On May 6, my second field day with EarthLungs, we left Mombasa early once again but this time went north instead of south. It was the same crew, myself plus William and Suleiman and Shem and a shifting cast of other EarthLungs staff on their way to and from places. Our destination today was the Kuchi site, near the bustling coastal town of Kilifi. Kuchi means “dark forest,” as it was historically known for the cool shade under its canopy of mature mangrove trees.

Our boat departed from the busy town dock of Kilifi instead of a lone mooring at the end of a trail like the day before.

As we sped through the brackish channels at low tide, we passed a small flotilla of fisherfolk casting nets from their canoes.

Then, we arrived at our disembarkation point. Amazingly, the Kuchi site was even muddier than the site near Vanga that I’d been to the day before. I wouldn’t have believed it possible as both areas consisted of entirely mud-covered intertidal mangrove habitat, but there it was: this Kuchi mud, perhaps due to subtle local mineralogical differences or something, was somehow both much stickier and much easier to sink into, practically to “stereotypical movie quicksand” levels in some spots.

Just walking around, so much mud accumulated on my boots that they doubled or tripled in mass, forming giant “clown feet” of mud continuously adding and sloughing off material.

Once we reached the site, a little ways inland (at low tide, that is) we were greated by Hassan, the Site Forester managing EarthLungs operations in Kuchi, and Titus. They were leading a dedicated local EarthLungs team of nine women and six men. There was a much smaller planting team at the Kuchi site than at yesterday’s site near Vanga. They hadn’t hired extra local community laborers for today's planting work, so there was just the permanent EarthLungs crew of 15 present.

Eyeing my comically stumbling progress with mud-caked feet on muddy terrain, Hassan said “We have a rule in Kuchi. If you step on a seedling, we throw you into the water!” He was joking, but the landscape around us gave a silent testimony as to why young trees were so particularly precious here.

Around me in Kuchi, there were lots and lots of young mangrove trees, but no old ones. The gray-brown mud was covered with shockingly extensive patches of scattered black ash. Twisted and gnarly flame-scorched stumps rose out of the ground at intervals. Blackened sticks and chips of wood littered the ground.

Wherever I turned, it was the same: a green but young landscape, with juvenile mangroves rising from a floor of stumps and ash and charred kindling. It gave the landscape a slightly eerie air, a vegetation version of babies playing in a field of bones.

Charcoal burning had already become a problem due to years of drought in the 2010s suppressing agricultural incomes. Parents needed money to send their kids for school, and converting mangroves into cheap fuel was a way to do that. When farming or fishing or local service jobs or working in the growing Kenyan tourist industry didn’t provide, there was always the tempting option to surreptitiously cut down a tree and slightly burn the bits. It carbonized the wood, removed water, and created a light, easy-to-burn, and highly polluting household fuel source. It was illegal to do this in Kuchi's mangroves, and Kenya has fairly strong environmental law enforcement, so for a while it was a recurring problem here but not an existential crisis.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Other sources of income were cut off. Desperation rose. People were suddenly willing to take bigger risks to support their family. Charcoal burning skyrocketed.

In just two years from 2020 through 2022, the forest of Kuchi was almost entirely razed. Denuded. Clear-cut tree by tree. Reduced to a wasteland. Became an ex-forest. The canopy of mature mangrove trees that had given it a name for dark cool shade on the sweltering coast was gone.

This was illegal to do in Kenya, so some of the last parts to be cut were thin strips along the water's edge, hiding the devastation from casual passing boats. A few of those still survive, plus the occasional lone older tree inland. But almost everything else was gone. Kuchi Forest, a patch of 247 hectares of mature mangrove ecosystem, had effectively ceased to exist.

This is an entirely quotidian tragedy, a story that recurs around the world every day. The UN reports that 40 million people worldwide earn income from charcoal production and that about half of all wood cut down from Earth's forests is converted to fuelwood or charcoal, a generally “informal” sector responsible for 2 to 7 percent of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions. Charcoal burning is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Africa. It’s also terrible for human health, producing lots of lung-ravaging pollutants like soot and particulate matter. Charcoal use for heat and cooking is a major contributor to the WHO-estimated 3 million premature deaths per year caused by household-level air pollution. It’s one big reason why clean cookstoves are so important - even fossil fuels like propane are a huge improvement in terms of both emissions and biodiversity impact compared to wild-harvested charcoal.

When EarthLungs arrived at the Kuchi site in 2023, they found a barren sun-baked mud plain covered in regularly salt-soaked ash, blackened trucks, and sea-smoothed burnt wood stubs.

But then they got to work fixing it.

The first EarthLungs mangrove planting at Kuchi was on May 5 2023, just three years almost to the day before I arrived and saw the result. Fascinatingly, they'd actively tried to hire the local individuals who had been most involved in the charcoal-burning and tree-cutting - a bold choice, but one which has been paying dividends. I met some of them here on the planting crew today, a man named Julius and a woman named Raphael Neve. Both of them said they much preferred this steady planting job to smoky, unpredictable, and illegal charcoal burning.

By offering a direct transition into paid restoration work for the people empirically most likely to resort to charcoal burning as a source of income, EarthLungs had converted a threat to the mangrove ecosystem into a support system, and incentivized day-by-day community education on the value of intact mangroves.

Hassan showed me one of the “mother trees,” a lone adult Avicennia marina mangrove that had survived the charcoal-burning COVID years and became a vital source of perfectly locally adapted seeds when EarthLungs started working on the scene.

This was one of several mangrove species EarthLungs was planting at Kuchi, and the differences in their life histories were already clearly visible after just three years.

Three different species of mangroves were being planted by EarthLungs at the Kuchi site. They grew at markedly different rates. Rhizophora mucronata, the loop-root mangrove, was the fastest-growing, the biggest among the seedlings planted at this site in 2023. The three-year-olds of this species were already well over my head! Avicennia marina, the grey mangrove, grew a bit slower. And Ceriops tagai, the spurred mangrove, grew much slower: their three-year-old seedlings were only up to my knee. Avicennia could grow in “Zonation 1,” deepest into the intertidal zone and most frequently inundated, all the way to “Zonation 3,” the least watery, while Ceriops preferred Zonation 3.

Once I’d explored the site for a while, I stopped taking pictures and joined the crew planting trees. William, one of the EarthLungs staff accompanying me on all of these different site visits, coordinated taking some pictures of me while my hands were busy.

I was slow and fumbling compared to the experienced planters, and too gentle and hesitant because I was afraid I was afraid I would hurt the little tree. The planting crew guided my hands and showed me that I needed to pack down the mud harder when I placed a seedling into a hole, smacking it down with my palm and even pinch-pressing it around the thin trunk to ensure that that it was firmy ensconced in the ground and wouldn't be washed away at the next high tide.

The dark forest of Kuchi is being reborn, thanks to the dedicated efforts of EarthLungs and the labor of the local community. In not that long, people and animals will shelter under a shady canopy of adult mangroves at this site once again.

The planting crew paused after a while for some group photos and a hand-clapping song and dance to welcome their guests, and then it was getting on for time to begin the hours-long boat and car journey back towards Mombasa.

On the way out, Hassan posed for a photo with a mangrove propagule fresh-dropped from the parent tree on the channel bank.

We also passed the fleet of snall-scale fishers again, still casting their nets from their hand-carved canoes. It looked so informal and “DIY” that my brain reflexively processed it as kids fishing for fun, but no, these were adults doing it for a living, providing a core protein source for their communities.

Someone in our boat called them over and bought some prawns. That appeared to be what they were catching today, filling buckets with glistening beige-ish shrimp relatives. These people's livelihoods were directly benefiting from the mangrove ecosystem; the prawns they were catching were so abundant here because they could safely grow and hide from predators in the dense three-dimensional labyrinth of mangrove roots at high tide. (And at low tide, these channels were too shallow for a lot of predator fish species). Some of the prawns they were catching today had very probably spent just the last high tide sheltering in the mazey roots of the human-tall young seedlings planted at Kuchi by an EarthLungs team composed largely of former charcoal burners.

Ecosystem conservation isn’t a one-time thing, it’s a never-ending process and an ongoing sociological relationship. Kuchi wasn’t doing that badly in the 2010s; it was a well-established forest with legal protections against development ornmass deforestation. But unexpected events like the global COVID-19 pandemic can blow up the status quo and cause waves of destruction, and then there’s new work that needs to be done to build the future that comes afterwards into a good one. Fortunately, more and more landscapes and seascapes around the world now have dedicated ecosystem restoration organizations like EarthLungs working to grow a good Anthropocene.

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At 6 AM on Tuesday May 5, the EarthLungs crew picked me up in the staff van and we set off for a day of mangrove reforestation. As with most road journeys I’ve seen in Africa, it was multipurpose: the EarthLungs staff van made many stops in the next few hours to pick up and drop off people along the way.

The four EarthLungs guys that I stayed with throughout the day were William, Suleiman, Solomon, and Shem (and I’m Sam - yes it was a bit confusing having four dudes with S_m names). We were ably chaffeured by driver Edwin. Notably, several EarthLungs staff (and a Kenya Forest Service officer who came along at one point) were wearing “15B” branded clothing, a reference to Kenya’s national goal of planting fifteen billion trees by 2032, which as of 2026 is reportedly on track! Ecosystem restoration has become a central part of the national political conversation.

We stopped for a breakfast of tea, beans and chapati in a local roadside diner. Kenya's small coastal towns looked very prosperous to my eye, with the consistent presence of power lines, paved roads, and ads for Internet data subscriptions bespeaking the nation's rapid development progress. Not just cashless but careless had become the monetary default in Kenya, with the revolutionary M-PESA online SMS-based banking and money transfer service now the norm for even the smallest of transactions. Lacking a Kenyan phone number, I was using paper Kenyan shillings from an ATM, but I was clearly behind the times.

Once we arrived at the closest drivable point to today's planting site, near the Kenya/Tanzania border between the towns of Majaoni and Vanga, that was only the beginning of the access journey. We’d timed our arrival for low tide, when the site was temporarily above water, but it was a long way out in the intertidal zone across muddy, impermanent terrain. The shallow channels were passable only by boat, and there were limited boats. When we arrived, the main planting workforce of village adults went first, and a second group including me would be ferried there about an hour later.

While we waited, the adorable village children (many of whose parents had just gone out to the planting site) pointed at me and chirped “Mzungu! Mzungu!” the Swahili word for “white person.” (Hilariously, it originally means something like “aimless wanderer.”) In their little high-pitched voices, it sounded like birdsong. When I pointed at myself and jokingly agreed “Yes, well spotted, I am a mzungu” they laughed uproariously.

I also fell into conversation with Jeremiah, a local public health worker. He was a Maasai man from the area around Kilimanjaro, now living on the coast and very interested in climate change issues.

We all then walked out through a mature mangrove forest (what majestically knobbly roots!) to the low-tide waterline, where the boat was now waiting for us, and set off for the planting site.

Many mangrove species can produce complex structures called “propagules” instead of or in addition to more recognizable seeds. Propagules are hardy specialized “embryo” pods that evolved to float long distances and are resistant to saltwater, a highly effective reproductive dispersal strategy that has helped mangroves spread across almost all of Earth's tropical tidal flats at one time or another. There were lots of them in the bottom of our boat, looking like a load of asparagus.

Spray misted my glasses as we navigated out through the maze of shallow brackish channels. It was a bright, warm, even hot day: the local rainy season so far had been almost ridiculously accommodating of my wish to go out and do stuff and take photos during the day, with regular rain showers but generally in the evening, night, or early morning.

Along the way, we passed several extraordinary small boats which each consisted of a small wooden canoe that looked painstakingly hand-carved plus a sail made from tattered plastic sacking.

Then, we arrived at our destination! Upon jumping off the boat, I almost immediately sank from my borrowed synthetic water boots up to my knees.

I’m quite familiar with mud. I’m from New England, where “mud” is basically a two-month season between winter and spring. The house I grew up in had a mudroom vestibule to clean shoes off before you went inside. Later, my undergrad academic advisor was an (awesome) wetlands ecologist, and I spent many happy class hours wading knee-high through vernal pools, salt marshes, or red maple swamps. In recent years, I’ve been smeared with various terraqueous gloops and colloids on multiple continents.

Nevertheless, the muddiness of this area was exceptionally striking. This was a permanency. A land of mud, not just a time of mud. A mudscape. Everything around me for miles was one vast intertidal zone! In temperate latitudes, this would have been just a vast barren expanse of sand, but here in the tropics even a permanently muddy inundated-at-high-tide zone can support a forest thanks to the innovative biology of dozens of species of mangrove trees.

The surface of the mud at low tide was dominated by crabs, multiple species from East African fiddler crabs with their outsized claw to more symmetrical Ocypode ghost crabs and many others I couldn’t even recognize. Their sideways movements weaved in and out of the regular pattern of “breather roots,” the gas-exchange biological snorkels poked up from adult mangroves as an adaptation to their semi-submerged daily rhythm of life.

The crabs skittered away and down into hidden holes as footsteps approach, but if you looked just a bit ahead you could see how incredibly many there were.

As we squelched on and moved away from the water's edge, we rejoined the planting crew.

There were about fifty people working here total, a plurality of them women from the local community hired as planters for the day. They wore a wide range of colorful clothing, including many intricate abstract prints plus one T-shirt that read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Global culture is pervasive.

Interestingly, many seedlings being planted today had been brought to the site a while ago, packed into plastic cylindrical seedling cards with a bit of local mud, then left to stand in shrub-sheltered “beds” before getting the wrap shucked off and planted in the real ground where they could spread their roots. This got them some extra “protected” growing time without competitors or crabs, and also got them used to this exact area's soil, water, and light conditions. At this location, these pre-introduction beds of seedlings could even withstand tidal shifts.

I hadn’t heard of this technique before, but it struck me as a clever strategy. It reminded me of the “headstarting” halfway houses now common in wildlife reintroduction efforts, where animals were released into a contained, fenced-in bit of real forest or desert or whatever to help gradually acclimate them to the wild instead of going straight from captivity to wide-open landscapes.

The work spread over a wide area, interspersing more new young mangroves in bare patches between already-established juvenile trees. It followed a steady pattern with efficient division of labor. Some folks would dig holes, either with a metal core-sampler tool or a good old fashioned poking stick. Some would peel the plastic off the seedlings. Some would pick up all that for later recycling. And many would carefully place the denuded seedlings into their new holes and ensure that they were firmly ensconced in the surrounding mud so they wouldn’t be washed away by the next tide.

Some of the planters could carry buckets full of seedlings on their heads, and chose to do so even when there hands were free. I've never had good enough balance to pull that off even momentarily.

After I'd taken lots of pictures and videos, I put my phone away and joined in the trees planting myself. I was much slower and more fumbling than the experienced planters, but it was pretty simple, just pressing a seedling into one of the predug holes and tightly packing more mud around it so it stayed in place through tue next high tide.

The holes where the mud had been dug out for the seedling beds were still full of water at low tide. I saw tiny killifish in one of them.

By the end of the day, 12,500 young mangrove trees had been planted. 7,500 of them from propagules, the rest from seeds.

It’s quite challenging to come up with a more multifacetedly positive intervention for human and ecosystem well-being than restoring and protecting mangrove ecosystems.

Mangroves are defense-in-depth against physical climate disasters, acting as “shock absorbers” for extreme storms by providing wave attenuation and “living seawall” water buffering. If a cyclone swept up towards Mombasa from the south in the years to come, these mangroves in its way would materially reduce the physical force of wind and water hitting the city. Studies have found that storm surge can be reduced by as much as 50% just by hitting the topographically conplex structures of a mangrove forest, reducing the potential flooding area by hundreds or thousands of square kilometers. In addition to protecting against waves, their roots also hold soil and sediments together, reducing coastal erosion (and filtering pollutants from the land before they can reach, say, offshore coral reefs!). The mangroves of South Florida are estimated to have potentially prevented billions of dollars in damages from Hurricanes Irma and Ian.

They also serve as nurseries for biodiversity and local livelihoods. Little fish, both small species and the young of larger species, thrive in mangrove ecosystems because of all the spaces in the dense woodsy labyrinth where bigger fish can’t get in to eat them. A recent study calculated that mangrove ecosystems globally support an annual abundance of over 700 billion juvenile fish and invertebrates, and another study found that mangroves directly support over 4 million human small-scale fisherfolk worldwide.

And they’re absolutely freaking spectacular at carbon sequestration, even more so than on-land rainforests. They’re generally very fast-growing, tend to be denser, and they trap lots of extra organic matter and sediment in their great squiggly root networks. (It also helps that they’re really hard to burn down - at least naturally or by accident - due to the whole “intertidal zone” thing).

Mangrove reforestation work is Anthropocene-ready climate resilience in action, a great life-filled woody sponge of an ecosystem that acts multidimensional living shield and buttress and filter and nursery and carbon vault all at once to safeguard coastal regions of humanity and its biosphere.

It’s now super late, and I’m getting up early again for another EarthLungs field visit tomorrow! There are many different and unique projects to explore. That’s all for now!

I crossed Uganda and Kenya from Kampala to Mombasa in a marathon twenty-six hour travel session, taking a sixteen-hour overnight bus from Kampala to Nairobi and then a 5.5-hour train from Nairobi to Mombasa a few hours later. The next morning, I arrived by three-wheeled tuk-tuk at the Mombasa office of the EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation, in the Nyali neighborhood. The tuk-tuk sent up spray as it plowed through puddle patches covering stretches of the smaller roads, left over from the recent bout of flooding.

Kenya appears to me to be visibly much more developed than Uganda, closer to, say, Mexico in terms of physical infrastructure. In just my few glimpses of Kenyan cities so far, I saw1 consistently paved and marked roads, no open sewers, and much less ambient trash. The air felt markedly cleaner as well. This brief impression tracks the statistics: Kenya has had an incredible last three decades in terms of socioeconomic development! The share of the population with access to electricity rose from just 5% in 1997 to 76% in 2023!

Impressively, most of Kenya's electricity is renewable, with local company KenGen becoming a world leader in geothermal development along the hot rocks of the East African Rift Valley.

Healthcare rolled out across Kenya so fast that for a brief period, life expectancy in years grew almost as fast as actual years passed, rising from 51 in 2000 to 63.4 by 2015. In other words, on average, Kenya's population got 15 years older but less than two years closer to probable death over that period! That’s a genuinely amazing example of the kind of underreported progress that has transformed the lives of tens of millions of human beings in the 21st century so far.

Kenya's “hot streak” also extends to geopolitics. The country is now a full-on democracy, with a peaceful transfer of presidential power from Uhuru Kenyatta to William Ruto after the elections of 2022. Kenya also led a multinational UN-sponsored task force from 2024 to 2026 to attempt to restore some order in terribly violent and gang-ridden Haiti (for which President Biden rewarded them with formal U.S. Major Non-NATO Ally status), which as far as I know is the first time ever that an African nation has led a military combat operation in the Americas - and apparently conducted itself well enough that local Haitians attempted to blockade roads to prevent Kenyan troops from leaving! Definitely a nation on the rise.

When I arrived at the EarthLungs office in Mombasa, I was making my first in-person rendezvous with a long-time partner organization. They’re the leading reforestation NGO in Kenya and they’ve now started expanding into other East African countries as well, with over 92 million trees planted and pioneering use of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) technologies showing enviable survival rates!

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Monthly Dose of Climate Hope: A Conversation with Victor Mwanga on Tree-Growing in East Africa (Recording)

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7 months ago · 17 likes · Climate Action Now and Sam Matey-Coste

Readers may recall that I’ve previously interviewed EarthLungs founder and CEO Victor Mwanga on two occasions, once in 2024 and once at a live event in 2025.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: Interview with Victor Mwanga, CEO of EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation

Here’s an updated interview with Mr. Mwanga, from 2025…

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2 years ago · 41 likes · 5 comments

When people use the Climate Action Now app to quickly and easily take civic actions (like sending a customizable prewritten letter to state or federal legislators, as regularly featured in the Daily Dose posts I write for Climate Action Now when not traveling!), it's EarthLungs that plants the trees that those users earn for their actions. Money also goes to support EarthLungs’ work when people buy a Climate Action Now “Planet-Saving Subscription!”

When I arrived, Mr. Mwanga was busy in Nairobi, and director Bill Odongo greeted me heartily and introduced me to the team. The EarthLungs office bustled with activity, inhabited by fourteen folks today plus the new arrival of myself.

(There was also an adorable young cat, recently adopted by the office thanls to employee Noor Omar who found a lone kitten in the streets).

To me, the atmosphere felt like a startup or hackathon, with passionate young people working intently on laptops alongside each other on room-filling tables. That vibe could’ve been from anywhere in the world, the quintessential paradigm of 2020s productivity, but there were other aspects that were distinctly local. They kindly offered everyone unlimited and notably excellent hot sweet tea poured from huge silver canteens. (Kenya is famous for its black tea production, a major export industry). There was delicious ugali, the staple maize porridge, with lunch. And of course the long rack of various sizes of knee-high mud boots for fieldwork in coastal mangrove swamps was distinctive.

We arranged my site visit itinerary for the next few days, and then I asked some folks what they were working on just then.

Marriam was working with the Veritree dashboard, the monitoring, reporting, and verification software that tracks EarthLungs plantings. She was checking the files on a planting that took place on April 30, 2026, at a place called Kadzyuhoni, in which 18,000 Ceriops tagai seedlings (or rather “propagules,” since mangroves can grow just from chunks of living twig!) planted at a distance of 45-55 centimeters from each other. This species, the spurred or Indian mangroves, grows and sustains rich ecosystems around the shores of the Indian Ocean from Madagascar to the Philippines. Geotagged photos spread across the plot were proof of work.

Across the table, Daniel was curating and uploading field reports sent in via WhatsApp. Lots of different people would go to recently planted areas near them and check on seedling survival rates, send reports and coordinates by WhatsApp, Daniel would input that to Google Sheets which in turn was a linked data source to add another source of updates to the master Veritree platform. I noticed that the three most common causes of death for seedlings appeared to be “drought,” “trampling” and “crabs.”

I’d already missed the optimal time and tide for going out to a field side today, and this Monday was a day of planning and meetings back at base anyway. I'm now staying in a nearby Mombasa hotel which Bill kindly recommended and writing this in the evening on my phone (computer still borked). I meet the team at 6 AM tomorrow to go out to my first mangrove reforestation field site! I’m psyched.

Lake Victoria (also known as Lake Ukerewe, Nyanza, or Nnanubaale in local languages) is the largest lake in Africa, the largest tropical lake in the world, and the third-largest lake on Earth by surface area after Lake Superior and the Caspian Sea. The Nile flows north from this lake all the way to the Mediterranean. Its waters stretch over an area almost twice the size of Belgium, and millions of people are fed every day by its fisheries. Lake Victoria is also the site of one of the fastest known examples of evolution in planetary history, with hundreds of closely related species of haplochromine cichlids, descendants of ancient hybridization between Upper Nile and Congo cichlids, diversifying to fill a great multitude of different niches throughout the lake in just sixteen thousand years - the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

This fabled waterbody is also a poster child for rapid environmental change, with new major disturbances piling atop one another for the last hundred years. Overfishing was already an issue by the 1920s, which motivated the introduction of the fast-spreading Nile perch, which did indeed feed a lot of people but also became a new apex predator that drove many of the lake's cichlid species extinct by the 1980s. Nutrient runoff surged due to the multiplying farms and cities in its fast-growing watershed, resulting in runaway eutrophication as cyanobacteria covered the lake in algae blooms. Water hyacinth became a new fast-spreading invader in the 1990s.

But lately, even as climate change adds a new stressor, there are some encouraging signs of a new Anthropocene equilibrium forming. The hyacinth was brought somewhat under control by the 2000s due to the follow-up introduction of an pest weevil species. Fish farming has taken off, providing a more reliable source of food less dependant on wild ecosystems. And many of the surviving cichlids appear to be managing to rapidly evolve to survive in a murkier, algae-heavy, perch-filled lake. As described in the excellent conservation book The Rescue Effect, the “orangehead” cichlid (Haplochromis pyrrhocephalus) had lost 99.99% of its population by 1987, but has since bounced back immensely, with populations 18,000 times more abundant than their 1987 low point. The orangeheads have experienced phenotypic and evolutionary rescue, moving into shallower waters, eating different foods, and evolving a more streamlined body shape that may have helped them outswim Nile perch.

As I was in the neighborhood already, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see at least a tiny fraction of this lake in person.

On May 1, my last full day in Uganda, I went from Kampala to an interesting-looking spot I’d seen on Google Maps where a patch of tropical woodland hugged the coastline between the lake and the road linking Kampala with the coastal city of Entebbe. This little green stretch was called the Kitubulu forest, and it was where I first caught sight of Lake Victoria.

I walked off the road into a grassy lot in front of a hotel, where a team of local workers were digging channels in the wet red ground with metal shovels. Dragonflies scattered into the air as my feet disturbed their grassy perches, the black spots on their wings dancing like inkblots given life. Local waterbirds were diving into the lake for small fish. The iNaturalist app told me I was looking at brown wedge-headed hamerkopfs, white egrets, and small black-and-white lapwings.

Almost right away, I saw four marabou storks, the iconic scavenger birds that range across much of sub-Saharan Africa. They are so comically ugly that it wrapped all the way back around to cute, with warty black-and-red heads, giant imposing beaks, and impressive spreading wingspan.

Among the tallest flying birds in the world (right up there with Andean condors), they looked as if they came up to my waist. They showed little fear, allowing me to walk quite close before beginning to move away. Their craggy big-winged long-beaked forms reminded me of pterosaur depictions in paleoart.

A metal fence blocked further access into the coastal forest, so I scaled it and dropped down the other side into a denser, thicker, steamier woodland, a few dozen meters inland. (There wasn’t even barbed wire on the top; it was practically a ladder). It had rained that morning, and droplets of water sprinkled themselves over me as I pushed my way through the low-hanging branches crisscrossing the overgrown narrow dirt trail. Eventually, the trail widened again and I crossed paths with some local folks: one person cutting firewood, two shoveling up earth, a few passing on dirt bikes.

Soon, I started hearing chattering in the trees. I glanced up, and my eyes met those of a monkey.

The monkey looked at me. I looked at the monkey. We both looked at each other, for a still inquiring moment, and then my primate cousin moved on with a bold leap and a crash of branches.

A group of red-tailed monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) were moving in the canopy above me! I hadn’t expected to see wild primates in such a city-surrounded forest fragment, but some adaptable species like these monkeys keep surprising us with how well they can learn to tolerate and thrive alongside even very dense human populations.

A man walked by carrying recently-cut firewood, just below the trees in which the monkeys were roosting. I kept walking along the path, and it eventually widened into a grassy knoll atop a small cliff overlooking the waters of the inlet.

Curlicues of green algae were clearly visible amidst the paler blue-gray waters. Once again, dragonflies with black wing-spots leapt up from the grass around each of my footfalls. A white egret stalked fish in the shallows. The buildings of the greater Kampala-Entebbe metro area spiked into the skyline.

On the far side of this little inlet, an array of fish farms were clearly visible, mesh pens enclosing a tiny subset of the great lake. Fish farming, mostly of Nile tilapia, has taken off rapidly across Lake Victoria in recent years, providing more reliable yields than wild fisheries, but still faces many challenges, from disease and pollution-caused die-offs to antibiotic-resistant bacteria spawned from efforts to counter those very fish diseases.

I kept walking, passing more folks about their business, and eventually came to the end of the forest. A plastic-ridden midden picked over by chickens and goats heralded the fringes of a human settlement, where men were working on long wooden boats amid houses built from scraps of metal sheeting.

Google Maps informed me that this was the Gudda fish landing site. At first glance it looked impoverished, and it was by developed-world standards, but paying attention to small details helped adjust my perspective. There were new power lines bringing electricity to these homes. Metal roofs would protect from rain, unlike branches or bamboo. The goats were fat, and had lots of cute babies. As I moved on, I passed a modern clinic within walking distance. Life looked to be getting better for the local families.

Striking black-and-white pied kingfishers abounded, perching on the power lines en masse like starlings or crows. A lone marabou stork stood sentry atop one wooden pole overlooking the lake.

After traversing the fishing shantytown, I walked inland into the more prosperous-looking built-up areas of Entebbe proper, where I then spent the afternoon writing in a local café run as a social enterprise by a Ugandan gorilla conservation group.

Lake Victoria neared its metaphorical limits many times in the last century, and its future is still risky and uncertain. But when I visited one tiny edge of its physical limits, I found it to be still full of life, hardy “weed” species thriving alongside steadily developing human settlements. As East Africa keeps growing, I hope that the communities around this great lake eventually lead an environmental and water quality renaissance of the sort that has restored flourishing freshwater ecosystems to so much of the developed world.

As I write these words, it’s May 2, and I’ll shortly be getting on an overnight bus from Kampala to Nairobi, Kenya, on my way to meet up with the amazing EarthLungs Reforestation Foundation in the mangrove swamps near Mombasa. My computer seems to have developed some arcane hard drive problem, so I’m writing this (and likely many future articles) on my phone alone. I’m psyched for what comes next - on we go!

On the eventful day of Thursday April 30th, as we were returning from a visit to the amazing Soleil Power battery factory at Kirolo, Brendan suggested that I drop by Uganda’s National Science Week. I hadn’t even heard of it, but apparently a big-deal government-sponsored expo to promote investment in Ugandan science and technology was underway at the Kololo Independence parade grounds in central Kampala1. I walked in (startling a marabou stork on the way), requested a free visitor pass, and looked around.

It was the first day of the event, and a lot of booths were still being set up. I was among relatively few early visitors. The booths, each sponsored by a Ugandan company, NGO, or academic project, were organized by field.

In the center was a big seating hall, oriented towards a projector screen on which several Ugandan officials were giving speeches. There was a food-and-agriculture area. There was a services area. There was a biomedical area, with the centerpiece item being a project by the renowned Uganda Virus Research Institute to develop their own “flexible and scalable” RNA vaccines for COVID variants.

There was an “industry” section with some projects on water filtration, minerals, and a nascent local university effort to use plastic waste in road construction.

There was also an “electric mobility” section at the far end of the expo, with a diverse medley of brands in attendance Some of them I already knew. There was a whole fleet of the Spiro electric motorbikes I’d been seeing regularly this whole trip, and a booth from Soleil Power featuring batteries made at the local factory I had toured just that morning!

There were also two cars from Great Wall Motors, a Chinese EV brand that had recently signed a deal with a local Uganda distributor.

Most novel to me were the two all-electric buses from Kiira Motors, a pioneer local Ugandan auto manufacturer. They were importing high-end electric motors and tires, and building the rest of the bus themselves locally, steadily gaining skills for the local workforce. It was an automotive equivalent of Soleil importing raw battery cells and assembling them into modules and packs. Moving up the value chain: a classic development strategy, and one increasingly relevant to the electrotech revolution as nations around the world seek to emulate the solar and battery colossus that is China.

I’d read about Kiira before: they had recently grabbed headlines by driving one of their 100% electric bus models on a 13,000-kilometer six-country 30-day tour across Africa from Kampala to Cape Town! That bus wasn’t on display today, but two other models were, a twelve-meter model meant to go between different cities and a ten-meter within-the-same-city model.

On the way out, a heavily armed Ugandan soldier on gate guard duty asked to take a selfie with me2. I did so with quickness.

A few hours later, I met up with Metkel Abraham, CEO and co-founder of Aptech Africa. I’d previously interviewed him in 2025, but this was the first time we’d met in person. After catching up personally (he showed me an awesome video of how he’d taken his kids whitewater rafting in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park!), I pulled out my notebook and we did an impromptu follow-up interview to update on the progress Aptech has made in the past year.

When we’d last spoken, Aptech had completed solar and microgrid projects in 31 countries. Metkel told me that Aptech was now operating in over 40 countries, and recently launched new solar installation projects in Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Yemen, Afghanistan, the West Bank, and Armenia. They now have 180 permanent employees at their head office in Kampala alone (where they have a new dedicated office building under construction), and 500 total employees spread across all their different projects.

The day we met, Metkel had just gotten back from South Sudan, which happens to be the country where much of Aptech’s inventory got looted when a civil war broke out 2013 and where they flew in a lithium battery to a school over the active war in 2016. This time, he had gone there representing Aptech’s bid to fulfill a World Bank project to solarize 52 more hospitals in South Sudan. Such a transformative reliable electricity source that would allow them to preserve life-saving vaccines in a cold chain.

To me, Uganda was an exotic adventure. To Metkel, it was a normal home base, the place he came back to from the actual rough parts of the world. (In case it’s not clear, I really admire this guy)!

One of Aptech’s big already-begun projects was a recent commitment to build clean electricity-generating solar arrays for 240 hospitals, 240 schools, and 80 administrative buildings, as well as installing 10,200 solar streetlights, across the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and until recently most war-torn countries in the world. The sheer human scale and weight of this endeavor astounded me. According to Our World in Data, only 18% of the C.A.R. population had access to even bare-bones basic electricity in 2023 (the national grid is practically nonexistent) so most or all of these hospitals and schools are likely to be getting electricity for the first time. Just for a thought experiment, assume a (very conservative) number of 1,000 local people whose lives are improved in some way by getting a hospital with consistent electricity in their neighborhood, whether it’s receiving a vaccine that they can now safely stock or getting treated with equipment that can now be powered. That would be 240,000 lives changed by the hospital component of this project alone, and the CAR only has between 5 and 6 million people total!

If you look at a map of the remaining countries in the world where most people still don’t have access to electricity, and then look on Aptech’s website to see where they’re building new projects, it’s practically the same list of countries. From Sierra Leone to Somalia, from Guinea (the one in West Africa) to Papua New Guinea (the one in Melanesia), they’re operating in frontier markets, literally empowering some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Aptech and companies like it are bringing some of the greatest fruits of modern civilization, the basic package of medical care and clean water and farm irrigation that brings child mortality down from 50% to 5%, to the last bloody frontiers of the world, where people with recent memories of fleeing warlords can gain a little stability and safety in their life thanks to power literally coming down to them from our parent Star. The places that a fossil-fueled global economy didn’t uplift for long impoverished decades are finally getting a foundation on which to strive for broad-based prosperity and human well-being thanks to the solar and battery innovations of the global Electrotech Revolution. There’s not all that many things more awesome, noble, inspiring or generally good happening in the world right now.

And now right when that growth is hitting an exponential curve, a stupid war is causing a fossil fuel shortage that’s likely to start biting down harder soon. I noticed a gas station in Kampala last night that had run out of fuel to sell. The case for electrotech adoption was already spectacular and getting better every day, and now it’s been accelerated even more. Just since I’ve been in Africa, my favorite think tank Ember has released some new jaw-dropping reports showing even more evidence that fossil fuels are entering structural decline worldwide, with fossil electricity generation decreasing in China, India, and the OECD in 2025. Worldwide, clean energy met all new electricity demand and then some last year!

The solarpunk future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. I look forward to seeing human civilization become a cleaner, greener, healthier, and more resilient hyperobject as electrification brings incredible new advances in the years to come!

On the morning of Thursday April 30th, I woke up early, checked out of my Airbnb at 6:30 AM, and crossed Kampala by taxi to a make rendezvous at 7 AM. I was meeting Brendan Cronin, CEO of Soleil Power, a new battery-focused “sister company” of leading frontier-market solar installer Aptech Africa. Both are now part of the new umbrella company Massawa Group, a fast-growing superstar of African electrotech deployment. I had interviewed Aptech CEO and co-founder Metkel Abraham over a video call in 2025, and I’d been absolutely fascinated by their bold and heroic endeavors to bring a clean first-ever electricity source to some of the most dangerous places in the world.

After several days of coordination efforts over WhatsApp, I received a kind offer for Brendan to drive me from Kampala to the new Soleil Power battery factory in Kirolo, a village about an hour to the north. He picked me up at the rendezvous point in a black Toyota Land Cruiser, and we drove off. Brendan had some fascinating stories to tell. An American originally from Maryland who’d worked as a Caribbean boat captain before getting a mechanical engineering degree, he’d been working in equatorial African infrastructure and development for the last twenty years in various roles across Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, South Sudan (just before the civil war) and now Uganda. Along the way, as we traversed an uneven medley of recently paved stretches breaking up eroded red dirt roads, Brendan told me how he’d come to this position. Soleil Power itself was a brand new company, a battery startup budding off Aptech’s highly successful solar-focused business. It had started existence around 2021, and Brendan had been hired as CEO in 2022, excited for a new challenge. Soleil started with prototypes in a tiny workshop in Kampala, and after years of work moved to a new purpose-built factory space on a plot of land they’d bought near Kirolo, with operations there beginning in July 2025. This new factory was the first multi-use1 lithium-ion battery assembly plant anywhere between South Africa and the Sahara.

We eventually arrived at a big gray building on a rural unpaved lot. A solar-powered borehole well on the left of the building provided drinking water. This was the new factory — we were here! It was already in operation but also still under construction itself, with new machinery and component materials arriving in shipping containers after traversing the Indian Ocean to the Kenyan port of Mombasa and then crossing overland on a truck to drop stuff off right at the doorstep. As Brendan and I walked in, I could see a production line taking up one wall on the left and a range of other tech spaced out across the other walls. It was just past 8 AM, and the employees had arrived just before we did. Brendan told me that what they had now amounted to a three fully functional semi-automated early production lines, one for metal casing fabrication and two co-located battery production lines assembling modules from both cylindrical cells and prismatic cells. As workers gained skills and experience in battery-making, they were planning to soon upgrade to fully automated assembly lines to speed up the process. EV motorbike companies had been the first to hire people to work on batteries in Uganda, but Soleil was the first to build diversified lithium-ion and lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) batteries for home, business, and EV uses, and they were regularly hiring and training workers with no previous battery experience — growing the whole sector.

It was a hot, sunny day outside when we arrived, though there had been rain earlier and it would rain more later in the day. Nevertheless, the space inside the factory was cool and shady, notably more comfortable than outside despite all the machines running. Soleil now had 20 full-time employees, and was still receiving substantial logistical support from the much larger Aptech. The working language was English, a common ground spoken by skilled Ugandan employees from a range of cultural backgrounds. Brendan told me that they hired many of their employees from Kampala universities based on electrical experience, but were also hiring some part-time “casual” workers from the local Kirolo village community with the goal of moving them to full-time as they gained skills and practice.

Like everyone else in Africa, Soleil imports part of their electrotech from China. But where they differ is that they only important the most basic sub-component of a battery: pallets of raw cells, single small cylinders or rectangles that chemically store energy. At the factory, they assemble these basic cells into functional productions, adding grounding, insulation, and connector cables around multiple cells connected as a module, then arranging them into full multi-module battery packs of different form factors and power output levels suitable for different use cases.

Brendan gave me the tour of the major pieces of equipment. There was a CNC laser cutter, a compressor-fed press-fit machine, and a drill press, all for machining the custom metal superstructure of the battery packs that held the modules in alignment.

There was a powder coating booth for painting those metal parts. There was a huge inventory zone, full of pallets of battery cells and soon-to-be-assembled new equipment.

There was a machine for stamping terminal sections on the positive and negative ends of the raw lithium-ion and lithium-iron-phosphate battery cells.

And interspersed with the semi-manual production line, there were a wide range of different battery testing devices for different stages of the process. Brendan proudly described their high process control to ensure consistent quality. This Soleil factory had already won several international certifications, including ISO 9001:2015 for quality management, ISO 14001:2015 for environmental management, and ISO 45001:2018 for occupational health and safety.

Checking the functionality of battery cells before using them, checking the functionality of cells assembled into modules, and checking the functionality of full ready-to-go battery packs.

As of right now, after less than a year, Brendan told me that this Soleil factory has a production capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 battery pack units, with unit size ranging from 1 to 5 kilowatt-hours of storage. (These battery pack units themselves can be grouped together in racks of sixteen or thirty-two for larger-scale uses, like for a business instead of a home).

In addition to the wide range of machines forming part of the battery pack assembly process, there were also electric motorcycles parked in several different corners around the factory. All were bikes from Ugandan e-mobility company Zembo, part of the Soleil company fleet as well as factory testing platforms for using Soleil batteries in two-wheeler EVs.

After two years of R&D and testing, Soleil has begun to commercially supply battery packs Zembo for use in their bikes and swap stations. Soleil’s marketing efforts have only just begun, but they’ve already built relationships with early customers.

Another relevance of motorcycles to this factory was as a source of new input components. Brendan told me that in addition to importing fresh battery cells from China to assemble into packs, they were also “triaging” battery cells from the fast-growing African e-mobility sector (all those electric motorbikes). Some of the time, some cells from bikes that had reached the end of their useful life could still be reconfigured for a second “upcycled” life in a battery pack. Testing was especially important to sort these ones out. Soleil was a pioneer in this emerging circular economy of energy storage, the very first company to go to market in Uganda with a second-life lithium-iron-phosphate battery product like this.

The tour finished, Brendan moved on to the many pressing tasks that did not include providing live narration and guiding for a curious Substacker. After checking that it wouldn’t be too much of a disturbance, I walked backwards up the production line, starting with the most finished product, and conducted a brief interview with each Soleil employee I met along the way.

First, I talked with Berna, an outgoing woman analyzing data at a computer console. She was the Assembly Lead, a role of great responsibility as the manager essentially running this entire factory day-to-day when more senior personnel were elsewhere. She’d been working with Soleil since April 2025, and was a big fan of renewable energy and particularly battery storage.

Reagan was using a TFT (thin-film transistor) diagnostic machine to triple-check the performance of a nearly complete battery pack. He’d been working here for two years, since 2024, and said it was because he liked renewable energy.

Daniel was one of the part-time workers hired from the local community, and was working on adding connector cables to a mostly-finished battery pack. He told me precisely that he’d been with Soleil for seven months and sixteen days, and that it was a good job.

Next up was Mukisa, another “casual” local part-timer, attaching metal casings to the newly cabled and insulated battery cell packs. He said he was on his third month and loved working with this team.

At the center of the production line, Shakirah was adding cables and insulation to a battery recently assembled from a network of cells. She’d been working with Soleil for one year, and told me she’d come to learn more and grow her career.

At the step just before, Lilian was adding nickel strips to help hold the battery cells in place as a pack. She said she’d been working here for one year, and took the job because it was “unique.”

Hafiswa was doing quality control, checking QC data for battery cells on a laptop just in front of the testing machines. She told me she’d been working here for nine months, and that she’d joined because she was really interested in batteries and wanted to learn more.

Then, at the far end of the production line, I met Abu and Marvin, working together on two laptops open to SolidWorks CAD and Excel respectively. They were designing a new prototype battery pack form factor, working towards a more “stackable” model that could click together without needing an external frame. Both were veteran Soleil employees: Abu had worked here for two years and Marvin one and a half. They both also said that they were working here because they loved clean energy.

Beyond them, the only other folks working in the factory when I was there were Vincent and Isa, both at work on the other side of the building from the main production line powder-coating metal battery pack parts with black paint. Vincent said he loved working here, and had done so for two years.

After that, as Brendan moved around the factory discussing various details, I walked around by myself, took some more pictures, and eventually fell into conversation with Berna again. I asked her if she wanted to share any message with future readers from around the world, and she said “Love from Africa!” We talked more, and she animatedly shared her ambitions for renewable energy to help power Uganda’s development. “Green energy is happening globally and to us here in Africa. Battery storage is really important because it works across all electricity sources. We can fast-forward through the process you guys [foreigners, Westerners] went through. We can learn from what you guys did. We can have a future where we’re more like you guys, a mixed country where people from all over feel they can come.” I was humbled and inspired by her enthusiasm.

As we stepped outside to head back to Kampala, Brendan outlined potential future plans for Soleil Power. Once they filled up this factory with new semi-automated assembly lines, they could build another one right next to it on the same multi-acre plot of land. They could pave the access road and parking lot, although that would be so expensive it wasn’t a near-term priority. They might even build on-site employee housing. There was lots of room to grow, and a strategy to make it happen. In Uganda, Soleil wasn’t planning to compete on price with the multiple straight-outta-China all-imports solar installers (including current local sales volume leader Felicity Solar, which I’d seen in the Kampala streets), but they could compete on being customizable, flexible, extra-reliable, and more reactive to the needs of the local market. A battery from China might linger in various importers’ inventories for a year by the time it’s sold at local distributors in Uganda, and it would be made to one of a set few preexisting models designed and built in China for global markets which might or might not match what people in Uganda wanted just then. Soleil could build small batches of uniquely formatted battery packs with custom sizes, shapes, and power outputs to meet individual local business clients’ specific needs as they arose. After ten years of scaling up their factory and their home, business, and EV batteries, Soleil could be building grid-scale battery packs the size of a shipping container. I don’t know what the future holds for this company, but I do know that they’ll be doing their darnedest to seize the day and help build a cleaner future for Africa.

It was a pleasure and privilege to visit this brand-new outpost of the electrotech revolution, with a dedicated team building an unprecedented center of clean industry in Africa. Spectacular work!

On my first morning in Kampala, still tired from the overnight bus ride but waiting until the afternoon for my Airbnb check-in time to open, I visited the Ugandan National Mosque to pass some time visiting the striking monument. I got a bit of a jump scare when I noticed that it was also named the Gaddafi National Mosque, as the infamous Libyan dictator had paid for much of its construction in the early 2000s.

Nevertheless, it was a beautiful building. (From the Pyramids on, how many other megalomaniacs have funded the dreams of architects?) The largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa, with intricate wooden carvings in the roof, metal chandeliers from Egypt, and spreading carpet from Turkey. It was Monday, so the big common prayer space generally filled on Fridays was empty. My tour guide recited a verse from a giant wall-mounted Qur’an in mellifluous Arabic, then showed me his Makerere University student portal on his smartphone in English. He was just a few years younger than me, and said that he wanted to both advance in the Islamic clergy and get a degree in hospitality and tourism. Tour guiding here was practice for both ambitions.

When we climbed over two hundred steps to the top of the minaret, he pointed out Anglican, Catholic, and Hindu places of worship scattered around the 360-degree panorama of Kampala city, as well as other landmarks like government buildings and Makerere University itself. He was visibly proud of Kampala’s ecumenical cosmopolitanism, with so many different faiths living in the city. The name Kampala literally translates as “Impala Hill,” and today’s metro area of millions was once a woodsy hunting preserve for historic Bugandan kings known for the eponymous antelopes.

Uganda is an intensely pluralistic country, situated on Lake Victoria (aka Nyanza) at a crossroads of cultures with links to both the Swahili-speaking coast and the Nilotic world to the north. The official national language is English, a classic “neutral ground” post-imperial decision by a newly independent country to avoid prioritizing one of several competing regional or tribal languages, and I was impressed by how many people in the street spoke at least a few words. I noticed more public religiosity than in Rwanda, taking a range of different forms from a noticeable minority of woman wearing hijabs to churches chanting gospel music the occasional born-again Christian guy on the street randomly asking me if I knew Jesus.

As I explored the capital city over parts of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I saw many campaign posters for incumbent dictator Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since 1986 and recently “won” a seventh term in January 2026, as well as some for the National Unity Platform, a leading opposition movement often brutally repressed. I also saw posters advertising an athletic event for the birthday of Museveni’s son, the infamous General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, known for his drunkenness, violence, and random Twitter threats to conquer Sudan, Kenya, Italy, and Türkiye. Succession questions loom large in modern Ugandan politics.

Overall, Kampala was a lot scruffier and rougher around the edges than Kigali. Traffic stops and lights are few and far between, while traffic jams are common. Open sewers are more common, sidewalks less. At one point, a traffic cop shook down my Uber driver for a bribe (for which I later reimbursed the poor driver). The streets of Kampala have far fewer EVs and EV bikes than Kigali, and the air is dirtier to a substantial degree, giving me a slight cough and headache that I recall all too well from Mumbai and Mexico City. The city is thronged with boda-boda motorcycle taxis, always trying to sell their services to a traveler on foot, and just eyeballing it I would estimate the Kampala motorbike fleet to be perhaps 10-20% electric compared to Kigali’s roughly 50%-75%. I began to appreciate even more the description of Rwanda as Africa’s Singapore.

Still, it’s a matter of degree. I personally felt safe all the time, and many people went out of their way to be kind and helpful to me. And there are many visible signs of electrification and new development at work in Kampala. I noticed common Spiro and Mocoo brands of electric bikes (though not the Rwandan brand Ampersand, ubiquitous in Kigali) and several battery-swap stations. Uganda is also a country “on the way up,” just at a slightly different point on a notional socioeconomic development spectrum.

As I worked to finalize a meeting with a local electrotech company, I noticed a Mocoo battery swap station right near my Airbnb, just next door to a quite decent local pizza place. I successfully requested permission to take some photos and stick around to watch their next client.

It was just a little hole-in-the-wall one-room place full of battery packs charging and charged, with one guy named Hakim running the show. He told me that he generally got over 100 clients a day, that people paid via an app, and that it was “a good job” to work here. Mocoo is a Uganda-based subsidiary brand of a Chinese company, seemingly trying to become a “national champion” similar to Ampersand in Rwanda.

Soon, a motorcyclist came up for a battery swap, with a package strapped to the back of his red Mocoo machine. Between them, he and Hakim very quickly unlatched the old battery from its quadrangular socket at the heart of the bike and hauled it back into the shop.

Then the client paid on the app and carried out a new battery, completing the installation process himself in a matter of seconds. He just connected up one wire and slotted the new battery into the socket, where it neatly clicked into place. It looked about as difficult as plugging in my laptop.

Next, I went to the Kasubi Tombs, an African necropolis home to four deceased Bugandan kings. The situation of modern Buganda (from which the name “Uganda” comes) is quite an interesting one, and bears a little explanation It’s a subnational kingdom within a (nominal) republic, covering the central capital region of Uganda and representing about 16% of the population. This arrangement seems paradoxical, but is actually quite common across modern Africa. In Western terms, Buganda within Uganda is as if there was a Kingdom of England within a British Republic, in which the House of Windsor had a ceremonial and cultural role across most but not all of the country, with Wales and Scotland part of the same country but not the same monarchy. There are four other major traditional kingdoms still extant in other parts of Uganda: the Ankole, Bunyoro, Torro, and Omokama. Abroad, Nigeria, South Africa, and Burkina Faso are among the many other African states with powerful and influential subnational kingdoms. The Bugandan king has few formal legal powers now, but still resides in the capital and retains immense cultural and spiritual influence, rather like the Pope in Italy.

After buying a ticket to visit, I was assigned a tour guide named Ronnie, who passionately explained the ancient and ongoing complexities of Bugandan culture. The great central building held the tombs of the four most recent ex-kings of Buganda, and the surrounding huts had historically been home to wives and concubines of these kings. The original had tragically burned down in 2010, and we were looking at a replica constructed with funding support from the Japanese government.

Ronnie told me that dead kings of Buganda were first shrouded and entombed in the “public” area in front of the great bark-cloth curtain, then their graves were pushed behind the curtain where it was forbidden to look, metaphysically entering the spirit world. (He also made sure to point out that unlike Egyptian pharaohs, Bugandan kings of old were never buried with animal or human sacrifices).

We entered the central tomb building to find a dimly lit but spacious abode, with a multilayered roof/wall woven of reeds and elephant-grass supported by fifty-six pillars each made from a trunk of the rukemia tree swaddled in barkcloth. The flooring was covered in intensely woven multicolored mats, and on one side of the building were two women busily weaving more. On the other edge were two women asleep under barkcloth blankets; visitors talked in low voices. Ronnie explained that while the age of dozens of royal concubines had passed, local women still took months-long shifts as ceremonial caretakers of the royal tombs.

At the far end, just before the great barkcloth curtain to the afterlife, stood a row of spears and shields crested by four photographic portraits of the most recently deceased Kings of Buganda.

The roof had a central circle of reed bundles modeled on a king’s head, expanding out into fifty-six progressively wider concentric circles representing the fifty-six clans that functioned as core socioeconomic units of traditional Bugandan society. Members of one’s own clan and one’s mother’s clan were considered kin, and forbidden as marriage prospects. Each clan had a traditional role: for example, the Buffalo clan served as outer-ring bodyguards, protectors of the king.

Ronnie pointed out a very elderly gentleman in a yellow suit seated as a guard/greeter at the door of the Kasubi Tombs complex, and told me that he was a Buffalo Clan man, 101 years old, and had served the kings of Buganda since the age of 16. A closed door marked the office of a Mushroom Clan inner-ring guard.

Ronnie himself was a member of the Otter Clan, and his mother was a member of the Leopard Clan. They were both artisan clans: it was the Otter Clan job to make the bark-cloth central to Bugandan textile culture, and the Leopard Clan job to decorate the palace. He verbally walked me through the steps in its production, starting with peeling the bark off part (not all!) of the trunk of a local Ficus natalensis tree. The “wound” was then protected with banana leaves, and could regrow new harvest-able bark in as little as eight months. If someone from the wrong clan tried to do this, it would allegedly “dry up.”

Once you had the bark, it was turned into cloth over the course of eight hours hammering on it with four different mallets. The first mallet removed the sap and water, the second hammered it thin and expanded its area, and the last two smoothed the surface even more. It was then sun-dried, sometimes smoked, and when complete served as the fundamental source of Bugandan clothing until cotton arrived in the 1800s. Amazingly, traditional Bugandan barkcloth is still a major export for the region, recently recognized by UNESCO as unique cultural heritage. It’s lately grown in popularity as a luxury “vegan leather,” used in a wide range of high-end products from some Mercedes-Benz car interiors to some of the costumes in the recent Hollywood productions Napoleon, Dungeons & Dragons, and Hamnet. Fascinating stuff: a centuries-old sustainable textile from the Otter Clan of Buganda is finding a new niche in the globalized world economy.

As we knelt on the woven mats in the cool, dark, airy, and quiet space under the spreading woven grass and reed roof, Ronnie gave me a quick summary of Uganda’s history as seen from the Bugandan royal compound. The kingdom of Buganda had formed centuries ago, likely unifying sometime in the 1300s and subsequently attaining regional hegemony over the Lake Victoria region, but intersected with European history in the late 1800s. King Mutesa I, the 30th Kabaka of Buganda, reigned from 1856 to 1884 and built relationships with multiple outside powers, half-converting to Islam while also welcoming British explorer Henry Morton Stanley and inviting Christian missionaries to his kingdom. He married 87 wives, and famously dictated a letter unsuccessfully proposing marriage to Queen Victoria. Upon his death, he was wrapped in 800 sheets of bark-cloth and buried in this very location, ordering in his will an end to the “mobile capital” burial tradition and enshrining the Kasubi tomb area as a permanent Bugandan royal cemetery.

His son, Mwanga II, had a truncated and unstable reign from 1884 to 1897, marked by his execution of the Christian “Ugandan Martyrs” and an escalating cession of sovereignty to the British Empire, culminating in the Kabaka leading a failed anti-British revolt. Mwanga II was forcibly replaced by his infant son Daudi Chwa II and soon died in exile in the Seychelles. The monarchy of Buganda continued its existence as essentially a local vassal of the British Empire, an arrangement rather similar to Indian “princely states” like Mysore.

In World War I, Bugandan forces in the King’s African Rifles successfully repulsed a German invasion and led a strike across the great lake into neighboring German East Africa (now Tanzania). After the war, the young king Daudi Chwa II visited Europe and America and returned as a Westernizer, abolishing taboos on which foods women could eat, allowing girls to go to school, building a football stadium, sponsoring translation of the Bible, and marrying only one woman in a Western-style church ceremony. He died of diabetes in 1939, succeeded by his son Mutesa II.

After Ugandan independence in 1963, Mutesa II was named the first ceremonial President of Uganda, but that didn’t last long. After Prime Minister Milton Obote and army chief Idi Amin were accused of gold smuggling in 1965, Obote seized power and abolished the monarchy in 1966, only to be overthrown himself by Amin in 1971. Amin’s rule was infamously psychotic, with megalomaniacal claims, reports of cannibalism, and the violent deportation of tens of thousands of ethnic Indians living in Uganda, including the parents of Rishi Sunak and Zohran Mamdani. Obote took power again after Amin was overthrown in 1979, but was himself overthrown by Yoweri Museveni in the mid-1980s. Mutesa II died in exile in London, but his Cambridge-educated son Muwenda Mutebi II was restored to the throne in 1993 with Museveni’s support and Mutesa’s remains eventually were laid to rest in the royal tombs. Museveni and Mutebi II still retain their respective offices today, with the four prior Kabakas of the age since European contact all buried together at Kasubi.

Back outside, a lightly smoking fireplace stood in the center of the right side of the compound. In the old days of the Buganda kingdom, warriors would muster here before the king and be fed with beef and beer. The fire stayed lit 24/7 (there was a clan dedicated to this responsibility) until a ceremonial extinguishing when a king died, after which it would be re-lit once the funeral was complete. Ronnie told me that it had been thus tended constantly since 1882.

Fascinatingly, historians have lately recognized that the history of the Kingdom of Buganda likely had a little-known “butterfly effect” repercussions on race relations in the United States and the British Empire. A young Winston Churchill toured Buganda in 1907, and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt visited Buganda in 1909 while on a massive East African big game hunting trip after leaving the White House. Both men were vocally and publicly impressed at the complexity and sophistication of the state structure, and raised awareness of Buganda’s accomplishments in the West. Centuries before the UK’s Glorious Revolution or the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Buganda had evolved a form of constitutional monarchy, with elected representatives serving in a parliament alongside the king. State capacity was very high. Networks of farms, mines, and orchards were linked by a network of wide roads across the kingdom, which not even dedicated imperialists could bring themselves to describe as another “mere” tribe. During the decade of the 1890s alone, the kingdom of Buganda harvested 30,000 trees to build 10,000 war canoes, the largest of which could carry half a ton of crew and cargo.

The fledgling NAACP ran an article about Buganda as an example of independent black civilizational accomplishment in 1910. When T.R. ran as the Progressive “Bull Moose” third-party candidate in 1912, seeking a non-consecutive third term, his platform was notably more “radical” on racial equality than his previous presidency had been, strongly advocating for African-American freedom. He lost, but substantively shifted the “Overton window” on race in American politics.

Even today, the Bugandan kingdom and its legacy are highly relevant in Uganda’s tumultuous politics. That fire in 2010 led to bloody riots when some Buganda loyalists believed that the government might have done it as an attack on the monarchy. Today, musician and democratic opposition leader Robert “Bobi Wine” Kyagulanyi is sometimes called the “King’s Rogue” for his devotion to the Bugandan royal family. After the January 2026 election saw widespread reports of illegal action, Museveni’s soldiers raided Wine’s house in March 2026, allegedly to kill him, and the opposition leader has now fled the country. It reminded me of what I’d read about French and British politics in the 1700s and early 1800s: a post-feudal world fully engaged in global capitalism and struggling to determine the new ground rules of their nation, with a “king’s party” just one force of many in the hotly contested arena.

And Uganda, like France and Britain at the dawn of the Fossil Age, is most definitely starting to hit the exponential growth stage of a new industrial revolution. Walking through the Katwe neighborhood this morning, I passed a little shop named Felicity Solar. Of course, I had to go check it out. They sold a range of photovoltaics-related goods, including the panels themselves in many different formats, integrated gadgets like solar streetlights, and several different forms of battery packs.

I noticed both lithium-ion and lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery chemistries available, prepackaged home solar arrays in different sizes (for example, 12 KWh or 3.5 KWh daily consumption), and of course lots of “Made in China” package labels. A quick check online found that Felicity Solar is headquartered in Guangzhou, with operations around the world.

Moving on, I saw a giant billboard for Felicity Solar closer to the center of the city. The tagline was “Make life full of hope,” and the sign explicitly advertised home battery storage to help save money and guard against power blackouts. (Which were common; one had struck my Airbnb in Kampala the day before).

According to data from leading think tank Ember, Uganda’s solar imports from China have risen sharply lately, but from a very low base. They estimate that Uganda wasn’t even in the top twenty African countries in terms of solar growth in 2025. These stats and the above chart do undersell Uganda somewhat, though, as Uganda also imports a lot of solar from (coastal, port-rich) Kenya such that a lot of Chinese exports to Kenya likely end up in Uganda — and China’s exports to Kenya have absolutely skyrocketed lately!

No matter how you interpret the tentative efforts to measure a surge growing faster than statisticians can keep up with, there’s clearly a lot of room to grow for electrotech in Uganda. All this ferment I was seeing, the billboard ads throughout the city and the multiple solar and battery shops (I only visited one of the several I saw) and the electric motorcycles — it was all just the beginning.

It’s the most hackneyed of travel writer cliches to say that some location is interesting because it’s “a mix of old and new,” because that description applies to literally every human settlement on Earth. But, well, Kampala, Uganda is really notably a mix of old and new. Ancient kingdoms and modern electrotech, young people dividing their careers between tourism-focused our guides and traditional clan or clergy roles, centuries-old barkcloth making it to global luxury brands. Africa in the Anthropocene is a crucible for novel combinations of identities, cultures, and ways of living.

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After the day I got to visit Zipline Muhanga, I was so excited by the experience that I stayed up until the next dawn writing my article about it. Luckily, I’d already planned a “break” day around this time, with my already-complete interview with Arthur Snell set to publish, so the next day and a half was a fairly quiet time in Kigali city as I prepared to move on from Rwanda.

As I walked out from my lodgings substantially later in the day in search of a spot to write, I passed by a green space with substantial activity going on. A sign proclaimed that this was the GISOZO-MUKINDI & KINYINYA wetland rehabilitation project, happening at one of the 6 FLOOD RISK HOTSPOTS in the City of Kigali. This was one of the places I’d read about where another urban wetland park like Nyandungu was being constructed! I could see the workers planting vegetation, digging channels, and firming up banks with stone riprap. All the stuff I’d learned about in my soil and water management course back at my university.

I’d read that were just some bad flash floods in Mombasa, Kenya, one of my planned future stops on this trip. In addition to the biodiversity and recreation value, “sponge” surfaces like wetland parks are increasingly becoming mission-critical infrastructure for cities in the Anthropocene. It was great to see Kigali prioritizing that at such an early stage of development.

When walking around Kigali, I regularly kept passing congregations of electric motorcycle drivers, just hanging out at busy intersections or near bus stops to await customers for back-of-the-bike taxi services. Quickly recognizable by their quadrangular battery packs instead of internal combustion engines, as far as I saw they already substantially outnumbered cars and non-electric bikes on the roads of the city. Spiro and Ampersand were the two most prominent brands, and I’d already read about their networks of battery-swap stations. Generally several of them tried to sell me on a ride as I walked by, but they always backed off with good grace when I politely declined. It always made me happy to see these working-class street-level manifestations of the electrotech revolution!

I was also charmed by the hadada ibises, a common urban bird across sub-Saharan Africa. Their cry sounded like an angry small child, so much so that on the first hearing it took me a while to associate with the large waterbirds on a nearby roof.

Just in general, walking the streets of Kigali gave me a strong sense of progress, of momentum. Everywhere there were new-looking pharmacies, schools, clinics, little indie mechanic and phone repair tech shops, apartment buildings, even normally-unremarkable fundamentals like bustling tile and wire companies — the infrastructure of modernity. Ads for digital bank accounts and finance apps were common. Power lines arced everywhere. Most people in the street had smartphones. The remaining open sewers were literally getting covered over with concrete sidewalks in real time. And I was about the only visibly foreign person I’d seen since I left the airport — this wasn’t some tourist enclave, this is how the people of Rwanda live today.

One random moment that I found really striking happened when I texted my Airbnb that I’d like to check in. And my host— just a dude who was renting out the spare room in his house and had great reviews on the app — said that he wasn’t home right now, but he’d leave the door unlocked so I could just walk in off the Kigali street. And he did, and I just walked in. He felt comfortable doing that. The “Rwanda is becoming Africa’s Singapore” narrative never felt more apt.

All this got me thinking about the geography of Africa, the rise of African cities, and how, in my opinion, Africa’s many nations are rapidly “differentiating” from each other in a way that I don’t think the rest of the world has quite caught up to yet.

The population density of Africa is distributed extremely unevenly across the great continent. There are some incredibly high-population density areas in Africa, like core regions of Nigeria and Ethiopia, the Nile Valley of Egypt, or almost all of Rwanda and much of the surrounding countries in the African Great Lakes region. There are also huge swathes of wild lands, the deserts of Sahara and Namib and Kalahari, the great Congo rainforest, the Sudd wetlands and the Serengeti plain, in which megafauna might roam or militias might lurk.

Another way of putting this is to say that if you drew circles around the areas home to half of all Africa’s one-billion-and-change total human population, it would only cover five disconnected areas of the continent. As shown in the map above, the five clusters of coastal West Africa plus Nigeria, the Mediterranean Maghreb, Egypt’s Nile Valley, the heartlands of Ethiopia, and the African Great Lakes region add up to over six hundred million, with a similar number inhabiting the entire rest of the continent, from Cape Town to Kinshasa to Benghazi.

On this trip, of course, I’m right in the heart of the African Great Lakes population cluster, which includes all of Rwanda, most of Uganda, much of Kenya, and parts of Tanzania and the D.R. Congo.

In the 21st century, Africa is now experiencing that transformational “strategically located villages becoming big important cities overnight” phase of growth that Europe and North America had in the 19th and Asia had in the 20th. Africa is home to the fastest-growing human settlements on Earth, and the percentage of the African population (itself fast-growing!) that lives in cities rose from under 15% in 1950 to over 50% by the late 2010s. (One study calculates that in addition to standard economic factors, African urbanization is likely being sped up even further by climate change, as cities offer more opportunity and security than drying farmlands).

Just based on what I’ve seen living in Kigali for a few days, these rising African cities look to Asia at least as much as America and Europe for their models of modernity. Much of the technology, as I have written, is Chinese and electric. Much of the food, I’ve noticed, is Indian: I’ve seen tons of samosas and chapatis for sale on the Kigali streets, far more than any other recognizably non-Rwandan cuisine. (Unless you count coffee and tea, but those are pretty global by now). And much of the popular culture is American1 and European: the English language is common, and I’ve seen several people wearing American sports team logos, hairstyles and clothing, and often heard American songs playing. It’s a fascinating historical serendipity, a “full circle” moment if you will, that Africa, the continent of humanity’s origins, is now the last heavily populated continent to urbanize and is thus becoming a crucible of influences from so many different descendant cultures from around the world.

As parts of Africa are developing much more rapidly than others, the differences between countries will become increasingly apparent and important. Or to put it in a more “LinkedIn” sounding news-you-can-use way: you better start recognizing which African country is which, so you know the difference between the one that just produced the brilliant new startup disrupting your industry and the one that just produced the scary new terrorist group disrupting your country’s foreign policy.

We in the rest of the world really ought to get out of the habit of thinking of “Africa” as one monolithic culture. The word’s used as if it refers to one really large country, like “China” or “India.” You know, lions, huts, elephants, guys with spears, starving children, military coups…Africa. It’s like saying “Asia” and not saying whether you mean Singapore or Afghanistan, or “Europe” and not saying whether you mean Switzerland or Belarus, or “North America” and not saying whether you mean Canada or El Salvador. They’re pretty different! I feel like people automatically grok that for other continents,2 but “Africa” is still undifferentiated below the Sahara in much of the popular imagination. That’s rapidly becoming an outdated conflation. (Sure, most of modern sub-Saharan African is descended from the great Bantu migrations, but that’s kind of like saying that everyone from France to Bangladesh is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European speakers. It’s true and interesting, but not that helpful in comparing today’s cultures).

This growing difference in living standards between different African countries is, of course, profoundly good news — it means that many regions of Africa are developing fast and outgrowing their old stereotypes.

And it’s important to recognize and distinguish where that’s happening, because it is also true that there are big parts of Africa that still do resemble the old stereotypes of unrelieved extreme poverty. For example, since I’ve been in Africa, there’s been news that a rough coalition of extreme jihadists and Tuareg separatists have launched major attacks on the (military dictatorship, recently coup-installed) government of Mali in the Sahel, killing the defense minister and possibly taking over at least one major city as of this writing. These militants’ mastery of newly cheap and flexible drone weapons is widely credited with their recent military success. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mali became a hardliner Islamic Republic very soon, and/or a Tuareg state of Azawad successfully seceding in the north.

Mali covers a vast geographical area, larger than France and Ukraine put together, and is home to around 26 million people. Rwanda is roughly the size of North Macedonia, over forty-five times physically smaller! Absolutely tiny by comparison, but Rwanda is home to around 14 million people, more than half of vast Mali’s population. And Rwanda is made up of densely populated fertile hilly arable land in that African Great Lakes cluster, while a big chunk of Mali consists of Sahara Desert and much of the rest of it is rough Sahel drylands. Rwanda’s mostly Christian (various denominations) while Mali’s mostly Muslim, Kinyarwanda is a Bantu language while Bambara is a Mande language, Rwanda is much more stable, developed, and fast-growing…African countries are different from each other in a lot of ways. Really really different. And what’s going on in Mali is about as relevant to me in Rwanda as the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was to Singapore, or the brutal Lukashenko dictatorship in Belarus is to Switzerland, or the Bukele internment camps in El Salvador are to Canada. Maybe the impacts are not at zero, but they’re essentially imperceptible in terms of day-to-day life. Rwanda and Mali may feel easy to mentally lump together, but they’re poles apart in a multitude of ways.

All this may be a bit of a tangent, but I feel it’s a simple but important point to make — Africa is really big, and complex, and diverse, and changing fast. That will shape much of the next century.

I left Kigali — and Rwanda — on the afternoon of April 26th, returning to the throngs of the Nyabugogo Bus Station and buying an overnight bus ticket for Kampala, Uganda from the Trinity transit company. (Sadly, this one was not electric). We left at 3 PM, and arrived in Kampala the next morning, one time zone away at 7 AM. I spent most of the trip rereading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, losing myself in the epic sci-fi saga of a hyper-evolved spider civilization. There was a break around 9 PM to cross customs at the Ugandan border, and at some unnoticed point after that we crossed the Equator, south to north, my first such crossing overland. Rwanda had been at the northern edge of the Southern Hemisphere, and Kampala is just barely back in the Northern Hemisphere. More hours of reading passed as the bus sped along the dark roads of the Ugandan night.

Then, at around 4:30 AM, I heard a popping sound like a small explosion, a lurch and a wobble as the floor shook, and the bus skidded to a stop in the middle of the road. A tire had burst. Fortunately, no one was hurt; it had barely been more of a jostle than the potholes (increasingly noticeable since we crossed the border). I think there must have been more damage than just the tire bursting, as the drivers’ efforts to fix it met with no success for about half an hour as we the passengers waited on the side of the road while trucks carrying shipping containers whizzed by.

Eventually, with admirable speed, the company had another one of their buses stop and pick us up. We arrived in Kampala in the early morning of April 27. I wrote some of this article in a cafe about a hundred meters away from the bus terminal, where I stopped for breakfast and device charging, and I’m finishing it in a new Airbnb. I’m excited to go forth and explore more of Uganda in the upcoming days!

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Arthur Snell is a former British Foreign Office diplomat with field experience in Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. More recently, he has been an independent geopolitical risk consultant, and has advised the government of Ukraine during the current war. He is the author of the new book Elemental: The New Geography of Climate Change and How We Survive It. He writes on Substack at .

Not all doom

Geopolitics, history and mountains.

By Arthur Snell

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Snell’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

You’ve had a fascinating career around the world. This is obviously a bit too big of a question, but what do you think are some of the defining changes of the 21st century so far?

To me, the big ones off the top of my head are America’s descent from global hegemon to increasingly a rogue state, and on a much more upbeat note, the incredible rise of renewable energy, the rise of China as the first electrostate, solar just outpacing every possible prediction, battery chemistry diversifying and providing a lot more resilience.

So what are your thoughts on the 21st century so far? Which is almost exactly my lifetime, incidentally.

A defining moment for me personally, but I think it’s part of this story, is 9/11. Obviously 2001, in your lifetime, but you probably don’t have a memory of it. But I think that defined America’s behavior for a decade and a half at least. and it’s part of America’s descent from this global hegemon with a generally kind of benign direction into what it is now. We’re watching this thing unfold. It doesn’t want to participate in global climate action. It’s increasingly active in a range of conflicts that are of questionable legality A lot of that has its origin in the 9/11 moment.

I think a lot of people look at the personality of Donald Trump, but Trump couldn’t happen in a vacuum. You had to have a political environment that was enabling for Trump. I think that began with 9/11.

The response to 9/11 took America down quite a dark path. Think of the Iraq War, which was basically launched on a false premise, the so-called WMDs that were going to be discovered in Iraq. You had an element of cynicism coupled with a willingness to use military aggression outside the norms of war, outside the norms of international legality. It seems to me that that then leached into a much wider array of areas, and that’s where the climate story comes into this. Because it was of course George W. Bush who withdrew America from the Kyoto Protocol. Which is almost the beginning point of America’s role as a kind of spoiler and a kind of negative actor in global climate action.

Now, obviously, you have the presidency of Barack Obama, an attempt to push back against that. Again, Joseph Biden, obviously, a shorter presidency. But you no longer made the assumption that the U.S. is on board with these actions.

And in the same period of course climate denialism grows and grows. It has a particular strength in America. What’s really interesting is that climate denial is actually quite unusual globally. It’s not a major political force in most countries in the world, but it’s a major political force in the U.S. I guess the only other place where it had some purchase was in Brazil. But even there, I’m not sure that it had a kind of general cultural landing. The idea of rejecting the concept of man-caused global heating seems to be a very specifically American one.

That’s interesting, because the U.S. is so unique in so many ways. It’s the world’s third-largest country, and it’s also the most religious of the developed countries, and it’s also a huge fossil fuel producer in a way that many other developed countries are not. It’s an outlier on a whole lot of graphs, so to speak. And I suspect all of that overlaps in creating a very strong constituency, between the religiosity and the fossil fuel business, for not wanting to believe that humans could change Earth’s climate.

I think that’s right. I think that religiosity is very important. And the significance of the fossil fuel business.

But actually, we’ve talked about the 21st century, but I will, being a bit older than you, stretch us back to the 20th century.

The 20th century is the hydrocarbon century. We can talk about the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century and the use of coal, but the really massive expansion of CO₂ emissions is a 20th century story.

And the 20th century is the American century. I think you can’t disentangle those two things. The global power of the United States was completely tied up with the access to and the use of hydrocarbon energy.

We’ll come back to the point that you made, Sam, about the transition and that being led by China and the rapidity of it. The projections constantly being overtaken, and the cost collapsing.

People are still arguing, oh, this stuff is very expensive, it needs subsidies. Well, as you will know, it isn’t. The cheapest form of energy now is renewable energy.

So all those things are happening, and it’s a profound shift, and it’s happening at the time that the U.S. is losing its role as the global hegemon.

I think you have to recognize that these two issues, the passing of the hydrocarbon age and the passing of the American age, are one issue.

What’s so frustrating about that, as an American, is that it did not have to be that way.

No. You’ve got all the technology, all the great universities, all the science...Yeah, you guys could have been leading the renewable energy revolution. Absolutely.

If we go back to 1973, a year that in some ways is a bit like 2026, there was a political crisis and a military crisis in the Middle East. Energy prices went through the roof. And shortly afterwards, the U.S. government started looking at alternative energy sources. This was particularly pushed by President Carter slightly later. And at that time, of course, because it was quite an obscure subject, it wasn’t politicized. There wasn’t a right or left position on solar panels or whatever.

There was a hot minute in the early 70s where President Nixon was trying to build tons of nuclear power plants and many Democrats were like, “keep jobs for coal miners!” The politics of energy have changed a lot.

Yeah, they have. Even then the Democrat position was around jobs and livelihoods. No one was arguing about whether or not this thing called carbon dioxide might be an issue, because it was just too obscure. It was something that a very small number of scientists were aware of. It was a very obscure subject. It wasn’t really until the 1980s that the big oil companies in the US started to spend money on trying to undermine the science, to try to effectively do a disinformation campaign to undermine the case for anthropogenic global heating.

The statistics on China’s dominance of the renewable energy industry are just extraordinary. Generally over 80 percent, sometimes over 90 percent of all manufacturing in solar, wind, batteries, all these fundamental technologies of the electric age.

Renewable energy exports accounted for something like 10 percent of their GDP last year. They’ve been consistently installing more solar than the whole rest of the world combined for the last several years, and keep breaking their own record.

I was just in China recently in January, writing a series of articles and traveling around, and I was blown away. Beijing’s air quality, which was apocalyptic in 2013, was actually great. Clear blue sky when I was there.

Most of the vehicles on the road were EVs. I took electric high-speed trains around the country. I saw the huge transmission lines pulling power from Xinjiang to Shenzhen.

The thing that I think people don’t realize about renewable energy, although they’re starting to now, is that it’s not just mitigation of the climate crisis. It’s adaptation to the climate crisis. It’s resilience. It’s decentralized. It’s harder to kill. It’s less reliant on international supply chains.

What are your opinions on the geopolitical implications of all this?

I write about this in my book. It’s a very classic Chinese story, in the sense of having a long-term plan, having a politically stable situation. Of course, I don’t support an autocratic state as a concept, but the political stability has allowed them to pursue these objectives. And has allowed them, as you just described very eloquently, to completely dominate this sector. As you’ll be well aware, it’s the whole supply chain. It’s the processing of critical minerals. It’s the installation that they’re doing to transform their own economy, but also capturing the entire manufacturing cradle-to-grave supply chain.

The geopolitical implications are profound, because there are a lot of countries in the world that have no problem with adopting Chinese technology. They will do that, and they will do it readily. It is cheap! And as you say, there are all the other advantages of renewable energy.

I mean, we’ve experienced in March and April of this year, once again, a hydrocarbon-based war in the Middle East. Ultimately what became the bone of contention in the war, what it came down to, was the blockage of the Straits of Hormuz, which is a crucial maritime passage for exporting hydrocarbons around the world.

So that’s what the war was about. Once again, it’s a hydrocarbon war.

Not all doom

Ouroboros - the amazing self-eating war

What are the aims of US-Israeli war on Iran? We all know that at the beginning of the war we were served up a range of answers to what should be a fairly obvious question. It was to prevent Iran’s ‘imminent’ access to a nuclear weapon. Perhaps even to prevent an imminent attack on America…

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a month ago · 53 likes · Arthur Snell

And so, of course, everywhere, governments, ordinary people, thinkers, journalists are all saying, we’ve got to get off our addiction to these dangerous energy sources. It’s not just what it’s doing to the planet, but what it’s doing to our dependence on a small number of countries, where an economic shock doubles the cost of your energy.

Coming back to the geopolitics of it for China, there are loads of countries that will just adopt Chinese technology, mostly Global South countries, without any concerns.

Then you have the Western countries, or the Global North, whatever, where there is a lot of reluctance. Some of that is understandable. There are clearly issues around protection of IP, privacy concerns and so on. Modern energy systems are complex, they involve all kinds of networked systems.

But where it gets complicated for those global north countries is that actually there are hardly any alternatives. I mean, South Korea is still a player in this space, but the Chinese have made such advances, and they’re continuing.

The story of Tesla is quite an interesting one. Setting Elon Musk’s really strange political journey, just looking at the company and the car it produces, they were the world leader in EVs. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. But they’re by absolutely no means the world leader anymore. And once again, it’s China that is constantly innovating and pushing ahead.

This new world, this electrified world, is one in which China is undoubtedly the world leader.

And of course, it’s at a time when China’s economy is anyway edging towards becoming the world’s largest economy, overtaking the U.S. And what goes with that is, if you have a hegemonic power it expects certain geopolitical privileges. The Americans have enjoyed that for a century, and it may be that China expects that too.

That has implications for things like the status of Taiwan. I wouldn’t predict a conflict. I would predict that actually we get to a point where America is in no position to defend Taiwan and doesn’t try to do it, and China is able to, in their terms, “reunite” with Taiwan. Or if you were Taiwanese, you might say annex Taiwan. Whatever terminology you use, the effect would be the same.

We’re seeing increasingly a waning of America’s military preeminence. This overlaps with the Electrotech Revolution too, because China has overwhelmingly the majority of the world’s drone manufacturing. As we’ve seen in Ukraine and Iran, that’s become a central weapon of war.

There’s an argument, and it’s kind of an out-of-the-box argument, that one of the best chances for stable world peace now might be nuclear proliferation. That countries that are at risk of being invaded, that are bordered by countries that have shown expansionist tendencies, like Ukraine and Poland and the Baltic states, and Japan and South Korea and Taiwan, and perhaps even Mexico and Canada, should develop nuclear weapons. What is your opinion?

Noahpinion

Japan, South Korea, and Poland need nuclear weapons immediately

In 1994, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and Russia to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty…

Read more

a year ago · 298 likes · 101 comments · Noah Smith

It’s very interesting, and it’s an argument which has been growing in foreign policy circles.

It’s an argument that still sits slightly in a kind of intellectual space rather than a political space.

If we take a look at Ukraine, this is a great case study. Of course, Ukraine did have nuclear weapons at the end of the Soviet Union. Now, it never had a serious intention of having that as its own nuclear deterrent. The Soviet Union collapsed and effectively Russia’s weapons were stranded in Ukraine.

Ukraine gave up those weapons under security guarantees from the United States and United Kingdom.

Well, we all know what happened. The guarantee did not work. The U.S. and the UK did not defend Ukraine against Russian aggression. Now, if Ukraine had still had nuclear weapons, I think we’d be pretty sure that the Russians wouldn’t have tried to invade it.

Not all doom

Four Years of Defiance

It would be impossible to write an article that did adequate justice to Ukraine’s incredible achievement. Four years ago, faced with a nuclear armed power and one of the world’s largest conventional forces, it did something that not even the best-informed intelligence agencies thought was possible. It confounded Russia’s invasion plan. Of course, it did…

Read more

2 months ago · 40 likes · Arthur Snell

And that reality is causing a lot of countries to think again about this. One of the countries that has had a more public discussion of it is Poland. Of course, Poland has a history of centuries of conflict with Russia. On several occasions in history Poland has disappeared from the map due to the imperial activities of Russia and other countries. Poland is now one of the most vibrant and significant economies in Europe. It is a country that has a big military and a big military budget and very ambitious plans to keep growing its military.

And that being the case, does it make sense for Poland to explore having nuclear weapons? Because it is in an unstable part of Europe. It shares borders with Ukraine. It shares borders with a lot of conflicted countries.

It’s very strange to be arguing for nuclear proliferation. But one wonders whether, in fact, it offers a kind of guarantee. Modern warfare, particularly drone warfare, is getting easier. The barrier to entry for a country to be able to attack a neighbor has gotten lower. Iran has these very low cost Shahed drones, and it is able to cause havoc in countries in the Arabian Gulf, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and so on, at very low cost to itself.

Iran’s military budget is a fraction of the budget of those Arab Gulf countries and yet Iran has managed to really upend their economic model in a few short weeks.

Not all doom

The Gulf Between Ambition and Capability

Before I start, it feels important to state some obvious truths. The Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran (and its allies in Lebanon) is an undertaking of epic, bizarre stupidity. There appears to be no realistic chance that it results in the seizure of Iran’s enriched uranium or the downfall of the Islamic Republic. In that sense, any talk of “disarming” the Is…

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a month ago · 39 likes · Arthur Snell

Speaking of which, the global mega-shift to renewable energy who are the winners and losers of that? Obviously China’s the winner because they’ve invested so much in the technology manufacturing, and America really seems to be determined on doubling down on sabotaging its own renewable energy efforts.

You’ve mentioned that the states that are almost entirely reliant on hydrocarbon extraction will all be seeing serious challenges, like the Gulf states.

Yeah, exactly. There’s two ways to look at this. There’s economic impacts, and then there are climate impacts. Now, of course, those are completely interlinked. But if we think about the Gulf states, it’s where those two things cross over in a really intense way.

Anybody who’s been to one of the Gulf countries in July or August knows, it’s almost impossible to operate. You spend your entire time inside in air conditioned buildings. The temperatures reach the point that humans can’t exist. People die of heat exhaustion. And that’s now. That’s in 2026. This is going to get a lot worse. The projections are for temperatures in the 60 degrees Celsius range. It’s not functional for humans.

At the same time, as you rightly observed, these are countries whose economies are completely based on hydrocarbon extraction. Now what’s interesting, and I think some of the conflict we’re seeing in the Middle East relates to this, is that these countries have been trying to transition their economies, not necessarily in the sense of an energy transition, but an economic transition.

An example of that succeeding is Dubai. Succeeding until recently. Dubai has created an entrepôt for tourism, financial investments, property development. It’s not an energy economy at all. It’s a different kind of economic model. But what we’ve seen in this war is that it’s quite hard to run that model in a very, very unstable part of the world. If your business model is people staying in luxury five-star hotels and Instagram influencers and all this stuff, and there’s drones flying over there? That doesn’t work. Dubai is looking at a very serious crisis there.

Saudi Arabia, they had Vision 2030. That, again, was a very ambitious program to transition Saudi economy. from an oil-based economy to a post-oil economy based on a mixture of tourism and business.

Vision 2030 has failed.

I mean, that is a statement of fact. It is not going to succeed in making that transition. And some of the biggest projects that were part of that, most notably NEOM, which was this new city, this weird long line in the desert with endless AI-type videos online showing you how cool it was going to be, it’s basically not happening. They’ve scaled back the plans almost to zero. It’s not going to happen.

Not all doom

Neom was never real.

In July 2023 I wrote a post looking at the gap between what the Saudis have claimed for Neom, and by extension other elements of their Vision 2030 project, and the reality. It got lots of pushback from people who make money from the Saudis, as you might expect. But I was pretty confident that the ambition would come to little and that the overall projec…

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6 months ago · 51 likes · Arthur Snell

So what you’re looking at is a region of the world where they’ve probably got a couple of decades left of extraordinary wealth. There is clearly a huge demand for the oil and gas at the moment, as this recent war reminds us but they’ve got a cliff edge.

And to my mind, that is actually part of the explanation of why these wars are happening. Because what you’re looking at is countries desperately trying to become a regional hegemon for those last decades of wealth and plenty, before this moment of crunch where, effectively, they’re going to go over the cliff.

One of the things to remember is that this is a place where you have autocratic monarchies.

And if the ruler is young, someone like MBS, he knows he’s going to be still ruling Saudi Arabia 30 years from now. So for him, this isn’t just like a normal politician. “Well, you know, my successor’s successor might have to deal with this.”

No, he has to deal with this.

He will be ruling Saudi Arabia at the point where the demand for global hydrocarbons collapses. So this is a personal fear that probably keeps him awake at night.

Not all doom

Live: What happens to the Middle East when no one wants its oil? With Arthur Snell

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a month ago · 21 likes · Arthur Snell and The New World

I obviously want to avoid a humanitarian crisis there, but Saudi Arabia has built out a huge amount of solar farms and desalination plants. It seems plausible that even in a 60-degree Celsius future summer, with some stable management, a lot of these Gulf states could become like a Mars colony on Earth, essentially. Desalinating their water, solar power, everyone is in air conditioned buildings.

In terms of influence on the world, I’m not really inclined to feel upset about a decrease in wealth for these autocratic monarchies. The UAE’s funded the mass-murdering RSF in Sudan. The Gulf states have paid substantial bribes in cryptocurrency to the current U.S. regime.

They have funded some good renewables and infrastructure development in Africa with stuff like Masdar and DP World, but they’ve also funded just a vast amount of corruption and insidious political influence in democracies.

Obviously this is a huge question, but is that a net positive?

I take your point. These are not sympathetic cases. And you’re absolutely right about the renewable energy. These countries are investing in it. They’re not climate deniers. They might deny actions to end fossil fuel use at the COP summit and that sort of thing. But they’re not climate deniers. They are investing and they’re aware of this shift.

But I think there’s a couple of issues there. There are different dynamics, and this is why I focus on Saudi.

The countries where you have a small citizenry, so Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, the number of citizens in all those countries is a small number. And it’s possible, maybe, that you could continue effectively to live off the interest of your capital, basically. Your economy becomes quite unproductive, but you could keep the lights on from long term investments, like a kind of pension.

Saudi Arabia is very different. Saudi Arabia has a big population. It’s going to hit 50 million by the next decade. You can’t operate that model in the same way where effectively you don’t really expect the citizens to work and you manage it through migrant workers.

But then let’s talk about migrant workers, because you mentioned that.

Now, obviously, the way these people are treated is deplorable, and they have very few legal rights, very unsafe working conditions, there are lots of tragedies, lots of accidents and so on.

But again, at a certain point, they might struggle to recruit these workers, because if you can’t actually operate outside, are people still going to risk their lives in order to work in those environments, particularly if they’re coming from countries whose own economies are growing?

So most of these workers are coming from Southeast Asia, South Asia. They do it because they want to send money back to their family. They want to work for a few years, go back, maybe build a home or whatever. It’s completely understandable.

And one might say when it works, although we could question the conditions and all that, it’s a positive because it allows people to improve their economic situation.

But at a certain point, the system breaks down if it’s actually not possible to get people to work outside. Or you can only do it for a few months of the year, so therefore construction projects become much slower.

There are all kinds of knock-on impacts of this shift, which again, I think a lot of people haven’t really thought their way through.

And this overlaps with another big trend, which is the massive global demographic shift. We’re used to a world of massive human population growth, since really the Industrial Revolution, where there’s just always another worker coming along in a minute, and that’s really changing.

China’s population has been declining since 2023. India just fell below replacement-level fertility.

Is the answer that all of these places are just going to eventually double down on Africa for migrant labor? Is there going to be increasingly competition for migrant labor? Will this be counterbalanced by just climate disasters pushing people to move? Or will we eventually be looking at a scarcity of migrants when historically they’re viewed, however unfairly, as a burden?

That’s an interesting question, and it’s one I haven’t really looked at. I think climate will cause a lot of migration, and we haven’t really touched on that. I think it’s very likely that you’ll see migration out of Saudi Arabia and out of a lot of the Arab world. We talked a lot about the Gulf states but of course you’ve got states in the Arab world that face similar climate impacts but that don’t even have the economic cushion that we talk about. Egypt, or Iraq. And Iran is not an Arab state, but it’s a state of nearly 100 million people, again with very severe climate risks coming down the track. So I think we’re going to see a lot of migration.

And again, with Africa, in particular, the Sahel region, as you’ll be aware, across the entire band from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, you’ve seen a real destabilization of every single country. You can draw a line. There’s been a military coup in every country over a short period. Unstable governments, foreign intervention. You have the French, and then you have Wagner, this Russian mercenary group. You’ve got, obviously, the war in Sudan, again, on that line.

Not all doom

Chaos in the Sahel: the fall of Mali

In 2021, the Biden administration decided to implement 2020 Trump’s surrender deal with the Taliban largely unaltered, making a minor delay to the final departure date of US troops. There was no reason for the US to do this, as the Taliban had not kept to the terms of the deal, but there were arguments which I had some sympathy with: that the billions o…

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5 months ago · 15 likes · Arthur Snell

Those are countries which do still have very high birth rates. I think you’re going to see a lot of migration out of there.

Migration is a complicated subject. We’ve seen it weaponized by right-wing politicians all over the world. It remains the case that most migrants don’t leave their country, or if they do they go to the nearest country. There’s this myth that all these people are going to come to Europe or that Central America will all go up to north America. But there is definitely going to be more of this.

One of the interesting areas that I looked at in terms of migration which I haven’t seen particularly well covered elsewhere, is migration out of China caused by climate. Because, of course, China is doing amazing things, but parts of China become very hard to live in in a climate crisis or climate breakdown world. Particularly the northern Chinese plain where you get these very dangerous summer wet bulb temperatures, intense humidity and heat.

Now, we’ve already seen that quite a lot of Chinese migrant workers are working in eastern Siberia, so in the Far East of Russia. The numbers are hard to track because the Russian government doesn’t really want to record it, but they’re quite happy to have the labor because it’s an extremely sparsely populated area.

As the climate shifts, you get new areas that are better placed for agriculture in that Far East of Russia, which a few years ago were not functional as agricultural zones. We might see quite a shift of that.

And of course, what’s interesting about that is that historically China lays claim to those territories.

Those were territories that Imperial Russia, seized from China in the 19th century, in 1860. The climate is sort of redrawing a map.

I’m not suggesting that China is going to go and invade Russia. Again, nuclear armed states are very unlikely to go to war. But I think you might have a kind of economic colonization unfolding as Russia’s economy is very dependent on China. Increasingly. Especially since the Ukraine war.

And also, China is now richer than Russia in many ways. When Chinese locals go to Russia, they’re not working as like, household servants or something. I’m just explaining this for readers. Because this is not at all similar to the case of Mexicans coming to America. Today, the Chinese going to Russia, they’re generally setting up an essentially extraterritorial little colony. like a mining or lumber camp, where it’s all Chinese people extracting resources for the benefit of China, so to speak.

Yeah, exactly. And in fact, that idea of extraterritoriality, what I think is so interesting about this is that if we go back to the late 19th, early 20th century in China, Western countries did exactly that. They had cantonments. There would be a district of Shanghai where British law ran or French law or American law.

For China, understandably, this is seen as a period of humiliation. Western powers came to China and didn’t even respect Chinese law. They operated their own laws within a certain space, effectively a kind of colonial system where the white man was seen as superior and so on.

I’m not suggesting that China will replicate that model. But a version of that may be coming in the future where because of China’s economic and geopolitical power, it operates economic colonies. Special economic zones, things like that, where probably Chinese law and Chinese norms are enforced, even though they sit geographically in another state.

And we’re already seeing more of those. Like the Simandou Corridor in Guinea. The giant iron mine that’s essentially just Guinea leasing the rights to mine a huge amount of iron to China in exchange for a percentage for the Guinean government, which is one of those Sahel governments formed by a military coup in the 2020s.

Yes, exactly.

A constellation of Chinese cantonments, SEZs and places like that, is to some extent already forming.

But, sort of in the same way that migrant workers voluntarily going to the Gulf states are often abused but often do manage to return home with enough money to improve the lives of their families, is that bad?

A lot of really impoverished countries in the world might benefit from Chinese investment, even if it’s completely transactional, if it comes with some spillover effects with more Chinese technology, stuff like that.

What’s your opinion on the rise of Chinese extraterritorial zones?

Well, in a way, I might say it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad and it doesn’t matter what I think. Ultimately, as you say, this is an economic reality.

If someone starts a mine and creates jobs, that is adding economic opportunity or at least economic activity to a certain place.

Now, of course, there are specific things that happen which will be bad. The safety in some of these mines. Rulers of countries are probably being paid corruptly. But of course, we’re now existing in a time when the United States is also perfectly comfortable with that model. Clearly, this is rather like nineteenth-century colonialism. I’m not going to try to defend it, but it clearly brought economic activity, both in the form of extraction but also in the form of development. That is probably what we will see as a result of China’s activities, whether we’re talking about Africa or Latin America or whatever.

On a more positive note, there’s a new report from Ember on this, it looks like in quite a lot of countries, Pakistan’s the most famous one but increasingly much of Africa as well, solar exports from China to that country are much greater than the country’s own tracking of solar being installed. Implying that there’s quite a lot of invisible small-scale solar, so to speak, that isn’t appearing in government registries. In Pakistan that’s now like a fifth of their entire electricity system!

In countries that are willing to trade with China, there’s a mass grassroots adoption of small-scale solar. My personal pet theory of optimism is that that really, really, really blunts the impact of the climate crisis. Not even primarily through mitigation of emissions, but in, like, charging one phone so the people of a whole village can get a weather report ahead of a storm.

When I was in Delhi in 2024 during a record heat wave, just one little fan in a little paratha shop was like a little cooling oasis for the neighborhood. Even a little power can really save people from climate disruption, and there’s now so much power being spread with solar panels!

What are your thoughts on the global decentralized clean energy surge?

That’s really interesting. Anecdotally, I’ve seen the same from my travels in Global South countries. People act out of simple economic self-interest and calculation. And if you live in a country where the grid energy is both unreliable and expensive, and somebody is saying, well, look, you can heat water with this thing, that’s becoming incredibly common all over. Now, for not very much money, you can install PV. Whether it’s micro-scale, just to charge your phone, or people on the fringes of the middle class feeling able to, power their homes with a few larger panels.

You have this kind of political argument going on with politicians, particularly in North America, saying this stuff is all a scam and it’s never going to happen. Meanwhile, people in Pakistan or wherever are just going to go and buy a panel and get on with it.

Another country where you see it is Nigeria, which is a famously poor country. The electric grid system is terrible, years of underinvestment and corruption mean the amount of generation for the country is tiny given the size of its economy. But again, there’s just a whole invisible private grid that that is growing all the time that we can’t see. It’s quite hard to measure, but it’s definitely there.

And that could save a lot of lives. That could really transform the outlook for Nigeria and Pakistan. That could redefine our very concept of developed, kind of in the same way that a lot of Africa got Wi-Fi before paved roads.

Yeah, totally. And of course, it’s an enabler for all the other things because, you know, try running a business without power. I worked as a diplomat in Nigeria, very much in the hydrocarbon era, in 1999 and around that time. Within the British Embassy, obviously a highly resourced environment, we relied on diesel generators. They would have to kick in four or five times most days! Most people don’t have that. Try running any kind of normal business when the power goes out for four or five times every day!

So there’s the economic boost you get from having an energy source. If you know daylight hours in Nigeria, you’re never going to lack solar energy!

There’s an emerging wave of studies, and this is a very niche area, finding that renewable energy, particularly solar farms but also offshore wind, can not just not harm, but actually have positive benefits for biodiversity and crop productivity on the same area.

There’s the whole field of agrivoltaics. In dry areas, solar panel shade can reduce UV exposure and retain moisture in the soil. You can actually grow more food if you have solar panels in the same field also producing electricity!

There’s even studies from the deserts of China and the grasslands of Colorado, showing increased biodiversity and wildlife in a place where you just built a solar farm than in a wild landscape nearby. There’s more native plants, more biodiversity!

I’m really interested in the possibility of these electrotech landscapes spreading.

Effectively, you’re talking about a kind of canopy, aren’t you? It’s a canopy of PVs rather than mature trees.

I haven’t looked into that much. Certainly here in the UK, in rural Britain, you have, some would say, an overly protected landscape. You’ve got a lot of farmland, not wilderness, not national parks, it’s agricultural farmland but it’s treated under zoning and planning laws as if it were a sort of protected wilderness.

There’s been a lot of people trying to push against solar panels and saying that they’re unsightly, they’re misusing land that should be put to food production.

But actually what some farmers are saying is, look, we’re using this land for food production but we’ve got solar panels on it as well! Whether it’s having poultry underneath the panels or sheep to graze, there’s all kinds of things you could do with this land as well as use it for electricity production!

One of these arguments that hasn’t really broken out for people people to be aware of is the fact that putting a big solar installation in a place does not stop you from using it for other purposes, and it may have beneficial impacts.

That’s something I’m really excited about!

What are your thoughts the potential for more rewilded landscapes? Moving out of the politics realm. We’ve seen a lot of rewilded landscapes recently, especially in Europe. We’ve seen huge shifts in land cover as people withdraw from farms.

And now a lot of countries, including some countries that are traditionally thought of as developing countries, places like Colombia, Chile, Sri Lanka, Thailand, are now hitting very low total fertility rates. China’s now below 1.0 TFR!

It may be selection bias, but I feel like whenever I see a country with notably huge declines in fertility rate, I can also immediately find tons of really big new conservation projects and protected areas. Maybe that’s cultural-psychological, a sense of enough space for both people and nature. Maybe it’s just economic, there’s less small-scale farmers hungry for land.

A lot of projections now estimate a peak in human population by the 2050s. The whole planet’s TFR is around replacement rate and falling.

What are your thoughts on these potential shifts in human population? Intersecting with the renewables revolution and the end of the hydrocarbon age and American hegemony and climate change heating up. How do these play into each other?

It’s a big question. I think one element of all of this which we haven’t touched on is actually food production. Obviously for centuries as the world’s population has expanded, people have imagined that we might run out of food, and we haven’t.

Actually, human ingenuity, improved agricultural techniques and all kinds of other things, have managed to keep food production growing even faster than the growing population.

Now, I think the climate crisis makes this harder. But also, and I think this is very important, there’s the changes of habits. Particularly China and to a lesser extent India, as people enter the middle class they want to eat meat. That, as you know, requires much larger inputs, larger areas of land and so on, so that even as global population growth is slowing down the amount of land needed, with the combination of changing habits and the climate crisis the amount of land needed to feed those people could increase.

At the same time, I mean, you mentioned Bulgaria. There are places where the population has shrunk and there will be rewilding and that, of course, has all kinds of positive impacts.

China, you know, the meat of choice is pork. The pigs that China feeds on are fed with soybeans grown in Brazil. That’s the current model. Now, the destruction of the Amazon is impacting not just the Amazon itself, but the neighboring areas in terms of the rainfall patterns and so on. So things like that are quite complicated.

I don’t foresee like a global famine or a food crisis like that, but certainly you have more competition and pressure at a global level.

There are other elements of this. Something I write about in the book is about rice. Ironically perhaps, because one thinks of it as a tropical plant, it doesn’t do very well in high temperatures. A big part of the calories consumed on Earth are consumed as rice. It’s completely part of the culture of food in Asia. You know, rice has almost a kind of mythical status. There’s no option where people say, well, we’ll stop eating rice, we’ll eat something else. That’s not going to happen.

Aren’t rice yields not falling, though? There was a great post by Dr. Hannah Ritchie. In 2025, most staple crops hit record high yields, including rice, at least globally.

By the Numbers

The world is on track for record harvests this year

It’s not uncommon for people to tell me that global food production is already collapsing due to climate change. They are then surprised to hear that we typically hit record harvests year after year (even as things get hotter…

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8 months ago · 204 likes · 100 comments · Hannah Ritchie

Yes, but over the long term trajectory there’s that combination of higher heat and higher extreme weather events. Very difficult for farmers, basically. China has this new food security strategy, and identified this issue that a lot of the core staples that Chinese consumers feed on face headwinds in a climate-adapted world.

Of course, there’s all kinds of things that can be done. New strains, things that do better in certain conditions. In Bangladesh they developed a strain of rice that that can that survives floods effectively! But I do think generally that the global food systems are going to see a lot of strain.

Mediterranean Europe is another good example of a very important agricultural zone, particularly for Europeans, where the climate is getting very hot and very dry. Add extreme weather events into that, and it just makes it harder for farmers to operate.

I’m actually really optimistic on food production. In 2020, like a fifth of Iowa’s corn crop was smacked down by a derecho, an inland super-storm. Since then they’ve started really rolling out a new corn strain, genetically modified so it’s much shorter, much more resilient, has a wider and stouter stem, and it’s just harder to knock over.

In Canada’s prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, they’re seeing much higher staple grain yields despite much more erratic weather, in part due to adoption of no-till practices, in part due to new strains, stuff like that.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: January 16, 2026

Canada is seeing record-high crop yields despite floods and droughts, thanks in large part to widespread adoption of no-till farming…

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4 months ago · 32 likes · 6 comments

Given the immense ongoing demand for it and the high pressure to innovate, I suspect that food yields will stay pretty solid even despite climate headwinds. What do you think of that hypothesis?

I think it’s perfectly possible because in the end, there are lots of examples of humanity finding ways to adapt, finding ways to deal with the challenges of the shifting climate. We haven’t talked about intensive indoor farming hydroponics all that kind of stuff. So there are many possibilities. But it’s certainly the case that if you look at for example productivity in Brazil, certain areas are facing these headwinds.

And yes, it may be that they can shift. They’ll find new ways to handle it. But a heating world with more extreme weather events is generally, I think, quite challenging for farmers.

I agree. I just think there’s a lot of really interesting innovation that could counterbalance that or more than counterbalance that.

What question should I have asked that I didn’t ask? The meta-question. What do you want to answer that you haven’t been able to speak about that you think is important to share?

That’s great.

I mean, we’ve covered a load of ground. It’s been a really fascinating conversation.

I think the one area we haven’t talked about is the Arctic, and that’s a big part of the book. Obviously, there is a climate crisis, and there’s an ecological tragedy of the shift of the polar ice cap and the possibility that in the next decade, in summer that will break up and that ice cap which has been there for tens of thousands of years won’t be there.

Of course that makes very significant shifts in maritime opportunities and shipping routes. There’s the economic opportunity that you can ship something quicker from Asia to Europe or to North America. But of course that in itself has a climate impact because it’s a shorter route. You’re expending less energy to ship commodities or manufactured goods or whatever around the world. I think that’s another really big part of this story.

Where in the world would you expect borders to change the most in the next 20, 30 or 50 years?

The Sahel? Maritime jurisdictions in the Arctic?

The norms on sort of major territorial shifts seem to be eroding. Where do you think are potential future instances of that?

I mean, that’s a great question because the pace of change at the moment is just bewildering. Just for example, it might be the case that the Strait of Hormuz is going to turn into a kind of toll booth operated jointly by Iran and the United States!President Trump was talking about that as a distinct possibility. Now, that upends literally centuries of standard practice in international maritime law.

Not all doom

The End of Capitalism?

In the bewildering chaos of Trump’s war on Iran, there has been little attention to what may have been a throwaway remark of his, but one which has profound implications. In an interview on 8 April with ABC News (ie, before the collapse of the Islamabad talks) Trump was asked about the Iranian blockage of the Straits of Hormuz. This has become, as we’re…

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25 days ago · 53 likes · Arthur Snell

Cosmographia

IS THIS THE END OF FREE SEAS?

Welcome to Cosmographia — a newsletter uncovering the deep roots of a turbulent world. For the full map of posts, see here…

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25 days ago · 41 likes · 9 comments · M. E. Rothwell

I’m slightly ducking the question, but the pace of change is so dramatic that I think that the idea of state sovereignty appears to be breaking down.

We’re entering a new age of empires.

Obviously we’ve talked a lot about America, but you see it on a regional basis. For example a country like Turkey feels that it can intervene in Syria or Iraq if it feels threatened or if it senses that there’s some activity, you know, relating perhaps to a Kurdish minority, and it doesn’t feel the need to seek permission from anyone to do that.

So I think this age of imperial behavior is not limited just to one or two great powers. We see kind of middle powers operating in that way as well.

And I think what the climate crisis does in this context is because it renders wider global norms less stable, whether we’re talking about mass migration, whether we’re talking about increased conflict, whether we’re talking about conflict over resources, it just contributes, I would say, as a catalyst to this wider destabilization.

What do you think are the odds for more positive models emerging from that?

We’ve already seen that the European Union has really emerged as a more coherent blocking in recent years, with common defense provisions for Ukraine and stuff like that, in part due to America’s unreliability and abandonment.

Not all doom

America's Weakness, Europe's Strength

The release of America’s new National Security Strategy has, unsurprisingly, occasioned an alarmed response in Europe. The document is negative and regressive, an unapologetic America First manifesto that blames the USA’s ills on “mass migration” and an elite class obsessed with “globalism” and “free trade”: things that were once celebrated by the Repu…

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5 months ago · 205 likes · 1 comment · Arthur Snell

And in 2026, a bunch of European countries sent troops to Greenland to deter American invasion, which would have been an unthinkable state of affairs not that long ago.

Do you think that more European Union-type broadly peaceful groupings might form to counter this age of empires, with more small countries forming transnational unions to support each other in these times?

Yeah, I think it’s quite possible, because ultimately countries behave rationally in order to protect themselves and their interests. And ultimately, the European Union grew out of countries wanting to make conflict impossible in the European continent.

You gave some great examples there. Ukraine, Greenland, and of course, it’s not just Europe. If powerful sort of hegemonic countries are going to behave in a certain way, you are also just as likely to see less powerful countries try to create the circumstances in which they can pool their sovereignty, defense, economic resources and so on in order to give themselves a better ability to protect themselves.

And so I would say that as much as you see a new age of instability and crisis, you also see a new age of collaboration.

Well, that is a brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Mr. Snell.

I’m hoping to go to East Africa shortly if jet fuel remains available. To write from Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, as I did from China recently. So I’ll probably publish this from East Africa in a couple weeks.

Amazing! Well, safe travels. Thank you. I’ll be following with interest.

Thank you so much.

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On April 24, I woke up to my second day of this reporting journey, left my Airbnb, had breakfast, and set off with great excitement to visit one of the most fascinating projects I’d ever gotten to write about: Rwanda’s world-leading network of life-saving Zipline medical delivery drones!

But on the way, Kigali presented new occasions that demanded to be written about first. Literally while waiting for a city-crossing electric bus at the bus stop, I saw a guy on an electric motorcycle from pioneering Rwandan startup Ampersand, right in front of a sign selling solar panels, and just had to snap a photo.

Soon after getting into that bus, we passed a Spiro solar-powered battery-swap station for electric motorbikes and a little independent repair shop advertising itself as an EV mechanic.

I got off at the teeming vortex of Nyabugogo Bus Station, Kigali’s central whirl of transport. There, I saw a multitude of electric buses amid the throng of people, yet found that the new bus that I wanted was still an old diesel model — for now. Kigali bus fleet electrification is moving fast.

As I bought my ticket and then waited for my bus to fill and leave, three middle-aged men came and asked for money. One was missing a leg, one a hand, and one an arm up to his shoulder. I thought it all too probable that they were survivors of the 1994 genocide, and gave each one a small sum in Rwandan francs.

As we traversed the urban periphery, I spotted many signs of Chinese culture: hanzi characters on the buses themselves and villagers’ T-shirts, a truck branded CHENG TONG, a wall with painted Chinese and Rwandan flags announcing that Chinese company StarTimes had provided satellite TV access to 10,000 villages. (This last is controversial). Once out beyond the city, the general landscape was like a rural version of the Kigali street scene: developing country on the way up, with sturdy metal-roofed buildings dotting the green fields.

Upon arrival at the bus stop in the Muhonga district, I got off into a thriving little town and started walking towards the Zipline point on Google Maps. Throughout today's bus journey into rural Rwanda, I’d had consistent 4G cellular data coverage. Along the way, I smiled at the sight of a piece of American culture: a little photo-printing business with a sign reading WAKANDA STUDIO.

I also noticed a compound with a rooftop solar array where the only English words on the signs I saw were “Rwandan Ministry of Health” and “Reception” in front of a line of visitors. I concluded that I had just passed, by happenstance, a solar-powered rural hospital.

A tour group from the University of Rwanda was departing via bus just as I arrived at the Zipline Muhanga drone base. A van in the parking lot bore the Zipline logo and the quote “The Best Delivery Service Not On Earth.” I said hi to the security folks at the gate, explained why I was there and showed my email thread with the Zipline office in the U.S., and they called out the director, an awesome guy named Prosper. I said that I didn’t wish to disturb his work and that I would be happy just to be let in to take some pictures of drone launches, but he kindly offered to give me a full tour!

First, we went to “mission control,” a room of screens and maps. One huge wall map showed all flight routes from this base, and one screen showed live tracking of all the drones currently in the air. This one Zipline base sends drones to over 1,000 health center drop points, hospitals and clinics across the western half of Rwanda. Their longest regularly supply flight is to Mibilizi, near the Congolese border. Before Zipline, it had taken seven to eight hours for someone to drive to Mibilizi to resupply their medical center. (And then, of course, that person had to drive seven to eight hours back). Now, Zipline drones have cut resupply time to Mibilizi, from order to delivery, to just 45 minutes. Less for everywhere else.

The map room also answered my half-thought question of why the major Zipline drone bases were hours away from Kigali: the international airport in the capital had a no-fly zone around it. Zipline coordinates closely with Rwanda’s civil aviation authority, and new low-altitude options are being planned for future Kigali flights.

I asked Prosper if storms could ground their flights, and he simply replied “We fly in any conditions. That is why we are here.” I could hear the buzz of drones taking off on the other side of the building as we talked.

Next, we visited a brief airlock-like antechamber where we covered our shoes with disposable stockings to avoid contamination, then entered the base’s medical supplies warehouse. There were medications for malaria, HIV, and many other ailments, a fridge full of blood plasma, a fridge full of red blood cells, a fridge full of platelets with little agitator racks to keep them constantly moving. Many fridges full of vaccines. Neatly stacked piles of empty Zipline drone packages ready to be filled at one of the workstations.

Zipline Muhanga now stocked over 300 different medical products and supplies, and was ready to send them zooming over the countryside to provide succor to those in need at a moment’s notice. Prosper held one example up for my inspection: a carton of Lumerax, a 3-day course malaria treatment for children. He told me that he had first joined a newly-launched Zipline intending to only work there for two years, but that he had found the work deeply meaningful and he had now been on the team for ten years. “At launch, there’s someone lying on a bed waiting for this drone. The idea is simple but the impact is huge.”

As we walked on, Prosper rattled off the statistics with justified pride. Since the Muhanga drone base had begun its work in this region of Rwanda, maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage were reduced by 51% in just the first three years, thanks to Zipline rapid blood delivery.

Blood expiry, the wastage of precious donor transfusions because they expired before a hospital had an occasion to use them, was down by 67%. Immunization rates were up. They’ve expanded into animal health as well as human health, benefiting farmers in the region1.

Rwandan immunization officials could now track the roll-out of new human (and animal) vaccination campaigns in real time with Zipline data, and no longer had to improvise a cold chain by piggybacking on restaurant freezers. In their early days, Zipline delivered special fortified food supplements to fight malnutrition, but malnutrition in Rwanda has declined so much that that’s no longer considered a necessary delivery item. And the existence of Zipline was a broad-spectrum boost to the economics of rural health centers. By avoiding waste, it also avoided redundancy, reduced the need to maintain expensive and fast-expiring stockpiles thanks to the certainty you could get what you needed quickly, and freed up money for clinics to invest in facility upgrades or more hires.

Zipline has 220 full-time employees in Rwanda, with 70 at the Muhanga base alone. (It’s a U.S. company, but all the employees I met were local Rwandans). That’s the directly drone-focused folks, not counting the large network of nurses and pharmacists involved in their supply chain and recipients. Jobs with Zipline were unsurprisingly prestigious, and Prosper told me they often hired young recent graduates with engineering experience. They’d also found it necessary to design their own internal “academy” system to train new hires in the many brand-new procedures Zipline had developed for their world-leading work. There was no such thing as gaining prior work experience in the rural African medical drone delivery field from another company (yet): Zipline had invented all this as they went along. Prosper explained that the entire operations area was optimized for efficiency. “One second per order saves hundreds of seconds per day.”

In the warehouse, I saw a Zipline technician lady (I think I caught her name as “Crystal”) receive an order and start the process of filling a drone package, which she graciously allowed me to record. They had two kinds of packages: a smaller one that carried two kilograms (about 4.4 pounds), and a larger one that carried 3.3 kilograms (about 7.3 pounds), the maximum recommended carrying capacity for their current drone models. Prosper told me that for the direst emergencies, like mothers’ postpartum hemorrhages or venomous snakebites, where someone was screaming in agony right now on a bed of pain and the drone was their only lifeline, they would always use the smaller package to shave even more precious seconds off the travel time for the drone carrying the sorely-needed blood plasma or antivenom serum. The loading I was watching now was not one of these cases; it was a resupply of treatment to counter H. pylori, the bacteria that caused stomach ulcers.

When she was done, Crystal placed the package in one of the two red hoppers (“Emergency” and “Resupply”) leading to the outdoors drone launch area, and a robotic voice started announcing “New shipment ready. New shipment ready.” On a loop, across the base, until the package was collected to be loaded onto a drone. Prosper led me back out of the warehouse zone and outside to follow.

I saw a landing before I saw a launch. A Zipline drone zoomed in from over the horizon, then its “tail” caught in a long catch-line stretched between two poles, and it fell like a hooked fish. Two Zipline employees rushed out to retrieve it and clear that landing area, reminding me of the racing car pit crews in the movie F1.

The launch was even more impressive. A crew member performed some final checks, set a drone on a catapult angled upwards, engaged the propellers with a deep thrumming sound, and then fired the drone into the sky to give it a head start on its journey. I saw a digital dashboard of daily flights in the area tick up from 249 to 250. Check out the video I took of the launches and landing!

The Zipline Muhanga operational baseline is launching a drone within five minutes of receiving an order for medical supplies! What I was seeing was nothing less than a fully functional just-in-time delivery system for blood transfusions and antivenom, reducing wastage and annihilating unavailability. Amazon Prime for saving human lives.

The drones themselves could go 210 kilometers round-trip on one full charge. Much of their fuselage was foam: cheap, light, and surprisingly resilient at high speeds. These “Zips” had a transient individual existence: they were all were made of interchangeable parts that snapped together like Legos, and were actually partially dismantled after every single landing and reassembled before every launch to check for and replace any potential damage.

Rows and rows of batteries were charging, to be swapped in with new wings, head, and tail pieces to form a new Zip drone when needed. The Electrotech Revolution at its finest. Maybe I’ve spent too much time thinking about energy technologies, but even though the batteries were far less visual striking than the drones, simply rows of cubes in charging cubbies with glowing LEDs, they entranced me. It positively warmed my heart to see all those electrons getting stored to power live-saving flight.

In addition to the batteries within each drone, Prosper explained that the facility is built for resilient energy supply in disasters. The Zipline Muhanga drone base is connected to the Rwandan grid, but also has a backup generator, and also also has a backup building-scale battery pack that can supply full power for six hours. There’s a third Zipline drone base set to open in Rwanda in Q3 2026, and that new one will be much more heavily solarized. For context, Prosper added that as a mode of transport for medical supplies, Zipline drones emit 97% less carbon dioxide than last-mile delivery using trucks. In addition, of course, to being unbothered by traffic or flooding and more than ten times faster to arrive, saving multitudes of human lives.

Since my arrival, the Muhanga base had seen drone launches and landings happening about once every two minutes, a dizzying progression of achievement. The air-speed velocity of an unladen drone was positively phenomenal: several times I tried to take pictures of an income drone just before its landing and literally couldn’t press the button fast enough to capture an image in the second-long window after the drone became visible but before it had already been “hooked.”

Prosper described this blistering pace of work as “slow.” There were apparently relatively few orders being placed at this time (early afternoon), with a speed-up apparently likely in a few hours’ time.

Eventually, Prosper was called away to another aspect of his work, and the tour was over. I stayed on the fringes of the building just watching and photographing the drone takeoffs and landings for a while, until the security guard politely but firmly told me that it was time for me to leave.

Humanity has created achieved many feats long believed to be only possible in the domain of myth and legend: flying across oceans, eradicating plagues, landing on the moon. Now, we’re building fleets of flying protectors that can carry the materials needed to save your life right to your sickbed in less than an hour. Perhaps the most salient difference I see between these drones and, say, the angels described in many religions, is that if you pray for one of these drones to help, there’s a high probability that you’ll soon see one coming with the help you asked for. The Zips are true “machines of loving grace,” operated by a crew of big damn heroes. I feel honored to have had this chance to help share the story of their noble endeavor.

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Prosper also told me that the Zipline Muhanga base stocks pig semen from five different breeds, and has so far delivered a total of over 70,000 units of pig semen to farmers across Rwanda. Each delivered unit could father eight to sixteen piglets.

Previously, Rwandan pig farmers wishing to improve their swine stock had to go fetch it themselves on motorcycles, which took hours and hours and often resulted in their sow going out of heat before they returned. The ripple effects for agricultural productivity - and thus, very directly, human health - must be enormous by now.

I’m personally a committed vegetarian, and I’ve long worked to promote plant-based and cell-based meat in developed countries, but until those cruelty-free protein sources follow the renewables track of becoming cheaper than the alternative, I would consider it deeply unethical to oppose improved access to vital macronutrients for human children in sub-Saharan Africa.

After an overnight flight, I landed at Kigali International Airport in the early morning of April 23, 2026. It was a partly cloudy day, pleasantly balmy at first and growing hotter towards midday, and I was incredibly excited to start this new reporting journey! I’d visited Madagascar and Morocco before, but this was my first time on mainland sub-Saharan Africa, a swathe of Earth increasingly central to humanity’s future. I was thrilled even at the early window-limited glimpses of Lake Victoria (aka Nyanza) from the plane window, and the rising green hills and red earth of Rwanda soon after.

The day started well. I asked for, paid for, and received an East Africa Tourist Visa, allowing “borderless” ninety-day travel through all three of Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, right away at passport control. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. I had read online that visa-on-arrival in Rwanda was the best point of entry for East Africa, and I can now add another testimonial in favor of their streamlined process.

This good impression continued as I walked out into the city, bearing my full trip inventory in my backpack, pockets, and a bandolier-like satchel. The air smelled clean, much less polluted than Mumbai or Mexico City or even New York at rush hour. The registration of new fossil fuel-powered motorbikes has been banned in Kigali since 2025, and I could already see a notably high proportion of electric vehicles on the road, from electric bike models to Yutong electric buses to snazzy-looking Chinese EV car marques ranging from the ubiquitous BYD to the obscure Trumpchi1.

Furthermore, there were power lines arcing overhead, consistently paved streets and sidewalks (though still open sewers in some areas) and omnipresent corrugated-iron roofs on even the smallest dwellings, a big step up in sturdiness and resilience from the branches or bamboo I’d often seen in Madagascar. Kigali looked prosperous.

I also noticed lots of new construction underway, with new apartment buildings going up left and right. Rwanda actually has a brand-new digital permit system for housing construction that lets people file, submit, and track their permits in a self-guided process online — an African case study of one fascinating win-win “Abundance” policy of the sort promoted by the emerging YIMBY movement in the United States.

Another example of an emerging ecomodernist “solarpunk urbanism” aesthetic was Kigali’s leadership in urban wetland parks, which I’d previously written about for my newsletter. The first template, the Nyandungu Urban Wetland Eco-Tourism Park, was conveniently located within walking distance of the airport (not a given, as Kigali is a poly-centric metropolis spread out over many hills) so that was my first stop on my first morning in Rwanda.

Nyandungu is a long, thin ribbon of wetland, rivulets, and vegetarian surrounded by urban development, and its official emergence as a park, with accompanying tourist infrastructure, was only completed in July 2022. It’s not even four years old; when I visited, the visitor center looked as if it had just been taken out of plastic wrap and a park restaurant in another area was still under construction. The hiking and biking trails were absolutely spotless, with people even sweeping fallen leaves off them. Nevertheless, despite its youth the Nyandungu project has already been deemed such a resounding success that the government now plans to restore and engineer another five wetland-parks like it across Kigali!

Walking in, I could see why. The park was a space of great joy and natural beauty, with liquid birdsong flowing out from every shrub and tree. I regularly heard evasive movements in the grass as I walked by, and once saw their originator, a lizard scurrying up a tree. Flowering plants in blue and pink and yellow and orange were scattered among the grid like leftover carnival beads on a shag carpet. Waterlilies ennobled the shadowy recesses of the ponds scattered throughout. I was the only person of visibly non-African descent I saw in the park, but there were many apparent locals just hanging out solo, in a couple, or as a family, enjoying the “nature bath” in the middle of the city. I saw a couple people actively bird-watching, including one guy with a gigantic camera.

I hardly recognized any of the birds myself, either by sound or by sight, and frantically took photos for future iNaturalist analysis. I learned later that I had likely spotted black-lored babblers, crested mousebirds, gray-backed fiscals, and an Ardea-genus heron similar to those I had seen in Europe, among the many, many more that I hadn’t been able to photograph.

And yet, all this had begun as a profoundly artificial space, with much human and machine work needed to restore a pristine affect. I could see the regular prints of machinery in some of the muddy channels going to and from the ponds. Its biodiversity and mental health benefits were real, but perhaps the ultimate deciding factor in their creation had been the utilitarian safety element, the climate-resilience shielding of permeable sponge-y wetland ecosystems to soak up floodwaters and greenery-provided evapotranspiration to counter the urban heat island effect. A lovely example of the quotidian realities of the successes we make in the Anthropocene.

Among the most common residents were the weaver birds, large songbirds with striking gold plumage common across much of tropical Africa. Brilliant citizen science app iNaturalist suggests that these were black-headed weavers, Ploceus melanocephalus, but they might have also included other weaver species in the genus.

Like the oropendolas of the New World, weaver birds are known (and named) for their intricately constructed nests, which are painstakingly assembled from strands of plant matter with only beaks and toes as manipulators yet can hold the weight of precious eggs and newborn young! As I was observing these feathered maestros go about their homesteading, I almost stepped into another example of extraordinary animal architecture: a small termite mound. It’s occasionally occurred to me that humans’ attitude towards such structures could provide a partial analogy for the Fermi Paradox. Hypothetical aliens might see our cities and space stations and ignore them as mere “instinctive behavior” like we do to the creations of ants and birds.

The weavers seemed to prefer some trees over other, perhaps for structural stability reasons or perhaps just for social togetherness. One tree besides one of the many ponds was absolutely festooned with weaver-bird nests, and I delighted in regarding it.

I briefly stopped at a recreation area on one edge of the park, observed a playground for children and even a painting station set up with brushes and easels (!), and played a few games of chess with one young Rwandan hanging out with a group of friends. As I walked out of the wetland area and back into the hilly, crowded streets in search of lunch, I reflected that any city, anywhere, would be proud to have Nyandungu among its parks. An impressive achievement for such a young, fast-growing capital as Kigali.

In the nearly thirty-two years since the abominable genocide of 1994, Rwanda has undergone rapid and profound changes in essentially every area of life. (Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame has been in government for all of that time, and formal president himself since 2000, leading to him often being cited as an example of a successful “developmentalist” dictator).

Per the ever-reliable Our World in Data, the fast-urbanizing population of Rwanda has nearly doubled since 2000 — on a relatively small amount of land, reaching a sky-high Rwandan population density of 576 people per square kilometer in 2023! (In the U.S. it’s 37.5, in France it’s 120). But Rwanda’s living conditions have improved much faster than the rate of population growth despite the space constraints, leading to major progress across key indicators of human flourishing. Rwandan life expectancy rose dramatically from 47.8 in 2000 to 67.8 in 2023. Child mortality has plummeted: 4.5% of Rwandan newborns now die before the age of 15, similar to the world average and down from a dreadful 22.9% in 2000. The share of Rwanda’s children accessing basic education (primary/elementary school) is now over 99%.

As of 2023, 64% of Rwandans had access to at least basic electricity (up from just 1% in 1997!), and that’s sure to be higher now as the country keeps growing. Not super impressive stats on a global scale, but very impressive both in terms of recent history (it and regional comparisons.

In fact, Rwanda’s achievements are particularly stark because Rwanda is one of the countries on Earth with the closest thing to a “control group” or “twin country” this side of North Korea and South Korea, so we have a “road not taken” benchmark to measure against. Rwanda’s southern neighbor Burundi is a very ethnically and culturally similar state, with a near-identical population size of around 14 million, that suffered very similar 1990s atrocities but has had much less competent2 autocrats in charge since then. In 2023, access to electricity in Burundi was just 12%, youth mortality rate was 6.6%. Access to basic education in 2020 was just below 80%. This wasn’t just a “rising tide lifts all boats” effect — Rwandans made smart choices, working hard on establishing the basics of modern technological civilization.

Rwanda has been categorized by the United Nations as a “Least Developed Country” (LDC) for its entire existence, but it met the graduation criteria in 2024. (It’ll likely “officially” graduate some years in the future, as that’s a political decision with impacts on WTO trade rules, not an automatic change). A few more decades like the last three, and it might be headed towards comfortable middle-income status.

This is, if you stop to think about it, a freaking amazing development! Rwanda has gone from being mentioned in the same breath as Somalia, a land of omnipresent violence, to being called Africa’s answer to Singapore, a beacon of technocratic governance successes3. It’s as if we were to find that Afghanistan thirty-two years in the feature is a shining example of gender equality, or that North Korea had developed a thriving and disputatious civil society. It really shows, yet again, that when the circumstances align we humans are capable of epic victories on a societal scale.

As I began writing these words on the evening of the 23rd, rain was pounding down on Kigali — it is the rainy season, after all, and in East Africa that often means several intense bursts of rain per day. It’s nighttime now, and I’m getting tired (so excuse any typos!). I’ll schedule this article to go out tomorrow, and I’m already excited for learning more about Rwanda tomorrow!

This newsletter is going on a new reporting journey around East Africa! It’s essentially in the spirit of my previous trips around the Netherlands, India, Mexico, and China. I plan to travel through three countries, Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, and write articles along the way. I’ll land in Kigali, Rwanda on April 23, and should depart from Nairobi, Kenya in mid-May. I’m really excited to explore this part of the planet!

In terms of article frequency, I’m thinking that this trip will be a hybrid model between the two extremes of my publishing cadence from Mexico (five in-person reporting articles over three months, interspersed among ongoing regular posts for The Weekly Anthropocene and Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope) and my publishing cadence from China (an article each day for eleven days replacing all other posts, which was a fun challenge but super intense). This will be the last weekly news roundup until I’m back from East Africa in late May, but I will intersperse some Daily Dose posts and at least one already-done interview among my ongoing field reports!

In my recent reporting journey around China, I was visiting only publicly viewable areas (except for that one time), as despite my best efforts I hadn’t been able to arrange any in-person interviews or worksite visits. For this East Africa trip, I’ve been luckier in beforehand arrangements, and I should be able to visit and report on several fascinating organizations’ work sites in person!

Rwanda infamously suffered a heinous genocide in 1994, but has since experienced an extraordinary development trajectory. The 21st century so far has seen rapid progress on healthcare, sanitation, education, women’s rights, economic development, and much more. From being one of the most violent places in the world in the 1990s, Rwanda is now sometimes described as an African Singapore. The capital, Kigali, is ranked as one of the safest cities on the continent and has become a regional leader in electric urban mobility and urban wetland parks.

In 2026, Rwanda signed a new agreement with rising-star U.S. startup Zipline to become the first country in the world with nationwide drone delivery coverage. Zipline is well-established across Rwanda and has already saved many lives by using their autonomous all-electric delivery drones to transport vital medical supplies, including drugs, vaccines, blood and anti-venom products.

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Next, I’ll be going overland to Uganda! In the capital city of Kampala, I’ll be meeting with the amazing folks from Aptech Africa, a scrappy grassroots solar startup that “bootstrapped” itself into existence with no development aid, starting with two brothers and $18,000 in loans in 2011, overcoming the looting of much of their inventory in the South Sudan civil war in 2013, and growing to become a world-leading solar and battery installer in frontier markets across 31 countries.

I interviewed Aptech CEO Metkel Abraham in 2025, and I’m really excited to see a few of their work sites in person. This is the on-the-ground leading edge of the Electrotech Revolution as it expands across Africa!

Next, I plan to spend some time embedded with the amazing EarthLungs Foundation, the largest reforestation NGO in Kenya, for several days in early May, visiting their mangrove restoration project sites! I interviewed CEO Victor Mwanga in 2024 and again (live!) in 2025. EarthLungs is a longtime partner of Climate Action Now — when CAN users earn trees for taking civil advocacy actions in the CAN app, EarthLungs is the group planting those trees. They’ve planted over 92 million trees so far, are expanding quickly, and are at the forefront of monitoring & verification tech! I’m fascinated by how ecosystem restoration can scale up, and this is an emerging success story.

This connection is why I’m coming to East Africa in the rainy season, as it’s one of the key windows for planting new carbon-sequestering and ecosystem-upholding mangrove seedlings.

After that, I hope to make time to visit one of Kenya’s amazing national parks before my trip ends in mid-May!

Throughout the trip, I’ll be keeping an eye out for the leapfrog effect. As the electrotech revolution progresses, much of Africa is rapidly pioneering a brand-new “solarpunk” development model, in which families, communities, and entire countries on the debt-trapped periphery of a fossil-fueled world for decades are now finally getting an affordable, pay-as-you-go, free-local-fuel energy source. For a whole lot of people now, the first motor vehicle anyone in their family has ever had is an EV, and the first electricity that their house has ever been able to use comes from solar panels! The future of Africa is electric, and prospects for Asian-style development and broad-based prosperity are much brighter than they looked before the Solar/Battery Age.

Thank you so much for reading!

Sam

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The Great Green Wall project of China, an epochal decades-spanning endeavor to plant a network of forests, grasslands, and shrub-lands across a huge swathe of land (40% of the country!) to halt the expanding Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, is advancing very successfully. Forest cover in the project area has nearly tripled from 5% in 1978 to almost 14% in 2023, soil erosion area has declined by two-thirds, and dust storms have grown much less common. It’s increasingly integrated with the Chinese electrotech revolution, with solar-powered irrigation for some shelterbelts and new growth sheltering under panels in the Kubuqi Desert. Awesome work!

Electrotech exports from China to the world keep rising. Monthly battery and EV exports hit new highs in December 2025, and new numbers are just in showing that the Iran War fossil fuel shock has spurred additional growth worldwide! EV demand is surging across Europe, Asia and Australia, and solar-plus-batteries is now quite simply the the no-brainer both-the-cheapest-and-best obvious default option for power generation worldwide. March 2026 was a new record-high month for China’s “new three” electrotech industries, up 70% year-on-year. Absolutely SPECTACULAR.

Battery titan CATL is on track to become the first company in the world to have built over 1,000 electric ships, amid reports that commercial-scale shipbuilding is set to rapidly accelerate as a new Chinese electrotech export industry. Decarbonization, fast!

Portugal

In the Greater Côa Valley of northeastern Portugal, the former tin, tungsten, and sand-mining quarry of Paul de Toirões, abandoned in the 2010s, has become a lush and life-rich mosaic of wetlands thanks to a dedicated rewilding project in recent years. Targeted interventions to allow more water retention have led to recolonization of the new ponds by birds, otters, turtles, amphibians, and more! Excellent work.

Ukraine

In an unprecedented landmark event in humanity’s long history of war, an outpost of Russian invaders surrendered to a Ukrainian force composed solely of ground robots and flying drones, with no Ukrainian humans present. Ukraine reports that it has replaced human soldiers with ground robots in over 22,000 missions in the first three months of 2026, with 9,000 UGV (uncrewed ground vehicle, “land drone” missions in March 2026 alone. It’s increasingly a robot war, and Ukraine’s highly innovative domestic defense industry is now an in-demand partner across Europe. Notably, after a long near-stalemate on the front lines, Ukraine has lately regained more territory!

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“Lives were saved more than 22,000 times when a robot went into the most dangerous areas instead of a warrior…

This is about high technology protecting the highest value — human life…

The future is already on the front line — and Ukraine is building it.”

— President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It might perhaps be a bad idea to defund battery manufacturing in this day and age.

Indonesia

In nine West Kalimantan villages, the innovative new KehatiKu project has now paid over 800 local observers for photographs of critically endangered Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). The data are valuable for conservation, and at about U.S. $5.84 per orangutan photo (and smaller sums for other species, like hornbills) it’s competitive as a full-time job and creates strong incentives to reduce human-wildlife conflict! Some villages have already decided to ban hunting and trapping. Awesome work!

South Korea

South Korea is accelerating their electrotech revolution in response to the Iran War with a suite of new policies spearheaded by farsighted President Lee Jae Myung. (South Korea has previously been one of the most “Hormuz-dependent” economies on Earth). A supplementary budget has increased funds for grid infrastructure and new renewables build-outs. The government plans to launch 700 more “solar income villages” by the end of 2026 (up from 150 now) and reach 2,500 by 2030. In this popular program, revenue from new rural solar farms goes directly to nearby villages which can then vote on using it for UBI-like individual dividends or public goods like communal free lunches, public transport, or cultural activities. Great work!

Mexico

In March 2026, eight Mexican wolves (Canis lupus baileyi) in two family groups of four were transported from Arizona to reintroduction in the Mexican state of Durango. The last wild Mexican wolves in Durango were captured for captive breeding by 1980, and these are among their descendants. Successful long-term conservation effort!

Ghana

Ghana has declared its first-ever marine protected area after 15 years of local knowledge consultations coordinated by NGO Hen Mpoano. It spans 703 km² of ocean around Cape Three Point, and protects key spawning grounds for small pelagic fish like sardinella, anchovy, and mackerel . Like much of West Africa, Ghana gets a majority of its animal protein from small local fish, but these stocks are threatened by over-exploitation. This could be a milestone towards more sustainable management!

Canada

After winning three by-elections in April 2026, Canada’s incumbent Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Mark Carney now has an absolute majority in Parliament, letting them govern until October 2029. Mr. Carney has a long history of climate leadership.

Poland

An imported Chinese-made Unitree G1-model humanoid robot dubbed “Edward Warchocki” has gone viral in Poland for herding wild boar off the streets of Warsaw. The incident, while inconsequential, is an amusing illustration of the intersection of the great re-wilding of Europe and the global electrotech revolution. Robot/animal interactions will become increasingly common in this Anthropocene century. Wow!

Honduras

For the first time since 2016, a jaguar has been spotted in the Merendón Mountains of Honduras! Camera traps recorded a healthy adult male in February 2026 amid the high-altitude cloud forest 2,200 meters above sea level — interestingly, just a few meters away from the 2016 sighting, on one of the tallest peaks! This is of great importance for the future of the species, as the Merendón range is a key connectivity corridor in a long-running continental-scale conservation initiative working to ensure protected links between all jaguar habitat from Sonora to Argentina. Awesome news!

Australia

Corporate titan Fortescue has begun construction of the world’s largest off-grid clean energy system, set to power iron ore mining and processing operations at its giant Pilbara complex in Western Australia. When finished in 2028, it will include 1.2 GW (1,200 MW) of solar power, 600 MW of wind power, and 4 to 5 GWh of battery storage. Solar-installing robots will be used in this project, and Fortescue is already using electric excavators for mining. The basics of industrial civilization keep electrifying!

São Tomé and Príncipe

Since September 2025, the tiny Lusophone island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe off the west coast of Africa has been the world’s first country to be entirely covered by a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Known as “Africa’s Galápagos,” the two islands are home to many endemic species including the giant sunbird, dwarf ibis, spinetail swift, acraea butterflies, and more. Lands purchased and conserved by South African Ubuntu OS developer and commercial astronaut Mark Shuttleworth now employ hundreds of locals in ecotourism ventures. Spectacular news!

United States

Momentum keeps building to overthrow the vile scum defacing America! We will win!

After overcoming two decades of permitting and construction delays, the largest-yet U.S. clean energy project has finally come online! The SunZia wind farm in New Mexico has 916 turbines totaling 3.5 GW (3,500 MW) of capacity! That’s enough to supply 3 million people, or about 1% of the entire nation’s electricity needs. A 550-mile power transmission line exports clean electrons to California. This historic project has been quiet to avoid regime attacks, with no official announcement made.

After numerous court losses, the White House regime appears to have given up their blatantly illegal attempts to sabotage American offshore wind farms! Five such clean power-generating artificial reefs are now under construction (some already with grid-connected turbines): Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, Vineyard Wind off Massachusetts, and Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind both off New York. Incredible perseverance paying off! Awesome.

As bills progress, check out new FAQ “What to know before you get balcony solar.”

In November 2025, a 175 MW project in this writer’s old Maine hometown became the biggest grid-scale battery in New England. Now, it’s already been overtaken by a new 250 MW battery near Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, with a 700 MW battery also under construction north of Boston. Clean electrification keeps on progressing!

San Diego, once a water-stressed city, has become an indirect water exporter due to the excellent performance of its new Carlsbad desalination plant, online since 2015 and the largest in North America. As the Colorado River grows drier, the states of Arizona and Nevada (and reportedly soon Utah as well) are now in talks to fund more California desalination and water recycling projects in exchange for some Golden State river water rights. The American West drought is getting innovative solutions!

A manatee was famously rescued from a storm drain in Melbourne Beach, Florida in early February 2026. Now, after weeks of treatment and healthy weight gain, “Melby” was released back into the wild on April 7! A lovely anecdote of coexistence.

New York announced that some fish caught in the lower Hudson River (like striped bass) are now safe for humans to eat for the first time in 50 years, following decades of hardworking water-cleanup campaigns lowering PCB pollutant levels. Great work!

Lake Erie is both the most species-rich and the most polluted of North America’s Great Lakes, and for the same reason: it’s unusually shallow, with just 2% of the Great Lakes’ total water volume. Now, it’s becoming a world-leading hub of lacustrine ecology innovation! The Cleveland Water Alliance is deploying hundreds of sensor buoys to provide real-time data on everything from wave height to algal blooms, the newly booming city’s CWRU is experimenting with microplastic filtration, and South Korean scienitsts are testing electrochemical water purification. Great work!

After decades of advocacy, 2024 saw the epic Klamath River dam removals restore free flow to a vast riparian landscape. Now, local Native American tribes have documented the first naturally hatched Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the largest Pacific salmon species) in the Upper Klamath watershed in over a century, as wildlife continue their rapid resettlement of the liberated ecosystem. Great news!

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The 12th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on April 14, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Premal Shah, co-founder ofRenewables.org, an innovative new nonprofit microfinance platform that allows investors to support solar development in the Global South with zero-interest loans! The YouTube recording is above! Below are some related resources.

Here’s my previous interview with Lassor Feasley, the other co-founder of Renewables.org!

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I’ve previously written that I got married in summer 2025 and moved to France to join my wife in her country in September 2025 — and that I am incredibly lucky to be here.

Here are some quick, scattered thoughts on aspects of living in France that stood out to me over the last few months.

As a new immigrant to France with a visa granted thanks to marriage, I was required to attend a series of mandatory appointments with OFII, the Office Français de l’Immigration et de l’Intégration. In the autumn of 2025 I had a French language test, a health exam, and a signing of the Contract of Civic Integration, in which I pledged to abide by French laws and values. Particularly striking were the Civic Integration Days, a four-day course in which a tranche of migrants arrived at an OFII-linked Paris office building at 8:30 in the morning and attended a class on everything the state wished them to know to become good French residents and potential future citizens until 4:30 in the afternoon, with a break for lunch. I had my first two Civic Integration Days in early January with one cohort of students, then requested and received to be reassigned to another, later cohort, then went to China for my reporting journey, then had my second two Civic Integration Days in February.

These were the most diverse spaces I’ve ever been in, with migrants from around the world lining up to become more French. At a rough estimate, the crowd filing into their different classrooms was generally maybe 30% people of African descent, maybe 20% Middle Eastern/North African, 20% East or South Asian, 10% Latin American, and 10% people of European descent. I was generally one of the only white guys around. There were Chinese, Afghan, Indian, Malian, Brazilian, and many other passports on display. I found it all rather heartwarming, a “common ground of humanity” feeling. OFII staff (or rather the staff of the company OFII had contracted to administer these classes) were uniformly kind, polite, and respectful, even when people were freaking out a bit over potential visa issues. Good work was being done.

A lot of what was taught in those classes was what you’d expect from a welcome-to-France class: very France-specific information that’s practically useful in day-to-day life or gives a general sense of important cultural background. The phone number for an ambulance is 15, for police 17, for firefighters 18. We learned how many régions there are (18), how many départements (101) and how many towns (over 34,000). We got a whistle-stop tour of French history: the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, the First Republic, Napoleon I’s First Empire, the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Third Republic, World War I, World War II, Nazi occupation, the Fourth Republic, the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic1. There was a rundown on symbols of the nation from Marianne to Marseillaise, highlights of French artistic culture from Delacroix to Debussy, and even — delightfully stereotypically — traditional cuisine items from different regions of France, from Brie de Normandie to Fondue Savoyarde.

But beyond the specific facts, I was really very positively impressed by how firmly the French Civic Integration Days were trying to instill liberal humanistic values, or at the very least make clear to you that no matter what you personally believe the French state and French civil society run on liberal humanistic values. There was a certain uncompromising quality to it which felt positively thrilling to an exiled American Democrat used to years of politically necessary kowtowing to swing voters. France says “This is who we are, this is how we do things here. Deal with it.” At one point the teacher told us, almost in these exact words, “In France, the schools will teach your children that gay marriage is okay, and you do not have a right to stop them from doing that.” A lot of time was spent on the admirable core French civic value of Laïcité, which translates into English as “secularism” but has a lot more historical weight than that, freighted with centuries of struggle against religious conservatism from Voltaire and Diderot through the Dreyfus Affair. It is illegal in France for a government employee to wear a religious symbol like cross (or a hijab, or a Star of David) while on duty, because on duty you are representing the French state, and the French state must serve everyone equally. Religious rhetoric in politics is verboten, or rather interdit. I wholeheartedly approve.

France, unlike the United States, is doing integration on Hard Mode. Many of the very poorest countries in the entire world are former French colonies in the Sahel — Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Central African Republic — and many of them still use French as a major language of administration. France is unsurprisingly a preferred destination for emigrants from these countries (as well as the many slightly-less-poor Francophone nations of West Africa, like Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Guinea), and it’s quite common for me to see Paris bodegas advertising cheap rates on remittance transfers or phone call plans to Mali.

A migrant to the U.S. from Guatemala is practically part of U.S. culture already compared to the vast gulf of historical and socioeconomic differences separating the Sahel and Western Europe. But they’re making it work! These Civic Integration Days are geared to be applicable for almost any human on Earth, to take someone who was perhaps a nomadic Fulani cattle-herder or a millet-grinding subsistence farmer from a village of scattered huts in the drylands around Timbuktu and turn them into a French person believing in liberté, égalité, fraternité. You have to admire the bold universalist vision of it. These French Civic Integration Days were trying to be nothing less than an extraordinary kind of “Modern World 101” class, downloading centuries of hard-fought Enlightenment values over four days in a classroom. It’s almost what you’d imagine a “Welcome to Earth” class taught by the Federation in Star Trek would be like. My class cohort in Days 3 and 4 had — it sounds too cute to be true, but I swear I’m not making this up — one Israeli and one Palestinian student, and the only interaction I heard between the two of them was a comparison of makhlouba recipes.

Some of the curriculum was basic stuff like “Taxes. Here’s what they are. Here’s what they fund. You have to pay them, it is not optional. No, really, you definitely have to pay them, the government will know if you don’t pay them and you will get in trouble.”

Some of it was clearly patching odd stuff that had become a problem before. One that particularly surprised me was “Tall building windows. If you live in a tall building with windows, do not leave them open or your child may fall out and die. Very very few children die from falling out of windows in France, but almost all of those who do are the children of very recent immigrants who left a window open in a tall building.”

One that didn’t surprise me but that I appreciated was a scared-straight session that clarified that all forms of female genital mutilation (FGM, tragically common in some parts of West Africa that send a lot of migrants to France) were ABSOLUTELY 100% ILLEGAL in France and YOU WILL BE PROSECUTED for it, and no it was not okay and it WILL STILL BE PROSECUTED as a French crime even if it was done on a “vacation” outside of France back to the country of origin.

There was overall a very strong emphasis on women’s rights and worker’s rights across the Civic Integration Days. Perhaps unsurprising from the nation of feminist pioneers like Christine de Pizan, Olympe de Gouges, and Simone de Beauvoir, but nonetheless deeply satisfying to hear for a member of the American diaspora in 2026. “In France, women and men are completely equal” was a repeated refrain. It was emphasized that husbands do not have legal authority or control over their wives, and that women had the right to work outside the home if they wished. There was even a class role-play where two students were selected to represent a marital discussion over this, with one spouse trying to order the other one to stay home and care for the kids and the other one insisting on their right to earn money themselves. It was clearly intended to reproach patriarchal norms, but the folks in my class had fun with it and role-played their own gender-flipped version, with a stay-at-home-dad arguing for the right to work against a businesswoman mom.

My Civic Integration Days 1 and 2, before my trip to China, were taught by E., a charismatic African-French woman. She was somehow both dead serious all the time and an incredible comedian, reeling off the clearly state-mandated talking points and then enlivening it with her own commentary that really helped it come alive. In discussing French constitutional values, she glossed “solidarité” as “giving a damn about other people.” She was particularly fierce when describing human rights and Enlightenment values. “In France, if you hit your kid, the state will damn well take your kid away from you.” In the FGM-is-bad discussion, she poignantly described the horror of a girl being mutilated by her own family, and launched an uncomfortable but salutary call-and-response for the folks in class to say what they felt about it.

Another time, the official slideshow was doubling down on the importance of education. Education is mandatory, it’s a parent’s responsibility to their child, it’s free and there’s state support to help you access it, it’s a path to personal and social advancement, et cetera, et cetera. E. said all that, then added, “That means if you don’t send your kid to school, you will FUCK UP THEIR LIFE and it will be TOTALLY YOUR FAULT!” At a different point in the education discussion, she quipped “Schools will not teach your children forbidden magics, despite what Harry Potter tells you.”

At one point, the official slideshow was solemnly relating that in the modern age, France accepts immigrants from around the world and has become a society of many different ethnic backgrounds and mixed-race people.

“And why are there mixed-race people?” she asked the class rhetorically. (In French, of course). “Because people moving to new countries don’t just masturbate!” There was a brief pause of utter shock — I saw a guy from Indonesia cover his face with his hands — and then the room burst out in laughter.

One other interesting thing I’ve really noticed about France, both in the Civic Integration Day curriculum and in day-to-day life, is a strong form of “linguistic nationalism” that doesn’t really pattern-match with the Anglosphere. In American English, if enough people make the same error or use made-up slang long enough, it becomes an acceptable version of the language, generally considered no better or worse than something from the pen of Shakespeare or Franklin or Melville.

In France, there is a One True Canonical French Language, decided by a National Academy led by forty sword-bearing dignitaries named the Immortals (seriously), and even though nobody actually speaks it perfectly and tons of people actively try to subvert it, everyone at least relates to it as the standard. And the French language, in both its official version and its penumbra of faster-evolving dialects, is central to the concept of being French. Code-switching is super common: even if you speak totally unofficial verlan slang with your friends or join a half-anglophone Discord group, you’re probably still speaking Immortal-approved old-school French with your boss. My in-laws sometimes debate French grammatical forms over the dinner table, and they occasionally won’t know the answer and will pause to look up the canonical construction on their phones. This is not just a family thing, this is a national thing. When officials proposed to remove the circumflex (the little thing on top of this î) in 2016, a mass movement to defend the circumflex sprung up overnight. There were protests in the street! (Admittedly, that’s quite a low bar here).

The Civic Integration Days definitely conveyed the message that you could be black, brown or white, gay, straight or trans, male, female, or non-binary, Christian, Muslim or Jewish, atheist or theist or agnostic, and be truly French. But you could not be a non-French-speaker and be truly French. If you want to be French, you absolutely have to speak the French language. If you didn’t speak it, it was your duty to learn it. If your kids did not speak it, special classes to help them learn French are available for free, and it is your duty to speak French with them at home.

This is interestingly distinct from U.S. politics, where even the extreme far-right Republican Party will happily buy ads and give speeches in Spanish advancing their white-straight-Christian identity politics. In France, it would be egregiously far-right to suggest that a person of Middle Eastern descent and Muslim faith cannot be French, but it’s entirely “normie lib” mainstream to say that someone who cannot speak French cannot be French, and it would be (and has been) wildly controversial even within the center and left for a French politician to speak at all in Arabic.

I am now simultaneously excellent at speaking French, in the sense that I can easily communicate pretty much any thought in my head and be understood, and still pretty bad at speaking French, because I constantly make errors (especially with stuff English doesn’t have, like noun gender and some of the more recherché forms of verb conjugation and tenses). But this is true of everyone, apparently, including native French speakers! There are entire tenses that barely anyone uses and that you only see in old books these days. Big chunks of the official French language are “legacy code” from the 1600s and 1700s intended to display erudition in the complex Versailles-era webs of nobility and intelligentsia, and a deep appreciation of the beauty, complexity, and difficulty of the French language still remains a profound cultural value.

On a more somber note, I think that people in the U.S. really, really, really don’t realize the extent to which we’ve lost Europe. A recent poll found that 37% of French respondents described the U.S. as a “threat,” 29% as a “competitor,” and just 10% as a “close ally.” Since 2025, American aid to Ukraine has essentially ended, and the EU has been stepping up to help fund the (increasingly successful!) fight for freedom. America’s still selling some weapons, but the EU is now paying for them — we’re not an ally anymore, we’re an arms dealer.

In (my liberal-leaning bubble of) France today, Trump is spoken of in the same breath as Putin: the two vile autocrats on either side of the European Union, both insulting European values and threatening to invade European territory. France actually sent troops to Greenland in January 2026, along with Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, clearly to deter the threatened “Venezuela-style” American invasion. And that was an overt, public, acknowledged act. There was also that one time in March 2025 when a French nuclear attack submarine mysteriously surfaced in Halifax right when the maniac in the White House was threatening to invade Canada. France has a substantial military and economic base with independent nuclear arms capacity, and it’s realized this kind of great-power brinkmanship is, sadly, needed now.

In March 2026, President Macron announced a massive new “forward deterrence” military posture, increasing the French nuclear arsenal and announcing unprecedented plans to deploy French nuclear-armed fighter jets in partnership with (and potentially on the territory of) Britain, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, and, notably, Denmark. France will become the third-ever country to operate a “nuclear weapons sharing” program like this, after the longstanding U.S./NATO agreements with the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey and the more recent Russian agreement with Belarus. (There’s also widespread speculation that a recent 2025 defense pact could soon lead to Pakistan sharing its nuclear arsenal with Saudi Arabia).

France has stepped up to become the new nuclear guarantor of European freedom. A balance of terror isn’t great, but it’s better than falling down and shattering.

This stuff may have been a blip in the American news cycle, but it’s an epochal realignment in Europe. De Gaulle was right: the Americans are not to be trusted in the long term. Sure, individual Americans are still welcome as tourists in Paris, but so are individual Chinese and the Saudis and even some Russian citizens, although EU visa spots for them are now very strict and limited. Sure, America heroically fought the Nazis in World War II, but so did Soviet Russia, and that doesn’t make Putin your friend. The U.S. is no longer on the same team as France, NATO is a dead letter, and that’s entirely 100% America’s fault. I weep for my country of birth, but I’m very proud of France.

In American discourse, I’ve recently read many people asking some variation of the question “what will we do when AI automates all the jobs?” Leaving aside the highly debatable plausibility or practicality of the premise, I think this is fundamentally a culture-bound question to ask, one that makes sense in places like America and China where “workism” is a central value but doesn’t make sense in many other fragments of humanity. This doesn’t even parse as a sensible question in France, for two very good reasons. One, because if you live in France you already have an answer for what you would do if you don’t have work today: you’d go to the park or a museum or a café or something. And two, because if someone’s considering automating your job it’s time for a strike, riot, protest vote, or all three.

When I went back to the U.S. to visit my family, I was struck by the sudden predominance of AI-related ads, and shifting from U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, broader-Anglosphere)-based to EU-based news outlets reveals a sharp discrepancy in AI-related headlines. I’ve even seen major AI commentators writing things along the lines of “It’s not all about the technology, there won’t be a magic wave of hyper-prosperity due to LLMs alone, whether AI has a net positive or negative outcome for the average person depends on choices made in politics and institutional structures.” Really? No way! This would not be a surprise in France, where centuries of tumultuous democratic politics since before the Industrial Revolution really got started have inculcated a deep knowledge that technology is made for people, not people for technology.

Futurist and Substacker once gave a presentation called “The future of work is artisanal cheese,” about how handmade imperfect crafts, where the whole point is that it’s made by human hands, are the most AI-proof of jobs now. France seems rather well prepared for that future. All the stuff that seems idiosyncratic and gets criticized as inefficient, the super-strict labor protections and super-generous vacation days and pensions and, yes, the heavily regulated artisanal cheese, now looks like a really good hedge against automation-induced social disruption. And hey, while you’ve got all that stuff so that people still have jobs, you can still enjoy the mass-produced machine-extruded version industrielle as a cheaper option, a supply chain backstop, or just another variety! Oreos didn’t wipe out home-baked cookies, we can have both. I think the French labor market model points towards a future in which we can have AI-assisted hyper-automation to make amazing technological progress and have lots of human jobs to give people a sense of meaning, dignity, and independence.

To be clear, every word of what I write about France, now and most likely forever, is profoundly biased by my personal circumstances. Of course France seems utopian to me, I’m a newlywed in Paris! I don’t have “rose-tinted spectacles” so much as “rose-tinted corneal implants” — impossible to peer around and very difficult to remove. La vie en rose, so to speak.

Thanks to the pioneering ecological urbanism efforts of Anne Hidalgo’s mayoralty (set to be continued by the new Gregoire mayoralty), Paris has now overtaken Amsterdam as the bike lanes capital of the world, with a network over 1,500 kilometers long in total, interweaving throughout the city. And it is awesome. I haven’t owned a bicycle of my own since I was a child, with walking, backpacking, kayaking, buses, rideshares, trains, and planes being my primary modes of locomotion in my adult life. But I don’t even need to own my own bike to bike all the time now! The city of Paris provides high-quality bicycle rentals at the incredibly reasonable price of three euros per hour, and that Velib system — a rough portmanteau of “free bikes” — isn’t entirely frictionless, but it’s pretty freaking close. Sometimes you go to a Velib station and all the bikes are already taken, and on sunny days it can be hard to read the little screens where you tap in your code to unlock the bikes, but overall the system is just spectacular.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: April 10, 2026

Paris just voted to double down on environmental transformation…

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a month ago · 51 likes · 1 comment

The bike lanes interweave between paved road alongside cars, paved road separated by barriers, broad sidewalks, and even sandy trails in the parks. You can really just pick one up and go wherever you want anywhere in the city. It’s incredibly convenient, and healthy, and fun.

I haven’t been inside a car in months2 (and, like, only 20ish times total since moving to France in September, half of those being taxis during the China trip!), and I’m absolutely loving it. If it weren’t for reading the news, I would never have known that there was a global fossil fuel shock due to the stupid war in the Strait of Hormuz.

In fact, even if all fossil fuels were Thanos-snapped into nonexistence tomorrow, France would be better prepared to weather the ensuing chaos than almost anywhere else in the developed world. A recent report finds that France had a national grid of 95.2% zero-carbon electricity (!) in 2025 as electricity production hit all-time highs, with fast-growing solar and wind at 27% and French specialty nuclear at 68.2%.

And even transport and heating, classically fossil fuel-dominated sectors (France still gets around 60% of its total energy from fossil fuels even with the almost-totally-clean electric grid due to this), are rapidly decarbonizing. A new national energy law passed in February 2026 set a target for 70% of French energy to come from decarbonized electricity by 2035. Chinese EVs like BYD are an increasingly common sight on Paris streets. The Paris Metro is fully electric, and increasingly the buses are 100% electric too. Just recently in April 2026, the state-owned EDF utility announced an extra 240 million euros in new funding to help French consumers purchase electric heat pumps and electric heavy-duty trucks to escape the shackles of price-skyrocketing fossil fuels. Paris is increasingly a solarpunk city in a solarpunk (and atompunk) country.

Recently, my wife and I were cycling through the lovely Parc de Vincennes when we noticed other cyclists ahead of us stopped in the middle of the road and pointing at something on the ground. I was delighted to observe a sprightly serpent in our path.

I’ve always been fond of snakes, and this was an impressive one. I managed to snap a picture while it was still crossing and before it slithered away into the long grass. Indispensable citizen science app iNaturalist informed me that it was a fine specimen of Zamenis longissimus, a species among the largest serpents in Europe. Its common name, I was thrilled to note, was the Aesculapian Snake. This is the snake that through long association with Asklepios/Aesculapius, the son of Apollo long worshipped as the Greco-Roman god of healing, became a symbol of medicine when twined around a staff. (One snake twined around a staff, not two: two snakes on a staff is the caduceus, a symbol of Hermes/Mercury, often confused with the medical snake staff these days). Aesculapian snakes are non-venomous, and were sacred animals to the doctor-priests of their namesake, used in healing rituals and allowed to slither around on the floor of temple-hospitals in the ancient Mediterranean. I would 100% sign up for the inclusion of friendly snakes in doctor’s visits if that was an option today, but I sadly doubt that it will catch on again anytime soon.

Later on the same journey, we stopped at a snack kiosk near the Lac Daumesnil which offered their customers free use of a fascinating new climate adaptation measure. It was a contraption that was a mix of an air-blower and a sprinkler, blowing a hearty mix of cold water and high-pressure air at the user. I shoved my face straight in it three times in quick succession, and I found it very similar to the experience of being struck full-frontal by a head-high wave when wading in the Gulf of Maine. I walked back towards my Velib bike a little bit wobbly, but definitely cooled down.

I’ve meant to write and share this piece for months, but I’ve hesitated and procrastinated on it a lot — I think for two main reasons. First, because I couldn’t come up with a unifying narrative for all these bits and pieces I wanted to share. I still can’t, but I’ve decided to share them anyway, hence “Scattered Thoughts.” Second, because I almost feel guilty about getting to live this dreamlike life — I’m a freaking newlywed writer in Paris! — at such a dark and chaotic time for the United States, the nation of my birth. I feel as though I’m getting away with something, as though it would be unkind bragging to share these stories with my majority-American audience. I felt fortunate to go on the reporting journey to China too, of course, but that at least was work, I was making an effort to go there and share the story. All this stuff in France has just become my ordinary daily life.

Nonetheless, I’m sharing it. As with my previous article on France, I think that one way it could be helpful to other nations is by helping to redefine the boundaries of the possible. Ambitions can be high. We can have nice things. We can welcome immigrants, build strong civic institutions and values, fill cities with parks and pedestrianized plazas and bike lanes, celebrate the joys of life. It’s all doable.

As of April 1 2026, the IUCN reports that a landmark 10% of Earth’s oceans are now covered by marine protected areas (MPAs) of some kind! The new High Seas Treaty, which came into force in January 2026, should soon allow the creation first-ever MPAs in international waters as well. Ocean conservation is advancing rapidly, and might just provide vital “breathing space” for key species and ecosystems to migrate and adapt their way to a new equilibrium in the warming waters of the Anthropocene.

Nitrosopumilus maritimus, an archaean single-celled microorganism, is ultra-common through Earth’s oceans and serves as a vital foundation of the entire plankton food chain thanks to its ability to oxidize ammonia making nitrogen more bio-available. Recent experiments (a collaboration supported by grants from both the U.S. and China) found that under high-temperature and iron-limited conditions, N. maritimus was able to very successfully adapt to use less iron more efficiently, potentially making them even more important and supportive in warming seas. Great news!

Neptune grass (Posidonia oceanica) is a major ecosystem-building seagrass throughout the Mediterranean, but has declined in much of its range. Now, a new study finds that Neptune grass beds have rebounded rapidly off the French city of Marseille since new environmental regulations and the building of a wastewater treatment plant (both in the 1980s) and are now thriving in the bay. City-funded research by GIS Posidonie checked in on earlier work to find that two quadrats had seen coverage increase from 47% to 94% and 6% to 81% respectively from 1987 to 2025. Excellent news!

Hungary

In an epic win for democracy and liberalism, infamously corrupt pro-Russian dictator-wannabe Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party were overwhelmingly defeated at the elections held in Hungary on April 12, 2026. The new Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, won in a historic landslide with record-high voter turnout, securing a two-thirds supermajority of 138 legislative seats out of 199, while Fidesz fell to 55 seats, down from 135 at the last election. Critically, the supermajority means that Tisza will be able to change Hungary’s constitution and overturn many Fidesz laws intended to entrench far-right extremists’ power. Absolutely SPECTACULAR news! A template.

This has excellent implications far beyond Hungary’s borders. Orbán had vetoed many key European Union plans (including using frozen Russian assets to help support the defenders of Ukraine), and the EU will likely now be far more cohesive and unified. Furthermore, the loathsome current American regime was closely tied to Fidesz, which funded many major far-right ideologues. This is a global victory for freedom!

Paul Krugman

The Axis of Autocracy Loses a Wheel

After Victor Orbán’s Fidesz party took power in 2010, Hungary became a role model for those who admired corruption, fascism, and loyalty to Vladimir Putin. Orbán’s regime brought widespread crony capitalism, captured Hungarian media outlets, and installed corrupt judges. He actively undermined solidarity within the European Union and worked to block aid…

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a month ago · 127 likes · 2 comments · Paul Krugman

Nigeria

The city of Kano in northern Nigeria is historically ultraconservative, ruled by Sharia law1 and male-dominated. Now, a new cooperative called Mata Halla (“exclusively women” in the local Hausa language) has imported a fleet of 120 hot-pink all-electric tricycle rickshaws from India (powered via battery-swapping from two solar charging stations!) and built a network of women drivers (often supporting children alone) who accept only women passengers. This bold challenging of social norms is making both independent business revenue and reliable safe mobility much more accessible to the women of Kano! EV rickshaws are also less polluting and more reliable, and Mata Halla plans to expand fast — there’s already a waiting list of 200 more women. The electrotech revolution arrives in magnificently surprising guises. AWESOME work!

Brazil

A project is underway to reintroduce blue-and-yellow macaws to Tijuca National Park, an urban rainforest in the heart of Rio de Janeiro! These macaws were last seen in Rio city in 1818. Four macaws from in captivity are currently in an interim enclosure in the park and set to be released in September 2026, with plans to continue through releasing 50 macaws. Tijuca is already home to reintroduced (and vaccinated) howler monkeys among others. True Anthropocene ecological urbanism! Great work.

There’s widespread concern about escalating droughts threatening the unparalleled richness of the Amazon Rainforest. Now, a great new study using long-term research into lowland shallow water table areas (swampy wetland forest, essentially) a category which covers up to 36% of all trees in the Amazon, finds that they have been highly resistant to recent droughts, unlike upland and deep-water-table forests. Not only have they survived, they’ve gained biomass (grown bigger) and increased recruitment (more young trees). Emerging climate-resilient refugia! Highly encouraging news.

“Our research goes against the belief that the Amazon is collapsing.

And this is big because someone needs to say that things are more patchy [than generally believed] and there are possibilities of a positive outcome. Because then, if there are such possibilities, you can go and protect these specific areas.”

— Dr. Flávia Costa

Greece

Greece is experiencing a super-fast renewables revolution! A series of solar projects on former lignite coal mines in the north have been completed, totaling 2.13 GW (2,130 MW!) of capacity and providing 6% of the entire nation’s power. Two nearby grid-scale batteries are also complete, with more (and pumped hydro!) underway.

Greece recently saw its first-ever twelve-month period with wind and solar producing more electricity than fossil fuels, and relatedly became a net exporter of electricity. Solar and wind output doubled in five years. Hellenic electrification is going great! This is the kind of ultra-fast transition story now increasingly common worldwide.

Central African Republic

The Central African Republic is one of the most impoverished countries on Earth and was in a state of civil war from 2012 to 2025. Now, seeds of hope are emerging around the remote Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the CAR’s southwest, home to rich Congo Basin rainforests, gorillas, and the utterly unique Dzanga Bai clearing where mineral-rich soil has been known to attract over 200 forest elephants at once. 800 ecotourists managed to visit the park in 2025, generating $1 million in revenue and providing a lifeline of economic growth for local communities. Mobile village health services and human rights legal aid center have sprung up, serving the long-marginalized Ba’aka indigenous people of the area. Extraordinary and noble work!

Croatia

In April 2026, the city of Zagreb, Croatia became the first-ever spot in the European Union where you can book a driverless robotaxi. The tech is from Chinese titan Pony.ai (installed in 100% electric Arcfox SUVs from BAIC) and they’re available to hire for rides on both the Uber and the local Verne ride-hailing apps. Wow!

New Zealand

The kākāpō (Strigops habroptilus) a famed ground-dwelling, nocturnal, and flightless parrot, continues to have a record-high breeding season in 2026! As of mid-April, 95 chicks are now growing across several predator-free sanctuary islands after a bumper crop of rīmu berries encouraged reproduction. This is a huge deal for the future of a species with only 235 adults alive. Excellent news, and great conservation work!

United States

As a cabal of criminal cowards continues to corrupt the halls of power, the American people fight on to build a brighter future!

For the first month ever, renewables produced more electricity than fossil gas on the nationwide U.S. grid in March 2026, reaching 35% of total generation! Zero-carbon sources (renewables plus nuclear) provided over 50% of U.S. electricity that same month. Renewables still overwhelmingly dominate new construction. Great news!

In a highly impactful local election, a team of explicitly pro-clean energy candidates won an 8-6 majority on the board of the Salt River Project, the largest utility in Arizona, despite both intense anti-renewables spending and an archaic landowners-only voting system! This will turn the body governing power in one of the sunniest parts of the country from a center of delay-ism into proactive clean electrifiers!

Tom Steyer2, longtime climate activist and clean energy funder, is now a Democratic candidate in a strong position to potentially become the next Governor of California, with a primary set for June 2, 2026. Check out Bill McKibben’s endorsement!

The Crucial Years

Clean energy needs actual champions

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a month ago · 298 likes · 23 comments · Bill McKibben

Geothermal pioneer Fervo signed a deal to buy 1.75 GW worth of turbines for their upcoming clean power plant build-outs. Their 500 MW Cape Station project in Utah should start generating electricity by end-2026, and a Fervo IPO is reportedly soon.

Over 20 years, Wisconsin man Tim Friede has let himself be bitten by a range of the world’s most venomous snakes. Over 200 times in total, including many extreme near-death experiences. Now, a potential universal snake antivenom is being developed based on his blood, which has assembled a uniquely powerful range of antibodies. Snake bites kill ~130,000 people per year, and modelers warn climate change may push more snakes towards human cities. An extraordinary story of gonzo science heroism!

Minnesota has approved Xcel Energy’s first-in-the-nation plan to create a utility-owned virtual power plant! Xcel will build out 200 MW of small-scale batteries dotted around the state over the next few years, software-linked to provide power together when needed like one power plant. Decentralized local clean energy!

Balcony solar keeps advancing fast across America! After Maine joined Utah in signing sensible deregulation into law, Colorado and Maryland now join Virginia in passing a bill through both legislative chambers, soon to be signed into law. A full 20 more states are still actively considering bills in this year’s session. Spectacular work!

Tsung Xu is a serial entrepreneur who went viral in 2025 for designing and 3D printing a custom VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drone capable of flying up to 130 miles. By himself, in his garage in California, while learning the relevant CAD design software. He’s since become the founder and CEO of Vight, a new U.S. startup planning to build human-carrying eVTOLs — electric flying cars. He writes on Substack at .

In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Mr. Xu’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification (links, etc) added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.

You rose to a degree of celebrity when you revealed last year that you had built one of the world’s longest-range homemade drones, an electric VTOL model that flew 90 miles, at home in your garage with 3D printing. While learning how to use CAD design software at the same time. Can you tell me how that happened? Because to use the buzzwords of today, that’s an incredibly agentic thing to be doing. That’s a really cool thing to just wake up and decide to do one day.

Yeah, sure! I should clarify that the goal was having to fly 130 miles. It didn’t fly 130 miles. It was capable of it, but I ended up crashing it before I had it fly that long.

And it wasn’t exactly celebrity per se. I wouldn’t put it that way. It did kind of go viral online in a sense.

What led to that was, I was looking at what startups I wanted to build in terms of the focus of the next 20 to 30 years of my life. I started to look into personal eVTOLs. And because of that, I thought, okay, well, if I actually like building drones and I find it enjoyable and get intuition about it, it’s going to be a really good starting point for me technically. Because, you know, I didn’t have an aerospace background.

So the small drone that you were talking about, the one that I built, the VTOL, that was the third that I’d built. I’d learned to 3D print properly to do it. I had designed everything myself.

Before that I had built a similar VTOL that was a similar size but actually made out of foam. That one I also managed to get flying at about the same amount of time, after about 90 or 100 days of work.

Before that, I’d assembled a reasonably sized quadcopter, 20-inch frame, where I put an obstacle avoidance system. It was LIDAR, point LIDAR and also vision-based obstacle avoidance as well.

It was definitely a massive stretch for me, that specific project, because I had never done any proper aerodynamic analysis before. There were just many things that I had to learn. But I was just really motivated and so that’s what sort of led me to it.

Now, I do not have the technical expertise to even come close to that. But I’m fascinated by the electrotech revolution, and I write a lot about just the emerging amazing range of stuff we can do with electric motors.

This is a very technically impressive thing that you just did. You mentioned that the files that you, a software beginner, made at home in CAD are actually export-controlled under U.S. regulation because a drone that can fly past a certain limit is categorized as a militarily relevant technology. And yet you literally designed and built this yourself from scratch.

Yeah, it’s an interesting clash of legacy regulations that weren’t designed with this tech stack in mind. The exact requirement I believe was 60 minutes of battery life to power flight. You design that, it’s technically export controlled.

People were telling me, why don’t you just put a smaller battery in it and release that open source? I just don’t want to have any legal issues, so I didn’t.

I mean, the tech stack now…there’s a few reasons. Because batteries are good enough now for that type of endurance, and then also electric motors are now power dense and torque dense enough such that you can have something flying with relatively light motors. In the structure, the airframe, on a small scale UAV, you can use 3D printed materials that are very, very light.

So yes, it’s very much possible to do that and it sort of has been for for a little while. But yeah, it is kind of crazy that something you can build in your garage can be export-controlled.

My brother has a DJI drone, just a camera drone for fun, and it’s import-controlled. It’s one gram under the maximum size of drone you’re allowed to import into the U.S. from China. I visited China in January, and I traveled around and wrote a bunch about some of the technology that’s spreading there faster.

One thing I was impressed by was their willingness to play around with the new electric tech stack. I actually saw a human-carrying eVTOL by EHang at their Suigang Wharf test site in Guangzhou and wrote an article about that.

What are your thoughts on the institutional culture around drones in the U.S. and what that’s been like to navigate as an eVTOL inventor? How much of a problem is it to navigate these export controls and import controls and so on?

That’s a good question. There’s kind of many parts to that. I’m focused on personal use manned details right now, but on the unmanned side, I can speak to that. “Beyond visual light of sight” was something where regulations in the U.S were not passed for a long time for commercial use, which definitely did hamper the drone industry.

I think on the manned side, though, in terms of manned eVTOL, you mentioned EHang. You know, China’s got a very different set of use cases for manned eVTOL. It’s very much about urban air taxi tourism. There’s very few people in China who have land. There’s very few people who have even a yard of any description to be able to land any VTOL, let alone like an acre or more to sort of comfortably land a manned VTOL.

So institutionally in the U.S., the regulations have actually been quite forward-thinking in terms of manned eVTOL, and I would say specifically for personal use manned eVTOL.

My startup now, Vight, which I decided to start after the drone experiments I did, is effectively a play on leveraging these new regulations. These new MOSAIC regulations that the FAA finalized summer last year. The means of compliance for those, basically how you certify against these regulations, will be finalized in the next few months.

Those regulations are world first. There hasn’t been another country in the world that has these these regulations allowing this class of aircraft with vertical lift capabilities to be built and designed and certified. I actually think the U.S. is quite forward thinking on this front. And yeah, that’s obviously very, very helpful for what we’re trying to do at Vight, my startup.

But certainly on the drone side of things, we haven’t been as forward-thinking in terms of the commercial use cases as I think a lot of people in the drone industry would have liked.

I’ve done some research on this, but I want to hear it from you because you have such an intimate experience, and I think you’d explain it for our readers very well.

Why are electric motors specifically, and the incredible exponential progress in battery technologies, so key to doing this?

Why was there no 1960s gas-powered flying car? Why are there no internal combustion engine-powered quadcopter drones?

What are the key things that are making this happen now?

That’s a great question!

I would say there’s two — well, there’s more than two, but two pretty important, obstacles that the electric tech stack solves.

The more obvious one that we’ve already spoken about is that the batteries and the electric motors are now power dense enough and have enough torque to actually be able to hover and fly an aircraft. It was just very hard before now, having a VTOL. There were experiments from the 50s, but they were very hard to control. With electric motors, you can now control them using software, effectively using motor controllers that allow power to be switched at very, very fast and very, very precise rates such that you can actually have motors able to spin up and spin down their RPM and hence their power very, very quickly.

Let’s say you just have a basic four-rotor drone. In that drone, the reason it can hover is because the rotors and the motors are spinning an constantly adjusting their RPM to be able to keep that drone in position, at the same altitude. Basically it’s a software and it’s a controls challenge, and those capabilities were really not available, both on the software side and on the hardware to control those motors, certainly in a cheap enough way, until like the last 15 years max.

I was speaking to a Stanford professor who was telling me like 20 years ago, he bought a controller to for a VTOL drone at the time. It was massive. It was, you know, $10,000 or more.

The software has gotten simpler. The hardware has gotten smaller, cheaper, lighter, better, and faster. You know, it shifts all these underlying factors.

And all these things that have helped computers get better have also helped a lot of this underlying hardware and software technology for drones get better as well, and for VTOL capable aircraft.

Not Boring by Packy McCormick

The Electric Slide

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8 months ago · 1009 likes · 72 comments · Packy McCormick and Sam D'Amico

Fundamentally, what you’re telling me is that electrons are much more controllable than molecules.

You can manage electrons with software and have them go down tiny wires to exactly where you want them. And with molecules, fuel, basically you’re setting a bunch of stuff on fire and hoping for the best. Which served us well for a long time! But a contained explosion is a lot harder to control than precise applications of electric current.

Yeah, and it is that.

It’s also that once you’ve got those controlled explosions, say in a helicopter. Say in a Robinson, like a helicopter that you might have for TV crews or maybe a helicopter a hospital might use, or for flight training.

You have these two or four seat Robinson helicopters and you have your internal combustion engine in there. Now, that engine is coupled to the main rotor and then a tail rotor with mechanical linkages. Those linkages are all mechanical. Without autonomous capabilities it’s actually really hard for a person to hover just a single rotor. Well, it’s technically two, but that takes quite a bit of practice and skill to do really well.

It’s actually impossible for a human to control a drone.

Without software organization, right? You’re basically providing inputs into it and the software takes your human input. You say “Okay, I want to move forward,” and the software’s going to take that and translate that based on where the drone is and what sort of disturbances it has in the wind and everything and then it’s gonna translate that into changes in motor RPMs for each of the rotors. It can do that.

So it’s not a direct one-to-one, whereas in a helicopter or an aircraft, you’re literally manipulating it via control surfaces. In a fixed wing aircraft, in a helicopter, you’re basically manipulating the RPM directly through throttle.

You can’t do that with four different motors or even like eight different motors on our manned configuration. It becomes just an impossible challenge to do without some sort of orientation and software

Fascinating. I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way, but you’re right. Humans can’t process fast enough to give little corrections to how fast each rotor should spin to compensate for wind speed. You just can’t do that.

Yeah, and it’s happening so quickly. The response time of those loops is now in milliseconds, running in a stable way.

Yeah, wow, that’s amazing.

So, now that we’ve covered some of the background, what is your vision for your current startup? Both in the medium long-term, like moving to full human-carrying testing, and the long long-term. In 20 years, if everything goes the way you want it to, what amazing stuff will be possible thanks to Vight? What’s your ideal future for this technology that you’re personally working on?

We can start with the vision and I’ll work back. We want to make door-to-door flying as normal as driving.

That sounds very challenging, and it is. It’s a very very hard problem. There’s nothing today that really allows us to do that.

But the technology is getting there. The regulations are there! So we see a path to make that happen.

On the first generation product and what we want that to be, it’s really going to be something that allows for folks who have access to at least one acre of land to be able to take off just with very very simplified controls. So just very easy to fly.

If any of your readers has ever tried to go on an introductory test flight in an aircraft, it takes some practice. It takes some skill. We want to like simplify that flying experience while making it safe for people to go to fly those things.

Folks with at least an acre of land, that’s sort of the primary target market for now for the first-gen product. We also want to focus on flight schools and flight clubs. Flight schools are using Cessna 172s for flight training, which are airframes from the 1960s and engines based on technology from the 60s. There just hasn’t been much progress in the types of aircraft that you can actually learn to fly in.

Those are sort of the primary use cases. And then also with flight clubs, it’s folks who buy a monthly subscription to basically access aircraft and flying aircraft. It’s a similar thing there to personal use, but you’re just basically paying for fractional access to that aircraft.

Again, it’s giving them just a very simple easy-to-fly thing. You can take off on land you have, with more control than a helicopter in a very small area. But also, you will be able to cruise over 100 miles per hour, 110 miles per hour. You can actually enjoy flying like you would in a fixed wing, and actually have useful range!

Initially the utility is more leisure focused. Like going out to a remote hiking trail or a golf course or a winery, or even just going for an hour joyride. It’s two seats, so it’s not just something that you do yourself, it’s something that you can take someone else on that experience with.

Over time, you start to actually get more utility out of this product. With a range of 75 miles, potentially a little bit more, you actually start to be able to do hops between where you live and then also a place of work or somewhere where you are frequently.

So leisure use cases and then also starting to have more utility, even in this initial product. And over generations of products, you actually start to get more and more utility as you can increase the volumes on the products that you’re building and then also drive down the cost.

You mentioned access to one acre of land for a safe landing space. I’m from Maine, and there’s a lot of people in Maine who own boats who don’t have waterfront property. You could envision people in the 2050s taking their electric car with a trailer to pull their flying electric car over to the town flying carport. Or maybe just storing it there like boats in a dry dock, and then just taking it out there to the common landing and takeoff space.

You could definitely see them being used at an airport, for example.

What we want to do, though, is more like this. One of the challenges of personal aviation is the dependence on airports. There’s only so many places you can take off and land from, and it’s a choke point.

In the air, there’s a ton of space. There’s no infrastructure that you have to stop at like you would on the ground for a car, but airports are that choke point.

So we really want to make it easy for folks to be able to fly without having to go somewhere else to fly. You can fly from where you are, whether that’s your own property or even other private property, you’ll be able to take off and land from any property.

And to your point about boats, we also want to have a water-capable version as well that can actually take off and land from water. That won’t be the first product but there’s certainly something there. You will take a slight range penalty, I’m going to say it’ll be slightly heavier, but you’ll be able to take off on land from lakeside properties, marinas.

It’s going to afford many different types of experiences that you can’t really get today. Use cases that you cannot really have today because technologies have not been integrated and developed into these types of products before.

What are your thoughts about the natural world? Even in existing large-scale aviation, bird strikes are a problem. You mentioned flying as common as driving. There’s currently a really, really high death toll, animal and also human, from car crashes on public roads. What are the thoughts you give to safety, for both the person in the vehicle and the people or animals outside the vehicle, to avoid collisions?

First of all, there is just, obviously, a ton more space in the area. Like, you mentioned bird strikes. Bird strikes do happen. It’s definitely a use case that we designed for, for the aircraft to be able to handle. Now, having said that, I would say that it’s very uncommon.

We want to design for safety. There’s several aspects of this. So we have a distributed electric propulsion system, which is basically what we’re talking about before, with multi-rotor. Having eight rotors means that you can have one rotor go out still fly to your destination, or if you can’t fly to destination for some reason you can find a landing spot nearby and that’s totally fine.

We also have redundancy in terms of the packs. We’ll be able to have one battery pack go out, out of many, and then with that pack out you’ll still be able to do that same thing where you’ll still be able to fly to a safe landing zone.

Then also we’ll have a ballistic chute able to deploy if for whatever reason you have more than one motor go out, but again, we’re talking about very, very improbable things that are very, very unlikely to happen.

Safety is absolutely really, really important for us. Designing a way to keep the occupants safe, to keep people around you safe.

When the aircraft is flying, it’s not that difficult, if you think about how hard it is for cars on the ground. For example, Waymo, to actually get their self-driving system, look at all the sensors that that car uses to be able to drive autonomously well.

It’s a much, much harder problem to solve on the ground. Where you’ve got a lot more obstacles, you’ve got a lot more people, you’ve got kids on the sidewalk, you’ve got cyclists, you’ve got unpredictable other drivers, and everything’s very close to the car. The car is operating very close to humans.

Whereas in the air, it’s a bit different. In the air, there’s a lot more space. You’re able to have a lot more space between you and other obstacles. Other aircraft, birds, the ground. You’re able to actually design that system. It’s much easier to develop that autonomous system than it is to develop something on the ground.

We’ll be developing with autonomous capabilities from the first-gen product. We’ll allow the aircraft to be as autonomous as the FAA and regulations will allow us to be! And that means a very high level of autonomy even in the first-gen product. You’re still going to have a license, but once you do, it’ll be a very, very seamless experience if you wanted to make it quite autonomous.

I’m guessing that includes collision avoidance software and stuff like that.

Exactly. We would have that type of software. Basically, it’s not the same but it’s similar in principle to that type of feature that allows a drone to hover.

As the world has famously seen with every other type of transportation technology ever, new transportation technology has military and national security implications. Just lately in Ukraine and Iran we’ve seen that small, fairly cheap-to-produce drones have become kind of a central weapon of war.

The U.S. even requested military aid from Ukraine specifically to try to deal with drone issues in the Iran War. And it’s been a source of U.S. security concerns that China makes an overwhelming majority of the world’s drones.

Yours is one of a relatively few really innovative new U.S. electric flight startups, right up there with Archer and Joby and the other ones like that. That’s just my perspective, maybe there’s tons of secret stealth startups I don’t know about.

Have you got any interest or concern from any kind of national security establishment?

We’re focused on the commercial and the personal private use for full-scale eVTOLs.

When I say full-scale, our aircraft is a little bit smaller than a Joby or Archer. A Joby or Archer is like two and a half to 3,000 kilos, like six to 7,000 pounds.

Ours is just under two and a half thousand pounds, about 1100 kilos, max takeoff weight. Because it’s designed for two seats, it’s designed to have that smaller form factor.

There’s a really large market here for personal use. If you think about the history of personal transportation, the biggest use cases of the internal combustion engine ended up being the car. That led to Detroit and that led to creating a Model T. It wasn’t a company making a shared use vehicle like air taxis are today. It wasn’t for defense purposes per se.

Obviously later you had defense use cases, like the Jeep adapted from a car. But I would say that for us we think the market is just absolutely massive when it comes to personal use. If you look forward, you think about shrinking that form factor, with various types of technologies where you can start to fold the wings or compact the wings on landing.

That technology is going to mature. Batteries are going to mature to allow those types of motors and propulsion systems to be used. We just think that personal use market is really large. The analogy being the rise of the automobile. It just ended up being such a massive market.

There’s also such an interesting range of ancillary benefits from a world where electric aviation is common, even just with drones.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: December 23, 2025

Drone delivery just took off in Atlanta — and has the potential to both reduce car traffic and save lives with fast-response medical intervention…

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5 months ago · 18 likes · 1 comment

I really love the stories coming out of Zipline’s work in Africa, carrying blood transfusions and vaccines to villages that don’t even have road access. I’m really excited about that. This tech could be huge for Africa in general because it’s so hard to build roads there for a number of reasons.

And EHang, they just came out with a model of their crewed eVTOL that is designed for the Beijing firefighting department. It’s fire-engine red and everything. Even if it just has two seats, you can have one person driving it and one person being evacuated from a burning building.

They also came out with an ambulance model they tested in Spain, potentially in cooperation with the European Union. Again, even with a human-piloted two-seater, in a medical emergency, you could have the other seat be a person getting pulled out of a city to a hospital really, really quickly.

There’s a great quote, Isaac Asimov I think, that goes, “A good science fiction author predicts the engine, a great science fiction author predicts the car, a brilliant science fiction author predicts the suburbs.” What is the sort of suburb-level societal change stemming from this eVTOL technology that you think might happen?

This is a great question. I would say, firstly, it’s like what you said about Zipline, what you said about EHang. I think, over time, just as cars have become core infrastructure for everyday use, personal eVTOLs will become that new category of transportation. Zipline’s had that in Rwanda, where they’re now basically part of Rwanda’s critical infrastructure.

They’re doing some great work. I’m actually planning to visit East Africa in a couple weeks and I’ve been trying to get in contact with Zipline.

In terms of the societal impacts, when you think about this type of technology, what it fundamentally does is it just fundamentally compresses distance. Just like how after World War II you had cars quite widely adopted in the U.S., starting to be adopted in Europe and Australia. That led to the highway network, it led to the ability to have suburbs. You fundamentally created a new mode of living called suburban life. There was no way you could have that many people living in suburban areas without the rise of the automobile.

Similarly with personal eVTOLs. With a car, you’re driving at like 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 miles per hour. You’re fundamentally constrained in how far away your suburbs can be from urban areas. L.A. is the worst example, it’s very sprawled. And of course, in Europe, Australia, they’re a bit less broad, especially in Europe because of public transportation and other things.

In a world where you can fly somewhere in, you can fly 120 miles in an hour, and then over time, 250 miles in an hour, you remove the constraints of living in suburbs that are 20 miles, 30 miles away from, from your place of work. So the societal change I’m pretty excited about is that at scale, this technology allows urban design to look very different.

I was talking to an investor about this and he said, hey, so should I start buying land? You know, like 50, 100 miles away from urban areas, that is like actually really nice land and where people want to live, but today it’s just not close enough to an urban area to make sense for what we’re talking about. And I think that’s true. You start to get to a point of being able to live 100 miles away, 150 or 200 miles away in the future, from urban areas, but still having access to the same sort of work options that you would want today. Having access to dense urban locations. People will be able to move out further away and still and still have that, and what that means is you could have small walkable neighborhoods that are further away and basically be more distributed.

There will just be pockets of these walkable neighborhoods where you’ll be able to fly using your light eVTOL! You’ll be able to get services. Right now, you might have trucks and vans delivering a lot of things to a lot of people. Amazon and et cetera. But over time, that could be Zipline, could be other things where you actually have drone delivery for a lot of services that you need. You will have autonomous trucks that can take goods out to you.

So it really sort of decouples where people want to live from where house prices are very expensive. Because everyone right now wants to live in large metros or near large urban areas where there’s the most competition for homes and there’s the least supply and the least build-out. So you can actually like help alleviate some of that pricing pressure that younger people have when it comes to like buying your first home!

I think that’s going to be something that is just a really exciting thing for like how we reorganize and sort of reshape where we live. Because one of the big constraints for that has always been modes of transport.

Can you get where you want to go in that period of time, in the amount of time for your commute or for other things? That actually makes that place liveable for most people.

That’s really just a fascinating concept, this pointillistic pattern of flight-linked walkable villages. This might add up to much less environmental impact, much less sprawl than a car-dominated landscape. Because fundamentally. a flying machine doesn’t need you to build a track through the air. Roads are obviously critical transport infrastructure, but they’re also so much impervious surface. Stormwater runs off them and causes floods. Animals die on them all the time. You need to cut through tons of stuff to build them.

You could envision, in the future, totally different housing developments, in much the same way people would think you had to be within walking or horse distance of a city before cars. You could envision housing developments that don’t even have like roads to them. A bunch of cabins in the middle of meadows or desert or something, very bucolic, maybe just a footpath to the nearest village, but everyone has their eVTOL in their yard and they can just fly into the city for a nice restaurant or theater. That opens up entirely new integrations with nature in a way, because you don’t need the constant car traffic.

Exactly! Exactly. I’ll add two things on this one.

You mentioned having footpaths between distributed neighborhoods. One thing I’m thinking is happening is the un-bundling of the car, in some ways.

You see eVTOLs on one side where they’re faster, they’re going to have enough range. You’re going to talk about 300, even like 500 miles of range within 20 years. That’s the sort of range. Everybody at a 250 miles per hour cruise. So it’s fundamentally just, 5x or more, really like 10x faster, than if you had to drive a car and deal with traffic.

So you’re going to have that, but on the other side, you’re going to have like small micro-cars or something. You see this already, it’s quite popular in Europe, in some parts of Asia.

And in the U.S. even, there’s literally communities where everyone just drives electric golf carts! Teenagers love it too, because you can now drive this without having to have a full driver’s license.

I was living in an Airbnb in Austin, for about a month, sort of in the suburbs. and most people were just driving golf carts around the neighborhood. So I think you’re going to see more of that as well and more of that adoption.

I think that’s a really important part of this. Personally, it just allows for a very different way of living.

You’re also seeing stuff like CA Forever. They want to build a new city in California. But for that neighborhood to be able to access SF or Palo Alto, you’d want something that’s faster than a car to get you there, because now it’s about 100 miles away. eVTOLs start to make those types of new communities more viable.

And then the pollution and impact of roads. I think this is underappreciated by people. We just don’t really think about, “Oh what does the world look like if we don’t need so much like road infrastructure?”

What does the world look like if we weren’t constrained to driving on the ground? These are just kind of assumptions that people have about life um and how we live. But even in a world full of EVs, you still have pollution from brake dust, for example, and from tire wear driving along roads.

Also, you’re not having to use as much of your living space. Roads are part of our living space! But in these small distributed neighborhoods, you don’t need as much physical space in these neighborhoods for roads.

If you’re using golf carts and the evolution of golf carts in 20 years to get around your local neighborhood and you’re using vehicles to fly further distances, you actually make your neighborhood much more livable too.

And you’re not as constrained by having to have large roads with these large vehicles that most of the time only carry one person anyway. You generally don’t need that sort of size vehicle for what you’re trying to do.

Car culture, especially full car dependence like in some suburbs, is such a local minimum in so many ways. It’s this equilibrium we’re stuck in even though it kind of sucks. In my age bracket in a lot of states, the most common cause of death for healthy young people is car crashes. It kills a lot of people.

For example, motor vehicles are the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States, with about 92,500 injuries per year. And that’s just from collisions and crashes, not counting the massive toll of air pollution!

It’s right through urban centers, right near people’s front doors, right where kids are playing. And it’s fast enough to kill people, but not fast enough that you don’t still have to spend lots of time stuck in traffic and on board on roads.

And there’s all these secondary things, the brake dust like you mentioned and flakes off the tires, as secondary factors of pollution after the combustion engine. And the tertiary things. In Maine, where I’m from, vast amounts of salt are spread on the road every year. As my biology teacher used to say, you can see this little stripe of beach plants along every road because they’re the only ones that can survive the amount of salt that’s applied to roads and washes off it every year. And it’s just a vast amount of work to maintain roads, of course.

I really love the walkable community ideal. In the U.S., people pay vast amounts of money to go to Disney World, people often reminisce about their college days, and what those have in common is a walkable space where you can go between things on foot. People really love that.

I think that evolving past roads or evolving towards much less roads and much less crowded roads might really gain traction by the second half of the 21st century and might be something that just really improves quality of life for humanity.

I think even by the early 2040s, I think by like 15 years from now, you’re going to start to see the early adopters, actually. Where they start to price a lot of this in. If you if you look, already, even with COVID, I knew people that were buying cabins near Yosemite and in more remote areas because they could work remotely. They didn’t need to come to the city so much.

You’ve already seen a lot of this with a lot of folks wanting to buy RVs. There’s 300,000 RV sales per year in the U.S. It’s a crazy large market that’s purely leisure, and it’s a very large type of vehicle. You see electric RV startups, like Pebble and Lightship, rethinking what an RV is.

I think we’re already starting to see that. You’ve got services, you’ve got Starlink satellite internet, you’ve got solar and batteries, you can be off-grid or very close to being off-grid, depending on your energy needs.

Growing up, I got my first car when I was 16 and a half. I loved driving. I was in a suburb in Adelaide and it gave me that freedom to be able to go where I wanted to go. And before that, I was riding my push bike everywhere. This is, I think, just the next phase of that personal freedom where, growing up, you had a bike or a car or something, and that gave a really great sense of freedom.

But being able to fly and fly safely, from where you would want to use your vehicle, and not having to go to a vertiport and hailing an air taxi! It’s fundamentally much more easy to use if it’s somewhere where you can already have access to it. You have an acre property, you can just walk outside and then just get in your vehicle and fly.

That type of freedom is, like, just really, really exciting in terms of what that affords. It has a lot benefits especially as you start to scale up, as it starts to become part of the infrastructure.

That is really amazing. It would be great to add that to the mix of what we already have to replace personal cars, like buses and trains and increasingly driverless cars too. And cycling. The whole global bike lane movement has been huge!

I am definitely a bit of an anti-car person. I would love to reduce that death toll, reduce that massive pollution, reduce what is often a really crippling financial burden for people, and just make transport a palette of much more cool options. I think that in America in particular, one thing that might finally sell people on a life without a car is their own personal electric flying machine! It’s just such a cool thing that might really accelerate a transition towards a more sustainable form of transportation.

Exactly. You can’t ask people to give up something that they need to do something that’s, better for the planet. You have to provide something more compelling.

If it’s just as safe, there’s going to be an increasing number of people that find utility from that. You can’t just say, “You have to give up your car” and then you don’t have an alternative to that. That’s not going to work for most people. You have to give them something that’s better.

And in the U.S. in particular, and also in many developed countries, a lot of people own a lot of land. You already have that use case, that market. These people already want something that allows them to access services. A lot of people just don’t have access, aren’t even 30 minutes away from a hospital or even a grocery store. There’s food deserts, there’s hospital deserts in the U.S. You could make it easier for people to access services than they can today.

I think a lot of folks think this innovation has to start in cities and urban areas, but that’s often not the case. You can look at Zipline, going really well in areas where people don’t have as good access.

Rwanda with the hospitals, but also even now with their pilots in the U.S, a lot of that traction that they’re seeing is in areas that are further away from services.

I think the innovation happens on the edge with this type of technology. The Model T got more traction on farms, it was more useful for farmers to actually use for many reasons. In urban areas you already had street cars you already had the ability to hire a carriage. A lot of people think everyone had carriages. Most people didn’t have carriages, but they did have access to carriages, a carriage taxi type of service in cities. So there were a lot of different types of transportation options already in urban areas. The Model T had more adoption in more rural areas.

I think it’s going to be a similar thing out here where there’s the value, the benefits that are personal to more remote areas, and it’s just much more compelling at first.

The final boss for any transportation technology is the commute to the urban areas. You build towards that, but at first, you don’t want to just go after the commute. I think that’s what was really challenging for air taxi companies. They’re trying to go straight after the commute. They’re like, “okay we’re gonna go to Manhattan!”

And you face so much regulatory overhead, so much permitting overhead, so many challenges to do that. It’s very very hard to do. Whereas you really want to start with small markets. People don’t even think those are credible or realistic markets, but when you start with these small markets, you get a lot of folks very, very excited about the value there, and then over time, you go after that final boss, you go after the commute use case.

We’re coming toward the top of the hour. I’m going to ask the meta-question I always ask, which is, what should I have asked that I didn’t ask? What question do you want to answer that we haven’t covered?

I think we’ve covered a lot of the things I would have wanted to cover about Vight and what we’re trying to do! I’m not sure if I have something off the top of my head that we haven’t covered yet.

Well, thank you so much. I really hope that someday I’ll be riding in or even own a Vight eVTOL. I will watch your progress with considerable interest.

Thanks so much. And this has been great. I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s been fun!

Thank you. Live long and prosper!

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Brilliant think tank Ember, constantly doing yeoman work to chronicle the global electrotech revolution, has a great new report underscoring just how fast progress has become. Around the world, developing countries are skyrocketing on key metrics like solar generation, wind generation, battery sales, EV sales, and electrification itself, the percent of total energy demand met with electrons as opposed to combustion. The leapfrog effect is now omnipresent, with many richer nations now relative sluggards.

Excitingly, many countries have a discrepancy in statistics between China’s export data on solar panels and the buyer country’s tracking of solar installations. Around the world, from Australia to Kenya and Poland to Pakistan, it now looks like people are buying and installing gigawatts more solar than their governments realize they are!

As fuel shortages start to bite down hard around the world, early anecdotal evidence of a great acceleration in the already-rapid global electrotech revolution is already coming in thick and fast. EV sales are booming worldwide. Governments are moving forward renewables build-out plans. Brazil, Australia, and Spain are all accelerating plans to develop offshore wind farms off their costs, parallel to ongoing solar booms across all three nations. The UK recorded record-high wind plus solar generation in March 2026, saving over one billion pounds in avoided fossil gas imports, and the government is moving fast on new pro-renewables policies. The president of Indonesia pledged to respond to the fuel crisis by completing the build-out of a whopping 100 GW of new solar in just two years! The great Bill McKibben has an excellent new article chronicling the world-historic global mind-shift from “fossil fuels are security” to “renewables are security, fossil fuels are vulnerability.”

The endgame of the fossil fuel era is playing out in real time. Its death throes are painful — and will likely get worse — and stupid people in power are making it pointlessly crueler, but a better world is rising.

The Crucial Years

Oil and Gas=Peril and Poverty/ Solar and Wind=Prosperity and Protection

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a month ago · 99 likes · 10 comments · Bill McKibben

Switzerland

A new study of a mountain stream in Switzerland has produced a world-first quantification of the carbon sequestration effects of the dam building done by beavers! The researchers calculated that a beaver-created wetland sequestered sequestered 1,194 tonnes of carbon over 13 years, about 10.1 tonnes per hectare per year, creating a long-term carbon sink with sediments containing 14 times more carbon than surrounding forest soils. The Eurasian beaver population increased by an estimated 16,705% from 1960 to 2016, an epic rewilding success story. Excellent news!

India

India just set an updated climate action target, pledging to reduce its emissions intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) by 47% below 2005 levels and to raise non-fossil energy to 60% of electricity-generating capacity, both by 2035! Earth’s most populous nation will likely far exceed these targets, as 2025 saw extraordinary electrification statistics across the fast-developing subcontinent. Non-fossil energy was 52.6% of total capacity as of February 2026, after India built 38 GW of new solar and 6.3 GW of new wind power in 2025. That same year, India’s power-sector CO₂ emissions actually fell by 3.8% and total CO₂ emissions grew by just 0.7% in one year, the slowest growth rate in two decades despite a thriving economy! Spectacular electrification progress.

The nearly complete Delhi-Dehradun Expressway through Uttarakhand state has a stretch passing through Shivalik Forest where the highway is elevated for over 10 kilometers, creating India’s first and Asia’s largest wildlife underpass. Now, camera traps reveal that 18 species of wildlife, including elephants, golden jackals, nilgai antelope, sambar deer, and chital deer, are using the underpass for safe passage to maintain habitat connectivity. A great example of Anthropocene-ready infrastructure!

Italy

A new multi-year study from the fields of northern Italy has found that agrivoltaics can support healthy potato yields! A field model with a canopy of sun-tracking solar panels that rotated counter to the sun for the early tuber initiation period produced 32.7 tonnes per hectare compared to 30.3 t/h for full light with no solar panels. Potatoes, a popular ancient Peruvian biotechnology, are a major global crop but had been underrepresented in agrivoltaics research — until now. Great work!

Research in the salt marshes around the Venetian lagoon has found that sea lavender (several species of flowering plant in the genus Limonium), is a veritable multi-tool of climate resilience, with strong natural abilities in carbon sequestration and erosion reduction as it stabilizes soil and traps sediments with its long snaking root systems. Sea lavender can hold 12 times as much of its biomass underground as above ground and its giant roots can persist long after the plant’s death, bringing long-term benefits.

Zambia

A new study has found that increasing use of new synthetic leopard fur regalia by the hundreds of participants at the annual traditional royal festivals of the Lozi people in western Zambia, a switch encouraged and funded by Panthera cat conservationists, has led to rising wild leopard populations in and around Kafue National Park! Just 10% of participants wore real leopard furs by 2024 (a 74% drop in two years). Poaching busts decreased, camera trap density estimates rose from 2.7 to 3.8 leopards per 100 km2, and the rise of artificial furs may save an estimated 204 to 1,310 individual leopards in the next ten years. A great case of innovative community conservation!

The copper mines of Zambia are rapidly electrifying themselves even as they produce critical minerals for an electrifying world’s fast-growing demand for copper wire. One mine took delivery of 31 fully electric Chinese mining hauler trucks made by LiuGong in 2025, and a new order was just booked for a fleet of electric drill rigs. The basics of industrial civilization are being fully electrified faster than almost anyone realizes!

Dominica

Dominica, a renowned “nature isle” nation in the Caribbean notably home to cutting-edge sperm whale research with Project CETI, is building a 10 MW geothermal project that has already begun to supply electricity to the grid. Awesome work!

Vietnam

Reuters reports that in fast-growing Vietnam, major conglomerate Vingroup has told the government that due to the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis they now plan to cancel a planned 4.8 GW (4,800 MW) liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant and instead build more renewables and grid-scale battery storage! This among the first (likely of many) concrete new grid-level projects shifting to electrotech due to the Iran War. Awesome!

China

In March 2026, BYD stunned automaking by unveiling their new ultra-powerful 1.5 MW each second-generation Flash public EV chargers, which can fill up a BYD car’s Blade Battery 2.0 to from 10% to 70% in 5 minutes and to 97% in 9 minutes. Now, in early April (one month later!), BYD has announced the installation of 5,000 second-generation Flash chargers in 297 cities across China. They plan for 20,000 by the end of 2026. China’s electrotech revolution continues to progress blazingly fast! WOW.

A new Star Shine I solar panel cleaning robot is coming to the European market, from Chinese manufacturer Arctech. It can travel up to 9 kilometers (or 3 km round trip) on a charge, autonomously cleaning dust and gunk off giant solar arrays. Vast electrotech farms sheltering plants or crops below and maintained by battery-powered drones are quickly becoming a widespread new Anthropocene landscape.

Thailand

The banteng (Bos javanicus), a critically endangered Asian wild cattle species, is rebounding in the Huai Kha Khaeng protected area complex1 of western Thailand. The estimated population roughly doubled in two decades to reach 1,400 in 2024, thanks to high-quality ranger patrols. Tiger, sambar deer, and muntjac populations have also grown, and wildlife watching ecotourism has become a major economic driver for nearby villages, with 5% of revenues going to a local infrastructure fund. A spectacular new success story for landscape-scale conservation in the Anthropocene!

A new rewilding program has begun reintroducing endangered zebra sharks (Stegostoma tigrinum, aka Indo-Pacific leopard sharks), a species over-fished in the wild but relatively common in aquariums, into the waters off Thailand. As of January 2026, seven yearling pups born in aquaria have been released so far (via interim sea pens) at Maiton Island near tourism hotspot Phuket in the Andaman Sea. Great work!

United States

In a wildly schizophrenic moment, the mad-king wannabe in the White House and his cabal of maniacs are making psychotic mass murder threats in a Middle East war of whim while the incredible Artemis II mission acts as a time capsule from a better America, reminding us of what the nation of my birth used to at least try to stand for.

People across America and beyond keep resisting the vile and despicable terrorist scum in the White House by fighting to build a better and brighter future! At this point, all common decency is an implicit rebuke to this nightmarish regime.

Seneca, one of several emerging firetech startups, just signed its first customer. The fire district of Aspen, Colorado will receive an AI-linked swarm of five firefighting drones that deploy from the same trailer and can all be operated together by just one human pilot. Each of the five drones can carry and spray 500 pounds of fire-suppressing foam, and the plan is to use them to reach and extinguish small wildfires before humans can. A vital climate resilience measure — great work!

America’s largest-yet urban grid-scale battery is now under construction, a 250 MW/1,000 MWh project right next to the iconic Cow Palace south of San Francisco.

New startup Funga is inoculating loblolly pine seedlings (widely planted in Southeastern U.S. commercial timberlands) with hundreds of species of soil fungi and microbes, including symbiotic ectomycorrhizae that interweave with roots to acquire (and even trade for!) more nutrients. Such biodiversity is often lost in timber plantations, and Funga reports that their biome-transplant spray boots growth by up to 100% in some places, with a target average of 30%. That’s similar to the effect of artificial fertilizers, and might even be able to replace them. Awesome work!

Scientists tested multi-chambered temperature-regulating “water jacket rocket box” artificial roosts in the territory of the critically imperiled Florida bonneted bat (Eumops floridanus), and found that 17 individuals had moved in (to one box!) at the last count. In addition to providing relief from extreme heat, the study box survived the strike of Hurricane Ian. A great example of proactive climate resilience conservation!

Governor Janet Mills of Maine signed into law a Utah-style plug-in solar bill on Monday April 6, 2026! Many other states are zooming forward. SUPERB news!

It is now cheaper to charge up an EV at home than to fill up an old-type car with gasoline in all 50 U.S. States, with the difference increasing sharply since the war.

The Manu-o-Kū, a native Hawaiian seabird also known as the blue-billed white tern (Gygis candida), appears to be adapting fast to live in human-dominated urban landscapes. As of early April 2026, the species had 691 recorded eggs and chicks in the city of Honolulu, and their population has been steadily growing. Great news!

Researchers have discovered 10 new species of moth (from 7 new genera!) in Hawaii.

The new 19.4-acre Bayshore Park in Miami Beach was designed to help soak up runoff and floodwaters in a city already regularly experiencing flooded streets. It centers on a lake filled with mosquito-eating fish and surrounded by a walking path that doubles as a levee. The park can hold the water output of a three-day storm, and also includes a butterfly garden, permeable pavers, and more. Solarpunk urbanism!

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One silver lining of this crazy situation is that the Democrats now have a solid chance to win a majority in not just the House but the Senate in the November 2026 midterm elections. I believe this to be critical to the future of the United States — regardless of one’s views on traditional U.S. political disputes like taxes or guns or healthcare, the political party divide has become something more fundamentally important, a question of “do you think the country should be governed by one-man-rule via demented social media posts, or not?” It’s become a cliche that the Democrats are the party of small-d democracy — they’re now also the party of small-r republicanism, in the sense of “not having a king.” I believe that at this moment in history, the Democratic Party, flawed as it is in many ways, mostly stands as a force for good, and the Republican Party has degenerated into mostly a force for evil.

As I’ve previously written, the 2026 Senate map seemed at first glance highly unfavorable to Democrats. The party opposing the current cult-of-personality cosplay autocracy currently holds 47 out of 100 seats in the Senate. They would need 4 more seats to win a majority of 51 that could beat the Vice President’s tiebreaker vote — and thus prevent the confirmation of any more of the President’s toadying cabinet nominees or Constitution-eroding federal judges. And there’s only one Senate seat up for grabs in 2026 in a state that voted Democrat in 2024 (the one in Maine) — the other three net wins would have to come from winning over voters in a state that opted for Republicans in 2024. The odds didn’t look good. In May 2025, when I wrote my previous article about the 2026 U.S. Senate elections, the nonpartisan Sabato’s Crystal Ball election forecast predicted a median outcome of 52 seats leaning towards Republicans, just 45 leaning towards Democrats, and 3 “Toss-up” races.

Then, in just the first few months of 2026, the sleazy gangster in the White House decided to trash the transatlantic alliance, excuse outright state-sponsored murder in Minneapolis, and then start a war of whim in Iran and send gas prices skyrocketing. That same forecast now predicts 51 seats leaning Republican, 46 Democratic, and 3 Toss-ups — but there’s been a lot more change than that one-digit shift makes it sound like, all in favor of Democrats’ odds. Georgia moved from “Toss-up” to “Leans D” in their model, Maine from Leans R to Toss-up, Ohio from Likely R to Leans R, Alaska from Safe R to Leans R, and four states (Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, and Florida) from Safe R to Likely R.

That’s a bit of wonky “inside baseball,” perhaps of interest primarily to politics nerds like this writer, but the anti-autocracy trend is also expressed in less abstract ways. In many key Senate races, Democrats have nominated charismatic new candidates already attracting widespread grassroots support while Republicans, well, haven’t.

The maniacal President’s favorability rating has hit all-time lows, with approval dipping below 40% after a massive 28-point swing in net approval (“% approve” minus “% disapprove”) to -17 points in mid-March 2026 down from +11 in January 2025.

Silver Bulletin

Trump approval just hit the 30s. Can his numbers get any lower?

The last time I did a check-in on President Trump’s popularity in November, I noted that the decline in his approval ratings had been remarkably linear. There have been peaks and valleys, sure, which you can correlate with particular news events. But the recovery after every bounce-back has been incomplete, leaving some permanent damage behind…

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a month ago · 287 likes · 87 comments · Nate Silver

As of early April 2026, online “prediction market” gambling platform Polymarket (a corruption-enabling and very deservedly controversial enterprise, but sometimes a useful barometer of “conventional wisdom” if nothing else) gives 51% odds that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate in 2026 midterms, up from just 22% as recently as October 2025.

So in this article, I’m profiling six Democratic candidates that I think have a strong chance to help take back the U.S. Senate. There are many more excellent Democratic candidates in the 2026 midterms, from those running to hold Senate seats to the great multitude of awesome folks running to flip the House of Representatives to state and local-level contests, but here I’m focusing specifically on Democrats going on offense to flip Republican-held Senate seats. If just four out of these six win (and we hold all current seats), the nightmarish regime will be materially weakened after November!

I’ve just donated $100 to each of these six candidates, and created six corresponding “The Weekly Anthropocene” (TWA) ActBlue fundraiser links1. It’s a rough economic period with stagflation incoming, but if any Americans can afford it, I would encourage others to contribute.

Maine

I’ve already written at length about why I think Governor Janet Mills of Maine would be an awesome candidate for U.S. Senate, and I was super excited and proud when she decided to run just a few months after my article was published! Governor Mills has a spectacular record of public service, with a multitude of major accomplishments including expanding Medicaid to cover 89,000 people previously without health insurance, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic with among the nation’s lowest death rates and fastest vaccine rollout, and founding the brilliant statewide climate action-boosting Maine Community Resilience Partnership (which I’ve done some work for).

Unlike most of the Senate races in this article, where Democrats have coalesced early around one outstanding candidate, this is still a hotly contested primary, with Maine voters set to choose either Janet Mills or Graham Platner as the Democratic nominee on June 9, 2026. Personally, Graham Platner strikes me as an unserious Internet troll with a history of crude and extreme online comments that might be a severe liability in a general election, while Janet Mills strikes me as an experienced, responsible and trustworthy stateswoman. But this is what primaries are for — to find the strongest candidate that can muster the most support from voters. I’m rooting for Janet Mills, but needless to say2, I hope that whoever wins the primary will triumph over disingenuous White House toady Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican Senator, who voted to advance the disastrous OBBBA budget out of committee in 2025.

I’ve reached out to the Mills campaign for an interview, but I haven’t heard back yet — if any of my old Maine colleagues there are reading this, I’d love to set up a call!

Maine 2025 Cook PVI: D+4.

Candidate Status: Primary Ongoing.

Volunteer at: janetmills.com/take-action/

Donate: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/twajanetmills

North Carolina

Roy Cooper was governor of North Carolina from 2018 through 2024, and now he’s running for an open Senate seat in his state to replace retiring Republican Thom Tillis. As Governor, he vetoed a great many extremist bills pushed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, successfully negotiated landmark statewide Medicaid expansion that provided health coverage to over 600,000 people, and led the relief, recovery, and resilience efforts when climate-supercharged Hurricanes Florence and Helene struck the state. He’s already the official nominee, with a polling lead over Republican apparatchik Michael Whatley. This is perhaps the Democrats’ single best chance to win a Senate seat in 2026 — one of the four needed for a new majority!