Interesting Ideas

In this week’s CleanTechnica YouTube gathering, fellow CleanTechnica writers Zach Shahan, Larry Evans, José Pontes, and I over-extended the allotted time of 30 minutes and talked for an hour and fifteen. The discussions were continuous and spontaneous, layered, one topic opening up another. One of the points we raised and ... [continued]

The post China’s Most Updated Autonomous Driving Framework Makes Both Carmakers & Operators (Owners Included) Liable in a Crash appeared first on CleanTechnica.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

Germany is the biggest auto market in Europe. With some giants of the auto industry based there — Volkswagen, BMW, Audi, Mercedes — one can think it’s just Germans buying German cars, but the market is huge, and there’s a lot of opportunity for other brands as well, especially as ... [continued]

The post Zeekr Enters Germany appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: I have memories of seeing them at night, on our pyjama-clad safaris round the farm, but they haven’t been here for a decade

There’s a shimmering in the sky and I can’t work it out. Driving, I can only snatch glimpses of flickering light. I pull into a lay-by near home. Now I can make out five or six broad-winged birds, flying in a loose flock. They are black and white and their motion reflects the low sun, flashing light and contrasting dark, like a disturbance in the force field.

Lapwings, or “peewits” as they are known for their call, are birds of my childhood. Every spring, they nested in the same field and, in winter, flocks gathered. I loved their crest and the way their petrol-sheened plumage changed with the light, from dark green to bronze or purple.

Mark Carney is considering lifting a tanker ban that has protected coastal communities for 53 years

The distress call went out to the Canadian coast guard station after midnight on an October night. The Nathan E Stewart, an American-flagged tugboat, sailing through the light winds and rain of the central British Columbia coast, had grounded on a reef.

The captain tried to reverse, moving the rudder from hard over port to hard over starboard. The boat pivoted but did not move, and the tug repeatedly struck the sea bed.

I was recently asked by someone in the maritime industry whether Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cells could play a real role in maritime propulsion. The question was prompted by the announcement from Ponant, GTT, and Bloom describing a concept cruise vessel for 200 passengers that would combine hard wing ... [continued]

The post Why Simple Fuels Win at Sea: Assessing LNG SOFCs, Hydrogen, Sails, and CCS Against Practical Needs appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The floating solar movement continues apace in the US, despite this year's sharp U-turn in federal energy policy.

The post The Floating Solar Revolution: Death By A Thousand Cuts For Fossil Fuels appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Exclusive: ‘extremely unhelpful’ policy seen as deterrent to clearing thousands of dump sites across England

Millions of pounds in landfill tax owed to the government has to be paid by the Environment Agency (EA) if it clears any of the thousands of illegal waste dumps across the country.

Of the £15m that taxpayers are paying for the clearance of the only site the agency has committed to clearing up – a vast illegal dump at Hoad’s Wood in Kent – £4m is landfill tax.

A new, bio-inspired carbon negative replacement for concrete is working its way through the laboratory at Worcester Polytechnic University in Massachusetts.

The post New Bio-Inspired “Super Bricks” Sucks Up Carbon appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Those plastic bottles that are so readily available at convenience stores, groceries, conferences, and sports venues are a real problem: they kill marine creatures. A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that plastic ingestion has been documented in nearly 1,300 marine species, including every ... [continued]

The post Your Single-Use Plastic Bottles Are Killing Endangered Sea Turtles appeared first on CleanTechnica.

RSPB says growing trend for honouring species that are in decline is not matched by action on conservation

Britain’s street names are being inspired by skylarks, lapwings and starlings, even as bird populations decline.

According to a report by the RSPB, names such as Skylark Lane and Swift Avenue are increasingly common. Using OS Open Names data from 2004 to 2024, the conservation charity found that road names featuring bird species had risen by 350% for skylarks, 156% for starlings and 104% for lapwings, despite populations of these having fallen in the wild.

Former Perth curator Mark Harvey is one of the few people on Earth to have described 1,000 new species, many of them arachnids. Colleagues say his legacy is ‘unquantifiable’

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For most people around the world, 16 August 1977 was memorable because it was the day Elvis Presley died.

“We turned the radio on when we got back in the car and that was the headline. Elvis was dead,” remembers Dr Mark Harvey.

‘Soilsmology’ aims to map world’s soils and help avert famine, says not-for-profit co-founded by George Monbiot

• George Monbiot: Over a pint in Oxford, we may well have stumbled upon the holy grail of agriculture

A groundbreaking soil-health measuring technique could help avert famine and drought, scientists have said.

At the moment, scientists have to dig lots of holes to study the soil, which is time-consuming and damages its structure, making the sampling less accurate.

Representatives from China, Turkey, the Middle East, and Europe met in Uzbekistan last week to celebrate a new renewable energy initiative.

The post Uzbekistan Proves The Folly Of US Fossil Fuel Madness appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Utah’s largest coal-fired power plant — the Intermountain Power Project (IPP), located in the Great Basin region of western Utah and primarily serving southern California — is no longer operating, after the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power quietly pulled the plug just before Thanksgiving. The shutdown happened with ... [continued]

The post Largest Utah Coal Plant Goes Quiet as Los Angeles Goes Coal-Free appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Conservationists say changes, coupled with underfunding, will curb take-up and leave less land protected for nature

• UK politics live – latest updates

An ambitious scheme to restore England’s nature over coming decades has been undermined after the government inserted a clause allowing it to terminate contracts with only a year’s notice, conservationists have said.

The project was designed to fund landscape-scale restoration over thousands of hectares, whether on large estates or across farms and nature reserves. The idea was to create huge reserves for rare species to thrive – projects promoted as decades-long commitments to securing habitat for wildlife well into the future.

There’s news this week that Zipcar is leaving the UK is interesting in multiple ways. I was an early Zipcar user back in 2004–2007. I loved it, and it helped me not own a car. Over the years, I was thus a big proponent of carsharing programs and even tried ... [continued]

The post Does Zipcar Leaving UK Have Any Relevance To Robotaxi Dreams? appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The debate about vehicle weight and road damage shows how quickly a simple idea can gain traction even when the underlying evidence is thin. Commenters often reach for a familiar claim that heavier vehicles must be responsible for increased road wear. The argument sounds reasonable at first glance and it ... [continued]

The post How Outdated Engineering Models Distort Today’s EV & Road Charges Debate appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Cameras capture lone creature collecting materials for its lodge in riverside nature reserve

A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.

It was filmed dragging logs and establishing a lodge in a “perfect beaver habitat” on the River Wensum at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk.

Bureaucratic delays and funding shortages stall plans to carve out a forest reserve for the uncontacted Indigenous group on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon

In 2024, agents of the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (Funai) walked more than 60 miles through rainforest on the southern fringe of the Brazilian Amazon on a mission to monitor and help protect a group of Indigenous people who had no contact with the modern world.

What they found was a small basket freshly woven from leaves, a child’s footprints on the bank of a creek, and tree trunks hacked open hours before to extract honey. There were huts abandoned a year before that were sinking into the forest floor, and brazil nut pods discarded around old campfires. They were all signs that the Pardo River Kawahiva people were there.