Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another week of positive climate news. This week, it’s coming from a well-slept and very content George who’s had a great weekend. I had the luxury of spending the weekend cycling around the Isle of Wight and generally having a massive appreciation for life. So that’s fun.
This week feels like a good one: lots of great stories and a lot of very different topics too. Enjoy and let me know what I missed.
👀 News to make you feel good this week
🔋 Batteries have unlocked the era of anytime solar. Solar hit a record 10% of global electricity in the first half of 2026, nearly double its share three years ago, and batteries are now cheap enough to push that power into the evening. Ember reckons this year’s battery additions can shift a third of new solar generation to after dark. In California, solar plus storage covered over a quarter of demand between 7 and 9pm, up from 6.8% in 2023.
💭 My thoughts? “But what happens when the sun goes down” has been the stock objection to solar for twenty years. Bulgaria, of all places, can now shift more than three quarters of its new solar into the evening. Generally, this is so cool.
⛏️ A former Colorado coal mine is now a solar farm. Molson Coors is covering 47 acres of its old Keenesburg mine site, which dug coal from 1979 to 1987, with 16,000 panels. The 7MW array will supply around 7% of the brewer’s electricity by the end of the year. Beer made on the bones of a coal mine is my kind of symbolism.
🏘️ Solar panels are contagious, even at 100 metres. Researchers tracked 260,000 Swiss households and found that one new rooftop install makes neighbours within 100 metres 2% more likely to go solar and 2.3% more likely to buy an EV. For next-door neighbours, within 10 metres, those numbers jump to 20% and 23%.
💭 My thoughts? This is probably my favourite story of the week. I know it’s a small increase, but it shows the influence we have at a local scale. Every panel on a roof is almost an advert of we’re people who care, and you should too. In a very similar vein, I have loved watching Trash Talk NYC, a guy who cleans up his neighbourhood and shows that community matters.
🚔 Five Amazon countries arrested 839 people in a major environmental crime crackdown. Operation Green Shield put 3,600 officers into the field across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, seized over $280m worth of illegal timber, minerals and trafficked wildlife, and rescued 3,000 live animals. Illegal miners and loggers have long counted on police forces not talking to each other across borders. This is the second year of coordinated operations, and it was bigger than the first.
🌴 Tropical trees are better at coping with drought than our models assume. A University of Minnesota-led team measured 290 trees across Puerto Rico’s rainfall zones and found 17 of 18 species adjust how they manage water to suit local conditions. Trees in drier spots build stronger plumbing against embolism (air bubbles in trees), while trees in wetter areas store more water. Climate models mostly treat these traits as fixed, so tropical forests may have more adaptive capacity than we’ve been giving them credit for.
🔥 Rewilding is the best defence against wildfires. With over 21,000 hectares of British uplands already burned this year, following the worst season on record in 2025, sheep and grouse interests are blaming rewilding for the fires. This essay from Ben Goldsmith takes that argument apart: centuries of draining and burning created the flammable heather monoculture in the first place, and rewetted blanket bog is what actually stops fire. At Wild Haweswater, the RSPB and United Utilities have blocked nearly thirty miles of drainage ditches, and when the 2018 Saddleworth fire raged across a managed grouse moor, nearby rewetted areas resisted its spread.
🫁 Children’s lungs recovered after London’s ULEZ came in. A study of more than 3,400 primary school children found that London kids whose lung development had been stunted by air pollution caught up after the zone launched in 2019, while a comparison group in Luton didn’t. The lead researcher called the speed of the catch-up “surprising and impressive”.
💭 My thoughts? It’s easy to hate on ULEZ. It has taken a political battering over the years, but it does make a difference to the health of London’s population (including me). Three years of data shows that children’s lungs are measurably growing back. Unpopular policy and bad policy are not the same thing. Just do the things that make our lives better.
🍑 OnlyFans creators are fronting climate explainers for Channel 4. A new series called Headline Newds, backed by director Adam McKay, has creators like Lily Phillips (2 million followers) explaining Big Oil, microplastics and wet-bulb temperatures to audiences who would never click on a climate story. Their pitch is that traditional climate comms is preachy and loses out to everything else on the feed. I did not have this on my 2026 bingo card, but reaching people where they already are beats lecturing them where they aren’t.
💭 My thoughts? Not one I thought I’d be talking about on a Monday morning, but here we are. Adam McKay is a great director; his films include The Big Short, which does a fantastic job of making difficult topics easy to understand.
🌾 A silicon fertiliser startup just raised a $5.4m pre-seed. Mafix, a Stanford spinout, uses idle cement kilns to speed up the weathering of silicate rock, producing a fertiliser that strengthens crops and pulls CO₂ out of the air as stable bicarbonate along the way. Silicon was only classified as an essential crop nutrient this year, so this is an early bet on a brand new category, and running it on cement kilns that would otherwise sit unused is the clever part.
One to watch 👀
Making my own land use framework. Tom Gegg took the government’s 2025 Land Use Framework, which buried its findings in static PDF maps, and built GBLandUse.org so anyone can explore Britain’s land trade-offs themselves. His headline finding: over a million hectares could restore priority habitats without touching prime farmland.
This week’s tune is Marianne by Fontaines D.C.
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚
P.S. I will not be doing a blog next week as I will have just completed my first half Ironman in Austria!! Wish me luck.