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Industry using ‘diversionary’ tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate
Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report.
Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector’s explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacentres, the analysis of 154 statements found.
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Advisory board member says Europe already paying price for lack of preparation but adapting is ‘not rocket science’
Keeping Europe safe from extreme weather “is not rocket science”, a top researcher has said, as the EU’s climate advisory board urges countries to prepare for a catastrophic 3C of global heating.
Maarten van Aalst, a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (ESABCC), said the continent was already “paying a price” for its lack of preparation but that adapting to a hotter future was in part “common sense and low-hanging fruit”.
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President says it is inappropriate for UK to be dealing with Gavin Newsom after Ed Miliband meets governor in London
Donald Trump has vented his fury against a green energy deal between the British government and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a likely future Democratic presidential candidate.
“The UK’s got enough trouble without getting involved with Gavin Newscum,” Trump said in an interview with Politico, using the derogatory nickname he reserves for Newsom. “Gavin is a loser. Everything he’s touched turns to garbage. His state has gone to hell, and his environmental work is a disaster.”
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Buxton, Derbyshire: From those who planted them, to those who pruned them, to the pollinators and the mosses, it’s a long, collective endeavour
As I prune one of our pears – a black Worcester, incidentally, a British variety from the 13th century – I ponder the linguistic connections that arise from our garden “acre” in a place called “Hogshaw”. The first word derives from Old English æcer, meaning an “acorn”. It was linked to wildwood, where the people would fatten their swine on wild pears, apples and oak mast. An acre of pig woodland (or hog shaw) was probably the land required to feed one beast for the winter. I wonder, therefore, how many pigs were put to pannage in our original Hogshaw for it to have acquired its name permanently?
Another thought arising as I clip away the three Ds – dead, diseased or damaged wood – is how much orchards are founded on connection and sharing. I’m not just thinking of the veilwort (a liverwort) on many branches, nor the bristle moss that gives colour and body to every lovely limb, but also the fact that we relied on previous owners to plant trees and their successors to prune them. We also depend totally for our fabulous pear harvest on pollinators, which I’ve mainly found here to be solitary bees. To date, we’ve recorded 19 bee species.
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Analysis reveals big regional disparities as critics say Labour’s proposed levy could slow uptake of EVs
Drivers in the south-west of England would pay nearly four times as much as those in London as a result of Labour’s mileage-based tax on electric cars, according to analysis of official data.
The 3p-a-mile road charge, announced in the autumn budget and due to take effect in 2028, is expected to raise £1.1bn a year, partly offsetting the loss of fuel duty revenues as drivers switch from petrol to electric vehicles.
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JD Vance is seeking to create a ‘trading bloc’ as shortages and climate crises mean a kaleidoscope of rare earths are increasingly jealously guarded
The announcement by the US vice-president, JD Vance, that the country is seeking to create a new critical minerals “trading bloc” is a final, exotic, nail in the coffin of the old global trading system. The era of mass abundance, as supplied by unfettered free trade and global markets – “neoliberalism” – is over. We live in a new world of strategic competition between states over scarce but essential resources, with shocks to supplies from human activity and natural disasters an ever-present risk.
This means recalibrating how we think about our economy: the new economic fundamentals today are resource constraints and climate and nature crises, and these, rather than human activity, will increasingly shape the world we inhabit. Flows of finance and stocks of wealth will matter less than stocks and flows of real material resources.
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The fight for Hope Moor is set to be repeated across the UK as the government aims to hit its renewable energy targets
Instead of a slingshot, the Davids are brandishing a sculpture and a coffee table book. Their Goliaths are a Norwegian energy company and a UK energy secretary with renewable targets to meet.
A fierce battle has begun over one of England’s tallest windfarms, proposed for deep peat moorland overlooking the Yorkshire Dales national park, in what residents say will mark the irrevocable industrialisation of their rural landscape.
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The charger firm claimed the site operated 24 hours a day, but the parking operator had different ideas
I charged my electric car at the 24-hour Mer EVcharging station in my local B&Q car park.
I then received a £100 parking charge notice (PCN) from the car park operator, Ocean Parking. It said no parking is allowed on the site between 9pm and6am.
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Some districts are adding programs in clean energy and sustainability, while one state is infusing environmental lessons into culinary education and construction
On one end of the classroom, high school juniors examined little green sprouts – future baby carrots, sprigs of romaine lettuce – poking out of the soil of a drip irrigation system they built a few weeks prior.
On the opposite end of the room, a model of a hydropower plant showed students how the movement of water can stimulate electrical currents. In this class in South Carolina’s Greenville county school district, students primarily learn about one topic: renewable energy.
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Wild gardening is about shedding obsessions with tidiness, embracing a looser aesthetic and providing a home for ‘the most important creatures on the planet’
On a wintry January day in Manchester, I crossed University Green, navigating a paved path behind our hotel through lush patches of lawn. It was the start of the inaugural “Wilding Gardens” conference. For two days, scientists and practitioners were gathering to discuss new ways to think about gardens and nature, about what nature needs to thrive, and the untapped potential of gardens – if we step back and allow ecological processes to unfold – to help counter climate change and biodiversity loss.
Clumps of snowdrop flowers poked through the unmown grass and a grey squirrel streaked across it, from one bare-branched tree to another. Probably common alders, going by the University of Manchester Tree Trail. The world’s first industrial city seemed an apt venue for a talkfest on the urgency of rewilding suburban gardens to help save the planet from precisely what drew Marx and Engels there to study, 180 years ago: the impacts of industrialisation.
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