More evidence that if you’re losing farmland to solar farms, you’re doing it wrong. The biggest agrivoltaic project in Italy has just opened. It’s called Big Fish, it’s paid for by Amazon, and it has the panels mounted on three metre gantries so that farming can carry on underneath.

It is now more expensive to hire an oil tanker to sail from the US to China than it is to send a rocket into space, according to Bloomberg. It’s $80 million for the tanker, up from $17 million before Trump’s attack on Iran. It’s $74 million for a SpaceX launch.

Brian Obara describes a nice participative design project from Kenya, where architects worked with residents to come up with new ideas for homes that stayed cooler and kept out mosquitos.

Friends of the Earth are hiring a community organiser for Luton, and should you be interested, you have three days left to get a job application in.

Recent highlights

• Mapping heat for a more resilient Brighton
• BlueCity’s circular economy hub
• Can Germany phase out fossil fuels by 2045?

We’re still getting used to that idea, with different interpretations of what that should mean. For the privileged, it means drinking English sparkling wine and congratulating yourself on not being poor. For people with serious health conditions, or working outdoors, or living on the top floors of tower blocks, it’s an altogether more challenging time and can even be deadly. Government statistics show 2,877 heat-associated deaths from the May and June heatwaves.

One place that is taking summer heat seriously is the coastal city of Brighton & Hove, which has just released a street-by-street analysis of heat across a 1km square of downtown. The urban heat island is a well known phenomenon, but if you want to do anything about it you need more detail on where it gets hottest and what the solutions might be. You can’t cool a whole city at once, but if you can identify specific locations that overheat and overlay that with data on where people gather, you can make a difference to citizen’s experience of heat.

The study was carried out by Hannah Dunsby and combined meteorological records for 2022 with LIDAR data that maps streets in fine detail and three dimensions, accounting for building heights, street furniture, trees and plants. They found that during heatwaves, it gets hottest in wide streets, in open spaces, and at transport hubs. This gives us some priorities.

For example, North Street is a busy road with little shade and prone to overheating. It has a series of bus-stops where people have to stand and wait in the heat. Those bus stops are good locations for cooling interventions.

A briefing paper on the research makes a series of recommendations, prioritising cooler spaces, creating shade, and cooling buses. Data mapping can spot homes at risk, and in music to my ears – schools at risk of overheating. I’ve done a lot of work on school overheating this year, including mapping exercises and surveying to identify problem areas of the country. More on that another time, but this kind of detail in specific places is exactly the kind of thing we need to build resilience.

There’s work to be done at the institutional level too, building “the summer equivalent of the winter machinery”. That refers to collaborative approaches that bring together social services, emergency responders, housing and community organisations. This already happens in winter to keep people safe, and we need the same for the summer. Not just for the 40C days that make the news, but the ordinary hot days in a warming city.

BlueCity is a business hub for the circular economy, with 55 different businesses operating out of the building. Because there are so many people researching and innovating around sustainability on one site, there’s no better place for entrepreneurs to set up and work amongst like-minded folks. There are architects, materials researchers, a company working on recycling solar panels. There are small ideas, like the start-up reducing marine micro-plastic with sustainable glitter. At the other end of the scale, another company is working on making Rotterdam container port sustainable.

Some of the businesses are complementary, such as the firm growing mushrooms on the used coffee grounds from the cafe. Another firm develops industrial applications such as dyes made from fungi. A brewer makes beer from purified rainwater collected off the roof, and the excess heat from the brewing vats is piped through to provide heating to the offices.

All of these businesses are working out of a building that is itself spectacularly repurposed. The Tropicana beach pool opened in 1980 with water slides and swimming pools under a big glass dome. It closed and sat empty for a few years before being overhauled in visionary fashion, initially by squatters and formalised over time. Some businesses are in rooms such as the salon or the changing rooms. Others are in spaces created within the dome, using reclaimed windows from building sites elsewhere in the city.

Obviously it’s best seen rather than described, so here’s a video from Biosphere Solar showing us around when they moved in:

Given this kind of track record, all big announcements on climate should be taken with a pinch of salt. But perhaps that’s a smaller pinch than it used to be. Last week Germany published a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. Some parts of that will be easier than others. Electricity generation has already made good progress. The trickier bit is the 36% of final energy consumption that is oil, and the 24% gas. Together that’s 60% of the country’s energy transition still to go, and it’s likely that the easiest stuff happened first. So it is realistic?

One reason for optimism is that the technologies to deliver lower emissions have fallen in price and improved in reliability. Saying you were going to phase out fossil fuels today is a whole lot more feasilble today than it was 15 years ago. Those early runners in 2008 and 2009 were betting on technologies that weren’t yet mature. It was a statement of hopeful intent more than a strategy. At that time the list of unanswered questions was much longer, with no good solutions for energy storage, and electric cars still an expensive sideshow.

Today the price of solar power and onshore wind have fallen so far that they are cheaper than fossil fuels. They’ve moved from alternative energy to the default choice, provided the grid can integrate them fast enough.

Other technologies are being adopted faster too. 2025 was the first year that saw more heat pumps installed in homes in Germany than gas boilers, marking a tipping point towards electric heat. That moment will come for electric cars too, currently running at around a third of new car sales.

Demand has shot up this year as people worry about the price of fuel, which brings us to this graph from the roadmap and another compelling reason for taking the target seriously.

Looking at fossil fuel imports, 95% of gas is imported, and 98% of oil. Renewable energy, on the other hand, is 100% German.

That’s a major dependency, and a clear motivation for the government. Now that other options are possible, the shift to clean energy isn’t just the right thing to do for the environment. It isn’t just a climate change policy. It’s an energy security measure. It always was, but that fact is now highlighted and underlined.

“It is not just extreme weather events around the world that demonstrate how urgently we need to do more to protect the climate,” Environment Minister Carsten Schneider said recently. “If the situation in the Strait of Hormuz determines whether people can still afford their commute to work, that is not a good state of affairs.”

This is another example of how the Trump’s wrecking ball to global climate action has swung and missed. The US may have been set back, but the chaos caused by his war in Iran has spurred everyone else to get off fossil fuels as fast as they can. All imported energy is vulnerable to disruption, and with Trump in charge, your supposed allies are just as likely to wreck your economy as your enemies.

Moving your economy off fossil fuels isn’t a bold and visionary thing to do any more. It’s the obvious thing to do, and more and more countries will do it.

I have heard points like this made by friends and relatives, often on lower incomes and in working class towns, unaware that this is a story told by the richest. Chris Goodall demonstrated that in his Climate Commentary newsletter this week, quoting exactly these points in articles from the Financial Times, the Telegraph and the Spectator. The latter was written by Matt Ridley, a Viscount who has a huge open-cast coal mine on his inherited estate.

In Ridley’s case, the conflict of interest is visible from space. Other wealthy people hide behind their newspapers. They use their tabloid mouthpieces to shape public opinion and protect their investments in the fossil fuelled status quo. Day after day, the drip-feed continues. Every mention of environmentalists is negative – doom-mongers, obsessives, fanatics, cultists. Climate action is never being suggested and rolled out, it’s being pushed, imposed, “rammed down our throats”. Everything is ramped up to hysterical extremes. ‘Net zero is a national suicide pact’, is the headline of the aforementioned Telegraph article.

For Possible, the answer lies in working with communities to deliver climate action that makes a visible difference – lower energy bills, warmer and more comfortable homes, more attractive public spaces. People don’t need to be persuaded on environmental talking points if they can see it working for themselves in their neighbourhood.

We have a similar approach at Ashden, and I’ve written before about projects like Energise Barnsley that are all about showcasing solutions for ordinary people. In my own work, I get to pursue practical climate action in schools and demonstrate the difference in energy savings, heatwave resilience, better playgrounds and cleaner air.

As Possible say, “climate action makes life better.” I wouldn’t be working on it if I didn’t wholeheartedly agree, and it’s why I’m a supporter of Possible.

Here’s their video:

End Times Fascism deserves some kind of award for the most depressing book title of the year. I’ll admit that my first reaction was ‘pass’, but I read a truly eye-watering book earlier this year called Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself. Written by historian Florian Huber, it is compiled almost entirely from diary entries by ordinary Germans as the reality of the Nazi project dawns on them. If there’s one lesson to draw from that era it’s that you don’t look away when fascism is on the rise.

A lot of commentators have tied themselves in knots over the idea of fascism. In some circles it’s worse to imply someone is a fascist than to actually be fascist. Klein and Taylor helpfully reset the conversation by framing it as a recurring response to crisis. It’s not something we ‘go back to’, but a phenomenon that spirals through history. It re-emerges in different forms and it doesn’t look the same each time.

“If we are waiting for soldiers goose-stepping in formation, we’ll miss the venture capitalists and their automonous weapons. If we are looking for yellow stars, we’ll miss the facial-recognition databases and the algorithmic threat ratings.”

In a helpful re-framing, they argue that revolutions are an uprising of the weak, who hope to transform society. Fascism is the revolt of the strong. Their aim is not to transform but to defend – whether that is nation, family, religion, or existing wealth and power structures. They weaponise existing discontent, create alliances around it and turn it against a scapegoat.

This is a fabulous distraction technique for capitalists. People feel disenfranchised and excluded, but with the right story that anger and resentment can be directed downwards. The problem is not the billionaires but the immigrants and the Muslims, the trans folk, the weak, the woke and the empathetic.

Our present version of fascism, the book suggests, is an alliance between religious, tech and nationalist interests, and “every part of its machinery is built for profit.” While the people driving it aren’t more dangerous than some historical figures we could name, the world itself is a more dangerous place. It’s a world with nuclear weapons, with AI, with gigantic inequality, and in the throes of an ecological crisis that can only be solved with global cooperation.

To make matters worse, there are people who have not just given up on fixing this world, but want to accelerate its end.

There is a strand of Christian theology that teaches that Jesus will return to earth in an apocalytic reckoning. For those that hold this view literally, news of violence and catastrophe can be interpreted as evidence of the end times. It’s a small step to move from mourning disaster to celebrating it as prophecy fulfilled. Another small step, and you can argue for instigating the war and disaster that will precipitate the messianic age. As the book demonstrates, there are people in the highest offices of the White House and the Pentagon who make this argument. See also Israel, where Netanyahu’s campaign against Gaza is officially called ‘The War of Redemption’ and which uses an AI targetting system called ‘The Gospel’.

There is no reason to work for peace if the better world lies on the other side of Armaggedon, and religious extremists aren’t the only ones pursuing that logic. The tech industry believes a version of this too. Sometimes the alliance is direct. Peter Thiel – founder of Palantir, AI partner to the Israeli military – gives lectures on the end times and says Greta Thunberg represents the antichrist. This would be hilarious if it weren’t exactly the kind of sleight of hand redirection we should be looking out for.

As Klein and Taylor describe, there’s a strong messianic streak to the tech industry’s AI fervour, which has “more in common with an ecstatic religious faith than with recognisable corporate projections based on science, engineering or markets.” Some openly describe the creation of super-intelligence as summoning a digital god. This god will usher in a new age of abundance, which may well lie on the other side of chaos and destruction. Just as the faithful are raptured from the apocalypse, the elites will ride out the destruction on private islands, luxury bunkers, floating cities or offworld space colonies.

For us mortals, largely disposable in this vision of the future, a natural reaction is to defend what we’ve got. The result is a rising nationalism, militarised borders, and culture wars against minorities of all kinds.

It’s not the only response, and the book closes with an alternative vision of the future. Fascism may spiral through history, but so do movements towards justice and cooperation. The people of Minnesota pushed back against fascist forces on their streets, showing us that solidarity and resistance is possible. A kind and inclusive politics isn’t naive and doomed to fail, as Zohran Mamdani demonstrated in New York, and Hannah Spencer showed us in Manchester. The story told here is “not one of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed.”

Where others see an escape to a technological or religious paradise, we can practice a politics of ‘hereness’, which has just as much a claim to the future. In a pleasing echo of this website’s title, they close with an appeal to a “proudly earthbound” politics – let us live on earth as if we mean to stay.

• End Times Fascism is available from Earthbound Books

They’re running for the sixth time and its probably the sixth time I’ve mentioned them, but don’t miss the list of winners of Covering Climate Now’s Climate Journalism Awards.

India’s supreme court ruled this year that walking safely in the street is a constitutional right, prompting a new focus on pedestrianisation and questioning the centrality of cars in urban design.

It doesn’t have a presence in the UK as far as I can see, but the Stellantis car manufacturing group has a circular economy car dismantling plant in Italy that supplies refurbished spare parts across Europe. You used to have to visit a junkyard and hope for the best for that sort of thing.

Nothing to do with sustainability, but I love to seek out good books from a wide range of perspectives. I read books by authors from 22 different countries last year, and so I like the look of World Editions’ Read the World A-Z of translated novels.

Recent highlights

• How Fyffes is adopting regenerative agriculture
• Learning to live as a hot country: Madagascar
• Book review: Lifehouse, by Adam Greenfield

Their goal is to roll out their Regenerative Agriculture Framework across all their banana and pineapple farms by 2030. By leading from the front with their own farms, they hope to model sustainable practice across their wider supply chain, so that 40% of their fruit is grown with this approach by 2035.

In practice, protecting the soil on their banana and pineapple farms will involve minimising mechanical disturbance, using cover crops and leaving organic matter on the ground rather than clearing it. This returns nutrients to the soil and reduces the need for chemical inputs, while slowing evaporation and saving water.

Regenerative practice is more agnostic about chemicals than organic farming, which attempts to get rid of them entirely. Fyffes will be looking at using fertilisers and pesticides far less, and using them smarter. This can be paired with more advanced technologies, such as weed control drones that inspect pineapple farms and target herbicides exactly where they are needed. This replaces routine blanket spraying of plantations, and reduces chemical use by 80%.

Smarter irrigation can reduce water use by delivering water when it is needed and where it is needed, and using simple automation such as pausing schedules when rain is expected. Every Fyffes plantation now has a weather station and real-time monitoring.

While there have been some successes already, all of this is a long term project. The targets are for all their farms to adopt the framework, but actually working to the framework will take much longer. The first priority is to set baselines, identify promising techniques and pilot them. The full roll-out will take many years.

Big corporations have often been greeted with scepticism when making these sorts of announcements, and Fyffes is certainly a company with a few skeletons in its old colonial closet. What’s different about such strategies today is that they are actually a matter of survival in a changing climate. A regenerative agriculture strategy isn’t a nice thing to have or a bit of PR gloss. It’s how you safeguard fruit production at a time of increasing heat, disrupted rainfall and erratic global markets. It’s sustainability at its most literal: if you want to still be selling bananas and pineapples in ten years’ time, you’re going to have to learn to farm in new and improved ways.

• You can read Fyffe’s regenerative agriculture framework here.

It’s been a recurring theme of the summer. Some have said it with a concern for justice and care for the vulnerable. Others have said it as a dismissal of climate change and the suggestion that we should enjoy the heat, but both sides agree that things have changed and we need to live differently.

I have certain hesitations over the idea that Britain must ‘think like a hot country‘. It’s not that simple. Hot countries don’t need to think about winter. Britain needs to learn to cope with extremes, and that’s a different challenge. That said, I’m interested in the idea of what we can learn from hot countries because I grew up in one. I’ve often noticed how different my own attitudes to heat and shade are to my fellow Brits. For example, I took my children to a theme park this summer on a day when it hit 36C. Out of the thousands of people there, I was the only person with an umbrella to shade us while we queued for the rides. Even a hat seemed pretty much optional.

My understanding of heat and shade comes from growing up in Madagascar, and so that is where my mind goes first when thinking about what we could learn here in the UK. Let’s see what can learn from some commonplace features of a Malagasy home.

Like everything on the island, Madagascar is doing it’s own thing when it comes to architecture. The first settlers came from the East rather than mainland Africa, and so traditional homes in Madagascar owe more to Indonesian building heritage than African. In the capital and the highlands, this was then blended with Western traditions and techniques.

The example on the left is a common pattern, and my walk to school as a child took me past neighbours houses that looked similar. The ‘Trano Gasy’ is rectangular, with a sloping roof of thatch, clay tiles or metal sheeting. Windows tend to be small and are shuttered, which keeps out the heat. Most people outside of the cities wouldn’t have access to glass anyway.

The bricks are dug from the same earth the building stands on, making the whole thing highly sustainable. Mud has the added advantage of being a dense material that offers real thermal mass. It heats up slowly and then releases that heat at night, helping to maintain temperatures inside.

A distinctive feature is the line of square pillars supporting a balcony and a canopy above it. What this does is create deep shade on the sunny side of the building, and it also creates an airflow across the facade. Sometimes the balcony is screened off to create a more private space that is neither indoors nor outdoors, like these examples. Balcony railings are often brightly coloured or elaborately carved, adding personality and visual interest.

Since much of my work on overheating is in schools, let’s look at this architectural style in a school context, and the Lycee Jule Ferry. There’s a bit more of a colonial flavour here, with some extra wooden panelling creating further shade. Students can move between classrooms out of the direct sun, with deep verandas instead of the hallways and corridors usually found in UK schools.

Malagasy designers continue to use this pattern, such as the up-market version in the header above from the architectural practice Filatex.

There is little point in replicating a house like this in the UK, where our context is entirely different. But for certain periods of the year, our climate is beginning to feel distinctly tropical. Our homes aren’t designed for that, and so it’s worth looking closely at homes that are.

Would it look like to adopt some ideas from the Trano Gasy? How can we use thermal mass better? Can we bring in deep shade in the summer without compromising on winter light?

In the coming weeks I’ll write about architectural traditions in other hot countries, as we investigate how to adapt our homes for a warmer world.

India’s stepwells are a fascinating lost technology and beautiful structures in their own right, so I’m always delighted to see them getting coverage. Here Ankit Mishra writes about how traditional water harvesting methods are being rediscovered, for BBC Futures.

Oil use in China has fallen 9% this year, with the rise of electric vehicles and the instability from Trump’s flailing about in Iran. As Inside Climate News point out, that 9% is equivalent to the UK’s entire oil consumption to date this year.

Also on the oil front, some steps forward in electrofuels recently, one of the possible approaches to decarbonising the tricky aviation sector. Often abbreviated to eSAF (Electro Sustainable Aviation Fuels), it’s been used in a commercial flight for the first time in the US, and a UK start-up called Zero Petroleum has just validated a hydrogen-based ‘replica’ of standard jet fuel.

The summer issue of the Zero Carbon Luton newsletter came out last week, with details of some space-based climate science being conducted from a business park in Luton, and also where to spot highland cattle on a walk this autumn.

Recent highlights

• What are the alternatives to air conditioning?
• The Electrotech Revolution
• Who leads the world in carbon drawdown from forests?

There is no big agenda against air conditoning, though there are some reasons to be cautious about it. It isn’t common in the UK and it would be expensive and disruptive to retrofit it everywhere. Since it moves heat outside the house, A/C in densely populated areas raises outdoor temperatures for your neighbours, which is why installations are restricted in some places.

It also uses a lot of energy if everyone’s running their A/C at once on a hot day, putting extra strain on the grid. That’s fine if we’re using solar on a sunny day, but where the grid is still gas or coal, that creates a vicious circle: burning more fossil fuels to escape the consequences of burning fossil fuels.

Hence the scepticism around A/C as a silver bullet solution to overheating, and why some green campaigners warn against it.

As always, what we need most is nuance and honest conversations, though I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. Air conditioning is a technology for managing internal building temperatures, same as a heating system. The more efficient the building is, the less you need those technologies.

If you can design a well insulated building that keeps the heat in during the winter, you don’t need much heating. If you design a building to keep the heat out in summer, you don’t need any extra cooling technologies.

You wouldn’t turn your heating on and then let all the warmth out through your windows in winter. And you shouldn’t depend on air conditioning while letting the heat in through your windows in summer.

In other words, if we build homes well and live in them sensibly, we might not need much air conditioning. If it turns out some buildings can’t do without it, or that some people need cooling more than others, then let’s fit A/C and not be absolutist about it. But a lot of us might not need it. We can do simpler and cheaper things first, and we’ll save a fortune if we do.

That’s my view, and the approach I suggest to schools that overheat as well. DW Planet A made a video on this subject recently that’s well worth a watch. I’ve mentioned some of these things recently myself, but here’s their take on what we could be doing instead of installing air conditioning.

If this doesn’t seem entirely likely, perhaps you live in the global north, where we get less sun and have the winter darkness to contend with. A glance at a global map of solar potential will tell you that we are the exception.

Drop a projection of global population growth next to it, and you’ll see that we become increasingly exceptional. The fastest growing parts of the world have much greater solar resources than we do in gloomy places like the UK. Every passing year sees an increase in the percentage of the world’s population who will be able to draw all or most of their power from the sun.

With cheap solar power come a series of logical choices that make the most of it, from domestic decisions such as cooking on electric, to electrified industrial processes and infrastructure. Electric vehicles become the obvious choice for both public and private transport.

The energy thinktank Ember summarise this set of technologies as ‘electrotech‘, and argue that it adds up to a historic shift in human development. The first revolution in human energy was the discovery of settled agriculture. Fossil fuels and the industrial revolution was the second, and renewable energy represents a third.

This revolution has been accelerated by digital technologies and “inherits its momentum”, as Ember put it. It can springboard off the rapid advances in battery technology, or the efficiencies made possible through smart meters and internet connected devices. That momentum will be all important if we’re hoping to avoid catastrophic climate change. The Electrotech Revolution will need to move a whole lot faster than previous shifts in energy.

Two things worth noting in the graph above, and Ember have a nice slide-deck if you want to explore more around either of them.

First, there’s a pattern in the history: all these previous revolutions ultimately depend on the sun. Even fossil fuels are the buried legacy of ancient sunlight. In that sense, the story of human progress in energy has been a matter of using the sun more deliberately and more directly. Solar photovoltaic technologies feel like a natural progression in that story.

Second, each of these steps represents an increase in the amount of energy available to humans. This runs counter to the prevailing narrative around the green transition, which is often characterised as using less and saying no. Right-wing opponents of climate policy endlessly reinforce this, and the green movement has traditionally been structured to oppose bad things rather than champion good things. Solar power offers an opportunity to reset. It invites us to say yes. It’s about abundance, because more sunlight falls on the surface of the planet than we can ever need.

If the postmodernists taught us anything it’s to be wary of metanarratives, and I won’t be hanging my hat on the Electrotech Revolution as the solution to all our problems. Other systems are in play beyond energy technology. What I find hopeful however is the growing number of people and organisations who have spotted that something is happening in renewable energy, and solar in particular. We are in the early stages of a process that will unfold over decades. In time, it may turn out to be as significant and transformative as the industrial revolution before it.