Interesting Ideas

Planet’s oldest bee species and primary pollinators were under threat from deforestation and competition from ‘killer bees’

Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.

It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest’s long-overlooked native bees – which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting – now have the right to exist and to flourish.

With the snow line edging higher, 186 French ski resorts have shut, while global heating threatens dozens more

When Céüze 2000 ski resort closed at the end of the season in 2018, the workers assumed they would be back the following winter. Maps of the pistes were left stacked beside a stapler; the staff rota pinned to the wall.

Six years on, a yellowing newspaper dated 8 March 2018 sits folded on its side, as if someone has just flicked through it during a quiet spell. A half-drunk bottle of water remains on the table.

The 3rd quarter was a record sales month for Tesla, thanks in large part to the US tax credit for EVs ending in the 4th quarter. However, that doesn’t mean Tesla has been having a good year. Leading into the 3rd quarter, Tesla wasn’t doing well, and it surely isn’t ... [continued]

The post Cox Automotive Forecasts 9% Sales Decline for Tesla in USA in 2025 appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The latest survey from Consumer Reports has bad news for the plug-in hybrid manufacturers. The message is, buyer beware!

The post Consumer Reports Finds Plug-In Hybrids Have 80% More Problems appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The argument begins with a pair of charts that appear to contradict each other while describing the same reality. One plots nominal residential electricity prices against carbon intensity for the ten largest electricity producing countries in 2015 and 2024. The other uses the same data but adjusts prices for inflation. ... [continued]

The post Two Charts, One Grid: Clean Electricity Is Getting Cheaper But Feels More Expensive appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Massachusetts has to reach 5 gigawatts (GW) of energy storage capacity by 2030, per legislation passed by state lawmakers. To get going toward that target, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) has conducted its first large-scale energy storage tender. In that tender, it awarded 1.268 GW (1,268 megawatts) of ... [continued]

The post Massachusetts’s First Big Energy Storage Tender Dishes Out 1.3 GW Of Contracts appeared first on CleanTechnica.

XPENG-PKU Research Breakthrough: XPENG, in collaboration with Peking University, has developed FastDriveVLA—a novel visual token pruning framework that enables autonomous driving AI to “drive like a human” by focusing only on essential information, achieving a 7.5x reduction in computational load. Top-Tier AI Recognition: The research has been accepted by AAAI 2026, one of the ... [continued]

The post XPENG–Peking University Collaborative Research Accepted By AAAI 2026: Introducing A Novel Visual Token Pruning Framework For Autonomous Driving appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Action began in January, before an all-out strike in March. For locals, the flytipping, vermin, maggots and mess are taking a huge environmental and emotional toll

It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.

This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.

The ZOUPW 450W Portable Solar Panel is designed for people who need reliable, renewable power wherever they go, whether that’s camping off the grid, living the van life, or preparing for emergencies at home. It’s a foldable, weather-resistant, and high-output solar panel built to make off-grid energy generation both powerful ... [continued]

The post ZOUPW 450W Portable Solar Panel — CleanTechnica Tested appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Attenborough, 99, enthuses about tube-riding pigeons, foxes, parakeets and others in Wild London for the BBC

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.

Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

The Renault Filante Record 2025 has set a new efficiency record for electric cars, an achievement that will benefit its future cars.

The post Renault Filante Record 2025 Raises The Efficiency Bar For Electric Cars appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Trump ratcheted up his questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it

In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.

This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.

Spring-like weather experienced by many Americans to end, while heavy snow in Japan brings deadly conditions

A week of extremes in the US as Arctic air plunges southwards across many states, sweeping away record-breaking warmth from last weekend. With low pressure in the west drawing up warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico, much of the south and midwest basked in spring-like weather this weekend with temperatures widely an extraordinary 15-20C above normal for late December.

This week, however, most people will ditch their summer clothes for hats and scarves as a ridge pressure builds across the west, allowing for a polar air mass to dive southward, bringing freezing temperatures and the risk of snow.

Following up on the article I wrote a few days ago about BYD having 20% of cumulative plugin vehicle sales globally and Tesla having 12% of cumulative plugin vehicle sales, I wanted to figure out the same kind of figures for fully electric vehicle (BEV) sales. Naturally, I had to ... [continued]

The post BYD & Tesla Combine for 30% of Cumulative BEV Sales Globally appeared first on CleanTechnica.

When the hot winds hit Roebourne, as many as 16 people pile into Yindjibarndi elder Lyn Cheedy’s home – one of the few with air conditioning

Few places are more exposed to extreme weather than Roebourne, a tiny cyclone-prone town on the Western Australian coast, where public housing residents endure 50C heat without air conditioning.

Lyn Cheedy, a Yindjibarndi elder, takes her grandson to the pool most afternoons.

Old Sulehay Forest, Northamptonshire: Distant church bells are about all I can hear as I stand below a 500-year-old small-leaved lime – a tree that may be making an unlikely comeback

On a bright winter’s day, I stand at the centre of a ring of multi‑stemmed small-leaved limes. Their gnarled bases are furred with moss and feathered with sprays of epicormic growth. Lime trees are notoriously hard to age, but this one is probably more than 500 years old, shaped and reshaped by centuries of coppicing, now with a vast canopy stretching nearly 20 metres.

Looking up, I marvel at the intricate fractal lattice of branches and twigs of each tree. Every stem holds its own space, the crowns kept neatly apart from their neighbours – a quiet phenomenon known as crown shyness. This seems somehow appropriate, given how quiet the woodland is. It feels emptied, with only the rush of a chill wind numbing my bare fingertips, a peal of distant church bells, and a robin offering its muted winter song.

In 2014 the Malaysian Airlines jet vanished over the Indian Ocean. Now the team that located Shackleton’s Endurance is looking again with the latest undersea robots

• Search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 expected to resume on Tuesday

More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing after veering thousands of miles off course, its location remains unknown.

The Malaysian government has promised to pay a private company, Ocean Infinity, $70m (£56m) to search for the plane on a “no find, no fee” basis.

Transport for New South Wales has announced that data from regional trials have proven the worth of electric buses. “To date, the 12 new electric buses in the trial have delivered generally positive outcomes, operating across 1,627 bus days and covering more than 300,000 kilometers. The average distance each vehicle ... [continued]

The post Electric Buses Prove Their Worth Down Under appeared first on CleanTechnica.

I know there are people in Europe who don’t agree with this assumption, but I and others have long said that Tesla was critical to the European Union’s electric vehicle sales rise. The argument against that is that the European Union (EU) had set a plan to cut CO2 emissions ... [continued]

The post More Evidence Tesla Did Push The EU To Stick To Its Automaker CO2 Reduction Requirements appeared first on CleanTechnica.

National Trust says these are ‘alarm signals we cannot ignore’ as climate breakdown puts pressure on wildlife

Extremes of weather have pushed nature to its limits in 2025, putting wildlife, plants and landscapes under severe pressure, an annual audit of flora and fauna has concluded.

Bookended by storms Éowyn and Bram, the UK experienced a sun-soaked spring and summer, resulting in fierce heath and moorland fires, followed by autumn floods.