Interesting Ideas

Christmas Day expected to be dry and bright, with low temperature warnings posing greater risk to vulnerable people

Christmas Day will bring bright weather in much of the UK, but a cold health alert has been issued warning of a “greater risk to life of vulnerable people”.

While the prospect of a white Christmas is “highly unlikely”, according to forecasters, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has issued a yellow cold health alert from 6pm on Christmas Day to noon on 27 December for south-west England.

Seaweed has become a key cash crop as climate change and industrial trawling test the resilient culture of the semi-nomadic Vezo people

Along Madagascar’s south-west coast, the Vezo people, who have fished the Mozambique Channel for countless generations, are defined by a way of life sustained by the sea. Yet climate change and industrial exploitation are pushing this ocean-based culture to its limits.

Coastal villages around Toliara, a city in southern Madagascar, host tens of thousands of the semi-nomadic Vezopeople, who make a living from small-scale fishing on the ocean. For centuries, they have launched pirogues, small boats carved from single tree trunks, every day into the turquoise shallows to catch tuna, barracuda and grouper.

A boat near lines of seaweed, which has become a main source of income for Ambatomilo village as warmer seas, bleached reefs and erratic weather accelerate the decline of local fish populations

Toward the end of our visit in Guangzhou, China, we attempted to take an electric river cruise but couldn’t figure out how to get there in time due to road closures from the light festival. Looking at the map for other things to do, we saw a showroom for BYD’s ... [continued]

The post You Can’t Buy This, America: FCB Ti7 4WD Luxury SUV appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Dursley, Gloucestershire: We have to embrace these darker months and get outside, but there’s also only so much wind and sludge I can take

Winter is tiring. The footpath is a gully of slop, and each step forwards is a little slip backwards. The north-facing slope was OK – the frost hadn’t been thawed by the sun, and crunchy ground is better than slippy ground. But the rest of Gloucestershire has turned into slurry.

It’s just as well that I enjoy it; I do this every week. For the last seven years I’ve been going out on a Friday, taking some combination of buses and trains to wherever the previous walk ended, and continuing. My Friday walk is a single tangly line stretching from Birmingham to Dorset, and the Malverns to the M25, and I go whatever the weather.

As the number of the semi-aquatic creatures soars so can tensions. But the Swiss have a tried and tested system to calm the neighbours and restore harmony

“I hate beavers,” a woman tells the beaver hotline. Forty years ago she planted an oak tree in a small town in southern Zurich – now at the frontier of beaver expansion – and it has just been felled: gnawed by the large, semi-aquatic rodents as they enter their seasonal home-improvement mode.

The caller is one of 10 new people getting in touch each week at this time of year. Beavers, nature’s great engineers, can unleash mayhem during winter as they renovate their lodges and build up their dams. For people, this can mean flooding, sinkholes appearing in roads and trees being felled. A single incident can clock up 70,000 Swiss francs (£65,000) in damages.

Low-cost tech and joined-up funding have reduced illegal logging, mining and poaching in the Darién Gap – it’s a success story that could stop deforestation worldwide

There are no roads through the Darién Gap. This vast impenetrable forest spans the width of the land bridge between South and Central America, but there is almost no way through it: hundreds have lost their lives trying to cross it on foot.

Its size and hostility have shielded it from development for millennia, protecting hundreds of species – from harpy eagles and giant anteaters to jaguars and red-crested tamarins – in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But it has also made it incredibly difficult to protect. Looking after 575,000 hectares (1,420,856 acres) of beach, mangrove and rainforest with just 20 rangers often felt impossible, says Segundo Sugasti, the director of Darién national park. Like tropical forests all over the world, it has been steadily shrinking, with at least 15% lost to logging, mining and cattle ranching in two decades.

DISCLAIMER: Except for the first paragraph, this article is satire. While it references real engineering concepts and locations, SLEIGH operations, reindeer biogas systems, and covert retail refueling networks do not exist. Santa’s actual propulsion system remains classified. On December 24, 2025, President Donald Trump told a child from Oklahoma that ... [continued]

The post CleanTechnica Exclusive: Investigation Reveals Sophisticated Propulsion System Behind Christmas Eve Deliveries appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Met Office says temperatures are tracking ahead of 2022 after year of heatwaves and drought, though late cold spell could yet intervene

Forecasters say 2025 is “more likely than not” to break the record for the hottest year in the UK since records began, after a summer of heatwaves and drought followed by a mild autumn.

According to the Met Office, the official forecaster, the mean temperature for 2025 is tracking well ahead of the previous highest year, set in 2022. However, a colder spell expected from Christmas until the new year makes it too close to call definitively.

The past year of thinking about climate action has increasingly felt like thinking about markets. Not markets in the narrow sense of price signals alone, but markets as arenas where learning happens, capacity is built, costs fall, and political coalitions shift. Reading and in some cases rereading Guns, Germs, and ... [continued]

The post From Guns & Steel to Grids & Batteries: A History-Informed View of Climate Action appeared first on CleanTechnica.

By The Waymo Team At Waymo, our mission is to be the world’s most trusted driver. We know trust is built through consistent behavior over time—earned through every mile we drive and every interaction we have with the community. This past Saturday, as a widespread PG&E outage cut power to ... [continued]

The post Autonomously Navigating the Real World: Lessons from the PG&E Outage appeared first on CleanTechnica.

U-turn lifts limit from £1m to £2.5m after protests and warnings that family farms were at risk

Ministers will increase the threshold for taxing inherited farmland from £1m to £2.5m after months of pressure from campaigners and MPs representing rural areas.

In a statement slipped out just before Christmas, the environment department announced the U-turn, which will apply from April when the tax kicks in.

Our 20 favourite pieces of in-depth reporting, essays and profiles from the year

Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?

… in China. Ford has launched a fully electric (BEV) and extended-range electric (EREV) Bronco in China. It is shutting down EV shop in the USA, for the most part, but it is gung-ho about the new electric era in China. The Ford Bronco BE comes with a 105 kWh ... [continued]

The post Ford Launches New Electric Bronco appeared first on CleanTechnica.

A Christmas Carol has a timeless message for us all, if we will only open our hearts to it.

The post Ignorance And Want — A Message For Today From Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol appeared first on CleanTechnica.

There are many hot, fun, attractive, exciting, competitive electric cars on the Chinese auto market. However, there are none hotter than the Geely Geome Xingyuan this year. Yes, passing up the Tesla Model Y, the Wuling HongGuang Mini EV, and all of the BYD models on the list, the Xingyuan ... [continued]

The post Geely Xingyuan EV Reaches 500,000 Deliveries in Just 14 Months! appeared first on CleanTechnica.

A handful more partnerships between robotaxi companies and ride-hailing apps have popped out in recent days and weeks. Baidu x Lyft & Uber in London First of all, we’ve got Baidu partnering with Uber and Lyft in London. Uber and Lyft testing of the Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi system is ... [continued]

The post More Robotaxi + Ride-Hailing Partnerships appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Scientists working for government breed biological control agents in lab to take on species choking native wildlife

Crayfish, weevils and fungi are being released into the environment in order to tackle invasive species across Britain.

Scientists working for the government have been breeding species in labs to set them loose into the wild to take on Japanese knotweed, signal crayfish and Himalayan balsam, and other species that choke out native plants and wildlife.

XPENG’s Mona M03 has been critical to the company’s EV sales growth and march toward profitability this year. Across the first 11 months of the year, 163,299 units of the Mona M03 were delivered. That’s about 42% of the company’s 391,937 total deliveries. Now, the M03 is getting a refresh ... [continued]

The post XPENG’s Mona M03 Gets Even Better appeared first on CleanTechnica.

From Copenhagen’s cycle lanes and Vienna’s shared parks to Barcelona and London’s unfulfilled potential, better living is close at hand

The angry rumble of a speeding SUV. The metallic smog of backlogged traffic. The aching heat of sun-dried neighbourhoods baking in an oven of concrete and asphalt.

For most people, the mundane threats that plague our environments are likely to annoy more than they spark dread. But for scientists who know just how dangerous our surroundings can be, the burden of knowledge weighs heavy each day. Across Europe, environmental risks cause 18% of deaths from cardiovascular disease and 10% of deaths from cancer. Traffic crashes in the EU kill five times more people than murders.

In November 2024, BYD reached cumulative production of 10 million plugin vehicles (or “new energy vehicles” as they are called in China). Just 13 months later, in December 2025, the company reached 15 million. That’s stunning growth. From 10 million cumulative vehicles produced to 15 million in just over a ... [continued]

The post BYD Reaches 15 Million Plugin Vehicles In Crazy Time appeared first on CleanTechnica.