This year is the 30th UN climate summit – the conference of the parties (Cop) – is due to be hosted by Brazil. Cop30 is taking place during extremely challenging times and it feels increasingly more difficult to be optimistic that November’s summit will unite the global community around concrete actions to mitigate climate change. Much has been said of Donald Trump’s decision to drastically scale down the US delegation, but the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that are not democratic; the correlation between places such as China, Russia or Saudi Arabia and state ownership of the fossil fuel companies that dominate global emissions is clear. For this week’s cover story and to open an online series on the world’s biggest emitting countries, environment editor Fiona Harvey interviews some of the world’s leading thinkers about how to negotiate with autocracies. There are some ready to argue that top-down governments may be better at setting climate goals than democracies characterised by election-to-election thinking. However, as Pjotr Sauer explains in his probe into attitudes to climate in Russia, “the canary in the coalmine” as one source puts it, the Kremlin seems content to let its emissions rip.
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Five essential reads in this week’s edition
Spotlight | A data leak, a secret plan and a public cover-up
In 2022 an email set of a chain of events affecting thousands of Aghans but few knew about it until last week. Dan Sabbagh and Emine Sinmaz report on the lifting of a superinjunction
Science | ‘It’s always been some white dude’
Ethiopia is the ‘cradle of humankind’, but Ethiopian palaeontologists have had to fight to do research on their own fossils, reports Fred Harter
Feature | An intimate account of an unprecedented trial
Sophie Elmshirst’s account of the bizarre trial of Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon looks behind the death of their child, Victoria, to examine the pair’s attempts to dominate the court process
Opinion | When politicians hide the truth, why should we believe anything?
If it’s not superinjunctions, it’s the Epstein files furore. There’s a reason that the public are losing what trust they had in governments, says Gaby Hinsliff
Books | Is it time to ban opinion polls?
Polling “incentivises kneejerk decision-making by governments” but more to the point, argues Steven Poole for the big idea, who has a fixed opinion on anything?
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What else we’ve been reading
Like many other Gen Xers, I was a keen compiler and recipient of mix tapes – if only I had a way of listening to them now – and I loved this piece by Guardian writers on their cherished cassettes and CDs, which is by turns poignant, funny and charming. Clare Horton, assistant editor
I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan – from the layered dreams of Inception to the time dilation of Interstellar, his films transcend spectacle to explore deeper human questions. His new epic, The Odyssey, saw its first Imax tickets sell out in mere minutes – more than a year before its scheduled release in July 2026. I can’t wait to see it. Hyunmu Lee, CRM Engagement & Retention
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Other highlights from the Guardian website
• Audio | The babies born with DNA from three parents – podcast
• Video | Last orders: a pub crawl across the UK’s dying booze industry
• Gallery | Wellcome photography prize 2025
• Interactive | How aid points in Gaza became ‘death traps’
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