The Driverless Cars Are Coming: This Week’s 13 Biggest Climate Stories

Posts 25 Oct 2016

Things are moving quickly as our planet makes the transition to a new, clean economy. You want to stay in the loop – but you’re busy, that’s why we keep an eye on the headlines for you!

Welcome to the 25 October 2016 edition of the Daily Planet’s weekly State Of The Planet. Don’t hesitate to send your tips and comments to @peter_koekoek or peter.koekoek@climate-kic.org.

1. Spain’s king has honoured the Paris Agreement on climate change with a royal award.

It may not have been implemented yet and the world is still in peril, but the Daily Planet reports the historic Paris Agreement on climate change has already received a royal award.

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive Patricia Espinosa and her predecessor Christiana Figueres accepted the prestigious 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation on behalf of the landmark agreement at a ceremony in Northern Spain on Friday (21 October).

But most work is still ahead, and even on the day of the ceremony EU climate commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete was in Madrid to discuss how Climate-KIC’s climate innovation programmes in Spain can help implement the agreement.

2. Spain’s powerful aim: 100 per cent renewable energy.

So says the director of one of Spain’s largest renewable energy companies according to ABC News and The New Daily. “It’s incredible. Some years ago people would say we would be crazy people saying these kinds of things, just dreaming but today it’s a real situation,” the Australian news network quoted Miguel Ezpeleta of Acciona Energy.

3. Driverless cars really will change everything.

They’re coming for you, and – unless you drive for a living – you shouldn’t be afraid. Self-driving vehicles are set to revolutionise our cities according to Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper, who writes “If you think personal cars will survive as status symbols, remember horses were once status symbols.” Kuper quotes General Motors’ Richard Holman as saying that most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or before.

Pollution and carbon emissions will drop, writes Kupers, because urban driverless cars will be electric. And fleets of driverless taxis will likely further discourage car ownership, which is already on the decline among millennials according to an article by NPR published few years ago.

4. All Teslas in production will be upgraded to be fully self-driving through a software update.

The big news this week was that all of Tesla’s electric vehicles will now be manufactured with hardware that will enable the cars to completely drive itself in all situations, Recode reports. This means when Tesla’s fully self-driving software is ready, all it will take is an over-the-air update to turn semi-autonomous Teslas into fully autonomous cars, according to the website.

New Scientist posted a breathtaking video released by the automaker, showing a demo of a Tesla car driving itself with a human in the seat only for legal reasons.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s TV hit Night Rider with David Hasselhoff as Michael Night – or young enough to have seen the various remakes – you’ll find that today’s self-driving cars have a lot in common with Night’s driverless car, the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT), which Night would summon by speaking to his smart watch.

On Twitter, Tesla’s Elon Musk explains how this would work in 2016. “When you want your car to return, tap Summon on your phone. It will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country.”

5. Europe’s Airbus, meanwhile, offers a peek at its self-flying electric flying taxi.

European aerospace giant Airbus has quietly lifted the curtain on an ambitious Silicon Valley project called Vahana, CNN reports. It’s a pilotless passenger aircraft that aims to add a vertical component to your commute, according to the American news network.

Airbus is following in the footsteps of a range of start-ups in this space, including Climate-KIC supported E-Volo, which has built – and is flying – a Volocopter in Germany, according to CNN.

6. A 1912 newspaper article reported that humans were causing global warming.

This story has been going around social media, and has now been confirmed as authentic. The 14 August 1912 article from a New Zealand newspaper contains a brief item about how burning coal might produce future warming by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, fact-checking website Snopes reports.

Following this news, a piece on the New York Times website explores even older reports about human-caused climate change, and includes several clippings dating back as far as 1859.

7. Have you seen these heartfelt tweets from the Marshall Islands’ fearless climate warrior?

The Marshall Islands are fighting for survival, and tweets from one of the country’s chief climate diplomats show the fight is personal, the Daily Planet reports. Mattlan Zackhras is a government minister and frequently represents his country at international climate change meetings. He only recently joined Twitter, but has already demonstrated a knack for conveying his message in 140 characters.

8. Scientists have accidentally discovered an efficient process to turn CO2 into ethanol.

The process apparently is cheap, efficient, and scalable, Popular Mechanics reports. The discovery could soon be used to remove large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, according to the website. The process could allow for the consumption of extra electricity when it’s available to make and store as ethanol, and could help to balance a grid supplied by intermittent renewable sources.

https://twitter.com/soopa/status/788563478495662081

9. The US energy shakeup is continuing as the country’s solar capacity triples.

Climate Central reports how solar power capacity in the United States will have nearly tripled in size in less than three years by 2017. An ongoing shift from coal to natural gas plays a major part in this, according to Climate Central – but the renewables share is also set to grow from 8 per cent this year to 9 per cent next year.

10. Will Leonardo DiCaprio bring Captain Planet to the big screen?

Movie star, documentary maker and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio is said to be working on the movie remake of a popular 1990s edutainment cartoon show the Daily Planet reports. Celebrity power matters – as confirmed by scientists who looked into the DiCaprio effect earlier this year – and it looks like the Hollywood star might lend his power to yet another effort to promote climate action.

11. Try these 3 delicious recipes to squash your pumpkin waste this Halloween.

The real horror during Halloween is the story about the thousands upon thousands of edible pumpkins that go to waste, according to the Daily Planet. In the UK alone over 18,000 tonnes of pumpkin go to waste during the Halloween period, that’s pretty scary. So this year, when you’re carving your spooky pumpkin lantern, don’t throw away the contents but make some delicious food! Here are three simple but mouth-watering recipes to try this Halloween.

12. Some more inspiration for Halloween: Could we be approaching the Trumpocene, a new epoch where climate change is just a big scary conspiracy?

The Guardian has published a piece about how websites “pushing climate science denial are growing their audience in an era where populist rhetoric and the rejection of expertise is gaining traction.”

13. Check out the international fusion energy plant in France… from a drone.

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or Latin for “the way”) has published a YouTube video with drone footage to show how the construction of its construction site in France is coming along. The international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject is set to become the world’s largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment according to Wikipedia. The project is funded and run by the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.

Looking for something to fix?

One of these stories may just inspire your next project:

  • The US is experiencing a sharp increase in ‘sunny day’ flooding. Global warming and rising seas are increasing the amount of tidal flooding on America’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts according to the New York Times.
  • Climate change may trigger the next financial crisis. So says Paul Fisher, who retired this year as deputy head of the Bank of England body which supervises the country’s banks, Bloomberg reports.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive next week’s State Of The Planet in your inbox. Don’t hesitate to send your tips and comments to @peter_koekoek or peter.koekoek@climate-kic.org!

 
Location

Share this article

Related Articles

This week’s ten biggest climate innovation stories – 28 June Spacious 500-acre park provides green backdrop to inspiring climate change art This week’s ten biggest climate innovation stories – 21 June
Back to all Articles

Share this article