This isn’t necessarily a problem with your neighbours and friends. Only 12% of UK citizens oppose government policy on climate, according to a long running government attitudes tracker. That’s not the impression we get from the media, which insists that nobody wants this net zero malarkey. The right leaning newspapers continue to print climate sceptic takes, and the left leaning news outlets endlessly fret about that scepticism. Both amplify those voices, one deliberately and one accidentally, and contribute to the gap between what people think, and what they believe everyone else thinks.

The best antidote to this is to make climate action visible and irrefutable. There are great examples of local projects doing this – community energy, repair networks, forestry and nature restoration initiatives. Some of these are so successful that they spin out into national networks, like the Transition Towns movement out of Totnes, or Incredible Edible from Todmorden. The Edinburgh Remakery spawned all kinds of similar projects around repair and reuse. Lots of people are working ro replicate what Power Station are doing in Walthamstow.

Others look on slightly enviously at some of these examples, as they struggle to rally volunteers and find funding to keep their own project going. So what makes the difference? Are there are any common factors? What can we do to grow more successful and powerful local climate projects, deliver change at a bigger scale, and take the brake off the green transition?

Carbon Copy, as the name suggests, are specialists in learning from and replicating good environmental ideas. They have been asking these sorts of questions, and just released a new report into why some local projects have a bigger impact than others. Last year they researched a range of climate projects and identified a series of case studies across the UK, in nature, renewable energy, the circular economy, etc. They have now analysed those 12 success stories, looking to draw lessons for others looking to run impactful local climate projects.

There are some important findings. One of the most important is that “success is possible everywhere“. This isn’t just for nice middle class market towns. There are plenty of examples that disprove that idea, one of my favourites being Energise Barnsley, winner of a recent Ashden Award.

Another headline is that “success factors can be copied“. That doesn’t mean that projects can be easily replicated, and places are different – “one size does not fit all” is another of the report’s messages. But what makes a project successful isn’t usually unique, and we can learn from what others are doing.

The report highlights three core characteristics that underpin success. One is a mindset of abundance, which is a focus on existing local skills and experience, rather than fixating on what’s missing. This is particularly important when funding is tight, empowering people to look at what they can do rather than what they can’t. A second key characteristic is belonging, a sense of connection with places and communities. Third, successful projects have a clear purpose that motivates and organises people around the mission.

When you put all this together, you get projects that create much bigger change, and Carbon Copy have coined a word for this: a ‘changeprint’. Not to be confused with the ‘carbon handprints‘ I wrote about not long ago, a changeprint is the “positive impacts and consequences beyond carbon reduction of collaborative action… it’s the sum of all the benefits the project generates, such as creating stronger community ties, a healthier environment locally or more jobs.” Unlike a carbon footprint, which you want to shrink, you want a changeprint to be as big as possible.

I’m not convinced by this neologism – isn’t ‘measuring your changeprint’ the same as ‘demonstrating impact’, which in turn is the third sector jargon for what most people call ‘making a difference’? But I do share their ambition to stretch our impact further, and make the green transition real to as many people as possible, and so I appreciate their research.

I won’t repeat what they’ve written, because if you run a local climate project of any kind, you should download the report and browse its findings for yourself. Read the tips at the end. See what you can refine and improve about your work, see if there’s anything you’ve missed or that you could do better. I’ll certainly be thinking it through with my own projects.

In a graph of global EV sales from 2019 it’s well ahead of the pack, trailed by a handful of Northern European countries. Everywhere else, at least nine out of ten new cars sold are still fossil fueled.

A lot has changed in five years, as described in this recent report from Ember.

Norway still leads and is still out front, but everything in the chasing pack has changed. The most dramatic movement is China, which has leapt past the 50% mark. In raw numbers, it outsells everyone else on the planet: of all new EVs sold, two thirds are in China. This graph only covers passenger cars. China leads the way on electric buses and ebikes too, which I consider to be more important in the grander scheme of green transport.

China matters for its own sales, and also for its exports. It is cheaper EV brands from China that are enabling the rapid shift elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Singapore and Vietnam and Nepal have overtaken much of Western Europe on EV adoption.

Speaking of Nepal, it’s interesting to see them and Ethiopia in the top five for EV sales, albeit at smaller numbers. Those are two very different countries, but with some common features that explain their prioritising of electric transport. Both have no oil reserves and have to import it. Both are landlocked, which makes all fossil fuel imports really expensive. On the positive side, Nepal and Ethiopia both have abundant cheap hydroelectric power and run on 100% renewable energy. EVs make spectacular sense, reducing their vulnerability to price spikes and boosting the local economy.

Similar factors explain those lagging behind. The US and Canada both have lots of oil and the case for EVs is less obvious. The Middle East is practically invisible in the graph, with the exception of Israel, which lacks oil reserves of its own. Moving slowly on electric vehicles will have consequences, and it’s notable that both the US and Canada wound down their incentives for them in 2025. Turning their backs on EVs politically risks locking the continent into an older technology. They won’t have the infrastructure domestically, and American car companies will fall behind on exports. North American citizens won’t see the benefits of cheaper transport, quieter cities and cleaner air that others will see elsewhere.

For oil producers, EVs are still seen as a threat rather than an opportunity. The world is leaving them behind. That’s their loss and we should not mourn the decline in geopolitical power of the fossil fuel producers. Consider the ongoing reality of wars and regime change for oil. Remember the ongoing destruction of the atmosphere for profit. Compare the vulnerability of global oil supply chains and locally produced renewable energy, and ask which one you’d rather build an economy around.

Taking these sorts of questions on board, this graph of EV sales tells us a lot more than who is buying electric cars. It tells a story about a slow and vast shift in power, away from the pollution and colonial violence of fossil fuels, and towards clean local power. For those choosing electric, like Nepal and Ethiopia, it’s about independence and self-reliance just as much as it is about the environment. Green technology has the potential to be liberating for people and for the planet.

The project finds promising refugee-led companies and organisations in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, and helps them to scale up with grants and technical assistance. Here’s a video that we watched in a recent staff meeting, and it really shows the difference that energy makes to those at the margins. Clean and affordable energy is an enabler of so many other things – raising incomes for small businesses, reducing the risk to women gathering firewood, freeing up household income to pay for school fees, allowing displaced people to communicate with family and friends elsewhere.

There are lots of solutions, and in the video you’ll find entrepreneurs working with solar power, but also biodigestion, charcoal briquette production, and I particularly enjoyed seeing mushroom farming in there too.

• More about Ashden Climate Solutions.

I’m aware of the ‘net zero dad’ phenomenon of middle aged men talking loudly about the size of their Coefficient of Performance, so I’ll keep it non-technical and to the point. Sharing experiences of heat pumps is important because there is so much disinformation about the technology. The tabloids provide a steady drip of horror stories about the heat pumps that the government is apparently ‘pushing’ on us ordinary citizens.

No heat pump has been pushed on me – thankfully, as they are very heavy – though the government were involved. They gave me £7,500 towards the installation, with no work required on my part to claim it. It was installed by Aira last March, so we’ve now had it for a year and I can compare our energy costs before and after.

First of all: it works. It continued to work through the coldest parts of the year. It worked when it snowed. We have not been cold this winter.

There were some teething issues with our system. While it worked flawlessly to provide the hot water during the summer, it did occasionally cut out in the autumn once the heating was needed. This happened with increasing frequency, and though it was easy enough to restart the system, it was an inconvenience over Christmas when we were away. This wasn’t a problem with the heat pump itself: it turned out to be flakes of rust from our old pipes that caught in a filter and reduced the flow through the system. It was a five minute fix for the engineer.

Second, it is different. Heat pumps warm homes differently to gas boilers. The latter flare up and provide a burst of heat, then cool down and flare up again when needed. Heat pumps provide more constant heating at a lower temperature. The radiators are never hot, they’re just warm. The house has maintained a comfortable temperature better with the heat pump, though my wife missed waking up to a blazing radiator in the morning. My daughter didn’t miss the roaring and ticking of the boiler that used to be in the corner of her bedroom.

Being a tortoise to the gas boiler’s hare, there were occasions when I wanted a bit more from the heat pump than it can deliver. Sometimes I don’t just want the house to be comfortable. I want it to be toasty, and on especially miserable days or when coming in from the cold, I might push the boost button on the old thermostat. Heat pumps can’t do that, so I put on the electric fireplace for a bit instead. I mention this as a difference, not a flaw – plenty of people with gas central heating still have wood burning stoves for nights when they want to be cosy.

Third, it’s cheaper. I’ve graphed the last year of energy bills in orange on the right. The blue line shows an average monthly cost for the last three years. The house is consistently cheaper to run, except for the coldest month of the year in January. The extra cost there is more than offset by savings in the warmer months.

In total, our household energy costs for 2025 were £873. The average energy bill for a house of our size in the UK is £1,755, so we’re paying half of the average. It’s actually better than that though, because that £873 includes charging the electric car. We also sold £229 of electricity to the grid. If you add those in, our costs are close to a third of the average.

This is by design, and the heat pump completes a larger and more long term project. It works well because we did lots of other things first, and this is really important. Because it provides constant low level heat, a heat pump is wasted on an inefficient house. This schoolboy error is ignored by the anti-heat pump brigade. Take this farcical article from the Daily Express, where a man whinges that the heat pump installed in his prefab home was so expensive that he was forced to insulate it. That’s so ass-backwards that no respectable newspaper would publish it, but the pro-fossil fuel paymasters of the Express were so pleased with it that they ran exactly the same story a month later with different pictures, to get a second bite at the cherry.

A heat pump is not a straight swap for a gas boiler in an older home, not if you want to stay warm and keep bills down. In our case, we made a series of improvements to our 1920s house to get it ‘heat pump ready’ before investing.

I’ve tracked these along the way. From a starting point in 2019, we incrementally reduced our gas use with insulation. First in the roof, then external wall cladding and then under the floor. Knowing how much energy the house needs to warm it up, and how well it holds on to that warmth, I could be confident that the heat pump would work.

As well as insulation to reduce gas use, we installed a battery so that we can use cheaper overnight electricity rates. This also helps to keep prices down with the transition to electric heat.

All told it was a six year project to get the house to low carbon heating. That’s mainly because we didn’t have the money to do it all in one go, so that’s not to say that it couldn’t be done quicker. One advantage of doing things slowly is that green technologies have got cheaper and better along the way. The west-facing roof was considered inappropriate for solar panels when we bought it, but improvements in panel efficiency made it viable within a few years. Likewise heat pumps, which have become much more efficient in the last decade. Since electricity is more expensive than gas, this is an important factor in whether or not bills rise or fall with a heat pump.

With that mention of heat pump efficiency I realise I’m a whisker away from mentioning coefficients of performance, and so I’ll stop.

These are outlined in a recent briefing from the Institute of Transportation and Development Policy. It aims to summarise what good public transport looks like, and breaks it down into five things to look out for:

A reliable and fast service is perhaps the one we might think of first. It’s usually the deal breaker on whether or not most people will use public transport. In today’s world, ITDP argue that zero emissions is also an important standard. This reduces greenhouse gases, but it’s also better for cities and their populations, reducing noise and pollution. Accessibility is a third main quality, ensuring that everyone can use the service and can do so safely.

Beyond those passenger-facing aspects of good public transport are more foundational princples. Is the service well maintained and responsive? And is it sufficiently funded and operating on a sustainable economic model?

Here in Luton, the train service fails on affordability. If I were to walk down to the station right now, an off-peak fare to London would be £30.40 – exactly a pound a mile for the 30.4 mile journey. Looking at the last minute deals of a local airline, I could alternatively walk to the airport and fly over a thousand miles to Reykjavik for just two pounds more. That’s a price per mile of £0.03. In this hasty comparison, which I hope is not representative, air travel out of Luton is 97% cheaper than the train. There are reasons why this is so. None of the reasons are good.

Depending on where you are in the world, public transport might need investment in any of these five. In countries with mature and well functioning transit systems, the main direction of progress might be low carbon. For others it will be improving the service itself. Or progress might be in institutions, securing long term funding or ending corruption. What are the priorities where you are?

More developments in the perennially imminent nuclear fusion, with new commitments in Germany alongside those in the US and elsewhere. If we had to summarise its journey over the last 20 years, it has gone from theoretically possible to possible to feasible.

Inside Climate News reports on how China uses corrupt police forces to intimidate local reporters writing critically about their investments and infrastructure in African countries.

In this, the year of our lord 2026, the vote finally passed to end hereditary peerages in the House of Lords. The government bribed the Conservatives with some seats for life in return for dropping their opposition to this obvious and long overdue improvement to Britain’s democracy.

The Society of Authors launched the Human Authored campaign this week. Ideally it would work the other way round and books generated by AI would be the ones that need to be identified, but this will do for now.

Recent highlights

• Where are Easyjet’s electric planes?
• It’s not solar that competes with farmland
• Osmosis, the other other renewable energy

A recurring argument in favour was that electric planes were on the way. They were imminent, practically on the horizon. By the time the second terminal was in operation, an estimated 2034, the transition to electric flight would be well underway. We could expand the airport without increasing emissions. I heard this fantasy reasoning from councillors, planning officers, the airport operator and from well meaning friends who backed the expansion (jobs! growth! etc).

This wishful thinking was actively encouraged by Luton-based airline Easyjet, whose PR efforts around electric planes look carefully timed. In late 2017 they made a big splash with their announcement that they had a plan: they had partnered with a start-up called Wright Electric, and they would develop an all-electric passenger jet within a decade. “It is now more a matter of when, not if, a short-haul electric plane will fly,” said the CEO.

The ‘electric flight within a decade’ hook was widely featured in the press. The Guardian reported it with no further questions. So too the BBC, while The Sun ran with the headline ‘easy peasy’. None of the journalists interrogated the claims – not the fact that it takes $10-30 billion to bring a new commercial airliner to market, which is a tall order for anyone, let alone a start-up. Not the fact that even the aviation giants of Boeing and Airbus can take a decade to develop a new airliner. Not the fact that Wright Electric said they had a two seater electric prototype already, but released no pictures of it. (There are still no pictures of this plane on the internet.)

So, nine years into that decade, is that electric plane any closer? Should we expect a maiden flight in 2027, and a roll-out across Easyjet’s fleet from there?

To trace the journey, Easyjet mentioned their partnership with Wright a few more times in the next couple of years. They harvested another round of headlines in 2020 with some design concepts, and announced an engine testing lab in 2021.

Wright then decided that they wouldn’t attempt a whole new plane, but would retrofit a hundred-seater BAe-146 instead. The plan was to swap in one of the four engines for an electric motor. Then you could try two, and so on until you had a proven all-electric plane, though they admit that it would likely remain a hybrid. Called the Wright Spirit, this is what will be flying by 2027, not the sunlit artists’ impressions released to the media.

That’s moving the goalposts somewhat, but that would still be progress and I’d be prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. The last I heard was that the motor had been simulated, then tested. The first actual flight with one of its electric motors was initially scheduled for 2023-2024. That hasn’t happened and 2027 feels like a stretch.

As for the Wright 1, the concept plane that was press released with Easyjet graphics, that’s now being talked about for 2032.

Have Wright Electric actually flown any electric planes yet? Why yes! Here it is.

That’s a hybrid crop duster, taking a test flight in 2023. I may be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge that’s the only actual plane that’s flown using Wright’s electric propulsion tech so far.

Easyjet didn’t issue a press release to celebrate this milestone, and not just because that’s an ugly plane and only has room for one person in it. They didn’t press release it because they’d already given up talking about Wright Electric and their potential airliner.

In 2022 Easyjet announced a partnership with Rolls Royce to develop hydrogen aircraft. They expect to be flying zero emission hydrogen planes “from the mid 2030s”.

Do I believe them this time? Not really, though they have a better chance with this one than their previous claim. I don’t believe that they were ever serious about electric planes within a decade. I think it was a PR gambit to build the case for airport expansion, and to keep the climate protestors and their tubes of superglue away from their front door.

However, I’m only disappointed because I care. Despite my cynical tone here, I do genuinely want them to succeed. From an entirely selfish perspective, I’d rather like to fly again. I want to take my children on more adventures, and I don’t want to do it until aviation is sustainable. I want the airport town I live in to be free of pollution and noise, and I would love it if Luton based companies were to lead the way on hydrogen and zero carbon aviation. Most importantly, I want a stable atmosphere and a liveable planet, which is why I’ll continue to keep an eye on the big orange airline down the road.

As readers of a certain generation will know, trainers have always been an icon of globalisation. Naomi Klein’s No Logo drew the connections between consumer brands and their exploited labour 25 years ago. Hipsters who had read the book used to black out the logos on their trainers with a marker pen in protest.

Not a lot has changed, as journalist Tansy E Hoskins describes in her book Foot Work, redrawing those connections to see what this very ordinary object can tell us about global power relations.

In the hopeful early rhetoric of globalisation, it was all about shared global culture and widening prosperity through trade. While many still see it as a success story, “the shoes on our feet tell a different story”, and they provide a useful case study in both “the propulsion and the consequence of globalisation”.

The books starts with the propulsion, at Sneaker Con in London, where sneakerheads – mostly young, mostly men – browse rare and expensive trainers. Some have come to buy, with hundreds of pounds ready to spend. Others have come to sell, somewhat desperately in some cases, failing to find the greater fool ready to take their hyped limited editions off their hands. These are not shoes to be worn, but essentially objects of worship. Most of them will never be worn, which goes part of the way to explaining how the world makes 24.9 billion pairs of shoes every year.

24.9 billion pairs of shoes is a number both “wondrous” and obscene, and needless to say it doesn’t work out as a tidy three pairs of shoes each for the global population. Many have none, and a few have lots. In the 80s Imelda Marcos appalled the world with the decadence of her shoe collection. Today she’d be an also-ran among the influencers, celebrities and Youtubers with instagrammable shoe closets and no shame. And before we get distracted by the top 1%, the average woman in the UK had 6 or 7 pairs of shoes a generation ago, and 24 pairs on average today, half of which are never worn.

As Hopkins reminds us, every single shoe on the planet is made by hand, by a real person. The shape and construction of shoes is such that it has never been substantially automated (though a chapter in the book looks at how it might be in future, and what the consequences might be.) There is a huge labour force behind footwear. Most are made by women, almost entirely in developing countries, and often in terrible conditions. Despite decades of activism around sweatshop labour, it remains rife, invisible, and very difficult to address. When scandal hits, brands move factories elsewhere and carry on. If a country brings in new laws to improve conditions or raise the minimum wage, the brands move. If workers unionse, the brands move.

One complicating factor is how many layers there are to shoe production. A big name brand might take reluctant responsibility and inspect its supplier’s factories, but there is no pressure on less high profile brands or unbranded shoes, which make up the majority of the market. Trainers are made from multiple components, and it’s much harder to get consumer attention on things like the leather or plastics industry, or factories making laces or metal grommets. A lot of work isn’t happening in factories at all, but at home through casual labour, the very bottom of the labour pile and with no rights whatsoever.

This vast inequality is a choice. There is nothing inevitable about this, as if it were impossible to pay people more. Hoskins mentions Michael Jordan, who still receives a licensing fee on every pair of Nike shoes sold with his name on them. This amounts to around $300 million a year. That’s enough to pay a living wage to every single person making those shoes with his name on, but the money all gushes to the top, to Nike and its shareholders and celebrity partners.

Hoskins investigates the world of shoes through ordinary people, meeting both sweatshop workers and trainer collectors, and uncovering all sorts of hidden aspects of shoes. The book ventures well beyond labour and branding too, with chapters looking at the environmental cost of shoe production and disposal. Another looks at how demand for leather makes shoe production inseparable from the meat industry, and the associated deforestation that’s a major driver of climate change.

Alongside the voices of real people, which brings these issues to life, Hoskins has an eye for curiosities. We hear about the global warehouses that specialise in matching odd shoes that have been separated in the supply chain of donated footwear. There’s a section on fake shoes, as sneakers are the most counterfeited item in the world. There’s the story of the journalist throwing their shoes at George Bush, an event celebrated with a statue of a shoe in Tikrit, Iraq. There’s an eye-opening history of high heels, orginally popularised by the court of King Louis, and used by men of rank to demonstrate that they didn’t work and expected to be carried. The fell out of fashion with men, but not for women, and feminists are divided on the subject of whether deliberately impractical shoes are empowering or infantilising.

The possibility of progress on all of this is not entirely lost, though Hoskins warns readers not to get distracted by their own personal consumer choices. “Neoliberalism would love for you to retreat to your own cocoon, to focus only on yourself, to perfect your own little space, and feel comfort and pride in your personal choices. But where does that leave everyone else?” By all means think through what you buy, how much you need and where things come from, with the awarness that the real solutions will not be found in shopping. Support campaigns to improve conditions, and push for political change. Governments and legislation will be vital, bringing regulation and scrutiny to supply chains. Since workers themselves are best placed to report on conditions, empowering workers with the right to unionise and speak up is the first priority.

• Footwork is available from Earthbound Books

I posted a similar graph last year in a post about road markings, but this one is more visual. What struck me this time is the potential disconnect between the sources of microplastics and general awareness of them. Arguably the most high profile consumer based campaigns have focused on microbeads in cosmetics, which would be a small part of the 6% ‘other’ category. I suppose this is because – like glitter – it’s added on purpose and unnecessarily. Perhaps because it’s in objects we might have in our houses and so it feels personal, something we can responsibility for.

Other campaigns have highlighted microplastics from clothing, and that feels like a similarly personal target with potentially bigger impact. Are other pollution sources getting a free pass? Some of these feel much more invisible. Is anyone working on them?

One area where there has been some movement is around microplastics from tyres, though it hasn’t been picked up on the consumer side anywhere as far as I know. And perhaps that’s just as well, as the tyre industry is huge, and its pollution problem is not something that can be solved with consumer boycotts or ethical consumer choices.

The biggest step in the right direction on tyres is from the EU, who passed new pollution standards for vehicles in 2024 that include tyre abrasion for the first time. This has made the tyre industry consider tyre durability, and the types of plastic that they use.

The solutions might not lie entirely with the industry either. It may need changes to city infrastructure, filtering stormwater to remove microplastics before they enter rivers and then the sea. Another project, The Tyre Collective, is developing car-mounted devices that capture tyre particles before they enter the environment. So far they’ve developed art projects out of captured microplastics, but they have working prototypes and might be on to something.

If you are in the market for tyres and want to choose one that produces less pollution, Michelin performed best in this study from Germany. They’ve had their eye on this problem for a while, to their credit. Firestone were the worst.

Have you come across any other campaigns or projects addressing the less known sources of microplastics?

Usually when we’re talking about renewable energy, it’s wind and solar that come to mind. Biomass is the sullen sibling in the big three, generating more power than solar in the UK right now but rarely mentioned. There are the other forms of renewable energy: hydropower, geothermal, and tidal and wave power from the ocean. It turns out there’s an other, other renewable energy beyond those.

Despite appearances, this unassuming building in Fukuoka, Japan, is not another distribution centre for the online retailer that shall not be named. It’s the world’s largest osmotic power plant.

As the name suggests, this uses osmosis, the natural process of water seeping from high concentration to low concentration. It’s going on in living cells all the time, and here it is tapped to generate electricity using the difference between salt water and fresh water.

Salty water and fresh water are piped into a chamber divided by a permeable membrane. Osmosis draws water to the salty side to try and balance the difference in salinity. This increases the pressure, and a turbine captures the movement of the water to generate electricity.

When osmotic power was first proposed, it was located in places where rivers meet the sea. The Fukuoka plant improves on this by combining other infrastructure facilities that serve the city. A wastewater treatment plant provides the fresh water, while a desalination plant supplies highly concentrated seawater. The osmotic power plant then runs the desalination plant.

This is the most advanced osmotic power plant in the world, opening in 2025. There’s only one other one at commercial scale, and that’s in Denmark. There have been pilot projects in South Korea and Norway, but otherwise it’s largely unknown.

There are reasons why it’s not got very far as a technology, despite the research into it dating back to the 1970s. The main reason is the membranes, which are expensive and prone to clogging over time. The electricity generated hasn’t been enough to compensate for this, though co-locating osmotic power alongside desalination increases the power capacity and reduces the costs of desalination. That might be a breakthrough.

There’s an ecological dimension to the Fukuoka plant as well. The waste water from desalination plants is very salty and can disrupt marine ecosystems. Here the water is diluted with the treated municipal waste water, combining the two waste water streams and generating energy in the process.

Are we going to be hearing more about osmotic power in the future? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, it needs specific inputs and is only going to work in certain locations. It can’t currently compete with cheap and widely applicable solar power.

On the other hand, desalination is going to be increasingly important as climate change threatens water supplies. It’s energy intensive and is often done unsustainably – Saudi Arabia burns oil to make fresh water. Osmotic power might become more common in desalination, even if it doesn’t catch on elsewhere.

And you never know. I have dusty books on my shelves, some by high profile authors, that confidently declare that solar power will be a footnote in the energy of the future because it’s just too expensive. Electric cars looked like an overpriced fantasy until really quite recently. It would be wise not to discount it.

I like to think that we’re better informed today, though there are still plenty of misconceptions. General ignorance around energy consumption remains, which is why there was a campaign recently in the UK to educate people around efficient cooking methods. The rise of the air fryer owes something to this campaign.

One useful educational tool for energy comparisons is the new website from Hannah Ritchie, author and data scientist with Our World in Data. Simply called ‘Does that use a lot of energy?‘, you can compare a host of different appliances and activities. For example, does a heat pump use more energy than a gas boiler?

Short answer: no, because a gas boiler makes heat, and a heat pump harvests it and moves it indoors, which is a much more efficient process. Likewise, electric cars use a lot less energy, not just different energy. This is one reason not to panic about our capacity to meet our energy needs with renewable energy – clean technologies use less of it, so it’s not a like-for-like swap for fossil fuels.

Ritchie’s tool allows you to compare a wide range of activities, and it displays cost as well as power usage. Browse it for your own curiosity. Use it to identify big energy users around the house. Send it to friends and relatives complaining about the price of energy. Use it in the classroom. Pass it on.

There is, however, another important consideration that Bill McKibben describes in his book Here Comes the Sun. He suggests that you can think of any field as a solar farm. All plants take in sunlight and turn it into products that we want. They use about 1-3% of the sunlight that falls on them, whereas a solar panel uses around 20%. So if we think about using the sunlight falling on the land rather than the land itself, solar panels are more efficient.

You can’t eat solar power, which is where this argument might fall down – except that lots of farms aren’t producing crops for eating anyway. In the US, 40% of all corn crops are grown for biofuel ethanol. This is the comparison we should keep in mind, McKibben argues: a field full of solar panels, and a field growing corn for ethanol. Since both are being used to produce energy, which one is more efficient?

The answer is solar, which produces 100 times more energy than biofuel ethanol.

“An acre of corn will produce enough ethanol every year to drive a Ford F-150 pickup about 25,000 miles,” says McKibben by way of example. “Cover than same acre in solar panels and you will produce enough juice to drive the electric version of the same truck – the F-150 Lightning – about 750,000 miles.”

Thought of this way, it’s possible that solar farms could have the opposite effect of the one we fear. They could actually free up farmland, provided they are part of a holistic energy transition that includes the phasing out of internal combustion engines. A recent study from the US state of Wisconsin makes this point. The state currently has a million acres of land growing corn for biofuels. Meeting the state’s clean energy targets with solar power would take 285,000 acres. That’s less than a third of the land currently growing biofuels, leaving the other two thirds to grow food or to be turned over to wildlife.

For the UK, we currently have over 350,000 acres producing energy crops, 30% of which is biofuels for transport. Solar farms, for comparison, currently occupy 52,000 acres. These, I remind you, can all still produce food if we use agrivoltaic methods.

If you are concerned about the loss of farmland for energy, support the shift away from internal combustion engines.