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:
It’s not solar that competes with farmland
One of the big hesitations around solar farms is that they take up land that could be used for food production. It’s an argument that’s made by climate sceptics who oppose renewable energy, but those on the green side of the equation worry about it too. My response has always been that if you’re displacing…
Catch up with Luton’s green schools
I don’t post many local stories, but here’s a little video featuring some of my work in the last couple of years in Luton’s schools. The Climate Action Teacher Champions (CATCH) programme was set up by Luton Council and local partners. I was involved in the pilot scheme and worked with the five cohorts of…
What we learned this week
The Guardian have run a whole series of articles this week on the theme Beyond Growth (a name I once used for a sister website to this one). Good to see that kind of sustained attention on postgrowth futures in a mainstream newspaper. As the Trump administration revoked the legal standing of climate regulation in…
The Earthbound Report 
Very interesting, well done.