I saw Toyota’s clear direction for electric mobility first presented in 2017 (as early as the 2006 Tokyo Motors Show, it had presented the vision and the plans, but was spotty in directions). This has not moved out of focus since then. I then experienced it in 2019 at the ... [continued]
The post The First of Toyota’s Many Mobility-as-a-Service Solutions Enters Production appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Sun Day national action supported renewable energy, day after ‘Make Billionaires Pay’ march ahead of Climate Week
Hundreds of environmentalists gathered in New York City’s Stuyvesant Square Park and a nearby Quaker meeting house on Sunday to rally in support of solar power and other forms of renewable energy. The event was part of a national “day of action” billed Sun Day, founded by veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben and first Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes.
“It’s so sad to watch the sun going to waste,” McKibben said at a press conference, standing beside environmentalists and their children. “Every single day, energy from heaven going to waste while we drill down to hell for another dose of the stuff that is wrecking this planet.”
Continue reading...Marking Fairtrade Fortnight, tea farmers in Kenya – a country which provides around half of the tea we drink in the UK – tell Nick Ferris that they are increasingly threatened by climate change and chronic poverty
The Independent’s Climate 100 List recognises leading environmental campaigners and change makers helping to tackle the climate crisis. Despite not setting out to write on the climate, the British Nigerian author realised it’s an issue that affects everything. She speaks to Emma Henderson
Tangier Island in Virginia — one of the last inhabited islands in the Chesapeake Bay — is under threat from rising sea levels and climate change.
(Image credit: Jim Watson)
Spoiler alert: Yes, AI is bad for the climate. AI’s computing power relies on massive data centers that use enormous amounts of electricity and water. The Trump administration wants that energy to come from burning fossil fuels, rather than renewable sources. Where does that leave the climate and communities caught in the crosshairs?
Ragasa weakens to a tropical storm after making landfall in China
Poland stands at a crossroads in its energy transition, with decisions today shaping its economy and security for decades to come. The government has committed to building 6 to 9 GW of nuclear power, beginning with three AP1000 reactors on the Baltic coast, but delays and financing uncertainty already suggest ... [continued]
The post Poland at a Crossroads: Nuclear Delays vs Renewable Success appeared first on CleanTechnica.
The US startup Boston Metal is bringing its new one-pot green steel process to the global industrial decarbonization movement, along with a process for recovering valuable metals from mining waste.
The post A Green Steel Process Based On 1980’s Technology Is Coming For Your Fossil Fuels appeared first on CleanTechnica.
New data shows governments now planning more fossil fuel production in coming decades than they were in 2023
Governments around the world are ramping up coal, gas and oil extraction which will put climate goals beyond reach, new data has shown.
Far from reducing reliance on fossil fuels, nations are planning higher levels of fossil fuel production for the coming decades than they did in 2023, the last time comparable data was compiled.
Continue reading...The last two years have witnessed the hottest one in history, some of the worst wildfire seasons across Canada, Europe and South America and deadly flooding and heat waves throughout the globe. Over that same period, the world’s largest fossil fuel producers have expanded their planned output for the future, setting humanity on an even more dangerous path into a warmer climate.
Ten years after countries promised to cut climate pollution in the Paris Agreement, countries plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels that would be consistent with that deal.
(Image credit: VISHAL KUMAR SINGH)
This story isn’t written from onsite coverage or from a press release. It comes from the official YouTube channel of the company, which found its way into my YouTube feed. And it’s fascinating. Though I knew about the e-series and Ducati’s rigorous R&D in the one-make race, I couldn’t catch ... [continued]
The post When Lightning Strikes Twice: The Ducati V21L’s (Almost) Final Thunder appeared first on CleanTechnica.
For most of the past half century, the H1-B visa program has been a conduit for global talent into the American economy. It has not been a minor contribution but a central driver of U.S. leadership in high technology. Scratch most successful firms of the last 50 years, and H1-B ... [continued]
The post The $100,000 Mistake: Why H1-B Barriers and Policy Rollbacks Shrink America’s Future appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Two weeks ago, I wrote an article about a couple in Virginia who are suing Tesla, claiming they were trapped inside their Model Y after it collided with a utility pole in 2023. An off-duty first responder rushed to the stricken couple, but the exterior door latch was not working. ... [continued]
The post Tesla Model Y Rear Door Emergency Release Hack. Redesign In Progress. appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Greg Jackson – founder and CEO of Octopus Energy – tells The Independent that wind farm companies are the winners from government policy, while consumers pay the price
Now in its second year, The Independent is proud to publish its list of the world’s leading environmentalists – marking the campaigners, change makers and innovators who are working to stop the damage caused by global warming
Porsche is getting rocked in its two major markets -- China and the US. It just announced a new plan to stop the bleeding.
The post Porsche Rethinks Its Product Lineup appeared first on CleanTechnica.
The Malawian-UK NGO Tiyeni helps farmers in Malawi increase their crop yields, because many people in Malawi live in poverty and need to be able to grow more crops. One way they do this is by teaching them to use a more productive farming approach. “We achieve this by delivering ... [continued]
The post Little Electric Tractor Supports Better Crop Yields, Runs On Solar Power appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Just a few years ago, it seemed like we could make a real dent in climate change through technological means like electric vehicles, renewable energy solutions, and digitalization. Times have certainly changed. With the Trump administration’s shocking authoritarian rule overtaking the US, fighting for democracy has taken center stage over ... [continued]
The post Must Climate Action Take Second Place To Fighting For Democracy? appeared first on CleanTechnica.
At least 14 killed in Taiwan and three in Philippines as Hong Kong, Macau and southern Chinese cities brought to standstill
Almost two decades ago, some scientists predicted that Arctic summer sea ice would ‘soon’ disappear. These predictions were mentioned by Al Gore and got a lot of press. However, they did not gain wide acceptance in the scientific community, and were swiftly disproven. Unsurprisingly, this still comes up a lot. Time for a deeper dive into what happened and why…
It is unsurprising that climate contrarians bring up past ‘failed predictions’ to bolster their case that nothing need be done about climate change. [It is equally unsurprising that they don’t bother to mention the predictions that were skillful, but let’s not dwell on that!]. For a long time, their favorite supposed ‘failed prediction’ was that there was a consensus about the imminence of a new ice age in the 1970s (a topic we have covered many times), but more recently it has turned to the supposed prediction of Al Gore that “Arctic summer sea ice would disappear” in a short number of years. This has everything – the ‘But Al Gore!’ knee-jerk, a conflation of Al Gore with the scientific community, it’s sounds suitably apocalyptic and, of course, Arctic summer sea ice has not disappeared (it’s only down 40% or so):
What did Al Gore actually say?
If we go back to Dec 2007, in the immediate aftermath of the shocking decrease in sea ice that summer, Gore gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize he’d received jointly with the IPCC. In it he said:
Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.
What was he reporting on?
This was truthful reporting. The first study (I think) refers to a commentary piece in EOS (or perhaps a preprint of it), which noted the poor performance of climate models in tracking the Arctic sea ice loss, and made an expert guestimate that summer sea ice would be gone by around 2030. The second (upcoming) one, refers to a fall AGU 2007 presentation that would be given by Wieslaw Maslowski, who at the time ran one of the highest resolution ice models available. However, his prediction was not directly based on his ice model, but rather on a linear extrapolation of the ice volume from his model:
One might sensibly ask why a prediction made in 2007 only made it into a review paper in 2012, despite having been highly publicised at the time? We’ll get to that.
Gore continued to reference Maslowski’s prediction at least through to 2009.
Over the next few years, a few other folks got into the sea ice forecasting game using similarly somewhat unorthodox methodologies. Chief among them was Peter Wadhams, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University. Wadhams (and a group that styled themselves the “Arctic Methane Emergency Group” (AMEG)) started showing graphs of extrapolated ice thickness from the University of Washington’s PIOMASS model:
Even without being an expert in sea ice, one might question some of these methods: naive fits to noisy data being extrapolated out of range, the odd fact that the same methods applied to extent or area data gave vastly different times of ice-free conditions, and, most obviously, a lack of any physical modeling for the future state. Sure, the standard climate models (CMIP3 at the time) used in scenarios were behaving too conservatively, but to ignore them completely…?
I don’t recall whether I was at Maslowski’s talk in AGU 2007, but I recall seeing him present similar results at least a couple of times. And even if he wasn’t present, his results were discussed widely among relevant scientists at multiple workshops. As far as I recall, opinions were pretty sharply negative.
What is the physics behind your prediction?
In 2014, the Royal Society hosted a workshop on Arctic sea ice reduction. I was invited to give a talk on paleo-climate perspectives on sea ice change, modeling and methane. Notably, Peter Wadhams was there and presented a graph very similar to the one above. If you hunt around carefully in the wayback machine you can find some of the audio recordings from the meeting, and specifically, if you listen to the Q&A period from his talk, you can hear me ask [43:00] whether there was any physical basis for such an extrapolation. The answer was no. [As an aside, this was one of the first climate workshops that really embraced Twitter (as it was then) as a means of broader dissemination, though this wasn’t appreciated by this particular speaker!]. Bizarrely, Wadhams maintained his confidence that 2015 (less than a year away at this point) would be ice free in summer.
To be clear, I claim no specific brilliance in being sceptical of these predictions. Almost everyone in the field was unconvinced by these extrapolations from the initial 2007 AGU meeting presentation onward. The reason why these predictions never made it into a peer-reviewed publication? I imagine that it was the difficulty in finding any reviewers that found these methods credible.
Lessons learned?
Science is very competitive, and scientists guard their independence fiercely. For them to agree on even one thing is major effort. Thus there will always be a range of opinions and methods on any topic and people who will cling strongly to them. The desire and culture of assessments (such as the IPCC) arose specifically in order to distill that broad range across individual scientists into a more coherent and better balanced assessment that a larger majority of experts will agree to.
In retrospect, it is clear that some folks were fooled by randomness, giving too much weight to the wiggles and not to the longer-term trend (which, to be honest, is a ubiquitous problem):
One could look back at this episode and what has been made of it since and declare that scientists should have somehow prevented Maslowski and Wadhams from presenting their ideas or talking to journalists or recovering politicians. But that is absurd: No scientist or group of scientists has that power, nor would they even want it. Alternatively, other scientists could have loudly expressed their scepticism at these results and produced better assessments. But both of these things happened. Some even went further and started betting against the extreme predictions (quite successfully in retrospect). For serious people, interested in serious projections, that might be enough. However, all of this will be (and are) ignored when someone wants to get a laugh line on Fox News.
If people are really interested in what the scientific community thinks, the assessed projections from IPCC and similar are your best bet. It can be useful to look at the range of individual projections or opinions, particular in fast moving situations, but it is very hard to discuss them in a public manner that is immune from later distortion.
The post “But you said the ice was going to disappear in 10 years!” first appeared on RealClimate.
Protest sparked by revelations that thousands of flood-control projects were allegedly substandard or never built
Queensland Nationals senator tells Cpac conference ‘last rites being administered’ and praises Andrew Hastie for threat to quit frontbench over policy
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Nationals senator Matt Canavan has claimed the Coalition is “on the cusp of walking away from net zero”, urging Sussan Ley to campaign against the emissions reduction target by taking inspiration from Peter Dutton’s opposition to the Indigenous voice referendum.
The conservative political conference Cpac has heaped more pressure on Ley to dump the climate target, with a host of rightwing Liberal and National politicians calling for the 2050 aspiration – agreed by the former Coalition prime minister Scott Morrison – to be scrapped immediately.
Continue reading...Conventional diesel-power can't beat this sleek hydrofoil electric ferry from Aretemis Technologies, which provides passengers with a smooth, practically noiseless, zero-emission ride.
The post Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have An Electric Ferry? appeared first on CleanTechnica.
The whitepaper I’ve just published through TFIE Strategy, From Quay to Sea: A Port Decarbonization Roadmap is the product of a series of articles that gathered more attention than expected. Stakeholders across the maritime industry, from port operators to regulators to grid planners, asked for a single document that stitched ... [continued]
The post From Quay to Sea: A Port Decarbonization Roadmap appeared first on CleanTechnica.
The Vermont Superfund law is under attack, as the federal government defends the fossil fuel companies who paid so much to get it elected.
The post US Administration Attacks Vermont Superfund Law appeared first on CleanTechnica.
The new "Speed to Power" initiative is a desperate cry for help that completely ignores the copious renewable energy resources of the US.
The post US Energy Dept. Begs For More Renewable Energy, Pleeeeese!!! appeared first on CleanTechnica.
BEVs represented over a third of the total Chinese car market in August. We saw plugins score another million-plus sales in August (in a 2-million-unit overall market, up 5% YoY), but growth has been slowing down, with August showing just an 8% increase over August 2024. Digging deeper into the ... [continued]
The post BYD Down 21% & PHEVs Down 7% YoY — August 2025 China EV Sales Report appeared first on CleanTechnica.
With higher utility bills, a house that produces more energy than it uses may be appealing. In southern California, one such house has existed for more than a decade. NPR's Jeff Brady visited the "Green Idea House" in Hermosa Beach, California.
(Image credit: Jeff Brady)
WEST UNION, Iowa—From the billboard on the edge of town to the limestone monument on Vine Street, the signs are hard to miss: “West Union, Deeply Connected.” It’s a motto that could apply to many tight-knit farm towns across the Midwest where families date back generations.
Scientists studying the health effects of one of the largest blowouts of natural gas in U.S. history just confirmed what residents long suspected: the massive release of fossil gas carried serious health risks.
Exclusive: Simon Stiell believes economic benefits will compel countries to speed up climate action
Cleaning up industry and the global economy will produce massive economic dividends for countries that grasp the opportunity – as the example of China has shown, the UN climate chief has said, before a crunch summit of world leaders this week.
In a last-ditch call to heads of government summoned to New York by the UN secretary general this week, Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said governments would almost certainly fail to come up with the climate commitments needed to fulfil the Paris agreement before a deadline this month, but they could still reset their economies to reap the advantages of low-carbon growth.
Continue reading...Incorrect logic and false narratives drive me nuts. Unfortunately, many Elon Musk fans succumbed to some extremely poor logic on free speech a couple of years ago. Now we’re getting to Part 3 of this story, and it shows what is a truly chilling attack on free speech. Where is ... [continued]
The post Warning: Free Speech Is *Actually* Under Threat In The USA Now appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Remember the days when the most shocking and corrupt thing around was large automakers cheating on vehicle emissions tests? Those were the days…. That said, the “Dieselgate” scandal was, of course, a huge deal. Millions of cars were put on the road with false claims about how much pollution they ... [continued]
The post Get Rid of Dieselgate Cars, Organizations Say appeared first on CleanTechnica.
There are less than two weeks left to get a used electric car in the United States and get the $4,000 federal subsidy that was provided for them in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Republicans in Congress and the White House are killing this subsidy, and the last day ... [continued]
The post Top Used Electric Car Options Before $4,000 Subsidy Is Gone appeared first on CleanTechnica.
Volkswagen made a series of announcements at the largest auto show in its homeland, and one of the largest in the world, IAA in Munich, Germany. From bidirectional charging to AI to semiconductors, the company was apparently trying to push the envelope and look more interesting and innovative than companies ... [continued]
The post Bidirectional Charging, AI, & Semiconductors — Volkswagen’s IAA Announcements appeared first on CleanTechnica.
California is doing what it has been doing for years — it’s leading on clean energy again. Well, it is leading in one way and it is catching up in another way. The California legislature passed a couple of bills on the last day of the 2025 legislative session this ... [continued]
The post California Passes Legislation to Support Solar & Lower Energy Costs appeared first on CleanTechnica.