A striking climate change conundrum has emerged in Namibia, where drought threatens the survival of 200 elephants. The government’s solution? Sell the elephants.
My wife, who is a BBC radio journalist, recorded a special programme on ‘earth heroes’ in our local area. It features activists, inventors, entrepreneurs and more, and you can listen back here.
People have been talking about geothermal power from Cornwall for decades and the potential has never been properly tapped, so it’s great to hear that the first commercial contract has been signed to supply it. (It’s with Ecotricity, once again with another UK first.) It’s only for 3MW of power at the moment – but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Good to read about an amendment to the Basel Convention on waste trading, that will hopefully give developing countries more ways to prevent plastic dumping by overdeveloped nations.
This graph of new car sales in Norway, posted by Robbie Andrew on Twitter, shows how pure petrol or diesel cars are now very much a minority interest. This is a dramatic shift in a decade, and the kind of thing I would hope to see in Britain in the coming years – alongside an overall decline in car sales and increased public and active transport, naturally.
Three of this week’s posts, in case you missed them:
Clean energy for Uganda’s refugees
In the long walk towards universal energy access, refugees are among the hardest to reach. Across the world there are 120 million people living in refugee camps, and 94% of them don’t have clean and affordable power. That’s something that my colleagues at Ashden are working on, as part of a project called Transforming Humanitarian…
A first winter with the heat pump
It’s a cloudless spring day outside as I write. This being England, it could snow tomorrow and the end of winter is largely psychological. At the risk of casting one’s proverbial clout, I’m still going to review our first winter with a heat pump. I’m aware of the ‘net zero dad’ phenomenon of middle aged…
The building blocks of good public transport
If you go down to Luton station at the moment, you’ll find engineers on site fitting lifts to all platforms. It’s a much delayed improvement to our old and shabby station that will finally allow people with disabilities, pushchairs or luggage to get to their trains without struggling down the stairs. With this addition, the…
The Earthbound Report 
Very interesting, well done.