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:
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…
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…
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.…
Very interesting, well done.