Interesting Ideas

When Lucid Motors announced plans to build its first manufacturing facility outside the United States in 2022, the move was framed as both symbolic and strategic. The plant in King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) would not only become Saudi Arabia’s first car factory, but also a cornerstone of the kingdom’s ... [continued]

The post Lucid Is Finishing A Greenfield EV Plant For The Next Phase Of Global Manufacturing appeared first on CleanTechnica.

BYD recently announced the revised Atto 3 EVO in Europe, ahead of its official release in China. While there is no official pricing yet, deliveries are expected soon, with the car already appearing on the website. Cosmetically, the changes are minor, and we have already seen many of them in ... [continued]

The post BYD Launches RWD & AWD Atto 3 EVO In Europe First appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Continued global heating could set irreversible course by triggering climate tipping points, but most people unaware

The world is closer than thought to a “point of no return” after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said.

Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish “hothouse Earth” climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed.

Vast flocks of birds return to Somerset and a rare grebe turns an ordinary walk into something special

After weeks of heavy rain, Cheddar reservoir in Somerset is finally full again – of water, and of birds. Thousands of coots, hundreds of gulls and ducks, and dozens of great crested grebes crowd the surface, some already moulting into their smart breeding plumage, crests and all.

They feed almost constantly, building up energy reserves for the breeding season. Among the throng are some less familiar visitors: a flock of scaup, the males bulkier than the nearby tufted ducks, with pale grey backs that catch the light. Flocks of goosanders dive frequently for food, the colourful males looking like a cormorant in extravagant drag.

DETROIT, Michigan — This week, the Trump Administration is expected to announce a suite of rollbacks that bolster the coal and fossil fuel industries, threatening to keep our coal plants online longer and make our environment and climate dirtier. The administration is expected to revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s longstanding ... [continued]

The post Sierra Club: Trump’s Latest Environmental Rollbacks Are Yet Another Move To Cut Corners For The Coal And Fossil Fuel Industries appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education

As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.

A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.

My father, Alex Kirby, who has died of cancer aged 86, was a well-respected journalist – at the BBC and elsewhere – and, despite beginning his career in the church, ended up dedicating much of his life to chronicling the climate crisis.

Following a degree in theology at Keble College, Oxford, he trained for the priesthood at the Anglo-Catholic theological college in Mirfield, Yorkshire, and after ordination, became a deacon in the Isle of Dogs, east London.

This started as a response to Zach’s recent article asking “Why Have Automakers Written Off $55 Billion In EV Investments?” Zach encouraged me to flesh it out a little and post it as a followup article. Here are a few reasons why Detroit automakers were able to rack up such ... [continued]

The post Reasons For The Legacy EV Retreat appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Birdwatchers flock to Montréal for rare sighting of ‘vagrant’ bird that has made its home during a bitterly cold winter

On a quiet Montréal street of low-rise brick apartment buildings on one side and cement barrier wall on the other, a crowd has gathered, binoculars around their necks and cameras at the ready. A European robin has taken up residence in the neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between two industrial areas with warehouses and railway lines and, a few blocks away, port facilities on the St Lawrence River.

Ron Vandebeek from Ottawa, Ontario, is here on a frigid February morning hoping to see the rare bird, which was first spotted at the beginning of January.

Meanwhile, its sales rose significantly in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Finland. I hadn’t seen anything about Tesla’s 2026 sales so far, and US sales are impossible to come by at this stage, so I decided to go have a look at how Tesla is doing in various European markets. Using ... [continued]

The post Tesla Down Dramatically in UK, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Kincraig, Badenoch: The Loch Insh Old Kirk is a compelling place, and yet, like the copious wildlife here, it is on the edge of existence

The snow has retreated to the tops of the Cairngorms and the last fragments of ice are crumbling at the edges of Loch Insh. In a muddy landscape, an old white church rises on a knoll on the northern shore. The simple stone building with its bell tower and arched windows dates to 1792, though the site was established by early monks from Iona, probably as far back as the seventh century. Indeed, some sources claim this as the site of longest continuous Christian worship in Scotland.

Those early monks would have built a stone cell here as a dwelling and a base for evangelising. A later chapel was dedicated to St Adamnan – the ninth abbot of Iona and Columba’s biographer – and a rough granite font remains from that time. The monks rang a bell to announce worship and the kirk still holds a bronze bell dating to AD900, one of only five left in Scotland. Resonant with legends, the bell was believed to have the power of healing and was once stolen and carried to Scone Palace – but it flew home, tolling the chapel’s name all the way over the Drumochter Pass.

The radical project is an attempt to preserve wildlife in one of Europe’s most light-polluted countries, but can they persuade local people they will still feel safe?

Two yellowing street lamps cast a pool of light on the dark road winding into the woods outside Mazée village. This scene is typical for narrow countryside roads in Wallonia in the south of Belgium. “Having lights here is logical,” says André Detournay, 77, who has lived in the village for four decades. “I walk here with my dog and it makes me feel safe and gives me some protection from theft.”

Belgium glows like a Christmas decoration at night, as witnessed from space. It is one of the most light-polluted countries in Europe, with the Milky Way scarcely visible except in the most remote areas.

Emissions have plunged 75% since communist times in the birthplace of big oil – but for some the transition has been brutal

Once the frozen fields outside Bucharest have thawed, workers will assemble the largest solar farm in Europe: one million photovoltaic panels backed by batteries to power homes after sunset. But the 760MW project in southern Romania will not hold the title for long. In the north-west, authorities have approved a bigger plant that will boast a capacity of 1GW.

The sun-lit plots of silicon and glass will join a slew of projects that have rendered the Romanian economy unrecognisable from its polluted state when communism ended. They include an onshore windfarm near the Black Sea that for several years was Europe’s biggest, a nuclear power plant by the Danube whose lifetime is being extended by 30 years, and a fast-spreading patchwork of solar panels topping homes and shops across the country.

Exclusive: Analysts say there will be oil spill catastrophe that could be far bigger than Exxon Valdez disaster

Decrepit oil tankers in Iran’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet are a “ticking time bomb”, and it is only a matter of time before there is a catastrophic environmental disaster, maritime intelligence analysts have warned.

Such an oil spill could be far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that released 37,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea, they said.

Donald Trump has a handful of clear areas of focus in his second term as president. One of those is to force old, polluting, expensive fossil fuel power plants on the American people. And he’s taking it to new extremes this week. “Based on reporting, today Donald Trump will give ... [continued]

The post Donald Trump to Give Coal Industry Another Massive Handout — via Department of Defense appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Eight thousand new EV chargers will be installed in Canada at a cost of $84 million. At the moment, Canada has about 35,000 public EV chargers. Canada also supports the transition to zero-emissions vehicles with EV incentives and the country has huge sustainable transition goals, as stated here: “To help ... [continued]

The post 8,000 New EV Chargers To Be Installed In Canada appeared first on CleanTechnica.

The endangerment finding is about to be removed from official US policy, thanks to the tireless efforts of hard core activists.

The post The Four People At The Center Of The Endangerment Finding Storm In The US appeared first on CleanTechnica.

XPENG has aggressively overhauled its Southeast Asian strategy in early 2026, transitioning from a niche importer to a regional powerhouse with localized manufacturing and an integrated infrastructure backbone. Central to this shift is a blueprint established in Indonesia: the integration of world-class ultra-fast charging to eliminate the primary barrier to ... [continued]

The post XPENG Isn’t Just Entering ASEAN—It’s Assembling an Operating System appeared first on CleanTechnica.

US courts, scholars and Democrats are pushing back against the president’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels

Donald Trump’s aggressive drive to boost fossil fuels, including dirty coal, coupled with his administration’s moves to roll back wind and solar power, face mounting fire from courts, scholars and Democrats for raising the cost of electricity and worsening the climate crisis.

Four judges, including a Trump appointee, in recent weeks have issued temporary injunctions against interior department moves to halt work on five offshore wind projects in Virginia, New York and New England, which have cost billions of dollars and are far along in development.

The US startup SOLRITE is opening up a new energy storage opportunity for residential ratepayers to participate in money-saving VPPs, whether or not they have rooftop solar panels.

The post Now Anyone Can Join A VPP, With or Without Rooftop Solar appeared first on CleanTechnica.