10 favourite posts from 2023

A usual, I have got to the end of the year without giving much thought to wrapping things up before the holidays. But I’ll leave you with some of my favourite posts from this year. They’re not in any order and there’s no particular criteria for inclusion. They’re just posts I was pleased with and wanted to share again.

China’s sponge parks – there are so many of these in China and they’re often beautiful, imaginative and a very clever form of climate adaptation. More of them in the UK please.
How Twitter changed sides on the climate – the grinding erosion of Twitter’s usefulness was a depressing story and a professional blow this year, and its stance on the climate marked a significant shift in the media landscape.
Planes and taps and climate priorities – did you know the UK’s aviation sector produces about the same amount of greenhouse gases as the water system? We hear a lot about one of those and very little about the other.
Fossil fuels and toxic masculinity – remember Greta Thunberg’s reply to Andrew Tate’s taunting in January? As well as being one of the takedowns of the year, it prompted this little essay from me on how climate change threatens things that men have been taught to value.
The Catch-22 of climate protest – one of the big questions in environmental circles this year was whether or not we approve of attention-seeking protest tactics. When you consider the lack of interest in Extinction Rebellion’s year off from civil disobedience, it’s easy to understand why some people want to throw soup.
Five examples of building with seaweed – I just like this globetrotting story, which grew entirely out of my own curiosity about whether or not you could use seaweed as a building material.
The climate impact of rice – after meat, rice is the food with the biggest impact on the climate. Not something you hear very often. Why is that, and what do we do about it?
What can we learn from a car designed for Madagascar? – this feels like a story that only I would write, and I take a degree of pride in those. Unless you’ve lived there, there is no reason that you would know the Malagasy car brand Karenjy. But taking a look at their unusual car shows how motoring would be different if vehicles were designed for the majority world.
Do we need robots with lasers to feed the world? – why wouldn’t you read a story with a title like that? The answer is probably yes, by the way.
The world’s most sustainable cities might not be what you think – this was a press release that didn’t sit right with me. Sure enough, a little digging into the methodology revealed a Western-centric view of sustainability that glosses over the failures of the global north and the successes of the global south.