Musk’s company that has been credited with disrupting the US market towards EVs and leads the US market in their sales.

Although the 50 percent figure would not exceed what many American manufacturers were already considering, it is a steep target for the United States as a whole.

While around 10 percent of European car sales are of electric vehicles, they account for less than two percent in the United States, the International Energy Agency said in 2020.

Biden also intends to beef up fuel consumption and emissions regulations, which had been dramatically rolled back under Trump.

– Measured praise –

The current emissions regulations, which date from March 2020, require manufacturers to improve by 1.5 percent the energy efficiency of their vehicles between 2021 and 2026, less than the five percent demanded under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama.

The Biden administration did not immediately unveil a new emissions objective.

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp praised the announcement as positioning the United States to compete in the emerging transportation economy.

“Countries around the world are racing to eliminate pollution from their cars and trucks,” Krupp said. “(Americans) can win this race, and our prize will be good jobs, savings at the gas pump for American families, cleaner air and a safer climate.”

But the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Simon Mui said more aggressive action was needed immediately “given how climate change has already turned our weather so violent.”

The Environmental Protection Agency “must now move expeditiously to put strong standards in place to ensure automakers deliver on that goal while also slashing pollution from gasoline and diesel vehicles,” Mui said. 

“Anything less puts our health and climate at unnecessary risk.”

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers from a smouldering power plant Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wreaked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the eastern island of Evia.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on a visit to the archaeological ruins where the first Olympic Games were held that it was time to “conduct studies as quickly as possible to avoid further disasters”.

The blazes forced also the government of North Macedonia to declare a 30-day state of emergency and the defence ministry in its Balkan neighbour Albania to declare the situation “critical” because of the threat to village homes.

The fires killed one person in Albania this week.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw fleeing villagers — some clutching pets they managed to grab from their homes — piling onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port as roaring flames lapped the 35-year-old plant in the dark of night.

But a few older locals refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection conducted after the flames had been doused by the morning showed “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

An AFP team saw yellow smoke smoulder over parts of the plant on Thursday morning.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

Greek firefighters said they had contained 92 of the 118 blazes reported on Wednesday evening and 180 have ignited in Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday night.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second-hottest on record in Europe.

Greek deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires meant that “we are no longer talking about climate change but a climate threat”.

The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to so as not to risk human lives,” the mayor of the Evia town of Limni, Giorgos Tsapourniotis, told Greece’s ANA news agency.

ANA said Greek aerial assets were struggling to fly over the fast-evolving fire on the eastern island because visibility was being hampered by thick smoke spread by strong winds.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government. We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office also launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

Good news: Scientists won’t have to worry about their mouse sperm vials breaking in transit ever again.

Researchers in Japan have developed a way to freeze dry rodent ejaculate between thin plastic sheets and sticky tape it to postcards, with the samples surviving long journeys to produce healthy pups.

The team from the University of Yamanashi were so delighted with their success one scientist even sent another a “Happy New Year” card with mouse sperm attached as a gift.

“Until now, storing or sending to other researchers of mouse sperm has required a freezing environment such as liquid nitrogen or dry ice,” Daiyu Ito, first author of a paper in iScience, told AFP.

Ito is a PhD student at Professor Teruhiko Wakayama’s lab, which had previously been the first team to succeed in freeze-drying mammal sperm, and send it to the International Space Station to study the effects of cosmic radiation.

The sperm originally had to be stored in tiny glass bottles that broke easily, rendering the sample unusable.

With such pitfalls in mind, the team set about working on a new method of preservation.

Plastic sheets were found to be a good way to seal the sperm, but it was also toxic to the DNA, and the scientists realized they needed another material to go inside.

After testing various types of paper, they found that weighing paper had the highest offspring production rate.

Using this technique, they were able to produce a “sperm book” made of postcards with different samples, “a completely new concept that no one has ever thought of before,” said Ito. 

“Almost every day, new genetic modified mouse strains were created from many laboratories in the world. Therefore, (with) this method, a thousand mouse strains can be stored and easily managed in only this one book at low cost,” he added.

Though the book was stored in a freezer at -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit), the team found the samples survived journeys of up to three days at room temperature when the postcards were sent in the mail — for example between the University of Yamanashi and the University of Tokyo.

Wakayama, the senior author of the paper, has previously said he developed freeze-dried mouse sperm for a future in which humans migrate to other planets and need to preserve the genetic resources of Earth, including our own species.

“It is now recognized that genetic resources are an asset to humanity’s future,” he said in a statement. 

“The plastic sheet preservation method in this study will be the most suitable method for the safe preservation of a large amount of valuable genetic resources because of the resistance to breakage and less space required for storage.”

The team is currently working on a method to freeze dry mammal eggs. “We believe that we can do it,” Ito told AFP.

Can humanity drag down greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to prevent Earth’s surface from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels?

That question looms larger than all others as 195 nations tussle over the UN’s first comprehensive scientific assessment of climate change since 2014, to be released Monday. 

And if we can, will we?

It is hard to exaggerate how urgent and politically charged these questions have become.

“We need to make sure that we keep 1.5C within reach,” UK minister and president of the critical COP26 climate summit in November, Alok Sharma, told AFP earlier this year, leaving no doubt that success at Glasgow would be measured against that yardstick.

No one has sounded the alarm more loudly than nature itself.

An unbroken cascade of deadly, unprecedented weather disasters — bulked up by global warming — has swept across three continents since mid-June.

Asphalt-melting North American heatwaves in regions considered too temperate for air conditioning; diluvial rainfall tearing apart German towns and drowning big-city commuters trapped on the underground in central China; untamable wildfires fuelled by drought — decades of dire climate predictions are suddenly a here-and-now reality.

And that’s with average global warming of only 1.1C so far.

So has humanity dithered too long to keep the 1.5C dream alive? 

There is little doubt that the planet will reach that marker — and sooner than previously thought, according to sources who have seen the penultimate draft of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) text under negotiation at a plenary this week.  

A table under review projects the increase in global surface temperature for five emissions scenarios, ranging from wildly optimistic to unimaginably reckless.  

In the draft, the IPCC identifies best estimates for twenty-year periods with mid-points of 2030, 2050 and 2090. 

Earth’s temperature is projected to hit 1.5C or 1.6C around 2030 in all five scenarios — a full decade earlier than a similar prediction the IPCC made less than three years ago.

The news gets worse.

By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold has been breached across the board — by a tenth of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. 

The glimmer of hope for 1.5C is that by century’s end Earth’s surface will have cooled a notch to 1.4C under the most optimistic “if-we-do-everything-right” storyline.  

A brief overshoot does not mean the target has been missed, scientists caution. 

But long-term trajectories do not look promising in the other four scenarios.

Temperature increases by 2090 forecast range from a hugely challenging 1.8C to a catastrophic 4.4C.

The findings are beyond dispute, and all IPCC diplomats reviewing them can do at this point is decide whether and how to present them to the world.

– ‘Aspirational’ –

By signing on to the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations pledged to collectively cap warming at “well below” 2C. 

With dramatic climate impacts already at hand, however, the focus has shifted to the more ambitious but non-binding target of 1.5C, reluctantly allowed into the 2015 treaty by some countries that probably assumed it could be safely ignored.

“1.5C was aspirational,” Maynooth University professor and climatologist Peter Thorne told AFP. “But then parties turned around and asked the IPCC to do a special report on it.”  

The resulting 2018 analysis starkly showed how much more devastating an extra half-degree of warming would be, for humanity and the planet. 

It also showed the power of the IPCC.

“1.5C became the de facto target,” said Thorne, a lead author of the all-important IPCC Summary for Policymakers on physical science, currently under discussion. “And it has changed the framing entirely.”

The climate science community — generally on the same page when it comes to key global warming issues — remains sharply divided on 1.5C.

“There is definitely a difference of opinion among scientists about whether the 1.5C target is reachable,” Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter and an authority on climate tipping points, told AFP. 

Some experts who think 1.5C is mission impossible simply avoid the subject to avoid casting a pall over efforts to ramp up climate action, he added. “They don’t discuss it.”

– Degrees of difference –

That porous wall of silence collapsed earlier this year when the prestigious Australian Academy of Science released a 100-page white paper on climate risk.

“Limiting climate change to 1.5C is now virtually impossible,” top scientists — including many IPCC authors — wrote, adding that even “well under 2C” would require a Herculean effort.

The reaction was fast and furious.

“Scientifically speaking, humanity can still limit global warming to 1.5C this century,” a quartet of A-list atmospheric physicists and modellers pushed back in a commentary. 

“Political action will determine whether it actually does. Conflating the two questions amounts to misplaced punditry, and is dangerous.”

Even optimists agree that 1.5C would be a heavy lift. It would mean, for starters, slashing emissions in half by 2030 — a mind-boggling eight percent per year — and to zero by 2050. 

And yet, things are still moving in the wrong direction: the International Energy Agency reported recently that post-Covid stimulus packages will generate record levels of carbon pollution by 2023. 

Some scientists, NGOs and policy experts are already preparing to navigate a world in which the milestone has slipped into the rearview mirror.

“The pathway to a stable 1.5C is clearly very, very narrow and very challenging,” Alden Meyer, senior associate at think tank E3G and a climate politics and policy veteran, told AFP. 

“But that doesn’t mean you stop fighting for it. Even if you fall short, every tenth of a degree matters in terms of impacts.”

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wreaked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of Evia.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on a visit to the archaeological ruins where the first Olympic Games were held that it was time to “conduct studies as quickly as possible to avoid further disasters”.

Prosecutors also launched a preliminary probe into reports that fires that blocked off Athens on Tuesday and saw air quality over the capital deteriorate sharply again Thursday were caused by an explosion at a public electric company plant.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw firefighters and police fleeing the 35-year-old KemHundreds of villagers — many clutching their pets in small bags or belongings grabbed from their abandoned homes — piled onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port of Oren.

But a few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection showed the overnight blazes left “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

Greek firefighters said they had contained 92 of the 118 blazes reported on Wednesday evening and 180 have ignited in Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday night.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second-hottest on record in Europe.

Greek deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires meant that “we are no longer talking about climate change but a climate threat”.

The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to so as not to risk human lives,” Limni mayor Giorgos Tsapourniotis told Greece’s ANA news agency.

ANA said Greek aerial assets were struggling to fly over the fast-evolving fire on the eastern island because visibility was being hampered by thick smoke spread by strong winds.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government, We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office in Ankara said Thursday it has launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

China’s top planning authority has allowed shuttered coal mines to restart production as the country works to meet surging power demand while forging ahead with ambitious climate goals.

Fifteen mines across China’s northern regions ranging from Inner Mongolia to Shanxi have restarted operations, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on Wednesday. 

Last week authorities announced the restart of another 38 mines in Inner Mongolia, bringing the total number brought back online to 53. 

The combined annual production capacity of these mines exceeds 110 million tonnes.

The resumption of operations comes as China seeks to temper rising prices for thermal coal, which hit a record in May.

But President Xi Jinping has also pledged to wean China off coal with a target of peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality 30 years later.

Top policymakers called for a coordinated and orderly path towards carbon neutrality in a meeting last month, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

China is the world’s biggest polluter and emits a third of the world’s greenhouse gases.

Last December tens of millions across the country faced power shortages in below-freezing winter temperatures as three provinces imposed curbs on electricity use when coal supply became squeezed.

Alexander Fyodorov peered out his office window towards the vast forests where wildfires had been raging for weeks around the Siberian city of Yakutsk.

It was a rare day for this summer — for once the sky in the world’s coldest city was not shrouded in a sepia orange toxic smog, produced by the third straight year of increasingly massive blazes.

In Yakutia, known as Sakha in its Turkic language, many believe that nature is a living spirit that will maintain harmony with humanity. 

But Fyodorov warned against what he called a false trust.

“What nature herself has shown — last year, this year — is a reminder that we shouldn’t put our hopes in nature,” said Fyodorov, the deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk.

“We need to start preparing.”

Yakutia, which has a border with the Arctic Ocean and sits atop permafrost on a territory nearly five times the size of France, is a canary in the coal mine for the global climate crisis, says Fyodorov.

The region has seen its annual average temperature warm by 3 degrees Celsius since the beginning of the 20th century — 2 degrees more than the average for the planet — and this summer saw several days with record heat of 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).

While it is difficult to link individual fires directly to climate change, global heating makes blazes more likely as harsher and longer droughts dry out regions to create ideal fire conditions, experts say.

And with this summer Yakutia’s driest in 150 years, according to local officials, the region became a tinderbox that has seen wildfires tear through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of its swampy taiga forest.

“The current fires are beating every record,” Alexander Isayev, a wildfire expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, told AFP.

– ‘Uncharacteristic fires’ –

With over a month left in Siberia’s annual wildfire season, officials have rushed to calm the blazes, sending in the military and seeding clouds to produce rain.

But in Yakutia — a region of just under one million people — the bulk of the work has fallen to thousands of weary firefighters and local volunteers, working with thin resources. 

Nikita Andreyev, head of the Gorniy district that has seen some of Yakutia’s largest fires this season, told AFP that the region only receives six rubles (8 US cents) per hectare from the federal budget — far from enough. 

That means that dozens of blazes are left to burn untended, with the priority placed on protecting settlements rather than stopping fires from burning at all.

“We didn’t have enough manpower and resources for these fires,” Andreyev said. “It’s necessary in our view for finances to be allocated in this direction.”

Critics say that Russia — which is home to one-fifth of the world’s forests — must spend more money to fight wildfires not only in Yakutia but across the country.

According to Russia’s forestry agency, more than 11.5 million hectares have burned across the country since the start of the year — well beyond the annual average since 2000 of 8.9 million hectares. 

From Siberia to the Urals and the region of Karelia in its northwest, Russia has seen “uncharacteristic fires” this season, said Grigory Kuksin, head of Greenpeace’s wildfire unit in the country.

“There has been higher heat and more dryness in these places than expected,” he said.

“It’s clearly the effects of climate change.”

The unfolding crisis was what drove Turgun Popov, 50, to rally his athletics club in Yakutsk to volunteer to help fight the blazes outside the city. 

“We have to realise that to preserve nature is to preserve our future — the future of our kids,” he said.

– ‘Dragons will wake’ –

Beyond releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and destroying material for absorbing it, Fyodorov said the blazes could eventually help trigger the mass melting of Yakutia’s already-thawing permafrost.

And given that permafrost contains twice as much greenhouse gases as the atmosphere, that could be a disastrous trigger in further driving climate change, he said.

“This will be unhealthy for the whole world — for everyone,” Fyodorov said.

In breaks from fighting the blazes, some locals in Yakutia have conducted prayer rituals to induce rain for some respite.

Heavy showers finally arrived on a recent July day, but 48 hours later they gave way to heat and strong winds that whipped at the embers. 

Outside the village of Byas-Kyuel in the Gorniy district, 29-year-old firefighter Andrei Yevdokimov observed the damp but still smoking forest floor.

The rain had not fallen long enough, he said, predicting that the blazes would come roaring back.

“No matter what, the dragons will wake,” he said. 

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wreacked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of Evia.

Greece deployed large forces near Olympia to protect archaeological sites where the first Olympic Games were held in antiquity.

“We’re waging a battle of the titans!” Greek deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias said.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw firefighters and police fleeing the 35-year-old Kemerkoy plant in the Aegean province of Mugla as bright balls of orange flames tore through the surrounding hills.

Hundreds of villagers — many clutching small bags of belongings grabbed from their abandoned houses as the evacuation call sounded — piled onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port of Oren.

The regional authority said “all explosive chemicals” and other hazardous material had been removed from the strategic site.

“But there’s a risk that the fire could spread to the thousands of tonnes of coal inside,” regional mayor Osman Gurun told reporters.

A few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection showed the overnight blazes left “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

More than 100 blazes were still burning in Greece and 180 have ignited in Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday night.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second-hottest on record in Europe.

Greece’s Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires ravaging the region meant that “we are no longer talking about climate change but a climate threat”.

The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to so as not to risk human lives,” Limni mayor Giorgos Tsapourniotis told Greece’s ANA news agency.

The Turkish mayor of the town of Milas spent days waging a social media campaign trying to get officials to send firefighting planes that could douse the flames before they engulfed the power plant.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government, We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office in Ankara said Thursday it has launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wrecked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of Evia.

Greece deployed large forces near Olympia to protect archeological sites where the first Olympic Games were held in antiquity.

“We’re waging a battle of the titans!” Greek deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias said.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw firefighters and police fleeing the 35-year-old Kemerkoy plant in the Aegean province of Mugla as bright balls of orange flames tore through the surrounding hills.

Hundreds of villagers — many clutching small bags of belongings grabbed from their abandoned houses as the evacuation call sounded — piled onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port of Oren.

The regional authority said “all explosive chemicals” and other hazardous material had been removed from the strategic site.

“But there’s a risk that the fire could spread to the thousands of tonnes of coal inside,” regional mayor Osman Gurun told reporters.

A few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection showed the overnight blazes left “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

More than 100 blazes were still burning in Greece and 180 have ignited in Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday night.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second-hottest on record in Europe.

Greece’s Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires ravaging the region meant that “we are no longer talking about climate change but a climate threat”.

The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to so as not to risk human lives,” Limni mayor Giorgos Tsapourniotis told Greece’s ANA news agency.

The Turkish mayor of the town of Milas spent days waging a social media campaign trying to get officials to send firefighting planes that could douse the flames before they engulfed the power plant.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government, We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office in Ankara said Thursday it has launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

President Joe Biden will set a target on Thursday that half of all cars sold in the United States by 2030 will be zero-emission vehicles, the White House announced.

Biden’s plan follows the dramatic loosening of many environmental regulations and climate protections under the Donald Trump administration.

“The President will sign an Executive Order that sets an ambitious new target to make half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles, including battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, or fuel cell electric vehicles,” a White House statement said.

The order, due to be signed on Thursday, will position “America to drive the electric vehicle future forward, outcompete China, and tackle the climate crisis,” it added.

The three big American auto manufacturers — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — expressed their “shared aspiration to achieve sales of 40-50%” of electric vehicles including battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2030.

In another statement, the manufacturers BMW, Honda, Volkswagon and Volvo — whose electric vehicles are often considered more advanced than their US competitors — applauded the initiative.

– Union support –

One of America’s largest unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), rallied behind the move. 

“The members of the UAW, current and future, are ready to build these electric cars and trucks and the batteries that go in them,” President Ray Curry said in a statement released through the White House.

“Our members are America’s secret weapon in winning this global race.”

Although the 50 percent figure would not exceed what many American manufacturers were already considering, it is a steep target for the United States as a whole.

The country is home to Tesla, a world leader in electric cars, but it has been slow to adopt such vehicles — especially compared with China or Europe.

While around 10 percent of European car sales are of electric vehicles, they account for less than two percent in the United States, according to the International Energy Agency in 2020.

Biden also intends to beef up fuel consumption and emission regulations, which had been dramatically rolled back under his predecessor Trump.

Car emissions are the single biggest US contributor to climate change.

The current emissions regulations, which date from March 2020, require manufacturers to improve by 1.5 percent the energy efficiency of their vehicles between 2021 and 2026 — compared with the five percent demanded by the Obama administration.

The Biden administration did not immediately unveil a new quantified objective.