Interesting Ideas

SpaceX has a plan to put a million solar powered data centers into orbit around the Earth to power the next generation of AI.

The post SpaceX Proposes One Million Solar Powered Data Centers In Earth Orbit appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation could also force ultra-rich to pay global wealth tax

Fossil fuel companies could be forced to pay some of the price of their damage to the climate, and the ultra-rich subjected to a global wealth tax, if new tax rules are agreed under the UN.

Negotiations on a planned global tax treaty will resume at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday, with dozens of countries supporting stronger rules that would make polluters pay for the impact of their activities.

Events such as Storm Chandra take a terrible toll on ecosystems, but nature can be part of the solution for mitigating flood waters

“The flood waters are only good for scavenger species,” says Steve Hussey, searching hard for a silver lining to last week’s deluges brought by Storm Chandra. When the waters recede, crows and ravens will feast on the carrion of hedgehogs, dormice and other small animals unable to escape the rising water, he says.

“It sounds very apocalyptic, doesn’t it?” says Hussey, a communications officer with the Devon Wildlife Trust.

With some of Ukraine’s most valuable biodiversity sites and science facilities under occupation, experts at Sofiyivka Park in Uman are struggling to preserve the country’s natural history

In the basement laboratory of the National Dendrological Park Sofiyivka, Larisa Kolder tends to dozens of specimens of Moehringia hypanicabetween power outages. Just months earlier, she and her team at this microclonal plant propagation laboratory in Uman, Ukraine, received 23 seeds of the rare flower.

Listed as threatened in Ukraine’s Red Book of endangered species, Moehringia grows nowhere else in the wild but the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. Of those 23 seeds, only two grew into plants that Kolder and her colleagues could clone in their laboratory, but now her lab is home to a small grove of Moehringia seedlings, including 80 that have put down roots in a small but vital win for biodiversity conservation amid Russia’s war with Ukraine.

I visited IBM’s headquarters in Yorktown last December, arriving just after a snowstorm had rolled through the Hudson Valley. The timing was fitting. Quantum computing, like winter weather, is something people talk about constantly but many don’t experience directly. At IBM’s Quantum Technology labs, you can at least hear the ... [continued]

The post IBM Advances Quantum Computing with Nighthawk for Clean Energy Transformations appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Bridport, Dorset: Paths became streams and new islands appeared as the River Brit burst its banks

We were warned that rain was coming – and so it did, barrelling down all night, falling through the darkness on to ground that was already saturated. By the time it was light, the rivers through Bridport had risen and spread across the floodplain, splicing into a broad, brown rope of water twisting to the harbour at West Bay.

Contemptuous of its banks, the River Brit was running noisily across meadows, forming new lakes where herring gulls sat floating on its muddy surge. Water went straight through the allotments, sending plastic pots bobbing like buoys against the boundary fence.

Das deutsche Wasserstoff-Backbone ohne Kunden oder Lieferanten — eine Pipeline von nirgendwo nach nirgendwo — ist realer Stahl im Boden, unter Druck gesetzt und als unvermeidlich verteidigt, doch sie wird für ein Energiesystem gebaut, das sie nicht braucht. Diese Aussage klingt provokant, bis die Energieflüsse vollständig offengelegt werden. Betrachtet man ... [continued]

The post Unter Druck gesetzter Stahl, fehlende Nachfrage: Deutschlands Wasserstoff-Backbone in den Energieflüssen* appeared first on CleanTechnica.

If you’ve been reading CleanTechnica for a while, you probably remember the Charge to the Parks Project (we’re also on Bluesky and on Facebook), where I aimed to visit all of the national parks possible on all-electric power. Along the way, I tried crazy things, like pulling a trailer full ... [continued]

The post Charge To The Parks Is Back! (Silverado EV Long Term Review Begins Now) appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Inspired by YouTube creators, some people are limiting beef to a handful of ‘feast days’ a year to cut their climate impact

“I love beef,” says Vlad Luca, 25. But unlike most other self-proclaimed steak lovers, Vlad eats it only four times a year, on designated “beef days”.

The “beef days” phenomenon has been popularised by the brothers John and Hank Green, known collectively as vlogbrothers on YouTube. John, 48, is better known for his YA fiction, including The Fault in Our Stars, while Hank, 45, is a self-described science communicator and entrepreneur.

As rivers swell and homes are cut off, scientists say UK winter rainfall is already 20 years ahead of predictions

When flooding hit the low-lying Somerset Levels in 2014, it took two months for the waters to rise. This week it took two days, said Rebecca Horsington, chair of the Flooding on the Levels Action Group and a born-and-bred resident. A fierce barrage of storms from the Atlantic has drenched south-west England in January, saturating soils and supercharging rivers.

Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries for environmentalists – and the release of Juan Orlando Hernández has reinforced its ‘crisis of impunity’, say critics

When Donald Trump announced that he would pardon the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, only the second world leader to be convicted of drug trafficking, Anna*, an environmental defender, was shocked.

In 2022, Hernández, also known as JOH, was extradited to the US and later convicted, along with his brother, on drug trafficking and weapons charges. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to smuggle more than 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US, becoming the first Honduran head of state to be tried and sentenced abroad for running a narco state. He was also accused of grave human rights violations.

A new aquifer thermal energy system in St. Paul, Minnesota promises to lower utility bills for residents by 50 percent or more.

The post Aquifer Thermal Energy System Comes To Minnesota appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Recently, there has been some encouraging EV charger news for passenger vehicles, with new chargers announced for retail outlets owned by Kroger and Walmart in a variety of states. Sheetz and WaWa also have an impressive number of EV chargers operating at some of their stores. Pilot is recognized as ... [continued]

The post Tesla Semi Chargers Planned For Pilot Travel Centers appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Bruce Friedrich argues the only way to tackle the world’s insatiable but damaging craving for meat is like-for-like replacements like cultivated and plant-based meat

For someone aiming to end the global livestock industry, Bruce Friedrich begins his new book – called Meat – in disarming fashion: “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat. You won’t find vegetarian or vegan recipes in this book, and you won’t find a single sentence attempting to convince you to eat differently. This book isn’t about policing your plate.”

There’s more. Friedrich, a vegan for almost four decades, says meat is “humanity’s favourite food”.

A wave of affordable Chinese-made EVs is accelerating the shift away from petrol cars, challenging long‑held assumptions about how transport decarbonisation unfolds

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Last year, almost every new car sold in Norway, the nature-loving country flush with oil wealth, was fully electric. In prosperous Denmark, which was all-in on petrol and diesel cars until just before Covid, sales of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) reached a share of 68%. In California, the share of zero-emissions vehicles hit 20%. And at least every third new car now bought by the Dutch, Finns, Belgians and Swedes burns no fuel.

These figures, which would have felt fanciful just five years ago, show the rich world leading the shift away from cars that pump out toxic gas and planet-heating pollutants. But a more startling trend is that electric car sales are also racing ahead in many developing countries. While China is known for its embrace of electric vehicles (EVs), demand has also soared in emerging markets from South America to south-east Asia. BEV sales in Turkey have caught up with the EU’s, data published this week shows.

The Fukushima towns frozen in time: nature has thrived since the nuclear disaster but what happens if humans return?

The UK government didn’t want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse. I’m not surprised

The 16-month battle to reveal the truth about Sydney Water’s poo balls

Powering up: how Ethiopia is becoming an unlikely leader in the electric vehicle revolution

‘My Tesla has become ordinary’: Turkey catches up with EU in electric car sales

The electric vehicle revolution is still on course – don’t let your loathing of Elon Musk stop you joining up

I was scrolling through energy posts on LinkedIn recently and came across yet another argument for nuclear power that leaned heavily on David MacKay’s 2008 book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. It was presented as a decisive reference, as if the book still represented the state of the art ... [continued]

The post How an Influential Energy Book Became a Drag on Decarbonization appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is banking millions on US Senate hopeful Nate Morris in Kentucky, though the move could backfire as the Epstein scandal grows.

The post Elon Musk Wants To Buy Another Election, Pitting Republicans Against Each Other appeared first on CleanTechnica.

A new, compact pumped hydro energy storage system uses lower elevations and sloping hills, avoiding the cost and environmental impacts of mountain-based storage systems.

The post New Pumped Hydro Energy Storage System Needs No Mountains appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Der 400 km lange Abschnitt des deutschen Wasserstoff-Backbones ist inzwischen unter Druck gesetzt, mit fossilem Wasserstoff gefüllt und wartet. Es sind keine nennenswerten Lieferanten angeschlossen und keine vertraglich gebundenen Abnehmer entnehmen Moleküle. Allein diese Tatsache rechtfertigt es, innezuhalten und die Rechnung sorgfältig aufzumachen, denn große Infrastrukturentscheidungen werden nicht automatisch klimapositiv, ... [continued]

The post Wenn Stahl Strategien überdauert: Die Klimakosten von Deutschlands Wasserstoff-Pipeline* appeared first on CleanTechnica.

After stories revealed high levels of contamination in neighborhood around factory processing US toxic waste, government announces sweeping array of tactics

The Mexican government has announced it will pursue a sweeping array of tactics to combat industrial pollution, from $4.8m in fines against a plant processing US hazardous waste to the rollout of a new industrial air-monitoring system, following investigations by the Guardian and Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican investigative unit.

Those stories revealed high levels of heavy-metal contamination in the neighborhood around the factory, Zinc Nacional, in the Monterrey metropolitan area, and showed the broader extent of industrial pollution in the region, linked to Monterrey’s role in manufacturing and recycling goods for the US market.