In writing about sustainability for two decades, I've read a few national climate declarations. Remember Sweden's bid to be the first fossil-fuel free country by 2020? Neither do the Swedes, and 2020 came and went with the target long abandoned. Same with New Zealand's ambition to be carbon neutral by 2025, which was announced in 2009 and has not survived the intervening electoral cycles.

"There's a story being told about you, about what you need, about what you care about, about what's possible," begins the new video from Possible, one of my favourite climate charities. There is a prevailing narrative about climate change that it doesn't matter to people, that it's too expensive to do anything about, that it can't be fixed anyway and we should learn to live with it.

End Times Fascism deserves some kind of award for the most depressing book title of the year. I'll admit that my first reaction was 'pass', but I read a truly eye-watering book earlier this year called Promise me You'll Shoot Yourself. Written by historian Florian Huber, it is compiled almost entirely from diary entries by ordinary Germans as the reality of the Nazi project dawns on them.

Trump's war in Iran has driven a decline in gas and oil demand, and even with a rise in coal use in some places, global emissions from fossil fuels are expected to fall by 0.5% this year. He may be a climate denier and fossil fuel booster, but luckily for the world he is incompetent. They're running for the sixth time and its probably the sixth time I've mentioned them, but don't miss the list of winners of Covering Climate Now's…

Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that maintains and even enhances nature. Much of the pioneering work on it has happened on small farms, often set in opposition to 'big ag'. But to really make a difference, regenerative agriculture needs to be practiced at large scale and the big boys need to learn from it too. So I was interested to find out that the global fruit company…

Earlier this year the Climate Change Committee, the UK's climate advisory body, published a report on adaptation. Britain's progress on reducing emissions has not been matched on the adaptation side. "There has been little progress on preparing ourselves for the changing climate," they warn. As one of the guests at the launch event put it, we need to learn to live like a hot country.

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.

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 to adapt to climate change.

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 winter darkness to contend with.

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 we are now living in a disrupted climate, what do we do?

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 emissions are falling. Among the interesting facts therein is this one: the country that leads the world in carbon removal through forestry is China.

I've always enjoying seeing neighbouring houses with solar panels, and knowing that one person's actions have inspired those around them. That effect has now been researched and quantified, should you be interested in the exact likelihood of someone installing solar if their neighbours do. Chinese battery maker CATL, the world's largest supplier of EV batteries, has reached carbon neutrality across all of its 20 factories…

This week I read about a 70MW solar farm that has just opened in Lapland in Northern Finland. Not so long ago this would have sounded like madness. Even with the benefit of 22 hours of sunshine in the summer, solar power this far north would not have made sense. PV panels are now so cheap that they are being installed at grid scale a whisker from the Arctic circle.

In January I suggested that solar cars, which I consider to be the gold standard of private motoring, would come out of the majority world rather than big legacy Western companies. Thai company Solarky are the latest, reviewed here by Everything Electric. Out to prove me wrong are Nissan, who recently announced that they are joining a UK government funded…

Octopus, the UK's leading green energy supplier, recently announced a move into trucking. Partnering with Chinese battery company CATL, they're planning a network of battery swapping stations for trucks. It will be called Swaptopus - of course it will - and the first one will open next year. Eventually there will be a network of battery swapping stations across Europe, electrifying heavy goods vehicles.

Last week I wrote about the expansion of Luton Airport and the vast increase in emissions that would come with it. This week I thought I'd post something more solutions-focused about aviation. The government is will do anything for economic growth and won't stand in the way of growth in flying. That puts the attention back on consumer choice to reduce flying demand.

This week the UK's Supreme Court waved away the last remaining opportunity to halt the expansion of Luton Airport. With all legal options exhausted, it will now go ahead with its plans to double passenger numbers to 32 million a year by the early 2040s. The court are the latest in a long line of people and organisations to turn a blind eye to the environmental cost of airport growth, a list that starts with Luton's council and political parties, and ends with the Secretary of State.

Watching the World Cup this summer, I couldn't help but notice the ads for AI. They were everywhere, most prominently in the form of Google Gemini as the lead sponsor of ITV's coverage in the UK. It didn't seem to matter that there was no link between Gemini and football, we were still encouraged to summon the app 'for every goal'.

Andy Burnham has become Britain's new Prime Minister, promising to "put a laser-like focus on growth". It's a full reset from his predecessor Keir Starmer, who told the country that "the defining mission of this government is to grow the economy." Keir replaced Rishi 'Seven Bins' Sunak, whose advice was to "relentlessly focus on growth". …

Due to the recent heatwaves the UK has been experiencing we've seen many schools close. Here are some practical solutions to keep your classrooms cool demonstrated by one of our dedicated Climate Act...

France made planned obsolescence illegal as part of its push for a circular economy, and Epson are the first company to go to court over it. It is claimed their (already criminally overpriced) printer cartridges stop working before they have run out of ink. A map showing legislation for balcony solar in each US state, with around half moving forward with it.

It's no great secret that climate change is predominantly caused by the world's richest. Carbon footprint tends to expand along with wealth, as people fly and drive, eat more meat and run more appliances. It's no surprise that other environmental limits see a similar pattern. A study in Nature offers this useful visual summary of the planetary boundaries, divided into deciles.

This was the year that we saw the world's first trillionaire, a state of imbalance so absurd that it really ought to rewrite how we talk about inequality. I don't see any sign of that yet, but this book might have one practical and popular answer: tax billionaires. An important thing to note here: first, this is a call to tax billionaires, not the rich more generally.

A study of four decades of news articles in America found that climate change accounts for 0.55% of news coverage, and has risen "from silence to a whisper" in the at time. Belgium is the first country to appoint a Chief Planetary Officer, a role "designed to bring Planetary Boundaries science directly into national decision-making, helping governments assess planetary risk across policy, budgets, infrastructure, finance, and national security planning."

Among the most important questions to ask of a new technology are these: who controls it? And who does it serve? With many leading AI applications, the answer to both is simple - the richest. But that's not inevitable, and so I enjoyed hearing about Ashden Award winner Frontier Markets. Frontier Markets is a social commerce platform designed to connect businesses with customers in rural India, through a network of women entrepreneurs that they call Sahelis.

It's fifty years since the famous 1976 heatwave which broke records as the driest and hottest British summer of the 20th century. From a weather perspective it was a true freak occurrence, and it's left a lasting legacy. Some of that is benign - lots of people have very happy memories of an 'endless summer'. Less positively, it's also a touchstone of climate denial in the UK.

There's a heatwave happening across Europe at the moment, and in my day job with schools there's one topic that everyone want to talk about: overheating. It's chronic in British schools, and very common across hospitals and healthcare facilities, as well as ordinary homes. In discussions about this problem, the go-to solution is air conditioning. Our buildings overheat, therefore we need air conditioning.

Environmental action in China is different to what we're used to elsewhere. Whereas readers in Europe might associate it with protests, green politics or grassroots movements for change, in China it's more likely to be top down. Environmental progress in the UK often starts as a lifestyle choice, while in China it arrives as policy backed by state power. …

The Trump administration has paid $765 million to another wind power developer to make them go away, following earlier deals worth $928 and $885 million respectively. Others have challenged Trump's ban in the courts and won, meaning Trump's personal vendetta against renewable energy in America has failed. Ten times more more clean power will come online in 2026 than the cancelled projects would have produced.

Here's a map that I enjoyed from the latest Our World in Data newsletter. It shows the leading source of electricity in each country. It's a fascinating geopolitical snapshot, telling us a lot about who has access to cheap coal, gas or oil. There are lots of little stories here, adding up to one big one. The big story is of course the global transition to clean electricity.

With so many to be getting on with, does the world need another 'ism' to fret about? It's a question I asked myself on first encountering Paul Dolan's book, but the definition won me over. Beliefism is prejudice against people you disagree with, and if you live in the same world that I do, that might sound very familar. …

I was travelling out to a school last week in Essex, East of London. My train had been delayed and I jumped in a taxi to get me there on time. The driver was a white man in his sixties, wearing a West Ham football shirt. In the course of conversation, and in-between some choice words on other drivers, he asked me where I was from and what brought me out to Billericay.

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 reaching a more optimistic conclusion: the price of renewable energy was falling, while fossil fuels were getting more expensive.

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, and once we understand that we can take steps to reduce temperatures.

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 desertification. It's an important idea that could be applied elsewhere.

One of the rewarding aspects of covering sustainability stories over time is watching good ideas creep towards the mainstream. Technologies and approaches that were once filed as alternative move from being theoretical to operational. They spread from pioneers and early adopters to wide scale use. This book demonstrates the transition. Not so long ago the subtitle would be 'how the green economy…

Last week Britain recorded its highest ever May temperature, at 38.4C - and it did so comprehensively. This is a full two degrees warmer than the previous record. That kind of heat would have been almost unheard of not so long ago in mid-summer, let alone the spring. Here's a graph I've been using in presentations recently, showing the number of days of heat over 35 degrees in the UK.

When I hear the term 'climate finance', I think of banks, governments and and big institutional funders. I think about the UN, the IMF, and international conferences where multi-billion dollar funding streams are negotiated. It turns out I might have had it upside down. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest Global Landscape of Climate Finance report recently. Care to guess what the biggest source of climate finance is?

There is growing concern over the the El Nino cycle and the possibility of record heat next year. Here's Bill McKibben on the topic, and David Wallace Wells. Less gloomy voices are also available, but now is a good time to be talking about summer heat and how we prepare for it. 11,103 new cars were registered in Norway last month.

My new food waste bin went out to the curb this morning. Like most of us in Luton, my family was given two blue plastic caddies last month for the start of food waste collection in the town. We're one of the regions of the UK that hasn't had food waste collected until now, and new government guidelines should finally be making that universal.

This week I was reading about Silicon Valley's investments in AI. Just four companies - Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) have pumped $670 billion into AI this year, equivalent to 2.1% of US GDP. The Wall Street Journal points out that in GDP terms this is vastly more expensive than the moon landings. The most comparable figure is the 1850s build-out of America's railways.

Beijing has 20 million citizens and 7 million e-bikes. There's a boom in e-bike use going on in China right now, and Sustainable Transport magazine looks at how cities are adapting their roads and parking facilities to accomodate them. Teacher friends, if you're a subscriber to Myatt & Co resources, they've just published a guide to using my book Climate Change is Racist…

Human lives, both individually and collectively, unfold in a built environment. Generally speaking we don't get to shape that environment all that much. Most of us don't get to design our own homes, let alone streets and public spaces. Unless you have a particular interest in architecture or urban design, you might never really think about the built environment all that much.

I came across the Missing Lynx Project this week, which is campaigning for the reintroduction of the Lynx to Northumberland and the Scottish borders and is worth commending for the name alone. Carbon in Context is a new comparison tool from Project Drawdown. Tonnes of gas is an unintuitive way of measuring anything, so stick the figures into the search box and it'll tell you what that means in a variety of more tangible metrics, such as cups of coffee or a Golden Gate Bridge worth of steel.

In 2022 I wrote about how Swedish EV brand Polestar had committed to creating a zero carbon car. Note that this isn't a 'net zero' car, but a truly zero carbon process from start to finish. It was industry-leading in its ambition, and also the kind of thing that some companies make a big noise about and then quietly drop once the PR boost is in (

If you're not familiar with Enter Shikari, they're a band from my hometown and the most badass thing to happen in St Albans since Boudicca sacked the Roman city of Verulamium in 61AD. Not the kind of thing I generally write about on the blog, but there's a song on their new album that caught my attention. "How I long for a different story," they sing on the track…

Last week I received a press release titled 'the countries leading the world in clean electricity'. Like most of the press emails I get, it was a list put together to generate links rather than present new information, and so I won't name the website involved. It did get my attention though, and not for a positive reason. According to this new list, the countries leading the world on low carbon energy are Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and France.

With the arrival of smaller and cheaper options on the market, the average price paid for a new electric car is now cheaper than petrol cars in the UK, according to Autotrader. The total cost of ownership was already lower, and now the sticker price shouldn't be a sticking point either. Beyond private cars and almost completely unnoticed, the government published an…

I've been doing quite a lot of work around summer overheating recently, looking at how we adapt buildings for a warmer climate. For the day job that's with schools, and I have a personal interest in it in homes as well. Our own house has a tendency to get too hot in the summer, and I've written about some of the solutions that we use…