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:
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,…
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…
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,…
The Earthbound Report 
Very interesting, well done.