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.
Latest articles
What are the alternatives to air conditioning?
Air conditioning was drawn into the culture wars this summer in the UK, joining a long list of things to be angry about, alongside flags, pronouns and National Trust scones. Now we have the tangled irony of people continuing to deny that climate change is real, while falsely claiming that they are being denied measures…
The Electrotech Revolution
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about why the age of solar power is here. As the technology has matured and become more widely available, solar will slowly rise to dominate global energy. If this doesn’t seem entirely likely, perhaps you live in the global north, where we get less sun and have the…
Book review: Lifehouse, by Adam Greenfield
Books on climate change have gone through several phases over the last twenty years. There were the awareness raising books, then the alarm ringing ones as those were ignored. Then came the climate grief and anxiety books. On the other side of all three of those previous waves, there’s demand for something practical. Given that…
The Earthbound Report 
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 😉