What we learned this week

Chris Hatch at Covering Climate Now writes about something I'd noticed: Mark Carney was very forward thinking on climate change while at the Bank of England, and seems to have forgotten all about it as Prime Minister of Canada. More evidence that if you're losing farmland to solar farms, you're doing it wrong. The biggest agrivoltaic project in Italy has just opened…

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Mapping heat for a more resilient Brighton

Britain experienced its hottest ever summer this year, pending end-of-year verification. While you can never really point at something and say definitively that it is climate change, the Met Office tells us that climate change made this summer 130 times more likely, which is as good as you're going to get. Climate change is transforming the British summer. We're still getting used to that idea, with different interpretations of what that should mean.

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BlueCity’s circular economy hub

I'm reading a book at the moment called Don't Build, Rebuild, by Aaron Betsky, all about reusing buildings in a circular economy. It's taking me ages to get through because every couple of pages there's an example that I can't resist looking up on the internet before I read on. This has proved unusually distracting, but it has turned up a few gems that I will tell you about, starting with BlueCity in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

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Can Germany phase out fossil fuels by 2045?

In writing about sustainability for two decades, I've read a few national climate declarations. Remember Sweden's bid to be the first fossil-fuel free country by 2020? Neither do the Swedes, and 2020 came and went with the target long abandoned. Same with New Zealand's ambition to be carbon neutral by 2025, which was announced in 2009 and has not survived the intervening electoral cycles.

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Possible’s new story about climate

"There's a story being told about you, about what you need, about what you care about, about what's possible," begins the new video from Possible, one of my favourite climate charities. There is a prevailing narrative about climate change that it doesn't matter to people, that it's too expensive to do anything about, that it can't be fixed anyway and we should learn to live with it.

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Book review: End Times Fascism, by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

End Times Fascism deserves some kind of award for the most depressing book title of the year. I'll admit that my first reaction was 'pass', but I read a truly eye-watering book earlier this year called Promise me You'll Shoot Yourself. Written by historian Florian Huber, it is compiled almost entirely from diary entries by ordinary Germans as the reality of the Nazi project dawns on them.

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What we learned this week

Trump's war in Iran has driven a decline in gas and oil demand, and even with a rise in coal use in some places, global emissions from fossil fuels are expected to fall by 0.5% this year. He may be a climate denier and fossil fuel booster, but luckily for the world he is incompetent. They're running for the sixth time and its probably the sixth time I've mentioned them, but don't miss the list of winners of Covering Climate Now's…

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How Fyffes is adopting regenerative agriculture

Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that maintains and even enhances nature. Much of the pioneering work on it has happened on small farms, often set in opposition to 'big ag'. But to really make a difference, regenerative agriculture needs to be practiced at large scale and the big boys need to learn from it too. So I was interested to find out that the global fruit company…

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Learning to live as a hot country: Madagascar

Earlier this year the Climate Change Committee, the UK's climate advisory body, published a report on adaptation. Britain's progress on reducing emissions has not been matched on the adaptation side. "There has been little progress on preparing ourselves for the changing climate," they warn. As one of the guests at the launch event put it, we need to learn to live like a hot country.

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What we learned this week

Much rejoicing from geography nerds around the world as the UN voted to formally retire the Mercator map of the earth in favour of the Equal Earth projection. If you haven't seen this version, it shows the continents in their right sizes without the odd stretching of the similarly corrective Peters projection. Togo led the change on behalf of the African Union, as Africa has been most affected by four hundred years of misleading cartography.

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What are the alternatives to air conditioning?

Air conditioning was drawn into the culture wars this summer in the UK, joining a long list of things to be angry about, alongside flags, pronouns and National Trust scones. Now we have the tangled irony of people continuing to deny that climate change is real, while falsely claiming that they are being denied measures to adapt to climate change.

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The Electrotech Revolution

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about why the age of solar power is here. As the technology has matured and become more widely available, solar will slowly rise to dominate global energy. If this doesn't seem entirely likely, perhaps you live in the global north, where we get less sun and have the winter darkness to contend with.

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Book review: Lifehouse, by Adam Greenfield

Books on climate change have gone through several phases over the last twenty years. There were the awareness raising books, then the alarm ringing ones as those were ignored. Then came the climate grief and anxiety books. On the other side of all three of those previous waves, there's demand for something practical. Given that we are now living in a disrupted climate, what do we do?

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Who leads the world in carbon drawdown from forests?

If you asked me to name some forested countries, I'd think of Canada and Russia, Scandinavia, Brazil. If I had to guess which country removes the most carbon from the atmosphere through its forests, I'd probably name one of them. And I'd be wrong. Carbon Brief recently published an article on why global land use emissions are falling. Among the interesting facts therein is this one: the country that leads the world in carbon removal through forestry is China.

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What we learned this week

I've always enjoying seeing neighbouring houses with solar panels, and knowing that one person's actions have inspired those around them. That effect has now been researched and quantified, should you be interested in the exact likelihood of someone installing solar if their neighbours do. Chinese battery maker CATL, the world's largest supplier of EV batteries, has reached carbon neutrality across all of its 20 factories…

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The age of solar power is here

This week I read about a 70MW solar farm that has just opened in Lapland in Northern Finland. Not so long ago this would have sounded like madness. Even with the benefit of 22 hours of sunshine in the summer, solar power this far north would not have made sense. PV panels are now so cheap that they are being installed at grid scale a whisker from the Arctic circle.

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What we learned this week

In January I suggested that solar cars, which I consider to be the gold standard of private motoring, would come out of the majority world rather than big legacy Western companies. Thai company Solarky are the latest, reviewed here by Everything Electric. Out to prove me wrong are Nissan, who recently announced that they are joining a UK government funded…

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Why EV battery swapping matters

Octopus, the UK's leading green energy supplier, recently announced a move into trucking. Partnering with Chinese battery company CATL, they're planning a network of battery swapping stations for trucks. It will be called Swaptopus - of course it will - and the first one will open next year. Eventually there will be a network of battery swapping stations across Europe, electrifying heavy goods vehicles.

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Positive travel experiences with Flight Free Schools

Last week I wrote about the expansion of Luton Airport and the vast increase in emissions that would come with it. This week I thought I'd post something more solutions-focused about aviation. The government is will do anything for economic growth and won't stand in the way of growth in flying. That puts the attention back on consumer choice to reduce flying demand.

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The carbon cost of expanding Luton Airport

This week the UK's Supreme Court waved away the last remaining opportunity to halt the expansion of Luton Airport. With all legal options exhausted, it will now go ahead with its plans to double passenger numbers to 32 million a year by the early 2040s. The court are the latest in a long line of people and organisations to turn a blind eye to the environmental cost of airport growth, a list that starts with Luton's council and political parties, and ends with the Secretary of State.

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Capitalism, now with AI

Watching the World Cup this summer, I couldn't help but notice the ads for AI. They were everywhere, most prominently in the form of Google Gemini as the lead sponsor of ITV's coverage in the UK. It didn't seem to matter that there was no link between Gemini and football, we were still encouraged to summon the app 'for every goal'.

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What if we stopped talking about growth?

Andy Burnham has become Britain's new Prime Minister, promising to "put a laser-like focus on growth". It's a full reset from his predecessor Keir Starmer, who told the country that "the defining mission of this government is to grow the economy." Keir replaced Rishi 'Seven Bins' Sunak, whose advice was to "relentlessly focus on growth". …

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UK Schools Close Due to Heatwaves: Cooling Solutions | Let's Go Zero posted on the topic | LinkedIn

Due to the recent heatwaves the UK has been experiencing we've seen many schools close. Here are some practical solutions to keep your classrooms cool demonstrated by one of our dedicated Climate Act...

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What we learned this week

France made planned obsolescence illegal as part of its push for a circular economy, and Epson are the first company to go to court over it. It is claimed their (already criminally overpriced) printer cartridges stop working before they have run out of ink. A map showing legislation for balcony solar in each US state, with around half moving forward with it.

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Inequality and the planetary boundaries

It's no great secret that climate change is predominantly caused by the world's richest. Carbon footprint tends to expand along with wealth, as people fly and drive, eat more meat and run more appliances. It's no surprise that other environmental limits see a similar pattern. A study in Nature offers this useful visual summary of the planetary boundaries, divided into deciles.

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Book review: We need to tax billionaires, by Gabriel Zucman

This was the year that we saw the world's first trillionaire, a state of imbalance so absurd that it really ought to rewrite how we talk about inequality. I don't see any sign of that yet, but this book might have one practical and popular answer: tax billionaires. An important thing to note here: first, this is a call to tax billionaires, not the rich more generally.

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What we learned this week

A study of four decades of news articles in America found that climate change accounts for 0.55% of news coverage, and has risen "from silence to a whisper" in the at time. Belgium is the first country to appoint a Chief Planetary Officer, a role "designed to bring Planetary Boundaries science directly into national decision-making, helping governments assess planetary risk across policy, budgets, infrastructure, finance, and national security planning."

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How Frontier Markets empowers women traders

Among the most important questions to ask of a new technology are these: who controls it? And who does it serve? With many leading AI applications, the answer to both is simple - the richest. But that's not inevitable, and so I enjoyed hearing about Ashden Award winner Frontier Markets. Frontier Markets is a social commerce platform designed to connect businesses with customers in rural India, through a network of women entrepreneurs that they call Sahelis.

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Book review: Heatwave, by John L Williams

It's fifty years since the famous 1976 heatwave which broke records as the driest and hottest British summer of the 20th century. From a weather perspective it was a true freak occurrence, and it's left a lasting legacy. Some of that is benign - lots of people have very happy memories of an 'endless summer'. Less positively, it's also a touchstone of climate denial in the UK.

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What happened to Britain’s window shades?

There's a heatwave happening across Europe at the moment, and in my day job with schools there's one topic that everyone want to talk about: overheating. It's chronic in British schools, and very common across hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as ordinary homes. In discussions about this problem, the go-to solution is air conditioning. Our buildings overheat, therefore we need air conditioning.

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