We don’t want to give you the wrong idea: things are bad. Antarctic ice sheets are melting, the fossil fuel lobby was everywhere at the COP talks, and even solutions like electric cars have their problems. And that just covers the past few weeks of this newsletter. But to end 2023 we’d like to focus on a few of the more optimistic stories we have run over the past year.
This roundup of The Conversation’s 2023 climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.
1. We have skyscraper-sized wind turbines now
- Back in January, we asked Simon Hogg, executive director of Durham Energy Institute, about huge new wind turbines being built in the North Sea.
- Nonetheless, ever bigger wind turbines have been a key reason why Britain has managed to shift much of its electricity generation from fossil fuels to renewables over the past decade.
- Read more:
Wind turbines are already skyscraper-sized – is there any limit to how big they will get?
2. Solar power keeps getting cheaper and more adaptable
Britain is, of course, more windy than sunny. But in much of the world, solar power is the real game changer. Yet one issue with solar is that we may run out of material needed to produce silicon cells – the main sort of solar panels you see in solar farms or on rooftops. Therefore many academics are looking for alternatives.
- Perhaps perovskite will become the new silicon, or maybe some other technology will dominate in future, but what’s clear is that solar power is fast becoming even cheaper and more accessible.
- Read more:
Perovskite: new type of solar technology paves the way for abundant, cheap and printable cells
3. On the menu: mammoth meatball
- Scientists recently created a meatball made of the flesh of extinct woolly mammoth.
- This in itself isn’t the good news: no one is proposing we fix climate change with prehistoric food.
- But it’s proof that cellular agriculture, sometimes called “lab-grown meat”, can work.
4. Climate change tipping points can be a good thing too
- The Conversation has covered these scenarios extensively over the years, most recently in a piece by authors of the major new tipping points report.
- Climate-related technologies or social and political behaviour can also pass similar tipping points, beyond which something better becomes inevitable.
- Read more:
Climate 'tipping points' can be positive too – our report sets out how to engineer a domino effect of rapid changes
