In a straight choice between a new petrol car and a new electric car, on climate grounds the electric car wins easily.

But what if your existing petrol car is still working fine – or is even only a year or two old? Contrary to popular belief, the overall climate impact is lower if a new petrol car is scrapped in favour of an electric vehicle (EV), new research reveals.

Studies show that although EVs produce more carbon emissions when they are manufactured, they are responsible for much lower emissions when they are being driven compared with a petrol or diesel car. Overall, the whole-life emissions for an electric car than for combustion engine vehicles.

at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at UC Santa Barbara wanted to find out whether drivers should wait until their current combustion engine car is ready for the scrapheap before moving to electric.

Using US data, they analysed the emissions impact of scrapping a fossil fuel car and replacing it with an EV at different points, from scrapping a car that is just a year or two old to one at the end of its life. Their modelling accounts for the emissions associated with producing and running a new electric car, and other factors including variability in the grid electricity mix, vehicle efficiency, manufacturing emissions and mileage.

“We found that in the vast majority of cases, and even for a brand new gas vehicle, you would be far better off scrapping the gas vehicle and switching to electric,” says Campbell. “It takes more energy to build an electric vehicle, but the savings from driving the vehicle swamp all the upfront costs.”

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Campbell stresses he doesn’t expect people to immediately scrap their brand new cars. Instead, the study aims to show that there is zero environmental benefit in keeping a fossil fuel car on the road until the end of its life.

The findings hold true for almost any scenario, except where an electricity grid is very reliant on coal power, or when a fossil fuel car is driven less than about 7000 km per year.

“The idea here is just to simply show what a huge advantage electric vehicles offer, so that when the opportunity to make the transition [is] something that people are ready and excited to do, by all means go for it,” says Campbell. “There’s no environmental concern to hold you back.”

at the Yale University says the paper takes a “clever angle”. “I think what they’re talking about makes perfect sense. I’ve thought about this before [but] I’ve never thought to write a science paper on it, and I’m impressed.”

Electric cars now last as long as petrol and diesel counterparts

Records from UK vehicle safety tests show that the average lifespan of an electric vehicle is 18 years, and the reliability is still improving considerably from year to year

But at the University of Michigan points out that the study is considering an “extreme case”. “It’s unlikely somebody’s going to purchase a combustion engine vehicle and retire it after a year,” he says.

Instead, those cars will likely hit the second-hand market, which could have knock-on economic and behavioural impacts, such as lowering the price of second-hand cars so dramatically that it convinces more people to switch from public transport to car use. More research is needed to model those potential impacts, says Campbell.

But the study’s authors say their findings lend support to the idea of subsidised scrappage schemes, to encourage people to scrap older fossil-fuel cars in favour of electric vehicles. Such policies could accelerate the EV transition in the US and help to cut transportation emissions, which are now the single largest source of carbon emissions in the country.

This unusual photograph, shot under ultraviolet light with a 13-second exposure, shows some of the damage caused on land by fishing out at sea.

Gaurav Patil’s image of a fishing net that has been carried by ocean currents and become tangled in a mangrove tree on the shore of Nandgaon village, south of Mumbai, India, has won the overall prize in the 2026 . The competition is organised by US non-profit organisation Mangrove Action Project to raise awareness of the precarious position of the world’s mangrove forests.

Mangroves less than 1 per cent of all tropical forests, but provide crucial habitat for wildlife and store up to 10 times more carbon than the same area of inland forest. Despite better recent news after decades of decline, more than half of mangrove ecosystems are to be at .

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear litter the oceans, carried around the globe by currents and eventually getting caught up or breaking down into microplastics. This gear can severely damage mangrove ecosystems, entangling marine life and choking mangrove trees.

“This photographer has put life into a subject that normally looks dull but is deeply important for conservation. Ghost nets are a real problem,” said judge Dhritiman Mukherjee in an announcement about the prize.

When your house is on fire, should you call a firefighter, an architect or a politician? OK, that’s an easy one – but what about when the world is on fire? That is a question many of us will be wrestling with as dangerous blazes spring up across much of the world.

Calling a firefighter fixes your immediate problem, which is that your house is burning down. What it doesn’t address is why your house is burning, or the steps you could have taken to reduce the risk of disaster.

As we report this week, the question of how to prevent wildfires in Europe is now at the top of many minds on the continent. This means changing the way that land is used in order to build in resilience, much as an architect might design a home with fire doors or other safety features.

Learning to live with wildfires in this way is a form of climate adaptation. It is essential that we redesign our way of life to ease the burden of the warmer world we have created, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the underlying cause: burning fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.

As long as our society is dependent on fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm

And yet, in responding to Europe’s extraordinary summer, some people seem to want to do just that. “We’ve lost the war against global warming – so we should ditch net zero and learn to handle hot weather” was the view of one columnist in The Telegraph, a UK newspaper known for publishing climate-sceptic views.

This is entirely wrong, and it is where our politicians must step in. If society is organised in such a way that your house keeps getting set on fire, there is only so much an architect can do – eventually, it will burn down. Similarly, as long as our society is organised around burning fossil fuels, Earth’s climate will continue to warm and the wildfires will continue to get worse. Achieving net zero, meaning we no longer emit a meaningful amount of greenhouse gases, is the only way to do that. Politicians who say otherwise might as well hand out matches.

To the many problems caused by wildfires, add reduced solar generation and more use of fossil fuels as a result. A study of the 2023 Canadian wildfires has concluded that drifting smoke caused a 3 per cent drop in solar power generation in both Europe and North America, costing nearly $2 billion.

“It’s clear that we are facing a situation where this is going to keep happening,” says Iulian-Alin Roșu at the Technical University of Crete in Greece. “It seems like every year from now on, we are going to have some relatively significant Canadian wildfire events.”

Smoke from large wildfires in Canada can spread across much of the northern hemisphere, reducing how much sunshine reaches the ground. Last year, Roșu reported that so much smoke was released during the massive 2023 wildfires in Canada that it reduced summer temperatures across the hemisphere by nearly 1°C – which still wasn’t enough to stop 2023 being the hottest year on record, now surpassed by 2024.

He recently discussed his findings with fire expert at the University of East Anglia in the UK. “We were looking at pollution maps and Matthew, out of nowhere, says, well, hang on a second, I wonder what this does to solar power production,” says Roșu.

So Roșu, Jones and their colleagues got data on solar generation in North America and Europe and plugged it into the climate model Roșu used for his 2025 study. Their study takes into account the fact that the cooling effect of smoke slightly compensates for less sunshine by increasing the efficiency of solar panels – by 20 per cent in Europe, for instance.

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Based on electricity prices at the time, the team calculates that North America – mainly the US – lost $711 million, while Europe lost almost $1.17 billion, with Germany being hit hardest. The reason why Europe lost more is largely that electricity prices are higher there, says Roșu, plus most solar generation in the US is in southern and western states that were less affected by smoke.

The impact of the smoke was greater than the researchers expected, he says. “A whole bunch of solar power was not being produced, and that led to increased CO2 emissions, because obviously the rest of the energy industry had to compensate.”

“There needs to be more understanding of the fact that fire can affect pretty much everything: pollution, health, weather and even solar power,” he adds.

With smoke from Canada reaching Europe again this year, the same thing is happening again. “I have seen some relatively worrying data for this year as well,” says Roșu. But with the season still ongoing, he says it’s too early to compare with 2023.

Parts of the UK have seen zero rainfall for the entire month of July for the first time in their history, underscoring the scale and severity of the ongoing drought gripping the country.

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said July’s weather had been “truly exceptional”, with both England and Wales enduring their driest July in 190 years, coupled with extreme heat and almost unbroken sunshine. Rainfall across southern England averaged just 1.5 mm for July 2026, just 2 per cent of the 1991-2020 average, while mean temperatures were 3.2°C above average for the time of year.

At London’s Kew Gardens, which hosts a Met Office weather station, there has been no measurable rainfall at all in July, the first time that has happened at the site since records began in 1871.

Meanwhile, Heathrow Airport in London has seen 42 consecutive days and counting without any rain, a new record for the site, which has been monitored since 1948.

And in Stratfield Mortimer, a village outside the city of Reading, zero rainfall was recorded in July for the first time in its history. The nearby market town of Wokingham recorded just 0.1 millimetres of rainfall over the same period, according to data released by the University of Reading.

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“Some parts of the Reading area remained without measurable rainfall throughout the calendar month, the only time this has happened since continuous local rainfall records began in 1858, almost 170 years ago,” said at the University of Reading in a statement.

The story is similar across southern England, with at least 20 Met Office weather stations seeing zero rainfall for July for the first time in their recorded history, according to provisional data seen by 91av. They include stations in Lincolnshire, Dorset, Kent, Greater London, Essex, Monmouthshire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight, East Sussex, Hereford & Worcester and Hampshire.

In north London, software engineer has been operating a private weather station since 2009 near Hampstead Heath. He says July 2026 was the first calendar month without any measurable rain in the local area, based on both his own 17-year time series and Met Office records for the area dating back to 1871.

More than half of England and all of Wales is now officially in drought, causing landscapes to turn yellow, wildfires to burn and farmers to warn of looming crop shortages. In Europe, the prolonged hot, dry weather has sparked huge wildfires and driven river levels to historic lows. Low river levels on the Danube have forced operators to shut down nuclear power reactors in Hungary and Romania, while in Germany low water levels on the Rhine have curtailed shipping.

But even though rain will bring relief, it also carries risks. , also at the University of Reading, says there is now a “really substantial” risk of severe flash flooding in the UK, when rain finally falls on sun-baked soils. “Most of the soils are crusted; reservoirs are stressed,” he says. “It’s not a day or two of rainfall that will solve it all. It might actually pose the greatest hazard of them all.”