Quilicura is a community in Chile that is facing water scarcity, in large part because so many water-cooled AI data centres are located there. To raise awareness of the problem, they brought together a group of local experts to answer people’s AI queries for a day. It’s an imaginative campaign and a good reminder that humanity’s greatest reserves of true intelligence lie in people, relationships and community.
The Climate Fiction Prize has announced its shortlist for 2026. Some intriguing entries on this impressively international selection.
Earlier this week I mentioned that net zero requires a certain degree of offsetting for some essential industrial processes that can’t be decarbonised. For balance, here’s an example of offsetting as a disingenuous distraction: a new platform from Aerovolt allows people to buy carbon credits from electric plane flights. Someone flies an electric plane, and you can pay to pretend it was you – though that’s not how the marketing blurb describes it of course. No carbon has been reduced, so this isn’t real offsetting. Worse, at this point almost all electric planes are tiny and flown for leisure, so this scheme essentially subsidises wealthy hobbyists and calls it climate action.
Edible spoons are an idea that the internet got excited about almost exactly a decade ago, as an attempt to replace single use plastics. They’re available but haven’t exactly caught on. Now the first firm to make them in the UK is having another go, with Eddy’s providing edible spoons to a deli in London, with the hope of rolling them out more widely.
The world’s largest compressed air energy storage facility has come online in China. Air is pumped into salt caverns when renewable energy production is abundant, and released through a turbine to generate electricity when needed. It is large enough to power 600,000 homes.
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Book review: Recomposed, by Kyle Devine
Kyle Devine is a professor of environmental studies with a particular interest in the music industry. He investigated the ecological impact of the music industry in a previous book, Decomposed. It didn’t cover the solutions, and that has become a follow-up. As the opening sentence spells out, “this book is about people in music who…
What we learned this week
Reuters’ investigation into global heatwaves has led them to conclude that we need a new term for them. They’re calling them heatstorms, and their report is an interesting crossover of journalism and science. On the subject of heatwaves, studies in Nature Health have calculated that there were 50,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer, the…
Let’s paint some roofs white
I’m doing a lot of work on overheating at the moment, and have been visiting schools to help them understand why their buildings get too hot in the summer and what they can do about it. One of the solutions that keeps coming up is painting roofs white. It’s well documented that white roofs reflect…
Eddy’s Teaspoons of Change!! I remember the post from 10 years ago and still think it is a great idea… If only I was a capitalist marketing mogul 😉