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- ⏳ Carbon up. Rain down. China everywhere.
⏳ Carbon up. Rain down. China everywhere.
Hello darkness, my old friend / Simon & Garfunkel
Max Aitken
October 19, 2025
Climate & energy are changing everything. This is the fastest way to keep up.
Second anniversary of starting this newsletter 🎂. Thanks for reading.
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What mattered this week
World’s most important number gets worse by a record amount
Trouble? Yes - carbon is going up, and by a record amount.
Can we do anything? Let’s try.
Read more: Here. Every week.
Whole UK towns becoming uninsurable. Today.
What happened? Insurers forecast the future. So if they see big costs: listen.
Why does it matter? Our first uninsurable town is here: Tenbury Wells in Gloucestershire. Flooded 4 of last 6 years. Before, once a decade. Government won’t build defences. Insurers have walked.
Read more: The Guardian
Tenbury Wells. Cooked.
Stop saying installing EV charging is hard. China’s going to add 28m in 2 years
What happened? Someone realised EV points are just fancy plugs. And is getting on with it.
Why does it matter? Proves humans can do stuff.
Read more: ChinaEVhome
One thing to worry about
Worst floods in the history of the Punjab. Biblical scenes.
300 towns cut off by floods in Mexico. Parts of Alaska being evacuated.
Hotter air carries more moisture, meaning… this.
Pakistan's deadly floods 😭
This is the biggest flood in the history of the Punjab 😭Heavy rainfall that triggered deadly floods in Pakistan in recent weeks was worsened by human-caused climate change, a new study has found.
#ClimateActionNow#Pakistan#PunjabFloods#FloodAlert— netzfrauen☮️ (@netzfrauen)
4:32 PM • Sep 2, 2025
One thing to be optimistic about
FT wrote a brilliant long-form piece about batteries. It’s behind a paywall, but what you want to see is this:
If you’ve got more time…
Worth reading Kaiser Kuo’s new essay on how China is redefining the world.
The Western mind barely comprehends that a system other than liberal free-markets is now defining the future.
We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself. We simply haven’t yet found the intellectual courage to face it.
The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace economically, technologically, and institutionally.
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