Much rejoicing from geography nerds around the world as the UN voted to formally retire the Mercator map of the earth in favour of the Equal Earth projection. If you haven’t seen this version, it shows the continents in their right sizes without the odd stretching of the similarly corrective Peters projection. Togo led the change on behalf of the African Union, as Africa has been most affected by four hundred years of misleading cartography. The big loser is the United States, whose true size is smaller and perhaps that’s why they were the only nation to vote against the change.
India’s stepwells are a fascinating lost technology and beautiful structures in their own right, so I’m always delighted to see them getting coverage. Here Ankit Mishra writes about how traditional water harvesting methods are being rediscovered, for BBC Futures.
Oil use in China has fallen 9% this year, with the rise of electric vehicles and the instability from Trump’s flailing about in Iran. As Inside Climate News point out, that 9% is equivalent to the UK’s entire oil consumption to date this year.
Also on the oil front, some steps forward in electrofuels recently, one of the possible approaches to decarbonising the tricky aviation sector. Often abbreviated to eSAF (Electro Sustainable Aviation Fuels), it’s been used in a commercial flight for the first time in the US, and a UK start-up called Zero Petroleum has just validated a hydrogen-based ‘replica’ of standard jet fuel.
The summer issue of the Zero Carbon Luton newsletter came out last week, with details of some space-based climate science being conducted from a business park in Luton, and also where to spot highland cattle on a walk this autumn.
Recent highlights
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…
Who leads the world in carbon drawdown from forests?
If you asked me to name some forested countries, I’d think of Canada and Russia, Scandinavia, Brazil. If I had to guess which country removes the most carbon from the atmosphere through its forests, I’d probably name one of them. And I’d be wrong. Carbon Brief recently published an article on why global land use…
The Earthbound Report 