What mattered this week

Champagne: Stronger, hotter and down by half

Worrying? Heat & drought means grapes high in sugar. For the first time, the appellation is letting producers raise the alcohol level.

Gulp!. But production halved - hottest summer ever recorded in the region.

Mine’s a beer? Maybe. Barley failed too. Clarkson’s farm is warning of shortages.

Read more: Bloomberg on the halving (£); ECIU on Mediterranean heat stress; the food inflation forecast

There ain’t no ice: Ships now regularly going over the top of Russia

Over the top? No need for Suez (+2 days), or the Cape (+20 days). The ‘Dubai Tower’ left Ningbo on 15 August and docked at Teesport on 9 September: 25 days including one stop.

One-off? First of eight this season for that line alone, and a South Korean ship is up there now. 103 transits last year against 43 in 2022. First time it ever happened was in 2018.

Why? Because the ice isn’t there. March’s winter peak was the joint-smallest in half a century of satellite records.

Read more: Sky News on the voyage; Carbon Brief on the ice

Forget the winter fuel payment. Have a battery, granny.

Sorry? The government’s AI-and-energy advisor suggests pensioners et batteries instead of a cheque.

Mad? No. Charge cheap overnight, run the house at teatime. The saving repeats every year. The cheque doesn’t.

Read more: The Grid We Need Now - report

One thing to worry about

People skied on Corvatsch in summer for about thirty years. Fifty-seven years of retreat later - this.

Italy said it out loud this week: “è stato l’anno della svolta.” The year it turned. Glaciers didn’t just retreat, they collapsed.

One thing to be optimistic about

Early evening: Everyone gets home and all the kettles go on at once. So gas power stations fire up.

Texas, 23 August: batteries put 13.2GW into that evening surge 😱. Roughly 12 big nukes, but charged on cheap, safe afternoon sun. Of which Texas has a lot.

Gas is on the way out. (Heatmap)

If you’ve got more time…

What makes clean technologies take off?

New idea: “positive tipping point.” A tech gets cheap, more people buy it, it gets cheaper, investment turns up, so others copy. Etc.

The Earthshot Prize and the University of Exeter published the details this week.

Example - solar. Cost down 90% in a decade, now the cheapest power in most of the world, and dragging electric transport, buildings, industry and clean air along behind it. They call it the master cascade.

Their test for whether a thing is about to tip is three words:

• Affordable: cheaper than the thing it replaces

• Accessible: actually available where it has to be adopted

• Attractive: good enough that choosing it is the obvious move

Dr Steven Smith, who led the report, keeps it honest: “We’re not claiming every system is about to tip. Our report shows where the self-reinforcing mechanisms are, and what governments, investors and innovators can do to unlock them.”

51 solution areas. Worth a read.