Interesting Ideas

Many small-scale landowners now include conservation measures alongside everyday farming. But progress is precarious, and the threat of guerrilla violence and poverty remain whichever candidate wins

Like most people settling in the area, Pablo Peña was seeking to escape violence and make a living from a patch of land when he moved to Guaviare in central Colombia. While his life has been strongly marked by conflict and deforestation, more than 30 years on he now focuses on community work and conservation.

Peña first visited Guaviare during his mandatory military service. Years later, in 1994, he settled down to farm in Guaviare’s Calamar, a town in a remote corner of the Amazon.

Frome, Somerset: This much-maligned midsummer menace has few friends among humans, but look closely and you might find an orgy of eating and mating

Eyes smarting, throat tickling, nostrils dog-wet, I pick my way along a thready footpath up the combe, only half-prepared for the next irritation. Nettles, I am watching you. But not well enough it seems, for a sneaky one hidden under the skirts of encroaching grasses and umbellifers grazes the back of my bare calf. It induces that tingling somewhere between pain and pleasure – one that quickly develops into a needling throb.

It is hard to love a nettle. This much-loathed plant may be one of the first that many children learn to identify, for their own protection. It has a secondhand look, with wrinkly, crinkly jagged hearts for leaves. It has no sheen; it does not shine. Near-invisible fine hairs on the upper surfaces give the dulled green a dusty, soiled appearance.

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.

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.

London Tree Ring project aims to create corridors of plant and animal life around the city to strengthen its biodiversity

Harry Ewing is heaping branches and foliage from the forest floor on to a dead hedge, reinforcing the protective circle around his newly planted trees in Hadley Wood, north London. He is in a glade created by a fallen oak that was previously overrun with thick bramble.

“I feel very happy – the trees are growing already. It’s really nice seeing it when it starts,” says Ewing.

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.

The energy-as-a-service company Budderfly has partnered with Viridi to add battery energy storage systems at some of the commercial sites it manages. Budderfly provides energy-efficient equipment, measuring and billing technology, virtual power plants, smart technology monitoring, and more. Typically, battery energy storage systems are installed in smaller numbers, so it ... [continued]

The post 100 Battery Energy Storage Systems To Be Installed At Commercial Sites appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Latin America’s giant is waking up. For long a regional leader (ranking consistently in the fourth position in our region), Brazil has shown long periods of relative stagnation followed by sudden bursts of growth triggered by the entrance of new, more competitive models in the country. However, this trend (constant ... [continued]

The post Brazil EV Sales Report: 153% Growth in May Brings Latin America’s Largest Market to 13.5% EV Market Share! appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought- and flood-prevention measures

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.

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.

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.

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.

xAI is hiding behind the skirts of Uncle Sam and the DOJ to dodge its legal obligations not to poison people with its activities.

The post DOJ Rushes To Help xAI Pollute The Skies Over Mississippi 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.

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.

Nearly every indicator of climate change is flashing red. But we still hold the tools available to bring the planet back into balance

The ocean is running a fever. In 2025, the number of days of marine heatwaves – prolonged spells when the sea turns abnormally, dangerously warm – was more than triple what it was in the early 1990s.

These are not abstract statistics. A severe and persistent marine heatwave bleaches coral reefs, strips away the kelp forests that shelter young fish, empties fishing grounds and – if occurring frequently – can tip whole ecosystems past the point of recovery.

Karina Von Schuckmann is an IGCC author and senior adviser of Mercator Ocean International

‘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.

For most of the 20th century, a simple assumption worked well enough for energy forecasting: when economies grew, fuel demand grew with them. More people, more housing, more vehicles, more factories, more roads, more ports, more airports, more concrete, more steel, more coal, oil, and gas. The relationship was not ... [continued]

The post Economic Growth No Longer Guarantees Fuel Growth appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this

US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.

Yet while elite attention on climate has waned, even among some previously vocal Democrats who have wound back on criticism of the fossil fuels that are overheating our planet, the American public remains concerned about the climate crisis and continues to favour action to deal with it, according to experts and polling.

Clinton Monchuk, executive director of Farm and Food Care Saskatchewan, is trying to persuade Canadian farmers to share more information about their growing practices in order to dispel misinformation that is circulating on social media. Monchuk states, “It’s just telling the truth and being transparent about what we do so ... [continued]

The post Is Being Transparent The Best Approach To Fighting Food Disinformation? appeared first on CleanTechnica.