🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #166
Can 3D printed shoes be the future of sustainable footwear?
Welcome back to another edition of your positive news. A day late for those not in the UK, but I enjoyed the bank holiday weekend and I apologise.
It was a scorcher in the UK. A reminder that climate change isn’t just in the future, but it’s happening now. Not only do we need to cut emissions dramatically, but we also need to adapt to ensure we can create a liveable society. I’m lucky I have a cold bedroom and a fan, but for millions around the world, global warming presents a real and current issue.
Anyway, some good news shall we?
👀 News to make you feel good this week
🌿 Charity buys meadow in Meon Valley to protect rare river wildlife. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust has bought Court House Meadows, a 21-acre water meadow on the River Meon, after more than 1,000 donations. Chalk streams are properly rare globally, around 200 worldwide and 80% of them in southern England.
💧 The English community that brought its river back from the brink. The River Mease has just won the 2026 UK River Prize after 13 years of restoration work by Trent Rivers Trust, the Environment Agency, and 40 local farmers. Over 250 interventions across 17km of river. The headline, “If we can get it right here, we can do it everywhere”, is the bit worth holding onto.
🌳 Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change? A great essay from Professor Thomas Crowther, drawn from his new book Nature’s Echo. His argument: most climate solutions come with painful trade-offs, but restoring nature is the exception, because it taps the same feedback loops that built the habitable planet in the first place. Not a substitute for cutting emissions, but could deliver about 30% of carbon removal we need.
🔌 British power prices are increasingly independent from gas. New analysis from Ember shows that 15% of Britain’s power generation is now priced independently of gas thanks to Contracts for Difference, heading to 36% by 2030. In hours where gas was below 20% of the mix last year, wholesale prices averaged £60/MWh, versus £130/MWh when gas was above 50%. For those of you who aren’t aware, the reason the UK has such expensive energy prices is because often gas, the highest cost per MWh form of electricity, sets the price for renewables. Rachel Reeves is trying to change this though.
🌍 BloombergNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2026. This year’s BloombergNEF’s NEO report is built around energy security rather than climate, which is telling. BNEF has dropped 1.5C as no longer feasible and now models a 1.81C pathway as their stretch case. The good news is that China, the world’s biggest polluter is underpromising and overdelivering when it comes to cutting emissions.
💭 My thoughts? The framing shift matters more than the numbers. For most of the last decade the case for clean power was “we have to do this for the climate.” It is now also “we have to do this because gas prices are politically and economically unmanageable.”
🦶 Footwear production is broken, so are our feet. Can 3D print fix both? I had the pleasure of attending a Vivobarefoot launch night for their 3D printed fully custom shoes last week. The shoes are made from a single recyclable material and made to order based on a foot scan. The shoe industry makes around 24 billion pairs a year and a similar number ends up in landfill, partly because the standard model overproduces by 20 to 30% to hit sales targets.
💭 My thoughts? I’m not sure how I feel about the shoes themselves, but boy do I love a business model changing things up and setting a trend. What a powerful model and a great company.
🎯 SBTi broadens focus from climate target setting to implementation. Over 10,000 companies now have validated targets. The new 2026-2030 strategy pivots from validation to implementation, with more tailored sector and regional pathways. This has long been a criticism of the climate reporting economy (one I agree with) that we spend more time thinking about targets than meeting them. But now, organisations will be rewarded for their reductions and that’s a great thing.
Just because it’s fun
🚪 The Fish Doorbell. Last week I recorded a podcast (it will be out next week) and the wonderful Niki showed me this fun underwater camera at a 17th-century lock in Utrecht. When you spot a fish waiting to migrate upstream, you ring the doorbell, the lock operator gets alerted, and eventually the lock opens. Nine million visitors last year. I love it.
This week’s edition was written after spending a lot of time in the sun, on my bike and generally just appreciating the world around us. I’m a lucky man.
My music recommendation for the week is the absolute banger that is Choosin’ Texas by Ella Langley. If this doesn’t get in my Spotify wrapped this year, I’m calling fraud.
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚