Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.
Dustin Benton
@dbenton.bsky.social
Sustainability MD Forefront Advisers. Prev:@GreenAllianceUK; Chief Analyst @food_strategy. Generic personal achievement. Folksy identifier. Humblebrag. #hashtag
Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.
Japanese officials have coined an entirely new word to signify the dangerous heat of #ClimateChange. It's "kokushobi," which means "cruel heat day." This coinage is but a drop of the coming shower of cultural changes that climate change will force upon us. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/w...
El verano que se salió de la campana de Gauss. Es una locura lo que estamos viendo este año comparado con años anteriores… Ya no hablamos de un año más cálido de lo normal. El clima se ha movido a un rango que la vieja estadística decía que no debía ocurrir.
2026 is on track to be the warmest (~35% chance) or second warmest (~63%) year on record, while 2027 is very likely (92% chance) to be the warmest on record on the back of a growing super El Niño event. For more, check out my new Carbon Brief State of the Climate Q2 update: www.carbonbrief.org/...
European heatwave wiped €2bn from value of grain crop, analysis estimates ft.trib.al/FkdESYN #FTEdit
European heatwave wiped €2bn from value of grain crop, analysis estimates
France and Hungary worst hit by lost production of maize and wheat
ft.trib.al
Bad energy week for a new UK prime minister who (rightly) wants to cut electricity bills. If the conflict with Iran continues, mooted bill rises for the October-December price cap will be rather higher than hoped. Ofgem's observation window ends in mid August...
"France is the European Union's biggest wheat producer and one of the world's largest wheat exporters, making its harvest an important benchmark for global grain markets"
France's wheat production to fall after heatwaves push early harvest
The wheat harvest in France, Europe’s largest grain producer, is expected to fall by 4 percent compared to 2025 after an unusually early harvest carried out during successive heatwaves.
rfi.fr
The interconnection issue (created by Brexit) was widely predicted to be a security of supply risk last decade. Still makes no sense to have left the internal electricity market. Hopefully DESNZ will get to fix this later this year.
Tom Haddon@tomh-analyst.bsky.social · 3mo agoBut broadly speaking, NESO ended up in a mess due to maintenance schedules, North/South constraints, and interconnector actions and their geography (in the South East), layer on a dose of not being as aligned to the EU's IEM and we have a Brexit shaped market design problem:
Nice charts. I continue to be frustrated that coverage of the relatively minor grid issues in Europe during the heatwave rather miss the point that solar and batteries were *helping*.
Tom Haddon@tomh-analyst.bsky.social · 3mo agoThere will be distributed energy/renewables narrative trying to emerge (the likely lads are trying to portray this as a Spain version two) but it's clearly nonsense. Wind output forecast missed by ~2 GW (room for improvement there I think!), but solar PV and BESS nailed the brief.
An ex-general Richard Nugee and former diplomat @snellarthur.bsky.social on why the people who assess threats for a living now count ecosystem collapse as one of them. Ep 1 of @carolinelucas.bsky.social new 4-part series on The Rest Is Politics I'm in ep 2 out Fri www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJUK...
The Secret Security Threat The Government Don’t Want Us To Know. | FIRST LOOK
YouTube video by The Rest Is Politics
youtube.com
EU ETS pricing on aviation proposed to be extended to everywhere in blue - deftly this avoids a fight with China and the USA
Or much of a drop in public support. Fascinating example of elite consensus switching despite popular opinion.
Arieh Kovler@ariehkovler.com · 3mo agoIn two years Net Zero went from broad political consensus to politically toxic, without any particular scandal over the policy.
Train-commuting home in New York today under the heat dome, let me just say for the record: our infrastructure isn't ready for what's to come. Not even close.
yes because they are only spending about 30p a day on fresh vegetables this framing is designed to turn people against green levies, obviously and forget the horrific heatwave we’ve been living through
Extraordinary credit to Sadiq Khan for pushing through this deeply controversial policy. This is what can happen when politicians are prepared to stick to their principles.
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan@london.gov.uk · 4mo agoThis is remarkable.
18 hours of battery storage! Germany's 22h storage requirement for its capacitymarket (imposed to make sure CCGTs win) might be delivered by batteries if they don't move fast...
Ed Porter@edporter.bsky.social · 4mo agoThe long-awaited LDES results are here - the "minded to" projects are below. 5 quick takes: 1) Lithium going far beyond 8 hours, that debate must surely be dead now.
Today was the hottest day ever recorded in France, breaking the record set just yesterday.
The govt handing over another $765 million in taxpayer dollars to companies to NOT build wind turbines, during an energy crisis, is bonkers. The total amount paid to cancel wind is now $2.5 billion dollars. About the same as DOE spends on all clean energy, transportation, & energy efficiency R&D.
Emily Pontecorvo@emilypont.bsky.social · 4mo agoBreaking: Trump made another deal to pay an offshore wind developer to walk away from all 4 of its leases, this time with Invenergy. More details in Heatmap. heatmap.news/energy/trump...
The @foodfoundation.bsky.social's latest Broken Plate report launch: the cost of a healthy diet for the poorest 20% of the population would take up 80% of their disposable income, up from 70% last year. That's how bad food price inflation, partly driven by climate disruption, has become.
To see how important US science is, consider measurements of changes in ocean heat content. US data are ~53% of the total. Over half! But removing the US data is worse than randomly removing 80% of the total data, because unlike other countries, the US makes measurements everywhere. 🧪🌊
Critical dependence of global ocean heat monitoring on the ocean observing system - Nature Climate Change
International collaboration has facilitated a global ocean observing system, providing data to measure ocean heat content at a resolution that enables the tracking of climate change. This study looks ...
nature.com
England just had its warmest spring on record. The record was last set in spring 2025. Before that, spring 2024. 9 of the 10 warmest springs have occurred since 2007. It's almost like there's a long-term driver causing this... www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/new...
My latest for Bloomberg: "We are about to see the Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 – a discontinuity in energy markets as profound as the oil shocks of the 1970s, and one that could bring forward the peak in fossil fuel use and emissions to this side of 2030." about.bnef.com/insights/cle...
Liebreich: The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0 | BloombergNEF
In September 2022, six months after Russia invaded Ukraine and with oil and gas prices around the world soaring, I wrote a piece entitled After Ukraine - the Great Clean Energy Acceleration, predictin...
about.bnef.com
Wondering what percentage of people reading this article are doing so in homes that are currently overheating.
Stop Funding Heat@stopfundingheat.bsky.social · 5mo agoThe Daily Mail also published a double-page spread attacking a new climate report. I.e., a veteran climate denier appears to cherry pick from a Climate Change Committee report in an attempt to discredit it. 💰 Ads: #Morrisons, #Wren, #Co-Op, #NationalLottery, #Waitrose, #Aldi, #Nationwide & #Lidl
The July energy price cap is a headlines problem, not an economic one. 80% of the nominal £208 price rise is in gas (not elec). Only 8% of domestic gas use happens between July and Sept. Most people won't see a significant rise in bills until the autumn. HT @regeninsight.bsky.social
An estimated 92 per cent of UK homes will be at risk of overheating by 2050, without so-called adaptation measures, up from just over half today www.ft.com/content/ec4d...
Nearly all UK homes will overheat by 2050 without ‘critical action’
Climate Change Committee calls for urgent measures to prepare for intense heatwaves and drought
ft.com
£260bn/y of climate damage is ~2x the cost of the state pension. That's the high estimate but even at half the price unconstrained climate damage undermines a small state (or a generous state pension.) www.theguardian.com/environment/...