The court are the latest in a long line of people and organisations to turn a blind eye to the environmental cost of airport growth, a list that starts with Luton’s council and political parties, and ends with the Secretary of State. One exception is the Planning Inspectorate, whose exhaustive investigation concluded that “the public benefits do not outweigh the environmental harm”.

So let’s look at the balance here more specifically. What are the public benefits? And what is the environmental harm?

The press releases all mention the former and are quiet on the latter, so it’s much easier to answer the first question. The benefits of airport expansion are 11,000 new jobs, 4,400 of which will be specifically within Luton. The project is expected to generate an extra £1.5 billion in economic growth every year.

Since the council owns the airport, this will mean significant further funding for local communities and causes – “up to an additional £13 million” by the mid-40s. Don’t get me wrong, that’s useful. I am yet to claim airport funds for any of my own projects, but they already fund the work of many of my friends in the local arts scene or environmental and community sectors. Airport funding keeps the libraries open, refurbishes parks, pays for school gardens, and supports the carnival and the fireworks.

It’s no wonder nobody wants to answer the second question, but I here goes. According to the airport’s latest sustainability report, the total emissions from Luton Airport are 1,310,848 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

To put that into some context, that’s the same amount of fossil fuel pollution as a small country. For comparison, the Seychelles produces 1,240,000 tonnes of CO2, Eswatini 1,390,000. There are 45 countries with fossil emissions smaller than Luton Airport, which is why airport expansion has to be considered in a wider context, and not just a matter of local traffic and noise.

By my own maths, which I’m happy to have corrected should Luton Airport publish an official estimate, the expanded airport will be closer to 2,210,498 tonnes. That’s about the same as Fiji.

But wait – isn’t the airport setting strict limits to carbon emissions? This is a recurring theme in the propaganda in favour of airport expansion: Luton Airport proposes limits to its environmental impact, in a framework it calls Green Controlled Growth.

Under this framework, legally binding limits will be set to noise pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions and traffic. If it breaches these, it has to pause expansion until it gets back on track. This is a groundbreaking idea in theory, and no other airport has anything like this. The devil is in the detail however.

The Green Controlled Growth framework only applies to operational emissions from the airport building and infrastructure. Quoting directly from their own report, “these emissions account for approximately 0.4% of the Airport’s total reported greenhouse gas footprint.”

These vaunted environmental limits don’t include the planes, as those are subject to separate government targets. Even though Luton Airport puts the fuel in those planes and is therefore directly responsible for their burning, this is somebody else’s problem. You need to root around in the online pfds to find this out – the 0.4% figure doesn’t feature in the press releases.

So this the trade-off we’ve made in expanding Luton Airport: we are committing to an expansion in greenhouse gases that’s equivalent to the African nation of Estwatini, population 1.2 million. We’re doing that for 12,000 jobs and £1.5 billion. The announcement was made during a drought in the UK, in a year of record breaking summer heat.

Does that sound reasonable?

In the associated full length ad, a series of people overcome their ineptitude with a little help from Gemini, including Harry Kane. Unable to find anything football related to make use of his skills, he is shown asking Gemini to help him schedule the food prep for a barbecue. (This, by the way, is a good way to give your guests food poisoning.)

This is of course the latest round of AI promotion, which has always smacked of desperation to my mind. It’s been thrust into applications where we’d never needed it before. We are ambushed by it on Amazon, as if we are incapable of doing our own shopping. Search engines hack together an AI summary that may or may not be useful. Word documents open with a variety of suggestions, as if we open new documents and then decide why afterwards. I don’t remember previous generations of technology being quite so aggressively pushed at prospective users. It’s as if – whisper it – the AI companies know that most of their tools aren’t really all that useful.

Cory Doctorow’s new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, has an explanation for this. Cramming AI into everything isn’t for you, he suggests. It’s for the shareholders. A vast amount of money has been gambled on AI. Companies have to show the investors that people want AI, and they do this through engagement stats.

Lots of engagement with AI tools demonstrates how popular and useful this all is, so Google, Microsoft et al task their engineers with driving up engagement. It’s often a key performance indicator, something they need to deliver if they want to keep their jobs. One easy way to game the engagement stats is to make AI an opt-out feature rather than an opt-in one, basically a very expensive internet pop-up.

If the tech companies can’t show increasing engagement, the investors will panic and sell before AI ever makes any money. Almost no AI companies are turning a profit right now – OpenAI burns $20 billion a year, xAI loses a billion every month, and the industry as a whole is on track to lose $700 billion this year. The moment the investors lose confidence, it’s over. And this is why big tech is so painfully needy: please, please please just push the colourful button and do something – anything – with AI.

Doctorow suggests that we should ask specific questions about any new technology. “Stop thinking about what the gadget does, and pay attention to who the gadget does it to, and who the gadget does it for.”

In this case, AI is serving capitalism.

Not you, not human progress, not some ideal of efficiency or convenience. Fundamentally, AI as it currently being pursued exists for the primary purpose of making more money for people who are already very wealthy.

This is where the reverse centaur of the title comes in. In technologist slang, good technologies make us like centaurs – a human with the advantages of a horse’s speed and strength. A person using binoculars or riding a bike is like a centaur, as the technology amplifies their human faculties.

A reverse centaur, on the other hand, is a horse with human legs. It’s a backward configuration that makes the human a servant of the technology – a person addicted to the endless scroll of social media, for example, or a delivery driver at the mercy of an app. The big tech version of AI risks making us into reverse centaurs, an imposition on society for the benefit of the richest.

AI could be done differently, Doctorow argues. Open Source AI projects are evidence of that. So is Deepseek and other Chinese disruptors. These lighter weight and more adaptive AI applications are more likely to survive the popping of the bubble, while the big cloud-based American model will collapse and take the stock markets with them. Hence the ‘life after AI’ bit of the title. There will be plenty of useful AI tools for us to use on the other side of the coming crash, though the disruption will be immense. Some of the world’s most valuable companies are likely to fail, with the AI bubble taking its dishonorable place in history alongside tulip mania, the Wall Street crash of 1929 or the derivatives scandal.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of ‘enshittification‘, explained in the book of the same name, articulates something that I’d been seeing everywhere online. His new book applies that theory specifically to AI, and it’s well worth reading. Other opinions on AI are available and it’s by no means the last word on the subject. What it does well is move the conversation around AI from simple questions about whether it’s good or bad, and locate it within capitalism and the drive for economic growth. With that in mind, we can ask better questions about who AI serves, and interrogate the underlying power relationships behind the AI boom.

• You can pick up The Reverse Centaur’s Guide from Earthbound Books
• I don’t generally use AI tools on the blog, but it felt appropriate to ask Google Gemini to generate a suitably apocalyptic header image.

It’s a full reset from his predecessor Keir Starmer, who told the country that “the defining mission of this government is to grow the economy.”

Keir replaced Rishi ‘Seven Bins‘ Sunak, whose advice was to “relentlessly focus on growth“.

He in turn took over from Liz Truss, who said that “what I’m about is about growing the economy”.

How different this was to Boris Johnson: “My government’s priority is to grow and strengthen the economy.”

Teresa May’s priority, on the other hand, was to “drive economic growth up and down the country”.

David Cameron promised that “a relentless focus on growth is what you will get from this government.”

Lastly, Gordon Brown, who said that “going for growth is the government’s number one priority.”

There have been eight prime ministers since I began writing this blog. It’s a list of politicians with a wide variety of views, competencies and popularity. One thing they all have in common is a commitment to economic growth.

Some of this was nuanced, with a greater or lesser degree of attention on how it was distributed. Starmer, May and Johnson all specified that they wanted it to be shared, while Truss openly scorned talk of distribution. Andy Burnham brings nuance too, specifically mentioning “good growth in every postcode”. This is important, and I don’t want to imply equivalence in economic approach across the eight prime ministers. Nevertheless, the underlying pattern is the same, the quotes largely interchangeable, and the latest resident of Number 10 has dutifully pledged his allegiance to the god of growth.

I use the word god deliberately, because I think growth fulfils a religious function in modern politics. We put our faith in it to solve our problems. It is the answer to our ills. It will either shine upon us and bless us, or it will abandon us to recession. Growth has many believers and a vociferous priesthood, and questioning its centrality makes you a heretic.

With my heretic hat on then, let me say briefly why I don’t stand among the growth worshippers. I’ve written an entire book on this if you want more detailed arguments, but perhaps the most important of all is this: growth is an abstract. It doesn’t mean anything on its own, like ‘activity’, ‘motion’, or ‘action’.

If we were to swap the word ‘action’ into the quotes above, we’d see the problem. If a politician promised “relentless focus on action”, we’d ask further questions – what actions? Who is acting? For what? Be more specific.

Talk of growth is so normalised that we accept it at face value, but we ought to ask the same questions: growth of what? For whom?

Growth in the abstract may or may not be a good thing. We always have to be more specific. There are plenty of forms of economic growth that we should resist, and industries that should be shrinking. Fossil fuels is one. AI is another, so massively inflated in value at the moment that it’s likely to punch a hole in the global economy any day now.

Some forms of growth are evidence of failure. Should we celebrate growth in the emergency tyre replacement sector if it actually reflects a breakdown in road maintenance spending and the proliferation of potholes?

Growth is also meaningless without saying who it is for, because context is everything. More for those who don’t have enough is vitally important, potentially life-saving, and that’s why it makes no sense to be anti-growth. Growth for people who already have more than they need, however, is pointless. It is a form of waste. In a context of extreme inequality, more for the richest is actively corrosive to society and to democracy.

Another reason to pause before talking about economic growth is that most people don’t understand it anyway. The vast majority of voters will tell you that it matters, because they are constantly primed to say so. A recent survey found that 87% of voters wanted a stronger focus on growth, which makes you wonder where it should come in a list of government priorities if number one isn’t high enough.

At the same time, the Royal Economic Society found that half the population can’t pick the definition of GDP out of a multiple choice question. We don’t know the god we worship.

What would happen if we stopped talking about it?

By all means let the statisticians calculate GDP, and let the treasury and the economics track it. But what if politicians paused every time they wrote ‘growth’ in a speech, crossed it out and put in something specific? Perhaps we could cut to the chase and talk more about what we really value. Higher wages, rather than higher economic growth. Security, a reliable pension. Funding for health and education. Work that pays and businesses that share the wealth. Safe and beautiful places to live, clean air and a thriving natural world.

What if, like Adam Smith did, we talked about improvements rather than growth?

Put a moratorium on mentions of growth in speeches, and politicians would have to be more specific about the improvements they seek. They’d need to tie their policies into the things that matter to people, rather than falling back on abstractions and assumptions. They would need to show how increased prosperity would reach ordinary citizens, what it would feel like to live in a healthier economy, how you would know that you were benefitting.

Dropping the economic jargon of GDP would also reduce the distance that people feel between themselves and politics. It would rebuild trust, and give voters more clarity on what politicians are actually suggesting.

And maybe we could put an end to the echo chamber while we’re at it, and end this sequence of prime ministers who all sound like each other.

A map showing legislation for balcony solar in each US state, with around half moving forward with it. Plug-in solar should be available in the UK by the end of the summer if all goes to plan, and will bring solar power within reach for millions of renters and low income households.

The culture warriors hate it, but London’s commitment to reducing air pollution under mayor Sadiq Khan has yielded a 40% drop in pollution related deaths.

Swedish railway operators have been painting the rails white to make them more reflective and reduce the risk of buckling during heatwaves.

Scientists and meteorologists, fired by the tens of thousands by the Trump administration, have rebuilt the Climate.gov website that their government deleted. They’re carrying on their work at Climate.us.

It’s been a very busy end of term round here. Lots of school visits to fit in, and I’m finishing the next draft of a children’s book, so not much time for the blog of late. It will likely remain fairly quiet over the summer, but I’m still here…

Recent highlights

• Inequality and the planetary boundaries
• Book review: We need to tax billionaires, by Gabriel Zucman
• The changing colours of the energy transition

A study in Nature offers this useful visual summary of the planetary boundaries, divided into deciles. In the case of climate change, the red segment below, we see that the richest 10% are responsible for 43% of carbon emissions.

The pattern repeats with the richest responsible of 23% of damage from land use change, 24% of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. For biodiversity loss the share is 37%, and water use at 18%. All of these, you will notice, breach the safe limit, which is marked by the red line near the centre of the graph. It’s even worse if you split the top 1%.

At the other end of the economic ladder, the poorest decile are responsible for relatively and are within the safe thresholds on all six measures here.

“Our analysis reveals extreme inequality in environmental footprints,” write the researchers, “highlighting the disproportionate responsibility of affluent groups in both developed and developing countries.” A reminder then, that while environmental action needs everyone, the need to reduce consumption applies first and foremost to the richest.

This was the year that we saw the world’s first trillionaire, a state of imbalance so absurd that it really ought to rewrite how we talk about inequality. I don’t see any sign of that yet, but this book might have one practical and popular answer: tax billionaires.

An important thing to note here: first, this is a call to tax billionaires, not the rich more generally. Those who would be affected are a tiny fraction of one percent of citizens, and there is nothing to fear for the rest of us mere mortals. If governments don’t do it, we will all know why and it will only reinforce the case for the next government to do it.

Neither is it an argument to take more from billionaires than from everyone else. As the book points out, most people pay somewhere near the average level of tax, until we get to the very top. Then the rules go out the window, and billionaires pay less than everyone else. In France, the average tax level is around 50% of income. Billionaires pay half that, despite fair and proportional taxation being written into the constitution.

The book explains some of the reasons why billionaires are so hard to tax. One of the main reasons is that billionaires pay very little income tax, and corporation taxes don’t make up the shortfall. Where most of us get our money through earnings, billionaires accrue wealth through ownership. They can easily funnel assets and dividends through holding companies, often offshore, allowing very rich people to claim that they actually earned very little. The Bezos, while remaining a billionaire throughout, has been known to file so little taxable income that he has received child tax credits. To stop that kind of nonsense, we need wealth taxes instead of income taxes.

Taxing billionaires fairly isn’t a punishment. Nor is it the politics of envy, though no doubt the think-tanks will dutifully say it is. To Zucman, it’s a matter of completing the “unfinished revolution” of income taxation. It would take away an unfair advantage that drives the gap between rich and poor – the less tax you pay, the easier it is to accumulate wealth. And it would help to reduce the deficit, because billionaires’ contribution to government revenues is currently miniscule.

Wealth taxes haven’t always been successful in the past, and the last sections of the book look at examples that we can learn from. Tax rules in some countries are better than others, and we can identify best practice that would make it harder for people to squirrel their fortunes away. There are loopholes that have scuppered previous efforts to tax billionaires, and we know to avoid them this time. Zucman’s favoured solution is a global minimum tax on billionaire wealth, and he sets out how it might work.

Gabriel Zucman is a professor at the Paris School of Economics, and so the main arguments in the book are made from a French context, with comparisons to other countries along the way. Unfortunately the UK doesn’t feature at all, as it hasn’t been possible to replicate the research into billionaire taxation that underpins Zucman’s work. That is telling in itself, of course.

We Need to Tax Billionaires is short and to the point, making its case in 96 pages and we’re done. (This is a mercy – I can think of notable books by French economists that weigh in at ten times that.) It’s got one central idea, and the prospect of having to tax trillionaires now should sharpen political resolve to get it done.

• We Need to Tax Billionaires is available from Earthbound Books

Belgium is the first country to appoint a Chief Planetary Officer, a role “designed to bring Planetary Boundaries science directly into national decision-making, helping governments assess planetary risk across policy, budgets, infrastructure, finance, and national security planning.”

Following last week’s story about climate and dentistry, here’s a nicely presented Grist article on the various ways that climate change affects human health.

With heatwaves getting drawn into the culture wars this summer, a World Weather Attribution study found that “a similar heatwave in June would have been about 3.5°C cooler during the day in 1976 and about 2°C cooler in 2003”, because of the effect of climate change. They also remind us that “heatwaves cause more deaths in Europe than all other natural hazards combined”.

Polestar, almost certainly the world’s most sustainable car manufacturer, has been banned from selling cars in the US. It will close its factories in the US and focus on sales in Europe.

Recent highlights

• What happened to Britain’s window shades?
• Book review: Heatwave, by John L William
• How Frontier Markets empowers women traders

Frontier Markets is a social commerce platform designed to connect businesses with customers in rural India, through a network of women entrepreneurs that they call Sahelis. These women run shops or small businesses, and are equipped with a phone and sales system to connect farming families with a wide range of goods and services that they didn’t have access to before – from small scale solar to farming supplies, household appliances to insurance.

As the founder says, it’s “the first ever AI-enabled technology platform which was designed with, for and by rural women.” It’s a nice example of technology in service to those at the margins, and that understands the human role in the system. It doesn’t matter how good the tech is, it’s useless without the women in the villages and the relationship of trust that they have with their neighbours.

Ashden’s video puts them at the centre of the story too, and the award should help to boost their profile as Frontier Markets seeks to reach more of India’s 800 million citizens in rural villages.

It’s fifty years since the famous 1976 heatwave which broke records as the driest and hottest British summer of the 20th century. From a weather perspective it was a true freak occurrence, and it’s left a lasting legacy. Some of that is benign – lots of people have very happy memories of an ‘endless summer’. Less positively, it’s also a touchstone of climate denial in the UK. “I was there in 1976” has served as convenient shorthand to dismiss the idea of global warming, and a way of talking down to younger climate activists.

Both of those aspects have been on display in recent weeks as the anniversary coincides with another heatwave. The right wing press have trotted out a series of articles about how everyone had a wonderful time in 1976 and we should all calm down. Not bothering to check the facts, some have insisted that schools stayed open throughout. Nobody panicked, everyone was fine, and hydration hadn’t even been invented then.

Some of this is climate denial by implication. Some of it is starkly explicit, such as an editorial in the Daily Mail that somehow uses the heatwave as an excuse to go after the “climate cultists” and their “suicidal rush to net zero.”

Since I wasn’t there in 1976, I picked up a copy of Heatwave by historian John Williams (not my Dad), to get a bit more perspective on what really happened. It’s fair to say that not everyone was having a lovely time. There was water rationing, farming was devastated and the government had to appoint a Minister for Drought. There was a simmering threat of violence in some cities, and that summer saw race riots and murderous gang warfare. Racial minorities and the LGBTQ community are likely to remember the summer differently. Police call-outs for domestic violence spiked by 600 extra calls a day in London alone. A teenager with special needs was murdered at an overcrowded outdoor swimming pool and somehow no suspect was ever identified. The NHS struggled to cope with the heat itself and the rise in demand from heatstroke, heart attacks and other heat-related conditions.

So no, not everything was fine.

It is also true that a lot of people were experiencing a uniquely wonderful summer. Those most likely to be enjoying themselves were children and young people, who had more freedom at the time. The book has plenty of their stories too, as they’re out swimming or riding their bikes and meeting their friends. My favourite anecdote is an interviewee remembering how the sun melted the yellow lines on the roads, and children peeled it off and competed to see who could scrape up the most. “My ball of paint was the size of a football”, she claims.

That raises an interesting question about the age and background of newspaper columnists, and whose stories get told fifty years on. The prevailing story today is from those who were children in 1976. We hear far less from the adults who were dealing with pupils fainting in their classrooms, or nurses trying to keep vulnerable patients cool in overheated hospital wards. For those of us who weren’t there, I think it’s important to recognise that different stories can be told about the same event.

Standing back from individual perspectives of the heatwave, Williams’ book conveys a powerful sense of a changing culture. 1976 was a turning point for the UK. It was the year that Britain had to be bailed out by the IMF, leading to emergency austerity measures and paving the way for Margaret Thatcher and her economic reforms. It was a breakthrough year for a number of social movements, including the Trico strike for equal pay for women, and the Southall Youth Movement of young asians. In the counterculture, 1976 was also the year that punk emerged.

The book is actually more about these cultural shifts than anything else, with the heatwave serving as a backdrop to explorations of culture and politics. It’s written almost like a scrapbook or a collage, with short sections on items in the news or songs in the charts, interspersed with longer chapters on specific events or trends. There’s a chapter on sleaze cinema and the ‘confessions’ series, which sounds like the worst of 70s trash but usefully illustrates how norms have changed. Another chapter looks at Joan Armatrading and how she bucked the trend as a popular black singer-songwriter – someone I didn’t know much about and am listening to as I write. Williams, who was 15 at the time, writes about his fascination with Soul Boy fashion, the Entebbe raid, or the West Indies cricket tour. As a child of the Francophonie with very near zero interest in cricket, it’s a testament to his writing that I found this chapter rivetting.

As a book, Heatwave is an engaging piece of social history, a mosaic of stories from a specific and memorable summer. As an event, the summer of 1976 is a complicated story that we should neither romanticise nor catastrophise. And given how much has changed in that fifty years, I’m not sure glib comparisons between today’s heatwaves and that one are remotely useful. What matters is today is what we do and how we treat each other in our hotter world, where such events are going to be more frequent.

• Heatwave is available from Earthbound Books

I have no particular problem with air conditioning where it is really needed, especially if it’s paired with solar. But other solutions are available, and there’s a really obvious one that we have forgotten about in the UK.

Over half term we were in France, and it was hot. Most homes had ways of dealing with this, and I bored the family by pointing out shutters, roller blinds and awnings. Keeping the sun off your windows is entirely normal in France. I’ve seen similar things in the Netherlands and Belgium, which have a similar climate to us, but they are much rarer in the UK.

It was not always like this. Historic photos of city streets often feature awnings on the buildings. At the top of the post is a picture of Luton’s high street in the 1950s, with awnings outside all the shops. Not a single one of these remains. Shades were widely used on upper windows and on homes as well. Below is a picture taken in the garden of Buckingham Palace in 1897, with external window blinds pulled down on the lower floors. For American readers, check out the nifty awnings that used to be on the White House.

Awnings and blinds were particularly popular in the Victorian era, and adverts from the time offer a broad range of styles. They were a common feature, and there were catalogues and showrooms to browse.

Where did they go? They apparently fell out of fashion in the 20th century, and I haven’t found an entirely satisfactory explanation yet. I’ve read that it’s because of air conditioning, but that’s an American answer for the similar disappearance of their own awnings and blinds.

AC isn’t common in homes in the UK, and so it can’t explain the absence of blinds on domestic buildings, though it might be true of offices and shops. I wonder if it’s more to do with changing design preferences, and a modernist aesthetic that favoured straight lines and avoided decorative elements.

Another factor could be double glazing, which offers some protection against heat as well as cold. Awnings also protect wooden sash windows from the rain, which is less important when windows are mainly made from PVC.

Whatever the reason or combination of reasons, people didn’t just stop building homes with shade structures, they also removed existing ones. Architectural historians working for Historic England point out that the fittings for awnings and canopies and rain hoods can often be seen on heritage buildings even though the shades themselves have gone.

We used to know how to stop our homes from overheating, by keeping direct sun off the glass. Then we forgot, and have become dependent on machines to remove the heat from the buildings when we could have prevented it from entering in the first place. Before we reach for the more expensive technofix of air conditioning, maybe it’s time we rediscovered window shades.

For a nice example, see the Shellhusen building in Copenhagen. It was designed with shade canopies in 1951. They went out of fashion and were removed, and then they were restored in 2022 and look fantastic. More of this sort of thing, yes?

That has risks of its own of course. It can tip towards coercion or get derailed by perverse incentives. And it has the opposite problem to western environmentalism: where we might rely too much on individual actions that don’t add up to systemic change, a top-down approach can focus on infrastructure and systems and forget to involve ordinary citizens. So it’s interesting to see a raft of new measures from the Chinese government this year that aim to influence consumer choices.

China’s Ministry of Commerce, in concert with eight other government departments, has set out a nationwide strategy to encourage greener consumption. It aims to support more sustainable businesses, build the circular economy, and raise environmental standards across the board.

I won’t detail all of the measures, but there are some interesting points to note across the strategy. One is a boost to organic food and more sustainable farming practices, using new certification programmes and consumer-facing logos. There’s also a provision for certifying geographical origins, like France pioneered with its ‘appellation d’origine contrôlée’. (France declared its first protected origin in 1411, a full 582 years before the UK, which tells you a lot about national food cultures). China is also looking at carbon labelling and energy efficiency stickers, empowering consumers to make educated purchasing decisions.

The strategy also looks at waste, recycling and single use plastics. There will be new rules on plastic bags, and investment in a wider set of materials for recycling, such as e-waste and textiles. This is an opportunity to create circular economy businesses, and new forms of ‘reverse logistics’ that take things back for reuse.

Something I’ve not seen elsewhere is a focus on secondhand goods as part of a sustainable consumer culture. Detail is scant at the moment, certainly in English, but there is talk of support for online and in-person secondhand markets, formally recognising it as a key plank in a circular economy. A healthy secondhand market for electric cars is also mentioned, ensuring that there’s a full ecosystem for EVs and that those on lower incomes are able to participate.

There are sections of the strategy that target specific sectors too, such as hospitality. Caterers will have to get to grips with new rules on food waste and biodegradeable packaging. Hotels are encouraged to use environmentally friendly cleaning products, eliminate single use plastics and install water saving technologies. Procurement guidelines – an under-appreciated aspect of environmental action – are pressed into service to bring transparency to supply chains and encourage carbon footprint evaluations.

I can’t find much on this yet either, but it looks like some of this will be ‘gamified’ through a credit system rather than a set of bans or taxes. People will earn credits when making greener choices, and then cash those in for discounts. That’s an interesting approach, and introducing a scheme like that with government backing could be a powerful incentive.

We’ll have to wait for more information about the specifics of all of this, but it’s an impressively broad and comprehensive agenda. If it goes to plan, it could take China a big step closer to the ecological civilisation that they aspire to be.

In a striking example of how climate harm spins out in unexpected directions, a dentist in Pakistan writes about prolonged outdoor working in extreme heat destroys people’s teeth. He describes it as “environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems”. One of his patients puts it more directly, saying that climate change is “here, right now, in my mouth.”

Social media has become the biggest source of news for the first time, according to the Reuters Institute’s annual report. I thought that had happened already, but TV news and news websites had been ahead until 2025.

Are hot schools putting pupils and teachers at risk? My wife Louise, the proper journalist in the house, writes about school overheating for the BBC.

Let’s Go Zero, the schools campaign I work on with Ashden, has released its impact report for 2026. With over 9,000 schools signed up, it’s now the biggest schools climate campaign in the UK.

Recent highlights

• The changing colours of the energy transition
• Price parity for EVs has arrived
• Why buildings overheat