English references

Focus on capital discipline, increasing customer centricity, and investments in new technologies may help companies navigate economic, geopolitical, and regulatory uncertainties in 2025

This article examines the technocentric bias that characterizes climate mitigation literature, focusing on the reports of the IPCC's Working Group III. This bias stems from structural features of the scientific field that prioritizes innovation, leading to the overrepresentation of technological solutions in climate research. Funding mechanisms further reinforce this tendency by incentivizing collaboration with industrial R&D, creating a self-reinforcing loop in which scientific authority and industrial interests converge. The IPCC's institutional positioning—as a policy-relevant yet politically cautious body—amplifies this dynamic by favoring allegedly “cost-effective” technological pathways that lack practical feasibility.

Despite concerns over the environmental impacts of AI models, it's surprisingly hard to find precise, reliable data on the CO2 emissions and water use for many major large language models. French model-maker Mistral is seeking to fix that this week, releasing details from what it calls a first-of-its-kind environmental audit "to quantify the environmental impacts of our LLMs."

Critical minerals, which are essential for a range of energy technologies and for the broader economy, have become a major focus in global policy and trade discussions. Price volatility, supply chain bottlenecks and geopolitical concerns make the regular monitoring of their supply and demand extremely vital.

An MIT Energy Initiative study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of “direct air capture” and therefore may not bring about promised reductions.

In Virginia, a small conservation group is leading the fight against the powerful and secretive data center industry.

Report calls for better safeguards to prevent bioterrorists from weaponizing new technology

Guardian analysis of data in light of Ohio train derailment shows accidental releases are happening consistently

The world’s reliance on hi-tech capitalist solutions to the climate and ecological crises is perpetuating racism, the outgoing UN racism rapporteur has warned. Green solutions including electric cars, renewable energy and the rewilding of vast tracts of land are being implemented at the expense of racially and ethnically marginalised groups and Indigenous peoples, Tendayi Achiume told the Guardian in an interview.

Wind, water and solar energy is cheap, effective and green. We don’t need experimental or risky energy sources to save our planet

With more governments embracing industrial policies to transform their economies, picking the right technologies to subsidize will become a key challenge. To navigate the minefield of entrenched interests, techno-hype, and political pressures, policymakers must embrace a mix of openness and caution.

An extreme technologically adapted future has not been defined in the literature. Such a future could be argued to be morally justifiable.However, a highly technologically mediated relationship with the biosphere introduces unique risks. These are likely to endanger humanity and future Earth-originating life-forms as well as creating moral hazard. An extreme technologically adapted future is therefore undesirable compared to restabilising the biosphere.

Only 17.4 per cent of 2019’s e-waste was collected and recycled. This means that gold, silver, copper, platinum, and other high-value, recoverable materials conservatively valued at US $57 billion — a sum greater than the Gross Domestic Product of most countries — were mostly dumped or burned rather than being collected for treatment and reuse.

To this day, the demand for metals has kept increasing. The energy transition necessary to meet climate objectives will add to that demand during the upcoming decades, for low-carbon energy technologies require larger metal quantities than their fossil-fuel based counterparts. This frequently raises concerns over the actual capacity of geological stocks to meet demand at scale, which we investigate in the present analysis.

The Belgian Institute for Sustainable IT is a think and do tank founded in 2020, based on its French equivalent the INR. Our aim is to bring together Belgian companies, organizations and individuals, and help them succeed their digital transition while reducing the environmental and social footprint of their IT services and usages. Thanks to the support of our members and of public authorities, we promote digital technologies and services that are more sustainable, inclusive and ethical.

Oil companies love to tell the world about the super cool technologies that have that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the climate. But those technologies are largely bullshit.

Low greenhouse gas technologies require more metals than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. This column estimates supply elasticities and pins down the price impact of the energy transition on the metals markets. The results show that prices for copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium could reach historical peaks for an unprecedented, sustained period in a net zero emissions scenario. The total value of production could rise more than four-fold for the period 2021-2040, rivaling the total value of crude oil production.

Technologies for the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere (direct air capture, or DAC for short) are already in use, but neither their actual benefits for climate protection nor their other environmental impact have yet to be investigated.

We also asked about organisations’ risk response and approaches to planning. Our survey results support a picture of UK organisations that are taking steps to prepare for similar extreme weather, with the top three actions of organisations affected being capacity training or some form of knowledge transfer, investment in new technologies, and making an insurance claim. While just 16% of organisations reported having an adaptation plan, a considerable proportion (37%) said their organisation was planning to develop one.

This article argues that resource and logistical constraints weighing on low-carbon energy and CO2 capture technologies are likely to pave the way for geo-engineering solutions such as Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), which demand negligible land, material, and energy inputs. This “climate transition without carbon transition”, though technically feasible, is far from being that simple, raising a whole new set of environmental risks as well as geopolitical, institutional, and ethical issues.