11,103 new cars were registered in Norway last month. Just 31 of them were petrol, 87 diesel and 33 hybrid. That’s a new record of 98.6% electric.

If you’re in London over the summer, Kulpreet Singh’s exhibition Indelible Black Marks looks striking and thought provoking (image above). An artist and farmer, his work reflects on the connections between climate and agriculture, the tradition of stubble burning, and is at the Hayward Gallery from mid June.

Luton folks, Friends of the Earth are hosting a free screening of the family film Savages on Sunday afternoon at the Library theatre, with craft activities to follow. Details here.

California’s current battery storage capacity is equivalent to 12 nuclear power stations,

Recent highlights

• How South Korea cut food waste
• On AI and the railroads
• Book review: Street, Palace, Square, by Jan-Werner Müller

Some countries have been well ahead of us on food waste, and South Korea is perhaps the world’s most ambitious nation on the topic. They recycle over 95% of food waste, thanks to a policy that makes complete sense but is hard to imagine politically in the UK right now – pay as you throw waste disposal.

The idea dates back to the mid-1990s, when Korea was struggling to find enough landfill sites for its rapidly growing cities and their consumers. Its solution was to pass new rules so that citizens could only throw trash away in official plastic bags, pricing in the cost of disposal and making it visible to households.

Needless to say, once people had an incentive to sort their rubbish properly and remove anything that could be recycled, they did. Recycling levels rose and total waste levels fell by a quarter over the next decade, inspiring the government to extend the scheme to food waste from 2013. The country went from 2.6% of food waste recycled in 1996 to just short of 100% today.

As households already do with their main bin bags, food waste has to be put into official bags, priced by local authorities. Residents of apartment blocks have a more convenient system: a food waste disposal machine that charges by weight. It’s charged at around 7p a kilo, and households scan a RFID chip to unlock the door and add the charge to their apartment’s service fees.

Seoul has 27,289 of these RFID units across its apartment blocks, covering over 80% of flats. Food waste in Seoul has fallen by a quarter since these were introduced.

There are fines for non-compliance, but the system mainly relies on people doing the right thing because it’s easy. If you have a RFID machine in your apartment block, you can drop off food waste whenever you like. If you’re using the bag system, there are daily collections and so you don’t need to worry about putting waste out on the right day. Councils have tested and refined their official waste bags to make them easy to use – the ones in the header are from the city of Seongnam, where they made them wider, friendlier and with ties and handles.

Once collected, the food waste is processed for useful things – it’s been illegal to send food waste to landfill since 2005, so there is a well established supply chain. Much of it is dried and compressed into chicken feed pellets. Some goes to compost and some to biogas.

In the UK we now have recycling and food waste collection, along with stiff taxes on landfill to discourage it. The targets and penalties are aimed at councils rather than households. There’s no penalty for not bothering with sorting your waste, as some of my neighbours make clear on a weekly basis. Everyone pays the same, so there’s no incentive for reducing household waste. I think there’s a good case to be made for a pay-as-you-throw model, though unfortunately there are historical reasons why we are unlikely to see it in the UK in the foreseeable future.

There was a moment when pay-as-you-throw might have come to Britain. In 2007 the Labour government of the time was discussing it, prompting opposition parties and the tabloids to howl pitifully at these proposed ‘bin taxes’. Conservative politicians such as Eric Pickles spread scaremongering stories about the ‘bin police’, trash burning in the streets, and how people would have to lock up their bins at night to prevent paying for their neighbour’s rubbish.

None of these concerns are anywhere to be seen in South Korea, where you pay your contribution when you buy your bin bags and don’t worry about your neighbours. But once the idea was framed in this way, it became politically toxic. The incoming coalition government made a big populist play of ‘scrapping’ waste charges even though they didn’t exist yet (they defunded the pilot schemes, is what they actually did) and that’s the last we’ve heard of it. But it’s a good idea that others might want to use.

The Wall Street Journal points out that in GDP terms this is vastly more expensive than the moon landings. The most comparable figure is the 1850s build-out of America’s railways.

That prompts an interesting compare and contrast exercise. If you’ll excuse a somewhat freewheeling thought experiment, let’s consider the history and legacy of that railroad construction and our current rush into AI.

The first railway construction project in America began in 1827, kicking off a boom that was to carry on for fifty years. It was transformational. Railways opened up the vast interior of the continent, creating new opportunities on an almost unimaginable scale. New towns and cities emerged along the rail network as people moved in search of those opportunities. The railways reached into the West and eventually delivered the first trans-continental lines, while linking up the South played a role in post-Civil War reconstruction.

If AI is drawing in a similar level of capital, should we expect something equally transformative? The kind of movement of money will have consequences, one way or another. Will AI play a similar role in connecting humanity and enabling greater communication? Or will it prove divisive, exacerbating our existing struggle to communicate across difference?

The railways were more than infrastructure. They laid down patterns for America’s economic development, from breadbasket regions to coal mining towns. The network enabled millions of new jobs in these expanding sectors, and it hired lots of people directly as well. The railroads were second only to agriculture as a source of employment.

There’s no question that AI is setting economic priorities. 61% of all global venture capital went to AI last year – a striking distortion of the market, to my mind. And we’re only at the beginning of what AI will mean for jobs. There will be a few jobs in AI directly, and many more made obsolete by intelligent machines. Since wages are the main way that economic growth is shared, will AI be a boom that leaves out the majority of working people?

Creating a railway network across the continent was also important in nation building. Passenger travel and mail, and goods from across the country, made geographically distant communities visible to each other, with a growing interdependence through trade. The railroads prompted new institutions and organisational structures. The very first federal agency was created to regulate trade between states. The coordination of rail timetables led to the formalising of America’s time zones.

AI, on the other hand, is likely to play a complicated role at the state level. On the one hand it could erode the power of governments and nations, as corporations and their machines increase their influence. On the other, more authoritarian governments are already using AI to track and control their citizens, and this could increase to dystopian levels in the years to come.

America’s railroads were not for everyone, it should be noted. The railroad was a colonial project. The government granted millions of acres of land that wasn’t theirs to give, carving up indigenous territories and disrupting their way of life. When native Americans resisted the railroad, the companies could call upon the army to respond with greater violence, and some of the worst massacres of American history occurred during this time. The railway industrialised the culling of the bison that the Great Plains tribes depended on, driving both the bison and the tribes into extinction.

Who will AI exclude? Madhumita Murgia’s book Code Dependent powerfully demonstrates how AI can make things worse for those at the margins. And as human capabilities expand, the gap between rich and poor could widen in unprecendented ways. There are still hundreds of millions of people waiting for access to electricity, billions without internet access. Will AI entrench poverty and exclusion, or will it empower people to catch up?

As for violence, we already know that AI will serve military power. The Pentagon has signed deals with all the major AI firms. Amazon, Google and Microsoft and more are all licensing their AI tech to the US military. The nature of these deals is classified, but under the leadership of the warmongering Pete Hegseth, it seems highly likely that it will be a matter of shoot first and ask questions about accountability later- or never.

America’s rail network was unashamedly capitalist, hoovering up investment funding from America’s elites and investors across the Atlantic. Fortunes were made, and as lines consolidated it handed extraordinary monopoly power to a handful of winners. Bearded Victorians like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould and J P Morgan became known as ‘robber barons’ for their cut-throat business practices.

We already know who the big figures in AI are – folks like Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai. Some of them, like Elon Musk or Palantir’s Peter Thiel, are well on their way to robber baron status, unafraid to use their economic clout to undermine democracy and twist politics to their own ends.

The railroad was a massive money-making machine, but fortunes were also lost. First in wild speculation, later in duplicated infrastructure and unfair competition, and finally in the rise of roads, oil and trucking.

A lot of people will lose money in AI too. Fears about an AI bubble may have subsided recently, but the reality is that not every bet on AI is going to pay off. Companies cramming unnecessary AI features into their software may find them hard to sustain. And if the dream of general artificial intelligence proves ultimately impossible, it could turn out to be one of the deepest and most consequential money pits in economic history.

That’s more questions than answers in the end, which I suppose is unavoidable at this stage in the journey. What we can say is that this kind of investment is historically significant, that the change it drives will be profound, and that there will be winners and losers. Perhaps by being aware of the history of technological change, we can be more alert to the risks and the injustices, and act to keep them to a minimum.

Teacher friends, if you’re a subscriber to Myatt & Co resources, they’ve just published a guide to using my book Climate Change is Racist in the school geography curriculum. Called Climate Change and the Lives it Shapes, it’s part of their KS3 The Ambitious Years project, it’s written by Darryl Sinclair, and it’s excellent.

The IPSOS Mobility Report asked people in 31 countries what their favourite mode of transport was. Most said private car. In Britain it was walking, one of only three places where that was the case, alongside Argentina and Ireland. There’s a good case for active transport infrastructure and walkable neighbourhoods there.

Last year I wrote about the National Emergency Briefing on climate and nature. The event has now been distilled into a shorter film that can be screened by local communities, schools, churches, etc. Have a look and see if there’s a screening near you, or help to organise one yourself.

The Postgrowth Institute has announced its cohort of fellows for 2026, and includes a whole range of interesting voices on postgrowth. Take a look if you want to see what postgrowth thinking looks like from Morrocco, Thailand or Jamaica, for example.

Just in case you’re in the market for reading material, Bookshop.org has a £250 gift-card giveaway this weekend. If you buy a book from Earthbound Books, you’ll be entered into the draw. Don’t forget we do e-books as well.

Recent highlights

• Book review: Street, Palace, Square, by Jan-Werner Müller
• The long road to reducing Britain’s plastic waste
• Polestar’s progress on a zero carbon car

Human lives, both individually and collectively, unfold in a built environment. Generally speaking we don’t get to shape that environment all that much. Most of us don’t get to design our own homes, let alone streets and public spaces. Unless you have a particular interest in architecture or urban design, you might never really think about the built environment all that much. It’s just there as a backdrop to other things.

When you do stop to think about it, it doesn’t take long to realise that the built environment is political. Everything ever built is an expression of power in some way, because building needs resources and labour and funds. The nature of that power is reflected in what we build, in who has access and who belongs, in who is served, in what sorts of behaviours are enabled or precluded.

Taking this view, Princeton politics professor Jan-Werner Müller invites us to consider the connections between the built environment and democracy. How are democratic ideas rendered in buildings and spaces? In turn, how do buildings and spaces shape our politics?

The book begins in Dhaka and the Parliament of Bangladesh, which is housed in a striking building by architect Louis Kahn. It looks like a medieval castle with cut away geometric shapes, suggesting strength and commitment, but also openness. Müller compares this ‘citadel’ approach with other visions for democratic buildings. Some want a monumental statement or a show of power. Others think that the values of democracy are best expressed by functional and modest buildings, perhaps even boring ones, like the almost apologetic structures that are home to the EU bureaucracy.

For others, government buildings best represent democracy by harking back to ancient Greece. Usually this is a visual reference, a matter of sticking pillars on everything, rather than an actual attempt to replicate Athenian public spaces. As Müller explains, these were diverse, combining large spaces for listening to public debate, to smaller arches where citizens could hold semi-private conversations. It’s fair to say that nobody has anything like an Athenian democracy today – especially since positions of power were chosen by lot – but it still gets referenced. Donald Trump is a fan, and signed an executive order last year to “make classical architecture the preferred architectural style” for federal buildings.

Which begs a question that Müller raises: can a building lie? Can you create the illusion of shared power, transparency and accountability through your buildings, while doing nothing of the sort in practice? He looks at Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romanian ‘People’s House’ as an example. It’s the heaviest and most expensive building in the world, displaced 40,000 residents of central Bucharest to build and was home to a notorious dictatorship – but it’s still ‘the People’s House’.

As the name suggests, the book isn’t just about buildings. It’s also interested in the politics of the street, where ordinary people often express their views in one way or another. Public space dictates the kinds of protests and movements that will arise, Müller suggests. He compares the politics of streets and of squares. Streets are fine for protests, where the main purpose is to flow through the city and display your message. Prefigurative politics, like Occupy or the Arab Spring, needs squares and larger gathering spaces.

If you have an interest in architecture or democracy, or better yet both, there’s a lot to enjoy in Street, Palace, Square. It’s full of insights and observations, such as the difference between a street and a road, the nuance of designs that “dignify, but not glorify”, or whether online spaces can ever take the place of physical ones. There are examples from all over the world, from Tahir Square to Saudi Arabia’s The Line, to modernist Brasilia. It’s not prescriptive, and Müller insists there’s no true democratic style. Instead, we get the benefit of history, and some hints at how we might create and curate spaces that support better decision making, and that tell people they matter.

• Street, Palace, Square is available from Earthbound Books.

Carbon in Context is a new comparison tool from Project Drawdown. Tonnes of gas is an unintuitive way of measuring anything, so stick the figures into the search box and it’ll tell you what that means in a variety of more tangible metrics, such as cups of coffee or a Golden Gate Bridge worth of steel.

The Japanese Meteorological Agency has held a survey to decide what to call the 40C+ temperatures the country has been experiencing during a record breaking hot summer, settling on the term kokushobi.

There aren’t a great number of people who would be interested in reading about changes in China’s plastic packaging standards as the country shifts towards a circular economy. But you know who you are and I’m with you.

After pitching multiple fiction and non-fiction book ideas over the last couple of years and getting nowhere, I appear to have something that’s generating some early interest. Anything other than a straight no is worth pursuing at a time of polycrisis in publishing, so that’s taking priority with my writing time at the moment and hence fewer blog posts while I finish a second draft.

Recent highlights

• Polestar’s progress on a zero carbon car
• The emerging story of citizenship
• The invisible leaders on clean energy

Their new sustainability report for 2025 shows that they have reduced emissions per car by 31% since 2020. The first step to making this kind of claim is to conduct a full cradle-to-grave assessment of the car’s emissions, which they have done. This is all publicly available, part of their plan to be “the world’s most transparent car company”. Since others don’t do this, it’s really useful for understanding the embodied carbon of a car, and also where the carbon comes from in the process:

Looking at the full lifecycle of the car, Polestar could claim responsibility for around 10% – that light grey 2.7 tonnes in the middle. That’s the manufacturing and delivery, and the bit that is most obviously theirs to deal with. Lots of sustainability initiatives do this bit and no more. It’s rarer to take on the full range, which Polestar do.

As the graph shows, the biggest source of carbon is in the materials supply chain. Polestar have a network of partners that they are working with to reduce emissions. I mentioned some of them in the previous article, including pioneers in green steel production and electric mining trucks. As well as low carbon materials from responsible suppliers, the other option is to use recycled materials whenever possible.

The Polestar 5, their latest model and therefore the beneficiary of all their research to date, has an aluminium chassis and body. 13% is recycled, and 83% comes from smelters using renewable energy. This cuts 14 tonnes of carbon per car when compared to new aluminium from China.

Using carefully sourced materials also reduces incidences of human rights abuses in the supply chain. Polestar is using 50% recycled cobalt in its batteries.

It’s not all good news. Wanting to do things properly has proved to be slower than anticipated, and so the original target of 2030 has been pushed back to 2035. That doesn’t surprise me. I didn’t think 2030 was possible. They insist that the delay has made them more determined rather than less, and last year the company opened Mission 0 House to bring all their science and engineering under one roof. As CEO Michael Lohscheller says, “our ambition is simple: to build the most sustainable cars in the world, without ever compromising on performance or design.”

That’s the kind of thing I like to hear from auto industry executives, and I hope to be able to check in again on their journey towards a low carbon, circular economy car.

“How I long for a different story,” they sing on the track Shipwrecked. Success is about competition and dominance, say the verses, a ‘Lord of the Flies’ existence of fighting for ourselves and grabbing what we can. Then the bridge crashes in to tell us that “this is what we’re told, it’s a stranglehold, it’s a lie!”

I noted the lyrics because I’d just read exactly the same point earlier that day, with less shouting and thrashing, in John Alexander’s book Citizens.

The core argument of his book is that we are in the midst of a long cultural shift from consumers to citizens. We could call it a paradigm shift, or an emerging mindset. It’s already well underway, both driven by and responding to changes in culture and technology.

In the current paradigm, we are addressed as consumers and encouraged to think of ourselves as such. We expect to be served, and organisations see us as a means to profit. We are individualistic and materialistic, entitled and ready to assert our rights.

As Alexander points out, the emergence of the consumer way of thinking has a historical context and there were useful things about it. We can contrast it to the dominant mindset that preceded it, which saw people as subjects. In such as system people are dutiful, obedient and subservient to a higher authority. They know their place and get what they’re due. This too has a historical context and isn’t something for us to look down on, but times change and society evolves.

A new evolution is underway as consumerism gives way to citizenship. In this new paradigm, power is exercised together. It is participative and creative, recognising our interdependence with nature and with each other. Alexander sums up the contrasting three worldviews in this table, also available from his organisation the New Citizen Project.

Cultural shifts aren’t neat and orderly, and elements of all three of these co-exist. There is a push and pull, movements and counter-movements. Citizens was published post-Covid and pre-Trump 2.0, a distinct time when things might have looked more optimistic. But paradigm shifts unfold over decades and centuries. If the old model isn’t working – and the current polycrisis suggests it isn’t – then the shift is inevitable. It can be delayed and obscured, but it can’t be stopped.

Like all such broad theories, it’s best not to lean too hard on it. A citizen mindset won’t solve everything, but it might be our direction of travel, and the alternative story that Enter Shikari are looking for.

According to this new list, the countries leading the world on low carbon energy are Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and France. Then they round out the top ten with Finland, New Zealand, Brazil, Denmark and Slovenia. By their reckoning it is Northern Europe that are the shining light of progress here.

I won’t argue with Iceland at the top there, because they have 100% low carbon electricity. But I have questions about the rest of that top ten. Drawing on Our World in Data, whose map appears below, it could look like this:

• Iceland, Albania, Bhutan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Paraguay are all tied for first place on 100% clean energy.
• The rest of the top ten would read Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Namibia.

New Zealand are doing a fine job of rolling out low carbon energy, but they don’t come anywhere near the top ten with their 85%. Zambia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Eswatini, Sierra Leone, Belize, Costa Rica and several others all have higher percentages of low carbon power. They are invisible here, whitewashed out of the story.

To be fair to the headline writer, a high percentage of clean energy on the grid doesn’t automatically qualify as global leadership – there are places that are coasting on legacy hydropower projects and failing to expand energy access. We can hardly call DR Congo a world leader when four out of five citizens don’t have electricity. But the list is clearly more diverse than is suggested here.

This is a recurring pattern, and I’ve written about this before. There are just as many countries in the Global South with high rates of clean energy as there are in the Global North. There are various reasons why this gets missed. Sometimes it’s to do with methodology and whether or not they include hydropower. Sometimes it’s to do with investment or capacity, which overlooks smaller power grids in low income countries.

Sometimes however, as in this particular study, countries get left out because the researchers just didn’t ask. They ran the numbers for 76 countries and prioritised the richest – and presumably most likely to run the press release. There were only four African countries in their dataset and six from Latin America. They missed a whole lot of clean energy action because they didn’t bother to look.

When we do look, we find that the story of clean power is more complex and interesting. In the UK it is framed as an energy transition – a term I use all the time. It’s all about moving from polluting fossil energy to more sustainable forms, swapping, upgrading and phasing out. Let’s not take anything away from the Nordic countries that are doing this well, often with a big role for nuclear power. But that’s not the only narrative to clean energy.

From a global perspective there’s a parallel story that is about leapfrogging fossil fuels entirely and building clean energy from the beginning. It’s about countries choosing to avoid the mistakes of richer countries and proactively choose something better, energy that is more democratic and more resilient to global shocks.

That’s what we see in places like Ethiopia or Costa Rica, which have mainly hydropower and are committed to only adding renewable capacity alongside it. Or Kenya, a leader on geothermal power with ambitions to reach 100% energy access with 100% low carbon electricity by 2030. This is real leadership too, and leaving out this Global South dimension gives us a shallower and paler version of the truth.

That press release did inspire an article, and I’m not sorry that it wasn’t the one they hoped for. I’ve sent them some notes on what they can do better next time, and maybe then I’ll drop them a link.

• Header photo by Mwangi Kirubi, Flickr, licensed as CC BY-NC 2.0

Beyond private cars and almost completely unnoticed, the government published an integrated transport strategy this month. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I will.

Over a quarter of households in Pakistan now have solar panels. This will save the country an estimated $6.3 billion in energy imports this year, and insulate people from Trump’s energy price rises.

OECD figures for 2025 show a 23% cut in international development aid over the last year. Since much of this was funding life-saving work, this cut in funding will cost an estimated 9 million lives between now and 2030.

Peace with Nature is a new basic income experiment that will support indigenous people to live more sustainably in the Colombian Amazon. Interesting to see the coming together of poverty alleviation, reparations and sustainability here.

Recent highlights

• Orienting building for energy savings
• Trump’s accidental boost to the energy transition
• Book review: Two Wheels Good, by Jody Rosen

One of the reasons that some buildings overheat more than others is the way they are oriented, along with the design of the windows and ventilation, and a variety of other factors. Orientation is a neglected aspect of architecture, as taking the movement of the sun into consideration during the design stage has major implications for the building throughout its lifetime. Correct orientation will keep it warmer in winter and cooler in summer, and maintain a more comfortable temperature for occupants.

That also translates directly into energy use. A building that’s naturally warmed by the sun in the winter has lower heating bills. In the summer months it won’t need mechanical cooling through air conditioning. Think about the cost savings of a large building such as a school over the decades, perhaps even centuries, that it remains in use. Orienting it right at the outset costs nothing at all, but over the years those savings could add up to millions of pounds.

At a time of high and volatile energy prices, passive energy saving measures like this should be at the top of the agenda, especially for new buildings.

Permaculturist Andrew Millison has a good video introduction to this idea and why it matters. Most of us aren’t designing our own homes, but he suggests ways to maximise the use of the sun even if your home isn’t optimally positioned. Make a cup of coffee and take a few minutes to watch it, and see if you can save some energy and improve the comfort of your home by thinking about the sun.

The supply shock also drove a wave of innovation in what was then seen as ‘alternative energy’. By the end of the decade the first wind farm was up and running in New Hampshire. The Passive house was developed in Germany. Everyone wanted an efficient Japanese car. The oil crisis profoundly changed the world. It’s a long transition, but it could be seen as the turning of the tide on fossil fuels.

According to Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency, the supply shock from Trump’s war in Iran is more serious than all three 1970s episodes put together. Will it act as a similar catalyst to environmental action?

If so, it would be profoundly ironic. Donald Trump hates clean energy and is committed to stopping it. This is proving very hard to do, to the point that Trump has issued executive orders to force coal power stations to remain operational while paying a billion dollars in taxpayers’ money to make wind power developers go away. He has made the Orwellian demand that his minions always say “clean, beautiful coal” when naming the fossil fuel, and devised a cute cartoon mascot called Coalie to try and buff its filthy reputation.

In other words, flailing, farcical desperation is all Trump has. And with his actions in Iran, he’s made it spectacularly worse.

One of the biggest criticisms of renewable energy is that it is intermittent, and that gas or coal can provide a more reliable constant power supply. For entirely different reasons, gas can be an intermittent energy source too. Putin’s Russia has proved that several times over with its willingness to turn off or even blow up supply lines. Now Donald Trump has underlined it. Your enemies can use dependence on external energy supplies against you, but the folly of allies can be just as destructive.

All across the world, countries are counting the cost of interrupted energy supplies as Iran holds shipping routes hostage, with all kinds of implications for energy policy. Energy prices have risen across the board and governments are scrambling to reduce taxes and keep energy affordable. Governments have released reserves where they have them, or faced protests and queues for fuel where they haven’t. Where shortages are most acute, more drastic interventions have been used, from a four day week in the Philippines to drivers in Myanmar only being allowed to use their cars on alternate days. Pakistan has reduced national speed limits, Bangladesh has reduced air conditioning use in government buildings. The IEA has been tracking these sorts of actions and it’s a very long list.

Much of this is crisis response and will presumably go back to normal as the dust settles. Some emergency measures will make things worse for the environment – several countries have fallen back on coal to get them through the interruption to gas and oil supplies. But there are long term changes afoot as well. South Korea is using the crisis as a springboard to move faster on its energy transition. Laos is encouraging working from home as an immediate fuel-saving measure, but it’s also announced investments in EV charging and public transport which will outlast the crisis. Chile has announced incentives for electric taxis, and several countries have dropped import taxes on EVs. Not that people need to be told – enquiries about electric vehicles are up everywhere.

Interest in solar power has rocketed too. UK supplier Octopus reports a 50% rise in demand for its solar offer. The British government has fast-tracked its plans for plug-in solar, something I’ve been looking forward to since Germany popularised it in the wake of the 2022 energy price spike.

Other transitions are underway, depending on different countries’ exposure to the crisis. India, for example, relies on LPG for domestic cooking and the shortage has been disastrous. There has been a surge in demand for induction cookers. Others have fallen back on coal or biomass. At the other end of the technology scale, the first hydrogen cooker just went on sale in India last week. The Iran crisis has been hugely disruptive to the simple business of cooking a meal in India, and it is likely to accelerate the existing shift towards other methods.

This won’t be fast and it will be problematic. Grid infrastructure and renewable energy capacity can’t expand overnight. But the current crisis has increased the resolve to move beyond fossil fuels and the vulnerabilities they create. It will accelerate government plans, and could create the political will to get things done even where governments haven’t previously shown much leadership on climate change.

“Renewables are needed now more than ever—not just for climate and environmental reasons but to break up volatile supply chains and reduce the leverage of oil and gas states,” Ken Silverstein wrote for Forbes recently, “For years, clean energy has been sold as a moral imperative. Now it is simply an economic and geopolitical necessity. It’s not about emissions. It’s about resilience and price stability.”

The violence and destruction involved in Trump’s war don’t make this a positive story. But I do wonder – if Donald Trump was a more enlightened man and had thrown his weight behind renewable energy, could he could have done more to accelerate the energy transition than he is likely to achieve through blundering incompetence?