I'm doing a bit of a reading series on the future at the moment. I reviewed Designing Hope last week, with more to come. The Green Ages is part of that too, despite being a book on history. Written by German historian Annette Kehnel and translated by Geshe Ipsen, it's written with an eye on the past so that we can apply lessons for the future: "The aim of this book is to help increase our scope for action.

Just outside my office window is a heat pump, which provides our house with low carbon heating and hot water. It's an air source heat pump, which means it draws heat from the air and channels it into the house. There are other forms of heat pumps, notably ground source, and less well known is the water source heat pump. I've written before about a scheme to use…

Featuring China's climate targets, a marine treaty, a bonus book review, and solar panels from Aldi.

When you put solar panels on your roof, the sun pays for them. It might not feel like it when you get the installation quotes in, but those panels will generate more than they cost and the universe pays you back. So why aren’t we putting them everywhere? Why are so many people living in energy poverty when there is such energy abundance right over our heads?

Did you know that during the Cold War, 10% of East Germany's GDP came from taking waste from West Germany? People couldn't move across that border, but rubbish could - and it moved from the richer territory to the poorer one. That's a pattern that repeats itself again and again in Alexander Clapp's eye-opening expose of the global waste industry. Trash from the EU is shipped across the world to be burned in East Asia.

This week we've seen the Prime Minister at pains to call out the Reform party's racist policies, while insisting that people who vote for Reform are not themselves racists. It's a tightrope walk, with journalists repeatedly inviting politicians to call their opponents racist. For those ready to milk offense for political gain, the distinction between policy and person is quickly blurred again.

Featuring China's climate targets, a marine treaty, a bonus book review, and solar panels from Aldi.

The landscape architect Kongjian Yu died this week, but as a pioneer of climate resilient cities, his visionary work will only get more relevant as the world warms.

In 2021 a survey asked 10,000 young people in ten countries how they felt about climate change. 75% said the future was frightening and 55% thought humanity was doomed. "People are not excited about the future any more," notes design futurist Sarah Housley, and that has consequences. Without a vision for the future, it's hard to summon the will to change what's broken and create anything better.

There are two very different climate events this weekend - Draw the Line, and SunDay. What can we learn from comparing them?

China is still regularly used as an excuse for inaction on climate change: if China isn't doing its bit, then anything we do is pointless. This line became popular about 20 years ago and it had some validity at the time. It hasn't been a serious argument for a while, as China has been doing far more than most people realise.

I don't generally read political memoirs. In the 18 years I've been posting reviews here, I can only think of a handful of politicians whose books I've featured. But I've got time for Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand and a politician who was different in many ways. Chief among those is that she didn't harbour any great ambition for power, and didn't consider herself politician material - too sensitive, too thin-skinned.

I did a bit of a double-take this week when I read that both Dale Vince of Ecotricity and Greg Jackson of Octopus - two leaders in green energy in the UK - had followed the Conservatives' in calling for support for oil and gas production in the North Sea. One of the main arguments for this is that domestically produced gas is cleaner than imported LNG.

Earlier this year I wrote about alternatives to rooftop solar, and all the many ways you can benefit from solar power without investing in a full scale installation. The most intriguing of those alternatives is balcony solar, which has been booming in Germany over the last couple of years. Known as balkonkraftwerk, there are now millions of balcony solar installations across the country.

What can I do about climate change? That's a very common question, and it's an important one. Climate change is a global phenomenon that is unfolding over decades. It can be hard to find a useful role for individuals when the problems are so clearly systemic. Some climate campaigns directed at individuals feel shallow at best and at worst like self-serving misdirection from corporations or governments.

Moldova is surrounded on three sides by Ukraine, with Romania to the West. Like many countries in Eastern Europe, its energy systems are a legacy of the Soviet era. Infrastructure runs East towards Russia. For decades Moldova has run on Russian gas piped through Ukraine, and cheap gas provides both heat and electricity. You can probably guess what happens next, but there's a twist.

Peter Betts was involved in climate negotiations for longer than almost anyone in the British government, from COP4 in 1998 onwards. At times he was a negotiator, at other times an advisor. He worked with a succession of governments and ministers, had been at the table for several key moments in the UN, including acting as the EU's chief negotiator for the Paris Agreement.

A few years ago now there was a big drive to set more ambitious climate targets. Net zero emerged as the phrasing of choice, with the UK government aiming for 2050. I was involved in the Extinction Rebellion movement at the time, who were calling for net zero by 2025. Although that was clearly impossible as a nation, I figured it ought to be possible for us as a household.

If you want to understand China and its distinctive relationship to the United States, then framing it as communism vs capitalism isn't helpful, argues Dan Wang. Instead, think of the differences between lawyers and engineers. "China is an engineering state, building at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States' lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good or bad." This isn't theoretical.

Tilbury A and B were twin coal-burning power stations in Essex, built next to the river Thames so that coal could be brought in by barge. For decades they served electricity to nearby London, before they were decommisioned. There was a brief attempt to convert one of them to run on biomass, an aborted 'clean coal' proposal, and then they were demolished in 2017.

A study by WRAP and the University of Leeds found "no correlation between price and durability" of t-shirts. Expensive ones didn't last longer before losing their shape or pilling. This rather plays into the hands of fast fashion that sells cheap and with low expectations - if you can't trust more expensive brands to be better, why spend the money?

Rewind back a decade, and fossil fuels were the cheapest form of energy almost everywhere on the planet. There were just three countries where wind power was out-competing coal and gas, and solar was always more expensive. That changed fast. Over the next five years wind power became the cheapest form of energy generation in a dozen countries, including the UK and the US.

Pay someone's electricity bill, and you keep their lights on for another month. Pay for their solar panels, and they've got cheaper electricity for a decade or two. I risk echoing that cliche about teaching proverbial men to fish here, but solar has a way of multiplying its impact over time. A church near me spent a £40,000 legacy on solar panels recently.