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
Price parity for EVs has arrived
Twenty years ago it looked like renewable energy was a luxury product. The world would never be able to afford to transition to clean energy, and many environmentalists concluded gloomily that a sustainable future would be one of energy constraints, re-localisation and austerity. Others were looking past the sticker price at the underlying trends and…
Why buildings overheat
Last week I wrote about how Britain was built for a different climate, and how a growing number of buildings are overheating in the summer. In order to do anything about that, we’re going to need to understand the causes of overheating. Buildings don’t just overheat because it’s hot outside. Design plays a big part,…
What we learned this week
Hum, by Helen Philips, has been awarded the Climate Fiction Award for 2026. Her novel explores “the intersection of climate, technology and AI” and is naturally available from Earthbound Books. I’ve written about this before, but it was nice to see a proper explainer from Carbon Brief on how China uses solar power to combat…
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 😉