Even talking about nuclear weapons brings us uncomfortably close to a nightmare too awful to contemplate

From the age of five until 10 I lay awake every night frozen in terror by the thought of the four-minute warning going off when I was at school, which I knew to be at least a five minute run away even on a day when your legs weren’t paralysed by fear. When I at last revealed all to my mother, she brought sweet relief and the return of Morpheus by responding: “Don’t be so daft! There’ll be all sorts of palaver before a war starts, and I’ll keep you home. And we’re in London! It’s the first place they’ll hit, and we’ll all die together! Now go to sleep.”

My understanding of global nuclear arrangements essentially arrested at this point. Teenage readings of Brother in the Land and Z for Zachariah, set in atomically- and apocalyptically bombed wastelands confirmed it was better not to know.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Businessman and Labour party donor’s FreeVolt project uses ambient wireless and mobile network waves to power CleanSpace tag for app designed for cyclists and pedestrians

Lord Drayson, the millionaire businessman, Labour party donor and former science minister, has released a pollution monitor that he hopes will drive efforts to improve air quality around the world.

The gadget is designed to be carried in a pocket and is powered by a new technology which constantly harvests energy from the ambient radio waves that mobile phone and wireless networks emit. As such, its battery never needs replacing.

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Source: Guardian Environment

How does the weather affect us? This is a splendid history of writers’ and painters’ reflections on the wind, rain and sun

I learned this poem by Christina Rossetti when I was a very small child. I thought about it a lot. It was maybe my first thinking about weather in general. The wind was a force with its own ways, and it could not be seen or controlled. It was there, and we did not know who or what it was. It was a real being, unlike elves or goblins or mermaids. My head was full of images of trees and leaves and movement. It made me oddly happy.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Diesel, with its lower CO₂ emissions, was a policy priority but NOx failed to fall despite the ‘stringent’ regulations

From backroom deals between European leaders to the burying of the bad news of 23,000 premature UK deaths on the day Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, the scandal that has engulfed the diesel car is a startling tale.

It is a story of good intentions being relentlessly undermined and has a nasty twist in the tail: even the real rationale for Europe’s drive for diesel – to curb global warming – has run into the wall.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Diesel cars made by Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat and Volvo among others emitted far more NOx in more rigorous tests, research shows

New diesel cars from Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and other manufacturers have all been found to emit substantially higher levels of pollution when tested in more realistic driving conditions, according to new data seen by the Guardian.

Research compiled by Adac, Europe’s largest motoring organisation, shows that some of the diesel cars it examined released over 10 times more NOx than revealed by existing EU tests, using an alternative standard due to be introduced later this decade.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Whatever you think about the capital’s cycle provision, jibes about ‘City boys’ or the middle class are a silly diversion from the real problems

I’d like to propose an amendment to Godwin’s law, the notion that decrees whoever compares an opponent to the Nazis in an online discussion has lost the argument.

My variant would be this: if you’re debating cycle infrastructure and you use “middle class” in a pejorative sense, the internet automatically deletes your last day’s typed output.

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Source: Guardian Environment

The majority of universities in England are set to miss climate change goals in 2020 – but say expansion is to blame

More than three-quarters of England’s universities are set to miss carbon reduction targets for 2020, according to the latest analysis.

Despite the introduction of initiatives to reduce carbon emissions and invest in sustainable energy, higher education institutions claim that an era of expansion has hampered plans to make the sector more environmentally friendly.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Rachel Notley supports a switch to clean energy to help Canada’s biggest oil-producing province move beyond fossil fuels within a century

The leader of Canada’s biggest oil-producing province has declared she sees no long-term future in fossil fuels, predicting Alberta would wean itself off dirty energy within a century.

In an early reveal of her forthcoming new energy policy, Alberta’s Rachel Notley said she would fight climate change by cleaning up the tar sands, shutting down coal-fired power plants, and converting to wind and solar power.

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Source: Guardian Environment

Our attempt to launch a new environmental political movement in the UK was certainly ill-timed but is hopefully not doomed

Well that was interesting. Last week I and a few other people attempted to launch a new environmental political movement here in the UK. If you count alienating most of your potential supporters on the very first day as a sign of success, I think things went rather well. If not … well, I’ll get to that in a minute.

The movement is “ecomodernism”, an attempt to transcend some of the political polarisation in current environment debates with a recognition that human ingenuity and technological innovation offer immense promise in tackling ecological challenges, even as poverty in developing countries is reduced and – hopefully – eradicated altogether.

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Source: Guardian Environment