All posts by media-man

Meloni-Backed Biofuels Project Under Scrutiny Following New Investigation

Investigation by SourceMaterial and Politico, supported by data from T&E, into Eni’s publicly-backed Kenyan biofuels project, shows that it is struggling to deliver on its promise to produce non-edible food crops on poor quality land. An investigation carried out by SourceMaterial and Politico, with support from T&E data, shows that an Italian government ... [continued]

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Lynk & Co In Europe To Be Operated By Volvo Cars To Support Growth And Unlock Commercial Synergies

Under a signed Memorandum of Understanding (“MoU”), Volvo Cars is planned to take on Lynk & Co’s commercial and brand operations in Europe, further supporting the brand’s growth plans in the region. Lynk & Co will maintain its strict brand independence and remain an integral part of the Geely Auto ... [continued]

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Hydrogen Trucks In China Are A Policy Side Bet, Not A Market Winner

Someone pushed another hydrogen trucking headline from China across my desk recently, this time tied to northern China, heavy trucks, refueling corridors, and the familiar implication that the future had somehow arrived. It is a recurring genre now. There is always another corridor, another station cluster, another policy target, another ... [continued]

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Water-Use Restrictions Follow Snow Drought and Heat Wave in the Western U.S.

From shutting off sprinklers to closing ski resorts, communities and business owners are adapting to parched conditions out West. Things could get much worse, experts say.

Officials were already sounding the alarm bells in early March across the Western United States after a winter with historically low snowpacks, which supplies water for communities as it slowly melts throughout the spring and summer. 

Australia’s superb fairywren could be extinct within decades due to climate crisis, researchers say

Scientists tracked bird population in Canberra’s botanic gardens and found climate impacts starting to affect them

A common and well-loved bird of bush and garden could go extinct within 30-40 years due to the weather impacts of climate change, researchers say.

Data derived from nearly 30 years of weekly observations tracked the lives of superb fairy wrens in Canberra’s botanic gardens, noting the changing weather’s impacts on them.

Continue reading...

Win Yourself A Rivian!

Vision, commitment, sustainability, leadership — this has been the ISEA way for four decades. As part of its fundraising activities to help advance solar energy in Illinois, the Illinois Solar Education Association (ISEA) has also been raffling off electric vehicles for years. This year, it’s all about Rivian — winners ... [continued]

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The Trump Administration’s New Biofuels Targets Threaten Carbon-Rich Rainforests

The U.S. doesn’t have enough bio-based diesel to meet the administration’s new mandate, so blenders will have to import yet more foreign crop-based oils.

President Donald Trump stood on the Truman Balcony at the White House during the “Great American Agriculture Celebration” last week and announced what he called a “historic” boost to the nation’s farmers.

An April Fool’s Joke Or Not? “The God Squad Is Overriding Protections For Endangered Species”

Here at CleanTechnica we like to step aside and have a little fun on April 1 and tease our readers a bit. (See here, here, here, and here.) So, in keeping with that tradition, I’d like to test your ability to separate truth from tripe, to distinguish applesauce from argument. ... [continued]

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Black-Led Climate Actions — Featuring The Solutions Project Grantees

The Solutions Project is a nonprofit philanthropic foundation that funds and amplifies the stories of grassroots climate organizations, most of which are led by women and people of color. The Project practices Solidarity Philanthropy, centering equity and justice at the heart of grant-making. They’ve invested $50 million+ in grants to ... [continued]

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Volvo, Toyota, & Daimler Truck Ink Memorandum For Fuel Cell Development

Toyota Motor Corporation is moving to join cellcentric as an equal shareholder alongside Volvo Group and Daimler Truck AG, following the signing of a non-binding memorandum of understanding among the parties. The planned structure would give all three companies equal ownership in cellcentric, which will continue to operate as an ... [continued]

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From Mainstream to Allstream

David Weinberger once said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people.” It’s the future now, and he was right, or close enough. Because today we live in a world where the power to publish and distribute no longer belongs just to institutions, but to everybody. Me included. Here are some stats for this very blog:

At its peak, this blog had dozens of thousands of visitors daily. But that was in the ’00s, when blogging was a small pond, and I was a large fish in it. That was also when big newspapers and broadcast networks were still mountain ranges on the media landscape. Now those mountains have worn down to hills amidst fresh volcanoes: stars new and old, gushing out “content” on podcasts, social media, YouTube, and the rest. They’re the ones with readers, viewers, followers, and subscribers in the dozens of millions.

While that’s interesting, the media landscape has widened exponentially as millions of consumers have also become producers. In sum, their flow is immense: far larger than what we get from the old hills and the new volcanoes. Let’s call it the allstream.

It’s not “the media” anymore. It’s too different. Let’s explore how.

First, “the media” is a modern label, dating from the 1940s. Here’s Google’s Ngram Viewer, which charts mentions in books.

As a topic, “the media” hockey-sticked when Marshall McLuhan made “media theory” a thing in the 1960s:

Meanwhile, the expression “major media” seems to have come and gone—

—while “mainstream media” is hot shit:

Why has “mainstream media” gone up while “major media” has gone down?

Politics. Writers and talkers on the right and the left both have lots to say about “the mainstream media.” It seems (at least to me) that talkers on both political wings think the old mainstream media—big newspapers, TV networks, broadcast giants, news wires—are still mountains. Or, to follow the stream metaphor, rivers.

But those old rivers were self-limiting. They controlled the production and the flow. That’s what made them main. It’s also what made them costly. Printing presses were expensive. Broadcast licenses were scarce. Regulations ruled. Editors and producers were gatekeepers because there were gates to keep.

Then came the Internet, followed by the Web, blogging, podcasting, cheap digital photography and video, and all the other means by which anybody with a keyboard, microphone, phone, or just an idea could put something into the world. The threshold for expression has fallen to trivial.

One reason was that RSS—really simple syndication—made distribution simple for everyone. Nobody had to ask permission from a publisher, a platform, or a network. It gave individuals the power to speak and flow into the allstream.

Every creator wants to be valued and followed by at least a few people—especially the right people—rather than by large populations. We each have our own public. (At least for this moment, reader, you’re in mine.)

In place of the mainstream, we now have wide slopes of braided rivers:

Canterbury, New Zealand. Photo by Bernard Spragg via Wikimedia Commons.

In the allstream, everybody can publish, distribution is easy, and the number of flows exceeds anyone’s ability to count or follow them all. Their variety is also extreme: blogs, podcasts, newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, posts in Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, X, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Flickr and Smugmug photos. Substack essays. Discord chats. Group texts. Private forums. Comment sections. Local news outlets (many written and published by just one person). Transcripts. Some are public. Some are semi-public. Some are private. Some are generated by AI or by humans with AI assistance. The scale of each is small by old media standards. But the aggregate is far more immense than what we call “the media” ever were.

In The Redstream Media, I described how partisan flows of news and opinion had already turned the mainstream into a sidestream. But it’s not just happening with politics. Expertise streams around institutions. Communities stream around beats. Hobbyists stream around trade publications. Local knowledge streams around outside authorities. People with cameras, microphones, and keyboards stream around organizations that have long monopolized distribution.

Of course, much of the allstream is noisy, false, manipulative, repetitive, trivial, and thick with propaganda, junk, spam, AI slop, outrage bait, and viral bullshit. It can produce confusion faster than clarity. But the old mainstream had propaganda, junk, exclusions, class filters, geographic biases, advertiser pressures, and institutional blind spots.

But scarcity was the media’s main feature. To see, hear, or read it, you needed a TV, a radio, a subscription, or a newsstand. Through those spincters, the few spoke to the many while the many lacked the means to speak back, or out. Now they have the means. All of them can stream too.

When I look at how far my readership has fallen from the heights it enjoyed in the golden age of blogging (and at Linux Journal in its peak years), I’m glad to have the readers I’ve got. The same goes for my photo collections here and here on Flickr. For two decades, those got ten to fifteen thousand views a day. Now they get a few hundred. I’m fine with that too, because the totality of all the flow on the Net is beyond measure, and growing.

The allstream is everywhere, and no longer only (1.0) or mostly (2.0) on the Web. It has spread across too many places for an old-fashioned search to encompass. As Gemini tells me, Google would rather be your “helpful assistant” than your librarian.

And that’s your new sphincter.

Big AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity, et. al.) stands between you and the allstream and says, “I’ll handle this.” So the sphincter moves from the point of publication to the point of retrieval. (My assistant, ChatGPT, gave me that quote and the sentence that followed. Everything else in this essay is mine.)

When we (David Weinberger, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and I) wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, we saw lowering the threshold of public expression as a plus for civilization. We published Cluetrain in March 1999, 27 years ago. Here is the “one clue” (from Chris Locke) that precedes the 95 theses that followed:

And dammit, we are still seats, eyeballs, end users, and consumers. Our reach still fails to exceed the grasp of the surveillance fecosystem. And none of big tech (or big anything) is dealing with it.

But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.

And we are still there. All of us can produce video, but if we want it seen, we’ll need to use YouTube, which has a monthly reach of 2.7 billion people. It’s a wide gate, but Google keeps it.

Can we ever get the high degrees of personal and collective agency we saw coming when we wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto?

I think we can, if online service providers agree to our terms, instead of us to theirs. That’s why we created MyTerms, and why I’ve written so much about it. (And I won’t stop.) The case we need to make is that an intention economy built on customer agency will be richer, wider, deeper, and larger than what we have here and now, in the final stage of the old industrial age.

Once we have the agency, we will need new and better forms of economic signaling and money flow than we have so far. Everyone who publishes anything should have a piece of the allstream action (whatever that might mean). MyTerms will tee that up as well.

I’ll leave you with a question: What will happen when the landscape across which the allstream flows is a worldwide commons of self-empowered customers?

If you have an answer for that, you can also inform the future of Customer Commons, which we created in 2013 to make good on what I promised in The Intention Economy in 2012. Both pushed forward the body of ideas we started assembling with ProjectVRM in 2006, but actually began forming with the Internet in the 1970s and ’80s, and the Web, Linux, and open source in the ’90s.

Everything takes time. Let’s make a better future happen sooner rather than later.

UK’s smallest bird of prey among 200 species at risk of extinction, study finds

Merlin could disappear in worst-case scenario, with British isles facing ecological ‘point of no return’

The merlin, Britain’s smallest bird of prey, is one of more than 200 species that will become extinct in the UK if action is not taken to curb emissions and unsustainable land use, a study has claimed.

According to the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), there is a 20-year window in which decisions on climate and land use will determine the fate of dozens of Britain’s native species.

Continue reading...

New York Homeowners Can Get Paid To Invest In Battery Storage

Homeowners in New York state are eligible for incentives to purchase home energy management and battery storage systems. The incentives come from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and virtual power plant (VPP) programs provided by National Grid’s ConnectedSolutions and Orange & Rockland Utilities’ Smart Savers ... [continued]

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More Perfect and PRX Present “In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan,” A New Podcast for America’s 250th

More Perfect and PRX Present “In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan,” A New Civic Podcast for America’s 250th

The podcast series featuring acclaimed writers, historians, and thinkers will explore lessons of the past to write the nation’s future

The bipartisan civic alliance More Perfect and Peabody Award-winning public media organization PRX today launched In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan, a new podcast inviting listeners to explore lessons from America’s past to write the story of the future. Shogan — the 11th Archivist of the United States and the first woman in history to lead the National Archives and Records Administration — will lead discussions with prominent public leaders, historians, and journalists on the United States’ quest to form a more perfect union.

Launched in February 2026, In Pursuit is a national initiative from More Perfect in which leading American public figures and scholars, including three former presidents, three former first ladies, the current Supreme Court Chief Justice, and seven Pulitzer Prize winners, share lessons from each American President and several First Ladies. The podcast will feature contributors to In Pursuit, advancing the project’s conversations and themes. The podcast, In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan, is available to listeners everywhere free on-demand across all major listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Overcast, and NPR One.

An audio trailer is available now. The first episode will debut Tuesday, April 7 with new episodes released every other week:

In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan

“The United States is a living, evolving experiment in self-government,” said Colleen Shogan, CEO of In Pursuit. “The essays and companion podcast help us debrief that experiment through history, storytelling, and the enduring question of what it takes to sustain and lead a democracy.”

Podcast episodes will delve into topics such as George Washington’s leadership trait of humility, Martha Washington’s foundational steps into public life, James Madison’s strategic approach to democratic essentials such as the Bill of Rights, Dolley Madison’s command of spaces where political life could thrive, and Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the future, and more. Guests will include New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas, Pulitzer-winning historian David Blight, and George Washington Presidential Library executive director Lindsay M. Chervinsky, among many others. The podcast team also includes Jim Ambuske, director of digital history for In Pursuit.

Colleen Shogan

“As a public media organization, we strive to serve the public interest through content and engagement that strengthens our communities and our democracy. In Pursuit embodies this mission,” said Stephanie Kuo, vice president of content at PRX. “We’re proud to partner with Colleen Shogan and the team at More Perfect to bring audiences perspectives that unite and inspire us.”

Listeners are also invited to read In Pursuit’s essays on Substack here.

More Perfect’s In Pursuit has been funded by the Ibis Group, the Lilly Endowment, Bezos Family Foundation, and the John D & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

About More Perfect

More Perfect is a bipartisan alliance of 43 Presidential Centers, National Archives Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Karsh Institute for Democracy at the University of Virginia, and more than 100 organizations working together to advance five foundational Democracy Goals: 1) Universal Civic Learning; 2) Expanding National Service & Volunteering; 3) Bridging Divides & Building Trust; 4) Trusted Elections & More Representative and Responsive Governance; and 5) Access to Trusted News & Information.

About In Pursuit

In Pursuit is led by CEO Colleen Shogan, the 11th Archivist of the United States & Senior Advisor to More Perfect & Senior Fellow in Civics at Stand Together; and Co-Chaired by John Bridgeland, More Perfect Founder & CEO and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President George W. Bush; Anita McBride, Director, First Ladies Initiative at American University and former Chief of Staff to First Lady Laura Bush, and Mark Updegrove, President & CEO of the LBJ Foundation and Presidential Historian for ABC News; with Vice Chair Andrew Mangino, an award-winning social entrepreneur.

About PRX

Celebrating more than 20 years as a nonprofit public media company, PRX works in partnership with leading independent creators, organizations, and stations to bring meaningful audio storytelling into millions of listeners’ lives. PRX is one of the world’s top podcast publishers, public radio distributors, and audio producers, serving as an engine of innovation for public media and podcasting to help shape a vibrant future for creative and journalistic audio. Shows across PRX’s portfolio of broadcast productions, podcast partners, and its Radiotopia podcast network have received recognition from the Peabody Awards, the Tribeca Festival, the International Documentary Association, the National Magazine Awards, and the Pulitzer Prizes. Visit PRX.org for more.


More Perfect and PRX Present “In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan,” A New Podcast for America’s 250th was originally published in PRX Official on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Federal Court Strikes Down President Trump’s Attacks Against Endangered Species Act

Bedrock Environmental Law Restored to Pre-Trump Status Oakland, CA — A federal court struck down President Trump’s attacks against the Endangered Species Act (ESA), restoring key values of the bedrock environmental law to the status it held for decades before the first Trump administration attacked the bedrock environmental law. After a seven-year ... [continued]

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Sierra Club Files Request for Rehearing on ACC REST Decision

The Sierra Club on Friday filed a request for rehearing to ask for a reconsideration of the Arizona Corporation Commission’s (ACC) decision to repeal Arizona’s Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST), a program that has supported the development of clean, affordable renewable energy, bringing clean energy jobs and investment to Arizona. In its ... [continued]

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Trump’s Iran war and drilling push show ‘dangerous volatility’ of fossil fuel era

Critics say president is locking into 20th-century energy systems even as his ‘bet’ on oil and gas ‘isn’t going so well’

By attacking Iran and threatening to seize its oil while taking extraordinary measures to block clean energy back in the US, Donald Trump has inadvertently highlighted the dangerous volatility of the fossil fuel era, critics say.

The US and Israel’s bombardment of Iran and southern Lebanon has caused a humanitarian and environmental toll, with threats of further escalation set to add to these casualties as well as add more planet-heating emissions and destroy drinking water supplies.

Continue reading...

Oil Companies Set to Make €24 Billion in Excess Profits from European Drivers This Year

T&E calls for a temporary tax on oil companies’ super-profits. Oil majors are set to make a €24 billion¹ windfall from European drivers off the back of the latest conflict in the Middle East, a new T&E tracker shows². Oil companies have already made €1.3 billion in excess profits, the ... [continued]

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Argentina & Mexico Just Placed A Massive EV Order On Brazil: 50,000 BYDs (Each) For 2027

Argentina has been the Latin American EV laggard for as long as I’ve been following the regional transition: it was the last country to surpass 0.1% market share, then one of the last to get to 1%. It also had almost zero presence from the region’s most popular brands, with ... [continued]

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FEMA Skips National Hurricane Conference Amid DHS Shutdown

The conference is one of the largest aimed at preparing for hurricane season, which begins June 1. A task force report on potential reforms to the agency also remains on hold.

ORLANDO, Fla.—A major conference to help communities prepare for hurricane season kicked off Monday without the agency that coordinates federal disaster response.

Blasting Begins For Border Wall On Cherished New Mexico Mountain

A planned 1.3-mile wall across Mount Cristo Rey has drawn opposition from environmentalists and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces.

Editor’s note: This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with Inside Climate News. Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual nonprofit newsroom and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border. 

New BLUETTI Fridge Storage System, EV Battery Innovation Updates — Top Stories of the Week

Another week has flown by, and it’s time to review and reflect on the top cleantech stories of the week. Here’s a hint: it’s about batteries, batteries, batteries. And also a bit of solar, a bit of fossil fuel war, and a bit of EV stuff. Let’s take a stroll. ... [continued]

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AutoTrader Says Fuel Crunch Puts Diesel Vehicle Sales Under Pressure As South Africans Look To Electric Alternatives

The unintended consequence of South Africa’s fuel crunch may be doing what the prevailing local environment that lacks supportive policy and incentives has long struggled to achieve: pushing more motorists to consider electric vehicles over diesel. In the absence of incentives for battery-electric vehicles (BEV) and in a year which ... [continued]

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Why Molecular Solar Thermal Is Great Chemistry And Bad Energy Hype

Every few years, a chemistry paper wanders out of the lab, passes through a university press office, gets dressed up by a science news site, and lands on social media as if humanity is one strained molecule away from solving energy storage. The latest example is Molecular Solar Thermal storage, ... [continued]

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10 New EV Fast Chargers To Be Installed In Indiana

Ten new EV fast chargers will be installed along travel corridors in Indiana. They will be located at three sites: Battery Innovation Center – An advanced battery research facility JJ’s Travel Plaza – A fueling destination located along US 31 The Beef House Restaurant and Dinner Theatre – A fueling ... [continued]

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Altitude Partners With Empacar Bolivia & Becomes First Commercial Buyer To Reach +1 Million T CDRs Financed

Altitude has signed an agreement with Empacar S.A. to purchase more than 305,000 tonnes of biochar-based carbon removal credits (CORCs) from facilities in Bolivia. The deal adds to the growing number of large-scale CDR offtakes in the Altitude portfolio. The biochar plant by Empacar in Bolivia is supported by global ... [continued]

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XPeng Serious About Robotaxis, Creates Distinct Division

XPeng spins off robotaxi unit as China’s EV race shifts toward autonomy Chinese electric vehicle maker XPeng has taken a decisive step toward commercializing autonomous mobility, establishing a standalone robotaxi unit that signals a broader shift in strategy from car manufacturing to full-stack transportation services. The new unit, reported by ... [continued]

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Why “Hating Cars” Actually Protects The Fossil Fuel Status Quo

The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes recently dropped a 48-minute video titled “Every Reason to Hate Cars.” Honestly, the host brings up some valid points. He talks about traffic fatalities, the sheer amount of space parking lots waste, and how even EVs chew through tires and kick up microplastics. There’s ... [continued]

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Manila International Auto Show Returns with a Different Kind of Energy

The Manila International Auto Show (MIAS) returns this April with a very different kind of energy, and you can feel it even before walking into the halls. In the Philippines, fuel prices are hurtling towards what were seen as impossible levels, inflation is biting, and conversations that used to stay ... [continued]

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