What mattered this week

Today, in Amsterdam: Ads for burgers, flights & gas boilers BANNED

Wait, what? As of today, Amsterdam is the first capital in the world to ban ads for fossil heavy products. Will Ronald McDonald go the way of Marlboro Man?

Going further? Many other cities. Spain looking at a national ban.

Read more: Earth.org on Amsterdam; BBC has a deep dive

Trump pays companies $2bn... to NOT build wind

Excuse me? US taxpayers paying companies to walk from offshore wind leases. Madness. One company (Total) committed to use their refund to invest in fossils.

Why? Trump loathes it. Meanwhile, UK regularly hits 50%+ of electricity from wind.

Read more: Fortune.com 

Solar farms bring rain. In the desert.

Um. Really? Yes. A 20km² desert solar farm produces more rainfall than a year of using planes for cloud seeding (which UAE does 300x a year).

How does that work? Dark panels absorb 95% of sunlight. Hot air rises. Persian Gulf wind brings moisture. You get clouds. You get rain.

How much rain? One storm = 1cm across a Manhattan-sized area = enough water for 30,000 people for a year, if it happens 10 times a summer.

Read more: Techradar 

One thing to worry about

Your jet fuel is about to rise. India has frozen jet fuel for domestic flights, but increased it for international flights.

If you're Indian and flying Mumbai to Delhi — fine. If you're flying Mumbai to anywhere else — you're paying the war. (Bloomberg)

One thing to be optimistic about

Tropical forest loss is reducing: Fell 36% in 2025 — the first real drop after a record-breaking 2024. But: still 4.3 million hectares of forest lost.

Eleven football pitches of forest flattened - every minute. And that’s a good year. (WRI)

If you’ve got more time…

OK, this is geeky but important:

🍾🎉 The scientists have retired RCP 8.5. 🎉🥳

“What is that?” you say, rightly. “It sounds boring.”

Well, RCP 8.5 is (or was) the IPCC’s worst-case outcome for the world if we did nothing.

And now, they don’t think it’s realistic that it will be that bad.

Bottom line: Scientists now think we will escape the worst outcome - because we’re making so much progress with EV, wind, solar and batteries.

For more, read Roger Pielke.