I’ve written about this before, but it was nice to see a proper explainer from Carbon Brief on how China uses solar power to combat desertification. It’s an important idea that could be applied elsewhere.

While I heard a fair amount of grumbling about temperatures in the 30s in Europe last week, farmers in India have been working at night to escape temperatures as high as 48C in their recent heatwave. People who work outside are among those most vulnerable to extreme heat.

With the World Cup kicking off imminently, a lot of people will be pondering the conflicted relationship they now have with the event, torn between the potential of the sport and the naked greed and corruption of its organising body. Reboot FIFA is a new campaign to investigate and reform the organisation through its ethics committee.

I’ve been away in France over half term, avoiding the news and thinking about other things, so I haven’t written much over the last couple of weeks. But here are the most recent posts:

Recent highlights

• Book review: Environomics, by Dharshini David
• Britain was built for a different climate
• Your role in climate finance

One of the rewarding aspects of covering sustainability stories over time is watching good ideas creep towards the mainstream. Technologies and approaches that were once filed as alternative move from being theoretical to operational. They spread from pioneers and early adopters to wide scale use.

This book demonstrates the transition. Not so long ago the subtitle would be ‘how the green economy could transform the world’ – or ‘will transform the world’ if you were feeling confident. Now it’s definitely in the present, documenting an unfolding reality.

Darshini David, a former economist with HSBC and now deputy economics editor at the BBC, aims to draw our attention to what is already happening. “Governments are acting,” she writes, “technology is advancing, our long-formed habits are changing.”

The books aims to bring the green revolution to life through daily actions and habits, grounding it in our everyday experiences. Each chapter starts a simple action as someone moves through their day, starting with switching on the light and making a morning coffee. Each action is then unpacked through its environmental consequences and the people and businesses that are doing things differently.

There’s a chapter on fashion. The morning commute introduces a section on transport. Later we cover green finance, waste, fishing and the oceans, before wrapping up with brushing our teeth before bed and a chapter on palm oil and deforestation. The tone is positive, the examples are drawn from all over the world, and it’s an engaging read.

I did raise an eyebrow a few times. Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is mentioned uncritically as a sustainable city project, whereas to me it looks like propaganda and the pinnacle of greenwash. A company called Biobean is celebrated for its reuse of coffee grounds as biofuels, but it had already completed the hype cycle and gone bust before the book was published. Things move fast, and events overtook Zipcar too – it’s mentioned as a success story in sustainable travel here, and has since disappeared from British streets.

Nevertheless, there are lots of interesting businesses and stories, some of which you will know about if you follow environmental news, and some that will be new. For those that don’t follow green news closely, it’s a really good guide to the emerging new economy.

That’s what makes this book important. The big challenge today isn’t to develop the ideas and the technologies that can reverse environmental damage. The challenge is to communicate them.

Every day I see articles in the British press decrying ‘net zero zealotry’. Fossil-fuelled politicians continue to insist that green technologies don’t work and are too expensive. Even though the green economy is a clear and present reality, plenty of people aren’t hearing about it, or believe self-interested populist lies about it. In such a context, progress can be snatched away, as we’ve seen with Trump’s deeply futile attempt to prolong America’s coal use.

We need books that make the green economy real for people, and help them to see themselves as part of it. Environomics is a good place to start.

• Environomics is available from Earthbound Books

Here’s a graph I’ve been using in presentations recently, showing the number of days of heat over 35 degrees in the UK. That’s the x’s at the bottom. As you can see, between 1960 and 1990 temperatures only reached 35C once, in the famous 1976 heatwave. That’s three days of 35C in thirty years. Looking at the end of that sequence, we see that we now hit 35 degrees at some point most years.

Looking at the lower threshold of 28C, taken from the same 2025 study, we see that in the last century you’d be unlucky to get more than ten days a year over 28C. There are years where that happens, including that outlier of 1976 again, but it’s around one in three. Not any more. In the last ten years, every year is a hot year, with more than ten days over 28C.

Putting these two together, we can see that all of us in the UK are living with higher top temperatures and a longer warm season. But here’s the thing – most of our infrastructure was built for that lost cooler climate.

Over 10,000 schools were built during that thirty year period where temperatures only hit 35C once. Because that was so exceptional, very few of those buildings can cope with that kind of heat. Some of them are physically unsafe for children and have to close when it gets too hot. At the time of construction, it was recognised that there might be a few warm days in the summer term when the school would get uncomfortable. Because it was likely to be a few days, it was something staff and students could suffer through. It’s very different when the heat goes on for week after week.

When it comes to homes, Britain has a notoriously old and outdated housing stock and this too was built for a previous climate. Around a third of the country’s homes were built before the Second World War, including many Victorian houses. The biggest building boom occurred post-war, with estates and tower blocks built with little thought to summer heat and the need for shade, accounting for another 25% of our homes. Only 8% of Britain’s homes are newer than the year 2000, and most of them haven’t been designed with higher heat in mind either.

The Well Adapted UK Report, released last month, paints a similar picture across other sectors, including hospitals, care homes or courtrooms. There is a growing awareness, especially during heatwaves, that we need to do something about this.

As I work in schools, that’s the bit I’m working on, along with my colleagues at Let’s Go Zero. We advise schools on the various techniques they can use to prevent overheating and adjust to higher temperatures. It’s going to be part of a much larger conversation, and I thought I’d write a bit more about it this summer, while it’s hot and it’s on people’s minds. Consider this an introduction, and we’ll return to the topic of heat and adaptation in future posts.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded the latest Global Landscape of Climate Finance report recently. Care to guess what the biggest source of climate finance is?

There’s a lot of information and a lot of jargon* in this graph. For the purposes of this article, I want to draw your attention to the left hand side at the bottom, and highlight this fact: the biggest source of climate finance is households and individuals.

Collectively, ordinary private citizens across the world contributed $470 billion in 2023, spending on things like energy efficiency, solar panels or electric vehicles. This is considerably more than the $335 billion from corporations, and over three times more than the climate finance from governments. Only the banks – listed as ‘commercial FIs’ on the chart – come close with their $436 billion.

What does this tell us?

First, it’s a reminder that our own money matters. The funding we put towards retrofitting our homes or changing the way we travel is counted as climate finance and is the biggest driver of change. We are far from insignificant.

Second, this graph suggests that some other sectors aren’t pulling their weight. Is it right and fair that households are contributing the most? Perhaps not, if we want to see those most responsible for the crisis paying the most to remedy it. In which case, we need more from corporations please. More from the banks who funded the rise in fossil fuels in the first place, and continue to profit from their extraction.

Third, and more positively, the fact that households are able to participate in climate finance to such a degree tells us that climate solutions are being democratized. Households can’t build nuclear power stations or high speed rail. But more and more people can install solar panels. The rise of plug-in solar in Germany, or small rooftop systems in Pakistan, shows how solar isn’t a middle class luxury any more. It’s affordable and practical, and 21% of the climate finance from households is going towards small scale solar.

Likewise, e-bikes and low cost Chinese electric cars have made cleaner vehicles accessible to more and more people. Household spending on battery electric vehicles was $180 billion in 2023. While Western Europe dominated climate finance from households in the past, a growing percentage is coming from middle-income countries.

There’s a lot I could dive into in the finance report, including the gap between what is needed and what is currently available. But I had underestimated the role of ordinary households. That’s the bit I want to emphasize, because unless you’re reading this from the halls of power somewhere, it’s where you and I come in.

How we spend our money is a vote for the world we want to live in.

* FIs – Financial institutions, DFIs = Development Finance Institutions, SOEs = State owned enterprises.

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.