Interesting Ideas

It took years, but New York City (NYC) finally implemented congestion pricing on January 5, 2025. (That’s 22 years after London first implemented it.) Aimed at cutting pollution in the city, would it work? Yes, it would! Paul Day of Air Quality News shares that a Cornell University study has ... [continued]

The post Wowza — NYC Congestion Pricing Cut Pollution 22% In Just 6 Months! appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Fire chief says summer, the UK’s hottest on record, was ‘one of the most challenging for wildfires that we’ve ever faced’

Ten English fire services tackled a record number of grassland, woodland and crop fires during what was the UK’s hottest spring and summer on record, figures show.

In total nearly 27,000 wildfires were dealt with by fire services in England during the prolonged dry weather of 2025, according to analysis by PA Media.

Cutting car crashes, injuries, and deaths is a perennial goal in city after city and state after state. Little things get implemented to help, sometimes big things, but it’s never enough. It’s often a case of two steps forward, two steps back. However, the city of Austin seems to be ... [continued]

The post Austin Cuts Pedestrian Crashes At 16 Intersections ~50% appeared first on CleanTechnica.

For 10 years, the scientist and photographer Jeroen Hoekendijk has been observing pinnipeds such as seals and walruses on the fragile North Sea archipelago stretching along the Dutch, German and Danish coastline. A remainder of the now-drowned Doggerland, left behind after the ice age, the low-lying islands are an advance warning sign of the warming and rising seas of the climate crisis

• Photographs by Jeroen Hoekendijk, text by Philip Hoare

The ‘border adjustment mechanism’ aims to create a level playing field while also encouraging decarbonisation

The biggest shake-up of green trade rules for decades comes into force today, as companies selling steel, cement and other high-carbon goods into the EU will have to prove they comply with low-carbon regulations or face fines.

But a lack of clarity on how the rules will be applied, and the failure of the UK government to strike a deal with Brussels over the issue, could lead to confusion in the early stages, experts warned.

Guardian US readers share how global heating and biodiversity loss affected their lives in ways that don’t always make the headlines

The past year was another one of record-setting heat and catastrophic storms. But across the US, the climate crisis showed up in smaller, deeply personal ways too.

Campfires that once defined summer trips were never lit due to wildfire risks. There were no bites where fish were once abundant, forests turned to meadows after a big burn and childhood memories of winter wonderlands turned to slush.

When I started covering the solar industry, the largest solar power project in the world had 100 megawatts (MW) of power capacity. This month, the largest offshore solar PV project build in the open sea (not a lake) was deployed, and it’s rated at 1,000 MW, or one gigawatt. Naturally, ... [continued]

The post China Gets World’s Largest Offshore Solar PV Project While USA … I Better Not Speak appeared first on CleanTechnica.

If you’ve used AI from Google, ChatGPT, or elsewhere to try to get answers to a variety of queries, you’ve probably noticed some odd and incorrect information some of the time. Part of the problem with this, to me, is that the answers are provided in an authoritative way that ... [continued]

The post Google AI Giving Wrong Information On US EV Tax Credit appeared first on CleanTechnica.

As the Trump administration derides climate policy as a ‘scam’, emissions-cutting measures are gaining popularity

A group of progressive politicians and advocates are reframing emissions-cutting measures as a form of economic populism as the Trump administration derides climate policy as a “scam” and fails to deliver on promises to tame energy costs and inflation.

Climate politics were once cast as a test of moral resolve, calling on Americans to accept higher costs to avert environmental catastrophe, but that ignores how rising temperatures themselves drive up costs for working people, said Stevie O’Hanlon, co-founder of the youth-led Sunrise Movement.

China is supplying low cost solar panels to many African nations, including South Africa. Doing so also increases its political power.

The post Chinese Solar Panels Are Transforming Africa appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Post-Fukushima nuclear closures of dozens of reactors forced the country to rely heavily on imported fossil fuels

The Colla Indigenous people claim Rio Tinto’s plans to extract the key mineral will harm fragile ecosystems and livelihoods

Miriam Rivera Bordones tends her goats in a dusty paddock in the russet mountains of Chile’s Atacama desert. She also keeps chickens and has planted quince and peach trees and grapevines, which are watered by a stream winding down the hills towards the Indigenous community of Copiapó.

But now the huge British-Australian mining multinational Rio Tinto has signed a deal to extract lithium, the “white gold” of the energy transition, from a salt flat farther up the mountains, and she fears the project could affect the water sources of several communities in the area.

Agreement signed between KP Group and the Government of Botswana MoU targets development of renewable energy projects with nearly 5 GW capacity KP Group to offer 30 annual scholarships for Botswana citizens MATAR (GUJARAT), India — KP Group, a leading renewable energy company, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ... [continued]

The post India’s KP Group to Invest INR 36,000 Crore in Botswana’s Renewable Energy Sector appeared first on CleanTechnica.

We learned a lot in 2025 about how the way we eat affects our climate and environment. Many of us started to rethink our food choices in relation to a warming climate. A number of 2025 studies were released that chronicled the intersection of food and climate emissions, and, over ... [continued]

The post Our Biggest CleanTechnica Food & Climate Stories For 2025 appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Before diving into a reflection on the year, it feels important to start with gratitude. None of this work happens in isolation. Over the past year, an extraordinary number of people took the time to share their expertise, challenge my assumptions, correct my mistakes, and patiently help me understand subjects ... [continued]

The post From Models to Money: Reflections on a Year of Practical Decarbonization appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The idea of storing renewable energy in a tank of liquid air has been bubbling under the CleanTechnica radar ever since the UK firm Highview Power proposed building one such facility in Vermont back in 2019. That project never materialized, but the dream of air-sourced, long duration energy storage refuses ... [continued]

The post Loads Of Renewable Energy Can Be Stored In The Air (Liquid Air, That Is) appeared first on CleanTechnica.

I’ve spent six years writing about environmental justice. The uncomfortable truth is that we’re not all in it together – but people power is reshaping the fight

It’s been another year of climate chaos and inadequate political action. And it’s hard not to feel despondent and powerless.

I joined the Guardian full time in 2019, as the paper’s first environmental justice correspondent, and have reported from across the US and the region over the past six years. It’s been painful to see so many families – and entire communities – devastated by fires, floods, extreme heat, sea level rise and food shortages. But what’s given me hope during these six years of reporting as both an environmental and climate justice reporter are the people fighting to save our planet from catastrophe – in their communities, on the streets and in courtrooms across the world.

Texas has emerged as a hotbed of green hydrogen activity in the US, supported in part by know-how borrowed from the oil and gas industry. Now another iconic fossil fuel state, Oklahoma, is jockeying for a piece of the action. A case in point is the Oklahoma City startup Tobe ... [continued]

The post A Green Hydrogen Innovator In Oklahoma Has A Message For Texas: Hold My Beer appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Greinton, Somerset Levels: Instead of drying the peat to make it fit for agriculture, a small group of farmers have decided to work with the wet

It looks like nothing more than a few soggy acres of bulrush, brown and broken, edged by a striding line of electricity pylons. But this modest patch of reeds and weeds is at the forefront of a novel farming method that upends ideas about how to manage some of our wettest landscapes.

For centuries people have worked to drain the Somerset Levels, transforming what was once a seasonal, shifting inland sea of islands, bogs and lakes into fertile pasture crossed by an intricate network of ditches, drains, rivers and rhynes. As usual in winter, December’s rain swept sheets of water across the lowest ground, leaving hedges and tracks sketched in broken lines on fallen sky.

Extreme heat and drought has destroyed 70% of Jordan’s olive crop, endangering livelihoods of 80,000 families and a centuries-old tradition

Abu Khaled al-Zoubi, 67, walks slowly through his orchard in Irbid, northern Jordan, his footsteps kicking up dust from the parched earth beneath centuries-old olive trees. He stops at a gnarled trunk, its bark split and peeling from months of unrelenting heat.

He points out that the branches should be sagging under the weight of ripening fruit, but instead they stretch upward, nearly bare, with only a few shrivelled olives clinging to the withered stems.