Interesting Ideas

Wharfedale, Yorkshire: On the trail of a wood warbler, I find a suite of woodland plants rising up from a fascinating land formation – limestone pavement

Grass Wood is a magnificent fragment of ancient woodland owned and exceptionally well managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is home to some lovely plants, including lily of the valley and herb paris. What became my defining revelation about the place and, in truth, about this whole area was down to a wood warbler.

It is among my favourite birds, so getting to see the individual singing just off the trail required me to enter the trees, rise up a short bank, and then sit for a long time on a rocky ledge. Slowly it dawned on me that the platform on which I rested, while carpeted in moss, was also incised into a tessellated pattern. From these narrow cracks in the limestone arose a suite of woodland plants. It was dense with ash seedlings, ferns and sedges, as well as linear thickets of dog’s mercury, but there – unmistakably where my hand rested – were strips of flowering herb paris.

The US startup Rivian has joined the ChargeScape collaborative, providing its customers with seamless access to utility discounts for EVs.

The post EVs Will Come Roaring Back, Rivian Edition appeared first on CleanTechnica.

In a letter to EU leaders, the group says that rather than lowering ambition, Europe must focus on accelerating electrification. To: Heads of State or Government of the European Union, Dear Heads of State or Government of the European Union, We, a broad coalition representing non-governmental organizations, think tanks, energy ... [continued]

The post The EU Must Reset The Narrative On Vehicle Electrification, Says Broad Coalition Of Industry Groups And Civil Society appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard

Half of the world’s children are exposed to at least three overlapping climate hazards threatening their health, education and survival, according to a Unicef report.

Globally, children face increasing threats from heatwaves, storms, floods and droughts as the climate crisis worsens, with more than one billion facing at least three of these at once.

Amid fears the wreck will be more accessible to explorers – and new species – as the climate warms, conservationists want to create the region’s first underwater protected area

The harsh temperatures, treacherous currents and shifting pack ice of the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, which crushed and sank his ship, Endurance, in 1915, led Ernest Shackleton to describe it as the “worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

For more than a century, the inhospitable conditions, which present a challenge even for modern icebreaker ships, helped to protect the lost wreck, which was discovered in 2022, its structure still largely intact.

Sea ice is melting fast, worsening the climate crisis, but a bold attempt to rethicken it is showing early signs of success

‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

Last month, BYD announced full damage guarantee for “Urban NOA,” or city driving, on LiDAR equipped cars that have been delivered with their latest 5.0 software or have received the OTA update. This comes in addition to fully covering “intelligent parking” using the advanced ADAS system. BYD indicated that their ... [continued]

The post BYD Taking Responsibility Increases God’s Eye Use & Makes Vehicles Safer appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Rivian is in the middle of a big moment in its still fairly young life. It is stepping out of the very expensive portion of the SUV and truck market and into the moderately expensive portion of the market. It is expected to sell a lot more units of the ... [continued]

The post Rivian Pursues Financial Sustainability with Layoffs appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Scientists are returning to a wartime solution that may be more sustainable than the traditional rubber tree

There is a global shortage of natural rubber and dandelions may be coming to the rescue. In the second world war there was such a severe shortage of rubber that the Allies used the Russian dandelion, Taraxacum koksaghyz, from Kazakhstan. Soviet scientists found the dandelion roots produced enough white milky latex to make natural rubber, but when the war ended producers returned to the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.

But the demand for rubber is now increasing, with rubber trees suffering from a fungal disease and the impacts of extreme weather caused by the climate crisis. So, scientists are looking again at using dandelions, with the added benefit that they grow in temperate climates, are a sustainable crop that do not need pesticides and lots of water, and don’t lead to the deforestation common in tropical rubber tree plantations.

Tech is helping to identify and save new specimens and could open ‘genomic goldmine’ of fungi data

The rise of AI and digitisation could be a turning point in the “race against extinction” faced by botanists trying to identify and save vital plants before they vanish, according to a major report from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

New technology is enabling scientists to track how flowering times have shifted by weeks around the world, rapidly identify new specimens and even get crucial genetic data from 180-year-old fungus specimens, potentially opening a “genomic goldmine”. Digitisation and online access to millions of specimens that were until now only accessible in archives is also producing new insights, especially in the global south.

Thinktank says decoupling electricity from gas prices has also helped shield Spain from hikes caused by Iran war

Spanish households save €10 a month on electricity bills because of wind turbines and solar panels installed in the last five years, a report has found.

Typical energy bills would be 19% more expensive if electricity costs were still as tightly coupled to gas prices as in 2021, according to Ember, a climate thinktank. It found Spain’s “strategic” expansion of renewables since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war.

Imagine if Europe chose to spend a half a trillion a year on a dependency that benefits regimes which wish it harm. We don’t have to imagine it. We are doing it right now. By Ariel Brunner, Regional Director, BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, Chiara Martinelli, Director, Climate Action Network Europe, Ester Asin, ... [continued]

The post Europe’s Sovereignty Budget appeared first on CleanTechnica.

In another example of how much US solar manufacturing has gone from small potatoes to a giant industry since Joe Biden took office in 2021, here’s a whopper of a stat: solar manufacturing capex in the USA has exploded from $150 million in 2020 to an estimated $2.5 billion in ... [continued]

The post Solar Manufacturing Capex in the USA Exploded from $150 Million in 2020 to $2.5 Billion in 2026 appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The UK is getting ready to rejigger its ZEV mandate to satisfy concerns from automakers and trade unions concerned about the future.

The post UK Plans To Roll Back EV Mandate appeared first on CleanTechnica.

‘Saddened, stunned, surprised and haunted’ is how one surfer describes the mood at the popular Sydney beach two days after Leah Stewart was bitten by a great white

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Under a clear blue sky on a Monday morning, Coogee beach in Sydney’s east is quiet.

A few swimmers have ventured into the ocean pools at the northern and southern ends of the beach. Most others sit on the sand, looking towards the water.

The short-tailed roundleaf bat was feared extinct until scientist Iroro Tanshi found one in Afi sanctuary in Nigeria, and set out to protect the only confirmed roosting colony

Just after sunrise, a cacophony of whoops and chatter can be heard over the verdant forests of the Afi mountain wildlife sanctuary. Nestled within the Cross River rainforest in south-east Nigeria, and spanning an area about the size of central Paris, the steep sanctuary is a haven for endangered gorillas, drill monkeys, the grey-necked rockfowl – and the short-tailed roundleaf bat.

The Nigerian biologist Iroro Tanshi remembers the moment she first spotted the endangered bat in 2016, during a field expedition for her PhD research. “We were trapping near a roost that night, so we caught a lot of bats,” says Tanshi. But, she adds: “This looked very, very different. Big-eared.” She promptly turned to her identification guide, which revealed that the tiny furry creature she was holding between her fingers was Hipposideros curtus, better known as the short-tailed roundleaf bat, last recorded in the wild in the 1970s.

It was just about one month ago that the Team Kentucky EV Charging program announced its tenth Kentucky EV fast-charging site was completed and open for charging. Two new EV fast-charging stations were recently installed and made operational; one in Elizabethtown and another in Shepherdsville. Each new station has four ... [continued]

The post 8 New Fast EV Chargers Installed In Kentucky appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Raymond Tribdino has done a great job for us covering VinFast for us — its grand ambitions, it struggles, and how it is adapting to try to eventually achieve its vision. One of the company’s biggest challenges and failures has been trying to break into the US market. There are ... [continued]

The post VinFast Needs To Work On Its Marketing In The USA appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Maritime fuel debates usually start with the wrong object. They look at today’s bunker fuel demand, line up replacement molecules, and ask whether ammonia, methanol, hydrogen, LNG, biofuels, or synthetic fuels can scale far enough to replace it. That sounds like a practical question, but it skips the larger one: ... [continued]

The post Fossil Fuels Are 40% Of Freight Shipping Tonnage, But Half Its Fuel Use appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Residents of West Oakland, which suffers from toxic waste and high pollution rates, rally against a coal export facility

West Oakland, a California neighborhood known for its rich history of Black activism from the Pullman Porters’ union to the Black Panthers, might not seem like the site of the country’s next great coal project.

But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is pushing for – with the injection of $75m to build a sprawling coal export terminal in the nearby port of Oakland.