Author: Alex Tabibi

Paris (my second favorite city) used to be a city where cars ruled and the beautiful boulevards were choked with traffic, the air was thick with exhaust, and finding a parking space felt like a competitive sport. But walk through the French capital today and something feels fundamentally different. Bike lanes have appeared on streets that once belonged entirely to vehicles. The Seine riverbanks, which were motorways just a decade ago, are now parks and promenades. Children cycle to school. Tourists explore by Vélib’ rather than taxi. The Paris cycling transformation is one of the most dramatic urban reinventions of…

When I first read about this – I was a little perplexed as it’s not every day that a figure from the green energy world steps forward to defend North Sea oil and gas production. But that’s exactly what happened recently, and it’s stirred up a genuinely interesting debate about how the UK navigates the messy, complicated road between fossil fuel dependence and a cleaner energy future. The comments came from a prominent green energy executive who argued that squeezing more output from existing North Sea oil and gas sites makes more practical sense than importing fossil fuels from overseas.…

Every time you type a prompt into ChatGPT (or in my case Claude which is my preferred company for a number of reasons), ask an AI to generate an image, or let a recommendation algorithm decide what you watch next, something invisible is happening in the background. Servers are spinning up. Electricity is flowing. Cooling systems are kicking in. And somewhere, a power grid is drawing on energy that may or may not come from renewable sources. The environmental cost of AI is real, it’s growing, and most people have no idea it exists. We’ve spent years debating whether to…

There’s a stretch of road outside almost every major city where the guardrails are lined with old mattresses, broken televisions, and bags of construction debris. You’ve probably driven past something like it. Maybe you’ve even wondered who does this – and why nobody seems to stop it. The answer is uncomfortable: in many places, illegal dumping is winning. Not because people don’t care, but because the systems designed to stop it are underfunded, understaffed, and increasingly outpaced by the scale of the problem. Illegal dumping isn’t just an eyesore. It’s a genuine environmental crisis that poisons groundwater, destroys ecosystems, and…

Sinkholes Devouring Farmlands in Turkey: A Growing Threat Beneath the Soil On a quiet morning in central Turkey, farmer Mehmet Yilmaz watched the earth open before his eyes. One moment he was checking his wheat field; the next, a deep crater large enough to swallow a tractor had appeared where his crops once stood. He says he now walks his land with careful steps, half-expecting the ground to vanish beneath him again. For many Turkish farmers, this isn’t a rare nightmare but an unsettling new normal. Introduction to Sinkholes in Turkey Sinkholes sudden collapses of land caused by underground voids…

Every morning, millions of women wake up before dawn and begin walking. Not to work, not to school – but to find water. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, women and girls spend an estimated 40 billion hours each year collecting water. That’s not a statistic you read and move on from. That’s 40 billion hours stolen from education, from income, from rest, from life. The connection between women and water access runs deeper than most people realize. Water isn’t just a survival need – it’s a social determinant that shapes who gets ahead in life and who stays behind. When women…

Beef and Lamb Get 580 Times More in EU Subsidies Than Legumes, Study Finds Some numbers have a way of stopping you mid-sentence. And this is one of those – as a recent study has found that beef and lamb producers in the European Union receive 580 times more in subsidies than farmers who grow legumes beans, lentils, and peas.Not 5 times, not 50, but nearly six hundred – and that in an era when Europe pledges to lead on climate action and sustainable farming, that kind of imbalance raises serious questions about where public money is steering the future…

Introduction to China’s Renewable Energy Journey When you think of China, you might picture bustling megacities powered by huge coal burning power plants which are also needed to power their endless factories. But in actuality over the past two decades, China has become the world’s most powerful force in renewable energy, reshaping not only its own energy future but also the planet’s. With huge hydroelectric dams and more on the way together with massive solar and wind projects China’s motivation is very practical on multiple fronts. Firstly it is a country that consumes roughly a quarter of the world’s energy, as…

Rising Ocean Temperatures Early this year (2026 – for those of you who may not remember) , oceanographers reported something both remarkable and worrying – that being that global ocean temperatures in 2025 reached their highest levels since recordkeeping began. This sis confirmed by both satellite observations and deep-sea buoys which now show that vast stretches of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans ( & Mediterrenean) are warmer than ever recorded and It’s not just a statistic it’s a sign of how deeply our planet’s climate system is changing. Oceans act as Earth’s climate memory as thy absorb around 90% of…

Global Water Bankruptcy: Humanity’s Overdrawn Account with Nature In early 2026, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health published one of its most sobering reports to date: Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era. The title itself signals a decisive shift in tone as though for decades, we’ve talked about a “water crisis”  a term suggesting something temporary, solvable, and reversible, calling it “bankruptcy” reframes the issue entirely. It means that we’ve not only overdrawn nature’s account but also reached a point where old systems can’t simply be restored; they require restructuring.…

World’s Richest 1% Already Used Their Fair Share of Emissions for 2026 According to Oxfam – already just two weeks into 2026, the world’s richest 1% have already burned through their “fair share” of carbon emissions for the entire year while the richest 0.1 % exhausted theirs in only about three days. The charity’s analysis shines a harsh light on the growing inequality between those who live carbon-heavy lifestyles (probably like most of the readers here) and those who barely contribute to the problem yet feel its worst impacts. Every day there are sobering reminders that climate change isn’t just…

When a nation as large and influential as the United States shifts its stance on climate cooperation, the ripples spread far beyond its borders. President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from dozens of international organizations, including many focused on combating climate change with nearly half of the 66 affected bodies being affiliated with the United Nations, among them the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that underpins global efforts to address climate change. Organizations working on development, gender equality, and conflict resolution are also among those impacted—areas the Trump administration has frequently criticized as promoting “globalist” or…

Why We Must Urgently Target Methane In the 1980s, the world faced a terrifying scientific revelation — a gaping hole in the ozone layer, the atmospheric shield that protects us from harmful ultraviolet rays. Fast forward four decades, and a new invisible threat is intensifying: methane. It’s colorless, odorless, and, in climate terms, dangerously potent. Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados has called this our next global wake-up call — another “ozone layer moment.” The message? We must act swiftly, or the damage will become irreversible. Understanding Methane: A Critical Greenhouse Gas Carbon dioxide often steals the spotlight in climate…

Congestion pricing the idea that drivers should pay to enter the most crowded parts of a city is often portrayed as a radical new experiment but in reality, it is the product of more than a century of thinking about how to manage scarce urban space, dating back to the dawn of the automobile age. The concept first appeared in economic theory in the early 20th century. British economist Arthur Pigou argued in the 1920s that road users impose hidden “social costs” on everyone else by creating congestion, delays, pollution, and accidents. If those costs were reflected in a price,…

The Avocado Boom While a decade ago, the avocado was just another fruit in the produce aisle it has by now become the poster child of health food culture. From brunch tables to TikTok recipes, its creamy texture and “good fat” reputation have made it a global symbol of clean eating. TikTok can other social media have made avocado toast de rigeur. Now while you’re sitting there brunching with your guacamole or toast the last thing on your mind is (at least till you read this article) is the chain of events that brought that fruit to your plate. Rising…

Mechanisms of Ice Thinning Out of sight – out of mind. That is how most of us treat the polar ice caps (as well as the global environment). In the meantime their condition and continuance are vital for life on earth as we have experienced for the past 10,000 or so year. We are by now all aware of the rapidly melting glaciers and sea ice but are not necessarily aware of the culprits at play in the story of thinning Antarctic ice. The most obvious is rising global temperatures driven by greenhouse gas emissions – and as the atmosphere…

Texas Is Heating Up: Why the Lone Star State Is the Next Geothermal Giant Somewhere outside Pecos, where the desert hums quietly and the horizon barely blinks, a crew drills deep into the earth. But it’s not oil they’re after this time, but heat — steady, renewable heat that could power homes, charge electric vehicles, and keep Texas running cleanly long after fossil fuels fade. For a state known as the heartbeat of America’s oil and gas industry, that shift might sound surprising. Yet Texas is quickly becoming a hotspot for one of the planet’s oldest—and most dependable—energy sources: geothermal.…

How Cheap Renewable Energy is Finally Flattening Emissions Every time we turn on a light, charge our phone, or drive to work, we rely on energy captured long ago from the sun — fossil fuels that were once living organisms, now burned (in my opinion wasted) to power our world. But that era is beginning to fade with humanity making a historic transition from ancient solar energy stored in coal, oil, and gas to current solar energy that shines on us each day and produces the winds and climate that allow for wind, geothermal, hydropower and waves to power humans…

Global Solar Additions to Fall for First Time in 2026 For many years now we have seen consecutively larger increases in the solar additions but it looks like this is coming to an end (halt?). Introduction to BNEF’s Solar Forecast BloombergNEF (BNEF) has long been one of the most trusted names in clean energy research, tracking how renewables reshape the global energy system and when their analysts speak, investors, policymakers, and sustainability leaders usually lean in. So when BNEF recently projected that global solar additions will decline in 2026 — the first drop in years — it raised both eyebrows…

Green Stocks Are Big Winners as Tech Boom Drives Energy Demand Introduction to Green Stocks and Their Rise in Popularity A few years ago, investing in green stocks might have seemed like a niche pursuit — the kind of play reserved for idealists or early adopters. Today, they’re among the market’s brightest stars. Green stocks, broadly speaking, represent companies advancing renewable energy, sustainable technology, electric vehicles, and cleaner industrial processes – like firms building solar panels, producing wind turbines, or developing new battery chemistries. Over the past decade, growing awareness of climate change, supportive government policies, and let’s face…