Climate

We're just weeks away from COP26, the big environmental policy confab where scores of world leaders will descend on Scotland and determine the future of the planet, answering the question, “Should we all die or live?” That's meant a whole truckload of new books on the subject, as well a

Buckle up, it's going to be a wild ride. The pace of change over the last few decades is only set to accelerate in the coming years, as improvements in biology, medicine, spacecraft, manufacturing, software and more continue to transform the very foundations of society, economics and politics.

“The Ministry for the Future” by Kim Stanley Robinson isn't a book that lauds ecoterrorists. In fact, it mostly manages to avoid the subject across its many pages. Yet, at the center of its speculative account about the eponymous ministry and its leadership over the next few decades

Climate change has been the deepest, most challenging cognitive puzzle for humans to untangle these past years. It's systems on top of systems, with emergent properties that can easily turn intuitive notions into catastrophic dead ends. Every action has a reaction or 10, and improving one part

Berlin-based climate tech startup Made of Air has closed a €5 mlion (~$5.8 mlion) seed funding round, led by Norwegian sustainabity-focused famy fund, TD Veen. Also participating are Patrick Pichette (former CFO of Google and chairman of the board of Twitter), EQT Foundation, Thomas Von Koch (co-

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone has announced its first 5G smartphone, the Fairphone 4. The “greentech” mobile maker differentiates from almost the entire smartphone industry through a promise of sustainability via repairable modularity. It combines this with a big pus

Tesla broke ground on its “Megafactory,” a new production facility in California, so christened because it will produce the company's large-scale battery system Megapack. News of the previously unannounced factory was confirmed by the Lathrop Mayor Sonny Dhaliwal in a Facebook post

President Joe Biden has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. He intends to meet this ambitious target through a wave of new federal spending and government programs. But our best hope for reducing carbon emissions isn’t new government spending. It’s a technologi

Salesforce has often preached about responsible capitalism, and today at Dreamforce, the company’s annual customer extravaganza, it announced a notable achievement in the battle against global climate change. The company said that it has achieved effective Net Zero energy usage across its ent

Farming sustainably and efficiently has gone from a big tractor problem to a big data problem over the last few decades, and startup EarthOptics believes the next frontier of precision agriculture lies deep in the soil. Using high-tech imaging techniques, the company claims to map the physical and

In order to support a buildout of renewable energy, which tends to over-generate electricity at certain times of day and under-generate at others, the grid is going to need a lot of batteries. While lithium-ion works fine for consumer electronics and even electric vehicles, battery startup EnerVenu

Supply chains can be a complex logistical challenge. But they pose an even greater environmental challenge. And it’s that latter problem — global supply-chain sustainability — where U.K. startup Sourceful is fully focused, although it argues its approach can boost efficiency as we

Many efforts are underway to reduce the environmental impact of cars, but what about the tires those cars ride on? Continental thinks it might help. Roadshow reports the company has introduced the Conti GreenConcept (yes, a concept tire) where more than half of the materials are “traceable, r

Space may be the endless frontier, but here on Earth, we define space in the modern sense as something enclosed. Walls, fences and barriers enclose space, define it and make it legible. In fact, the sense of limits is so strong these days with place that we often have to add qualifiers like “open