I wonder what happened about 1990 that totally stopped construction of water reservoirs?? 🤔 (The UK needs to build more reservoirs - by Hannah Ritchie) hannahritchie.substack.com/p/uk-reservo...

cont.

Quitting the ECHR would unleash a populist nightmare in Britain, argues Simon Nixon ../2

For all those 'we didn't complain about the heat when I were young' types... we didn't HAVE heat back then. Source: @carbonbrief.org

#Farage

"The greenhouse gas emissions of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google spiked in 2025, pointing to a growing problem for the hyperscalers: reconciling their climate goals with the massive amount of energy required to power AI, much of it still generated from fossil fuels" - @bloomberg.com green

France passed a law requiring owners of big car parks to install solar photovoltaic shading devices - but take-up has been slow (Solarisation des parkings : seule une fraction minoritaire des surfaces de plus de 10 000 m2 sera prête au 1er juillet) www.lemoniteur.fr/produits-et-...

I know this isn’t a Stephenson screen so not an official air temperature, but it’s currently 37C in the shade outside in my bit of north London

Good. We can learn from Paris, where whole streets of car parking have been replaced by rain gardens, to ease the urban heat island effect

Under-rated comment on this ludicrous promotional video for the failed Line development www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqVS...

"vast amounts of land in town centres in England is given to surface car parking" Fun new tool: the Parkulator! open-innovations.github.io/parkulator/

"This mixture of residential and destination parking undermines public transport among other negative impacts and underpins a pattern of development which has dominated in England for fifty years: urban sprawl" - CPRE www.cprelondon.org.uk/wp-content/u...

Heatwave: To fight against the heat, the city of Lille is extensively planting and ripping up hard paving in its schools Canicule : pour lutter contre la chaleur, Lille végétalise et désimperméabilise massivement ses cours d’école www.lemoniteur.fr/transition-e...

Here's a policy priority for Andy Burnham: Get Britain's 'intermediate cities' (ICs) working better. Luckily, the OECD has just released a report on the policies needed to do that. www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

Imagine how much housing we could fit in our existing cities - without developing green belts - if we treated urban highways as boulevards www.cnu.org/publicsquare...

Oh, and Reform wants to liberalise gun ownership!

I trust MI5 are right on top of this.

Meanwhile south of Bordeaux, France gives us a lesson in how to construct railways cheaply, quickly, and efficiently 🤔 www.lemoniteur.fr/chantiers/lg...

🤔 Via Adam Bienkov’s Substack

A massive good news story, so don't hold your breath for it to be covered sensibly in any of the British news media.

Local elections fallout: Reform was successful in bringing 2024 non-voters into the electorate in 2025. To sum up the big moves: *Labour lost lots of voters to Greens *Cons lost some voters to Reform *Greens also picked up some former non-voters, but *Reform picked up slabs of former non-voters

Multimillionaire Reform member Nadhim Zahawi interviewed with a Hermes Avalon III throw blanket (£1,620) behind him while he "praised his party for making real inroads into both Conservative and Labour traditional working class industrial heartlands” Via @hopenothate.org.uk Reform Watch newsletter

And the winner is... China! "Exports of electrotech from China in the months of March and April have been higher than in any month before."

Absolute scenes.

A mere 10km of reinstated railway track removed in the 1960s (blue dotted on the map) would give a second rail route to Plymouth, solve the weather interruptions at Dawlish, and improve low carbon accessibility for a swathe of Devon. Cost is less than £1bn. Come on! tavyrail.2day.uk

Look at what the rotten First Past The Post gives us. Time for change! #MakeVotesMatter #ProportionalRepresentation action.electoral-reform.org.uk/page/2401/pe...

Here’s my #BrexitReward - customs charges on a spare part for my bike 😠

Here’s real life #BrexitDividend - a spare part for my bike costs even more 🤬

Here you go: (stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app)