We can all remember the sky during the Covid-19 lockdowns. I was in London at the time, and it was as if someone had polished the heavens clean – the usual moving dots and contrails were gone and the blue expanse above was suddenly clear.

Could this be the future? Citing rarely discussed figures by Airlines for Europe, the EU’s largest airline association, philosopher Fausto Corvino notes the cost to airlines of complying with new climate norms will be 13 to 14 times higher in 2030 than in 2019. This would spell the end of low-cost air travel as we know it – no more cheap getaway weekends to Ibiza, in other words.

The problem is that these rising costs won’t deter the rich from turning to private jets. To Corvino, who researches the ethics of climate change, this is a loophole in the principles of the just transition at the heart of European climate laws. In this week’s article, he tells us why it’s critical for policy-makers to enrol everyone in the climate effort, and points to some initiatives underway to do so.

Georgia is on a dangerous path to autocracy, after the government passed a bill requiring NGOs receiving 20% or more of their funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”. The legislation, which could hamstring civil society and jeopardise EU membership for the country, has inspired thousands to take to the streets – in the capital Tbilisi, but also Kutaisi in the centre to Batumi on the coast. Natasha Lindstaedt explains how the mammoth demonstrations tie into the country’s unique history of protests stretching back to the Soviet era.

Other pieces we liked this week include an article tracing the links between humanity’s vulnerability to multiple sclerosis and migration patterns from Siberia to Western Europe some 5,000 years ago. You can also learn how, more than 80 years after For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, the works of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa continue to define the Spanish war.