Oil giant Exxon has posted a loss of $22 billion as the pandemic has cut into demand. Shell has lost $21 billion. There will be more such headlines to come for fossil fuel companies that aren’t diversifying.
There has been lots of self-congratulation in Britain recently over its headstart in vaccinating for Covid-19. But as Cai Nebe warns at DW.com, “the West has treated vaccination as a right for itself and a privilege for the rest.” In so doing, they have ceded leadership on public health to others.
Legal challenges to climate policy are an increasingly common way to push businesses and governments further. Courts ruled against the French government this week, judging their actions to be insufficient. Not that it’s working everywhere – the British government has waved through a huge new gas power plant and a new coal mine in the last month.
The first human composting funeral service has opened in the US. In nature every dead animal turns back into soil, so it’s strange that we’ve got to a place where this is innovative.
If you’ve got 20 minutes to spare this weekend, have a look at the Fully Charged Show’s episode from Shenzhen, and how they are running 16,000 electric buses. As they say in the intro, these sorts of stories need to be broadcast around the world.
Latest from the Blog
The New Age of Empire, by Kehinde Andrews
It seems to me that many of the most popular books, theories and movements around race are imported from the United States. My kids, aged 7 and 9, have learned about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks at primary school. They are iconic figures, but it’s also easier to talk about other nations’ racism rather…
Has the Green Homes Scheme fallen down already?
As you may know, I have a long term plan to get my home to zero carbon by 2025. I’d have done it already if I could, but we’re basically moving as fast as we can afford. So when the government announced that it was going to help pay for home energy improvements, it was…
The complex politics of neonicotinoids
This post is a collaboration with Poppy Cann, a student in London hoping to study Environmental Sciences at university this year. Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticide that was banned by the EU in 2017. The pesticide is known to weaken bees’ immune systems, and also harms the development of baby bees’ brains, leaving them…
The Earthbound Report 
I visited my brother in Solingen and saw the trolley bus system operating there. It seems so sensible.
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