Interesting Ideas

In this week’s newsletter: Conservationists have seen nests raided around the country to match demand from the Middle East

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Earlier this week we published an investigation that found hundreds of UK peregrine falcon nests have been raided in the past decade, in order to feed a growing appetite to own prized birds for racing and breeding in the Middle East.

This piece has been a year in the making, working with a great team of reporters from Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) to shed light on a multimillion-dollar industry that stretches around the world.

Germany’s dying forests are losing their ability to absorb CO2. Can a new way of planting save them?

The LA wildfire victims still living in toxic homes: ‘We have nowhere else to go’

‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?

How demand for elite falcons in the Middle East is driving illegal trade of British birds

‘It’s soul destroying to find nests have failed’: inside the battle against Scotland’s falcon thieves

Global wildlife crime causing ‘untold harm’, UN report finds

Oceans absorb 90% of global heating, making them a stark indicator of the relentless march of the climate crisis

The world’s oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists have reported.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon pollution is taken up by the oceans. This makes ocean heat one of the starkest indicators of the relentless march of the climate crisis, which will only end when emissions fall to zero. Almost every year since the start of the millennium has set a new ocean heat record.

Experts and community trying to untangle mystery of outburst that saw water travel almost 10km overland into a bigger lake

Manoel Dixon had just finished dinner one night last May when a phone dinged nearby with a Facebook message.

Dixon, 26, was at his family’s hunting camp near their northern Quebec home town of Waswanipi. They knew the fellow hunter who was messaging Dixon’s father, but what he wrote didn’t make sense.

The US startup ElectricFish aims to bring hassle-free EV charging to every gas station in the US.

The post “ElectricFish” EV Charging Innovator Is Transforming Gas Stations Into Electrification Hubs appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Pacifico Accelerates Growth in the Vietnam Energy Market Vĩnh Long, Vietnam — Pacifico Energy Vietnam (PEV), the Vietnam-based development platform of Pacifico Energy Group (PEG), a leading global energy infrastructure developer, today announced the commencement of commercial operations at its 30 MW Sunpro Wind Farm (Sunpro), adding new power capacity ... [continued]

The post Pacifico Energy Achieves Commercial Operations at Sunpro Wind Farm in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Plant Heritage says gardening trends mean many species in danger of disappearing as they are no longer offered for sale

More than half of garden plants previously grown in the UK are no longer offered for sale as flower fashions and modern gardening trends have reduced the diversity of blooms.

Plant Heritage is asking the public to choose unusual plants for their gardens, and maybe even start their own national collections of rare blooms, in order to stop some cultivated plants from dying out.

North Sands, Salcombe, Devon: They’re my daughter’s favourite find, and I’ve never seen such a concentration. These ones have only just hatched

It’s two hours to high tide, and the beach has been reduced to a half moon of smooth sand. The sea is grey, grey-blue and green, and even here in the estuary it’s lined with ragged swell. Winter swimmers in trunks and swimming costumes are wading in, hunching their bare shoulders.

Without much sand to run on, my four-year-old, Nina, decides we’re playing mountain goats on the boulders at the back of the beach. They are a jumble of awkward shapes and irregular angles: sometimes I have to hold a hand – sorry, hoof – but mostly she finds her own balance. A rock pipit (Anthus petrosus) seeps at us then flutters away. Nina bleats at it. A wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) whirrs away into a crevice, a tiny ball of fox-red feathers. Nina bleats again.

Vast swathes of the country’s trees have been killed off by droughts and infestations, in a trend sweeping across Europe. A shift towards more biodiverse cultivation could offer answers

Even the intense green of late spring cannot mask the dead trees in the Harz mountains. Standing upright across the gentle peaks in northern Germany, thousands of skeletal trunks mark the remnants of a once great spruce forest.

Since 2018, the region has been ravaged by a tree-killing bark beetle outbreak, made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves. It has transformed a landscape known for its verdant beauty into one dominated by a sickly grey.

XPENG launched the new P7+ in Europe earlier today. Last November, XPENG gave me the privilege to see a preview of the car now being launched, which I can now share. This is a next-generation model in China, with the 100,000th P7+ rolling off the line this week. However, it ... [continued]

The post XPENG Launches Multi-Talented P7+ in Europe: Hands-On Review appeared first on CleanTechnica.

After taking over control of Venezuela, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s decision to pull the United States out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) may not seem like the biggest news, but it is a huge deal and it’ll be interesting to see where things go. ... [continued]

The post How The World Can Respond To Trump & Rubio’s UNFCCC Idiocy appeared first on CleanTechnica.

For much of the last 30 years, the rest of the world has been forced to persevere with climate action in the face of US intransigence

• Outrage as Trump withdraws from key UN climate treaty along with dozens of international organisations

Donald Trump’s latest attack on climate action takes place amid rapidly rising temperatures, rising sea levels, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, burgeoning costs from extreme weather and the imminent danger that the world will trigger “tipping points” in the climate system that will lead to catastrophic and irreversible changes.

The US president’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the world’s leading body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will not alter any of those scientific realities.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

I have a hard time understanding the appeal of giant vehicles — all the land yachts on the road around me — but my, oh, my do I love a small electric car! I’d have a Mini Cooper EV and BMW i3 in my driveway if I had the money ... [continued]

The post Kia Launches EV2!! appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Trump administration continues to undermine Colorado’s efforts to turn the page on coal DENVER — The Trump Administration’s EPA today disapproved Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, again illegally undermining the state’s efforts to rein in pollution from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources. The state’s plan includes retirement deadlines ... [continued]

The post EPA Rejects Colorado’s Regional Haze Plan, Including Coal Plant Retirement Dates appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Everything at an Elon Musk enterprise reflects his morals and beliefs, none more than the sexualized content supplied by Grok.

The post Elon Musk & Grok Celebrate Their War On Women appeared first on CleanTechnica.

ATLANTA — Today, environmental groups demanded the Georgia Public Service Commission reconsider Georgia Power’s plan to build the most expensive gas plants in the nation. The Sierra Club, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) filed a motion to reconsider Georgia Power’s “Requests for Proposals,” ... [continued]

The post Environmental Groups Demand Georgia PSC Reconsider Data Center Energy Plan Overreach appeared first on CleanTechnica.

It has been a couple weeks since CleanTechnica published an article titled “Massachusetts’s First Big Energy Storage Tender.” The tender is a result of a law on battery storage, signed by Governor Maura Healey on November 20. Addressing the 1,500-megawatt (MW) tender, author Zachary Shahan wrote, “If you’re upset because ... [continued]

The post The Mystery Of The Massachusetts Battery Tender appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Cars that emit fumes closer to pavement result in pedestrians experiencing 40% more pollution

Some vehicles are much more polluting than others and the design of exhaust pipes could affect how much air pollution we breathe when we walk along a busy road, research has found.

Diesel vehicles still dominate exhaust pollution 10 years after the International Council on Clean Transportation revealed that many diesel cars were highly polluting, emitting far more nitrogen oxides on the road than in official testing.

This is a problem across our society, a major problem. Perhaps it’s a significant problem in every society, but at least some other societies more implicitly trust people who understand science to be leaders in society. In the US, the issue is that we’re making one disastrous decision after another ... [continued]

The post Our President Doesn’t Understand Science, Or How Science Works appeared first on CleanTechnica.

At the Oxford farming conference there were signs the government has much to do to win back farmers’ trust

Few symbols were more potent than the wooden coffin bearing the inscription “RIP British agriculture, 30th October 2024” that greeted Labour’s environment minister at the annual Oxford farming conference.

It marked the date of Rachel Reeves’s first budget, when she announced plans to levy inheritance tax on farms. For the chancellor’s cabinet colleague Emma Reynolds, it underlined the anger among Britain’s farmers.