A new United Nations report has calculated that hunger among humanity declined for three consecutive years, in slow but sustained progress after the dire COVID-era regression! (Like “extreme poverty,” this is a formal metric more serious than common use of the term in developed countries: the UN FAO defines “hunger” as “undernourishment,” i.e. not having regular access to enough calories for a human’s minimum physiological needs).

An estimated 7.8 percent of humans (645 million people) faced hunger in 2025, down from 8.6 percent (688 million people) in 2022. Roughly 43 million fewer people are hungry in 2025 than 2022! Notably, Africa now has more people facing hunger (309 million) than fast-progressing Asia (292 million), despite Africa’s far smaller population. Despite murderous sabotage and climate chaos, we are still progressing!

Relatedly, a particular standout lately has been South America, which has substantially reduced hunger in the last two decades thanks to successful new social programs and farming techniques and despite disruptive climate change-induced weather patterns threatening agriculture. All countries on the continent except tiny Suriname saw undernourishment prevalence decrease from 2004-06 to 2023-25. A record-low 3.5% of humans in South America are now undernourished, and hunger is decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. Great work!

Australia

The epic world-first Solar Sharer Offer program, granting three hours of free electricity to Australian households thanks to a surplus of solar power around midday, has BEGUN! It started July 1, 2026, from 11 AM to 2 PM in New South Wales and southeast Queensland and 12 to 3 PM in South Australia. A similar program will begin in the state of Victoria this October, and other states may soon join in.

This is an ever bigger deal than it looks, as Australia is also a world leader in home battery adoption, so many homes can now fill up their battery for free during the three Solar Sharer hours and then use it to power the rest of the day! A bold new paradigm.

The last Australian financial year (July 2025 through June 2026) saw a new record-high in clean energy development, with 9.1 GW of new solar, wind, and battery capacity coming online. That’s more than double the 4.4 GW in the previous financial year!

Australia is now planning its first compressed carbon dioxide battery project from fast-growing startup Energy Dome, to be inflated in former coal country in Victoria.

The unique numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus), a termite-eating marsupial native to Western Australia, is no longer considered endangered by the IUCN! They were once found across the continent, but were down to around 300 individual survivors in two small patches near Perth by the 1970s due largely to introduced foxes and cats. After years of work, including a decades-long captive breeding and release program by the Perth Zoo, there are now an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 individuals. Excellent work!

France

The Tara Polar Station, a custom-made research vessel built to be frozen into the Arctic ice cap for long dark winter months to study the ecosystems below, set out from its Breton home port of Lorient on July 19, 2026! It should be caught in pack ice by September and stay there for 350 to 500 days, leaving in 2027 for a resupply run. A crew of twelve people and one Lapponian herder dog will live aboard for five months of polar winter, growing to eighteen during the summer. An incredible mission!

Here’s my article on my recent in-person visit to the Tara Polar Station in Lorient with Kim Stanley Robinson!

Titanic work by firefighters has now contained the wildfires threatening the beautiful and historic Forest of Fontainebleau sixty kilometers southeast of Paris.

Buzzy electrotech startup Octopus Energy has announced a new venture to build 100 new “Zero Bills Homes” in the Breton village of Guichen-Pont-Réan, France. They will integrate rooftop solar, heat pumps, home batteries, and Octopus’ smart home energy management software, all to maintain zero net electricity costs over ten years. (“Net” as sometimes they’ll sell extra power to the grid, sometimes buy). Awesome!

Benin

An expedition led by local conservationist Gérard Zinzindohoué has rediscovered a coral reef off the coast of Benin, home to at least eight coral and eight fish species!

1960s surveys had suggested its presence but nobody had ever followed up until Zinzindohoué dropped a deep-sea camera system (provided by a National Geographic grant) from a local fisherman’s fragile wooden pirogue boat. The reef likely extends much further and is home to many more species than this glimpse showed, and it seems to be in good shape despite years of warming seas and bleaching events. Awesome cutting-edge low-resource scientific discovery work!

The traditional Vodoun religion of Benin is reportedly helping preserve vital coastal mangrove ecosystems, with a form of “spiritual regulation” leading certain forests to to be protected from woodcutting by belief in the deity Zangbéto. Fascinating!

European Union

A new Ember report calculates that across seven EU countries, the preexisting grid connections (power lines) of hydropower dams could be used to unlock 25 gigawatts of scarce connection capacity for new renewables (e.g. floating solar on the reservoir, or just nearby solar and wind farms) even after excluding protected areas. Clever!

Bulgaria

After decades of rewilding work, since 2023 a reintroduction project has released forty cinereous vultures (Aegypius monachus, one of the largest birds in Europe with a three-meter wingspan!) to the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria. In spring 2026, there were new wild vulture chicks in the Bulgarian Rhodopes for the first time in over 30 years, with four mated pairs beginning incubation and three chicks hatching. Excellent!

Ecuador

Certified deforestation-free coffee is taking off across the Amazon region of Ecuador, thanks in large part to the new market-reshaping EU Deforestation Regulation set to enter into force by 2027. A satellite geospatial imagery-verified certification model was developed in 2019, and now 373 coffee producers have signed up. A cumulative 172.5 tonnes of certified coffee were grown in Ecuador since 2022, and it’s accelerating, with more produced in 2025 than in the previous three years combined. A key early buyer is Lavazza coffee, a major brand in Europe. Great work!

Southeast Atlantic Ocean

A new study has quantified a recent uptick in sightings of Antarctic blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) and southern fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) in the Benguela Upwelling, a patch of ocean in the Southeast Atlantic off the coasts of Namibia and South Africa. Reviewing records of 17 blue whale sightings and 76 fin whale sightings from 1964 through 2025, they found that 95% of the rare encounters were recorded since 2012, an encouraging sign suggesting post-industrial-whaling recovery in the area consistent with recent positive reports from the Antarctic and elsewhere.

Iraq

Iraq now has its first-ever solar module assembly production line, installed by Italian company Ecoprogretti for the Al-Abbas Holy Shrine (a religious institution that also runs a lot of development and social programs) in the Shi’a holy city of Karbala. It has assembly robots, has an annual capacity to make 200 MW of solar with plans to scale to 600 MW, and will serve Iraq’s fast-growing domestic solar market. Spectacular!

Brazil

In 2024, Project Reconecta built eight rope bridges for several local monkey species to safely cross from canopy to canopy across a road near Alta Floresta in the Brazilian Amazon where rare primates had been becoming roadkill. Zero primate roadkill has been recorded in the area since then, and camera traps revealed that just these eight bridges have already been used for 15,000 successful crossings by arboreal animals Eight more rope bridges are set to be installed in Alta Floresta itself this August, and a bill before Brazil’s Congress might help extend the model nationwide. Epic work!

A new report finds that forest fires in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil fell to a historic low in 2025! Just 3.1 million hectares (31,000 km²) burned that year: 31% below the historical average, the lowest burned area since records began in 1985, and down substantially from the horrific 15.8 million hectares burned in the Brazilian Amazon during drought-stricken 2024. Many fires in the Amazon are set for illegal deforestation purposes to clear land for cattle, so this decrease is also a function of President Lula da Silva restoring environmental law enforcement after President Bolsonaro’s vile incitement of organized forest crime. Brazil: re-elect Lula in 2026!

Netherlands

A student team at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have built Stella Juva, a world-first experimental solar-powered ambulance and remote-area mobile clinic. It has 542 solar cells on its roof and extendable panels, powering a 50 kWH battery plus onboard equipment like a vaccine cooler, defibrillator, X-ray machine, and more. Its driving range is 715 km on paved roads and an average of 360 km in off-road terrain. The team plans to test it in Kenya this August. Brilliant work!

United States

Despite the demented would-be autocrat in power and his vile cabal of cruelty, a bottom-up surge of sanity and freedom keeps fighting to build a better future!

As the 2026 state legislative sessions draw to a close, there are some encouraging signs that this newsletter’s preferred “abundance environmentalism” political philosophy is gaining ground! In 2026 so far, nine states have passed permitting reform bills of some kind expected to benefit clean energy build-outs to some degree, including major wins like Virginia and Illinois preventing local governments from passing nonsensical blanket bans on solar and Washington and Oregon streamlining their lengthy permitting processes as well as smaller-scale bills like Alabama allowing potential future conversion of oil and gas wells to geothermal. Only one state (Utah) has moved in the other direction this year, passing a restriction on use of state tax credits for solar on farmland. That’s a big shift from 2025, when just six states made it easier to build renewables and six other states made it harder. Onwards we go!

More balcony solar systems are going on sale in the United States (in addition to Bright Saver’s nonprofit at-cost offer!) as more states have passed de-facto legalization! German makers CraftStrom and EcoFlow are beginning to enter the nascent yet burgeoning American market.

The Charles River of Massachusetts flows past Boston, and like many other urban rivers worldwide it has experienced an epic ecological renaissance in recent decades thanks to dedicated local environmentalists! Once essentially a lifeless open sewer in the 1920s, it sustained a run of 300,000 alewives (“river herring”) in 2025, the highest in memory, and a concomitant abundance of waterbirds. Further progress is possible!

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Humanity reached a cumulative total of 1,000 gigawatts (one terawatt, or one million megawatts) of installed solar capacity around December 2021. We passed 2,000 gigawatts of solar by September 2024. And in April 2026, we exceeded 3,000 gigawatts, with over 1,000 GW of new solar installed in less than 20 months.

The Dawn of the Solar Age remains, so far, unstoppable. SPECTACULAR news!

Canada

A fascinating much-needed experiment in localized, responsible geoengineering is underway at the remote island settlement of Ikaluktutiak in Nunavut, the vast Arctic majority-Inuit territory of Canada. Since 2023, pioneering UK startup Real Ice has worked with the local community at a one square kilometer test area to drill holes in the sea ice and pump seawater from below during the winter to freeze on the top, thickening the ice layer and simultaneously making it much more reflective, enhancing albedo and slowing melting. In 2026, at the beginning of the melt season in May, the treated sea ice was 50 centimeters thicker than untreated sea ice. This method looks promising: as each small pump uses only as much power as a toaster, there’s great potential to scale up to meaningful ecosystem conservation! Awesome.

Greece

The Aegean island of Gyaros in the Cycladic Archipelago of Greece was the site of a brutal prison under the 1967-74 military dictatorship, and it’s since been uninhabited and nearly un-visited for decades. Fish stocks multiplied. A world-largest colony of 70 ultra-rare Mediterranean monk seals (Monachus monachus) was discovered by a stray fisherman in 2004, openly nursing their young on human-free beaches and making up as much as 12% of the total species population! Then a nesting site of rare Yelkouan shearwaters (Puffinus yelkouan) was found in 2015, home to 15% of their entire species.

Gyaros was declared an MPA in 2019 and received upgraded protections in April 2026! Efforts are now underway to police no-fishing zones, cull egg-eating feral pigs, and replant shallow algae forests. A place of horror has became a haven of life. Superb!

Over the last seven years, the volunteer Typhoon Project has cleaned over 4,800 beaches across Greece, removing over 1,090 tonnes of trash. Great work!

Along with much of the rest of the world, Greece is rapidly transitioning to clean energy. Solar, wind, and hydro together provided over 46% of the whole nation’s electricity in all of 2025 (as coal fell below 5%), and solar alone provided a record-high 31.9% in June 2026. The Hellenic Republic has just allowed household-level balcony solar and home batteries, and a grid-scale 930 MW solar farm cluster was completed on the site of a former lignite coal mine in Greek Macedonia. Great work!

South Korea

On Gapado Island, a tiny rock off the much larger Jeju Island of South Korea, a large quadcopter drone recently carried vital medication to an imperiled tourist, a woman in her 60s with diabetes who had become stranded by strong winds and high waves. Medical helicopters or Coast Guard vessels couldn’t reach her, but the drone could.

This is a direct benefit of the revolution in battery and electric motor technology, and such “angel networks” of life-saving medical drones (like the Zipline base I visited in Rwanda!) may become a defining feature of Anthropocene civilization. Fascinating!

China

Grid-scale batteries are spreading incredibly fast as a vital clean reliable grid-stabilizing power source around the world….and even faster in China specifically. In 2025, total cumulative lithium-ion battery storage capacity in China hit 140.2 gigawatts of capacity, exceeding the rest of the planet combined at 132.1 GW. For context, that’s up from just 2.8 GW of batteries in China and 10.2 in the rest of the world in 2020. Renewables plus batteries are transforming human life on Earth!

Torrential rains caused devastating flooding in the Guangxi Zhuang region of southern China in July 2026, and drones — including some hastily repurposed from local agriculture — played a key role in relief efforts. Drones air-dropped supply packages to villages cut off by floodwaters, functioned as airborne hubs providing Internet connection, and even physically lifted some people to safety, as seen in videos that quickly went viral on the Chinese internet. Fascinating climate resilience work!

Chinese startup Relu Robotics has developed a nine-ton AI-enabled solar installation robot, the “Bison Series,” that can autonomously install ground-mounted solar arrays in a multitude of challenging conditions and terrains. It functions anywhere in a temperature range of -20°C to 60°C (-4°F to 140°F) and is reportedly already in use building a large-scale solar farm in Algeria. Wow! Marvels of an electrifying world.

Democratic Republic of Congo

A new species of colobus monkey has been discovered (or rather, formally scientifically described) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the Lualaba river in the east-central region. Known to the locals as Likweli, it’s been granted the scientific name Colobus congoensis, and is recognizable by its unique orange lips. It is likely endangered given its small range, but most of that is within an existing protected area, Lomami National Park. This is only the fifth new African monkey species in the last 75 years! We’re still meeting new primate cousins. Fascinating!

WeLight, Africa’s largest solar microgrid builder, is planning to expand into the DRC!

The deadly new Bundibugyo strain of Ebola virus has infected over 1,400 people in the DRC. Now, in Bunia near the outbreak’s epicenter, new WHO clinical trials have begun to evaluate several new antiviral therapies that could become the first effective treatments. Virunga rangers and conservationists are increasing precautions and security to prevent a potentially-devastating zoonotic leap to gorilla populations. And Oxford launched a clinical trial for a putative Bundibugyo vaccine. Excellent work!

United Kingdom

A new UK Prime Minister, former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, took office on July 20, 2026, after winning a Labor Party leadership challenge to replace Keir Starmer. Renewable energy progress has been a bright spot of success in the controversial Starmer premiership, with Energy Secretary Ed Miliband overseeing a surge in solar and offshore wind build-out. Burnham has previously expressed strong support for clean energy and climate action, and will likely continue Britain’s renewables progress — and hopefully will also be able to kickstart economic growth.

Electric vehicles have overtaken old-style fossil fuel cars in total new car sales across the UK! In the twelve-month period ending in May 2026, UK consumers bought 516,490 new EVs and just 504,010 new petrol cars. Electrification just keeps going!

As this newsletter has regularly reported on, four European bison were introduced in Britain in 2022 at the Blean woodlands of Kent, and with several new calves born the herd has grown to nine by 2026. Now, the herd has been split in two, with the bull, two adult females, and two calves moved to Castletown Estate, a second site in the northern region of Cumbria. British bison keep expanding their range! Awesome.

White storks, driven to extinction in England in the 1500s but reintroduced at the pioneering Knepp Estate rewilding project in 2016, have now spread to the Guildford industrial estate in nearby Surrey, with some young birds building “practice nests.”

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has purchased Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth off Scotland. It’s a small island home to 100,000 northern gannets — the largest colony in the world — and will now be managed for conservation.

Brazil

Sightings of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangeliae) have skyrocketed off the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (like in NYC!), as a growing populations migrates past the city from feeding grounds in the Southern Ocean to breeding grounds in the Abrolhos Reef off northern Brazil! Whale watching tours are now proliferating in the iconic Guanabera Bay, and some biologists speculate that the Rio area could become a new future breeding ground. Worldwide, the humpback whale population has rebounded from around 2,000 individuals in the 1980s after decades of commercial whaling to around 35,000 today, nearing the estimates for pre-whaling highs. Excellent news!

Brazil continues the unrelenting fight to protect indigenous territories in the Amazon Rainforest from brutally abusive and exploitative organized crime logging and mining networks. Re-electing President Lula da Silva this October is likely necessary to keep environmental law enforcement active. Lula currently leads in polls!

United States

Despite the demented wannabe-dictator and his incompetent murderous thugs in power, people across America keep unyieldingly striving to build a better future!

The exciting new “Glass Half Full” report from MIT quantifies the incredible resilience of America’s renewable energy progress despite an unprecedented nonstop barrage of attacks and sabotage from the White House. They calculate that even after all the destruction, about 71% of the clean electricity generation and 67% of the power sector emissions reductions projected to arrive thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 are still on track to be realized as of mid-2026. Down but definitely not out!

In the wake of the devastating climate-supercharged Hurricane Helene in 2024, hard-hit Appalachian communities in western North Carolina are pioneering a new model of mobile, decentralized solar-powered microgrids for community resilience!

The state is partnering with the nonprofit Footprint Project and local community organizations to deploy a swarm of “Beehives,” trailer-mounted microgrids with a rooftop solar array plus battery storage. Models include “Cooler Bees” powering fridges of medication and food, “Power Bees” letting people charge their devices, and “Water Bees” powering clean drinking water filtration. The plan is to deploy 24 stationary “bees” at community centers like food banks, fire stations, and libraries, plus two mobile bees for rapid response anywhere. Spectacular renewables-powered climate resilience work — a model for the future! Brilliant news.

Construction has begun on the massive Steel River solar farm in Arkansas. When fully complete in 2029, it will be the largest clean energy site in America, with 2.5 GW of solar plus 2.9 GWh of battery storage — enough to power 315,000 homes!

In the first quarter of 2026, solar plus batteries together accounted for 91% of all new-built power-generating capacity from any source across the United States.

The new 16-story office building at 555 Greenwich Street in Manhattan was completed in 2023, and is among the first NYC skyscrapers to be built with 100% clean zero-carbon heating! It has 68 geothermal energy piles stretching 120 feet underground that conduct warmth upwards in winter and downwards in summer.

The number of American oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus) on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of North America has increased by a whopping 45% from 2008 to 2023, from an estimated 10,150 to 14,375 individual birds, thanks to fifteen years of dedicated conservation efforts protecting key breeding grounds from Rhode Island to South Carolina. Excellent work!

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The 14th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on July 15, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Cora Stryker, co-founder of the incredibly fast-growing new plug-in solar advocacy group Bright Saver! The YouTube recording is above! Below are some resources relevant to Bright Saver’s epic work.

Check out Bright Saver’s state-by-state plug-in solar progress tracker map!

“Plug-in solar—small panels that plug into the wall let renters and homeowners generate their own electricity—is being legalized state by state. This map tracks legislation across all 50 U.S. states—where bills have passed, where they’re advancing, and what’s next.

Updated daily by Bright Saver, the only nonprofit working across all 50 states to track policy and educate the public on plug-in solar. Find out what is happening in your state and how you can take action.”

— Bright Saver State Tracker

Here’s our updated CAN action to lobby your state legislators on this with a few clicks!

Bright Saver is now selling plug-in solar kits at cost, making no money — available both in the newly legalized states and as a “guerrilla solar” option in most other states. Nobody has yet been fined for installing U.S. plug-in solar — we don’t have to wait for regulatory-captured institutions to catch up before unleashing clean power. Putting the punk in solarpunk!

“Start generating clean electricity today. Bright Saver members get the Balcony Solar Kit at cost with their $29 annual membership.

This plug-in solar panel is a compact, affordable way to start generating your own electricity. No roof or electrician required. We offer kits with one or two panels and 180 W and 360 W of output, respectively.

The system is designed to be easy to use and install. Just mount or hang it onto a wall, fence, or balcony that gets direct sunlight for at least 6 hours a day and plug it into a standard outlet. You’ll start offsetting a portion of your energy use right away.

We are currently sold out and new inventory arrives in late August. Become a member to preorder and secure your place in line for one of these panels. Your card will be charged immediately at checkout.”

— Bright Saver

Bright Saver is a nonprofit, and their salaries are donor-funded. They make no money from selling these plug-in solar kits at cost; they’re focused on accelerating clean energy for America.

WHAT “AT COSTS” MEANS:

Zero Markup. Radical transparency. As a nonprofit, we pass on all the savings to you.

You pay what we pay. No catch. We’re a nonprofit on a mission to accelerate adoption of clean energy in America.

— Bright Saver

This is a spectacular way for Americans right now to access, adopt, and actively accelerate the epic clean energy revolution that so much of their current government is trying to stop. Let’s GO!

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Many ordinary parts of your daily life, entirely unremarkable, not prized or treasured but treated as an expected standard notable only if absent, were once precious rarities, available in such a quality only to an elevated few or perhaps nonexistent entirely.

I once lived and worked for three months in a part of the world where the vast majority of the people around me had no shoes.

Not “bad-quality shoes” or “old hand-me-down shoes” or “shoes with holes in them that they couldn’t afford to repair,” but no shoes. Most people in the rural Kianjavato district of Madagascar when I was living and working there for three months in 2019 owned absolutely no shoes at all, and walked barefoot everywhere for all occasions of their life. I walked on the trail of endangered lemurs up hillside paths covered in slick red mud, laced with tree roots, and studded with stones, and thought myself a bold adventurer until I recalled that I was wearing precision-engineered hiking boots and the Malagasy people walking beside me — generally ahead of me — were barefoot1.

Now, I quite like being barefoot sometimes. At home, or at the beach, or in a grassy field. But the thing is, when I’m barefoot, it’s a choice. These people had no choice. Really think for a second about what it means to not have the option to wear shoes ever, at all.

Did I mention that malaria and schistosomiasis were endemic? That this particular region of Madagascar was, in fact, known to be among the worst places in the world in terms of risk of exposure to water-borne skin-burrowing parasites? It was. The research station where I lived had water filters, and I was taking atovaquone-proguanil malaria prophylaxis pills, and I had waterproof hiking boots to wade through streamlets that crossed the path and a strict warning to never, ever let my nude skin touch wild water. The average local person had none of that. Bare feet, open to mosquitoes and nasty flesh-tunneling disease-spreading worms, splashing through water and mud every working day in a hard-working life. Ye gods, the major staple crop there was rice, and this was a subsistence agriculture economy, which meant that a substantial chunk of the people of Kianjavato spent all day barefoot up to their shins in a rice paddy flooded with parasite-ridden local water!

Some of the more well-off people in the village had flip-flops. They all seemed to be more or less the same brand and quality of flip-flops, and they were the cheapest, crappiest flip-flops I’d ever seen, mass-produced probably years ago in China and gradually diffused down to itinerant merchants in rural Madagascar, made of thin gray plastic that practically flaked as soon as you looked at it. The little toe-thong thing holding the flip-flop on the foot was about as sturdy as a rubber band. On many of these flip-flops, it had just broken and had been crudely mended or replaced by a homemade strap of bamboo or vine.

We weren’t allowed to give them our shoes. Or any shoes. There was actually a specific written policy about this at the NGO I was volunteering with, part of the contract/handbook we’d all agreed to before the journey. We, the volunteers from first-world countries, were expressly forbidden from giving away any of our extra pairs of shoes, be it sneakers or hiking boots or even a better quality of flip-flop for wearing around camp, even to someone we’d worked alongside for months and really wanted to help out, because experience had taught them that it caused severe resentment, jealousy, and ill-feeling in the local community. Akin, perhaps, to someone on a job site being casually given a Lamborghini by a passing billionaire, and suddenly being vaulted into a much higher stratum of material good than his fellow workers through no merit of his own. It would be hard not to resent something like that.

Several Malagasy folks working at the research station did indeed ask me to leave them my boots when I was departing, and I duly told them that it was not allowed.

It’s been a formative memory. Sometimes, in the years since, I’ve looked at homeless people or panhandlers in developed countries and I’ve thought something like, At least you’ve got shoes. What you’re wearing right now would mark you as a very rich man in Kianjavato, Madagascar. It’s perhaps an unkind thought, but a recurring one.

I was in Delhi, India, for ten days in late May and early June 2024, during a record-breaking heatwave and a national election. The brief period when I was there in that ancient megacity contained, in fact, both the largest election in the history of the world and the hottest day in the recorded history of Delhi up to that point.

It was so hot that pointing your face at the sky hurt like you’d shoved it into an open oven door. It was so hot that the frames of my glasses burned against the skin of my face. It was so hot that spilled hand sanitizer stung like spilled hot chocolate. It was so hot that my phone displayed a “System overheating” warning if I spent too long out of the shade. It was so hot that I saw a man collapse in the street from heat exhaustion, and gave him my second backup water bottle.

I could buy cold and comfort whenever I wanted. The exchange rate was over ninety rupees to the dollar when I was there, and a lot of stuff didn’t cost very many rupees. I slept in air-conditioned Airbnb rooms. I wrote, some of the time, in cafes where you felt a wall of cold air blasting you as soon as you stepped in the door. I bought cold water bottles and drank them down more or less constantly throughout the day.

But I also explored the super-heated city, sweat pouring down my skin and leaving salty ridges on my clothes. And in one corner of Delhi, near the Laxmi Nagar metro station, I went into a little shop selling parathas, a flaky flatbread similar to yet distinct from the better-known naan. I had some aloo parathas, with a delicious lightly spiced potato filling. And I felt, shockingly, almost comfortable while eating in that shop, despite the heat of the oven itself and the wide-open door to the heatwave outside, because it had a little fan.

Just one small, very elderly-looking, wire-framed black fan, sitting on a counter as I recall, that did little more than gently prod the air to move. Probably needed just a trickle of electricity, a few little watts. But it made such a difference. People flocked to that paratha shop, a little oasis of relative cool. Its shady depths, lightly stirred by the fan, gave a moment of sheltered relief to the old and young. The shade would still have made it a place of refuge in a pre-electricity world (though a pre-electricity world probably wouldn’t have had a heatwave like this) but the fan made it so much better.

Extreme poverty is not the same as what we in developed countries think of as poverty. The difference between affluence, developed-world poverty, and extreme poverty is the difference between having good new shoes, bad old shoes, and no shoes at all, ever. It’s the difference between comfortable air conditioning, just a fan, and no protection from the heat at all. It’s the difference between a good meal, a bad meal, and starving.

Extreme poverty has a formal definition, and it is different from national poverty lines that vary by country. In the United States in the 2020s, 11% of people live below the national poverty line, set at about $27.10 per day in 2021 prices, but less than 1% of people live at the UN International Poverty Line, set at $3 per day. In Ethiopia, a full 39% of people live below $3 per day. This is what headlines like “China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades” mean — not that those people may not feel poor and struggling, but that they are unlikely to have zero mass-manufactured material possessions and be at risk of literally starving to death.

And extreme poverty has decreased. Immensely. Massively. Unprecedentedly. World-changing-ly. In both relative and absolute terms. The epochal decrease in extreme poverty is the defining aspect of human existence on Earth today, and it is still deeply, deeply, under-discussed and little-understood.

In 1910, just 116 years ago, there were about 1.75 billion human beings alive on Earth. According to our best available data, in 1910 1.30 billion people were living in inflation-adjusted extreme poverty. The majority of humanity was subsistence farmers on the edge of starvation, spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This was not post-apocalyptic (quite the reverse), this was much like the way things had been for millennia.

In 2015, there were about 7.35 billion human beings alive on Earth. The global population had more than quadrupled, a never-before-seen growth rate called “more bacterial than primate.” Yet, almost unbelievably, extreme poverty was lower. Despite a century full of World Wars, genocides, and oppression, the flowering and fruits of the great enterprise of science had produced a surge of progress unparalleled in human history. We had not fallen into a Malthusian nightmare, we had produced world-historically widespread prosperity. According to our best available data, in 2015 around 734 million (0.734 billion) people were living in inflation-adjusted extreme poverty.

The ever-excellent Oxford project Our World in Data has a great in-depth article on this, including the in-depth research behind how they they got the numbers and adjusted for inflation.

Billions of people, the great growing majority of humanity, have been uplifted and uplifted themselves from a hand-to-mouth existence over the last hundred and fifty years, a mere blink of the eye of the great expanse of time since the emergence of anatomically modern humans around 200,000 years ago. We live in a golden age, richer than any ancient empire that ever was.

And it is simultaneously true that lately in many countries a growing fraction of wealth has accrued to the tiny group of people on the far right of the graph above, the centimillionaires and billionaires and now, sigh, the evil mass-murdering trillionaire. (Also note that this chart is plotted on a logarithmic axis). Inequality is a big-deal serious issue, and none of this article about the rising tide of human wealth should be taken as waving that away. I personally think that substantially more redistribution would help us progress even faster.

But it is also true that there is now so very much forgotten wealth. What would be manna from heaven to a villager in Kianjavato today or a Swedish peasant during the 1600s famines is now the bare minimum ordinary everyday expectation for billions of people. That’s real progress worth acknowledging, celebrating, and building upon.

Right now, you, the person reading this, are by some very reasonable definitions an immensely wealthy person, beyond your distant ancestors’ wildest dreams. I know that is true by definition because you are READING this, which means that you are literate and you have at least some form of access to a device with a screen. You may be working a soul-crushing dead-end job or deep in debt or wracked with pain in a dire health emergency — I’m not trying to downplay these real and important struggles — but if you are reading this, you also have access to over 75,000 free books, more than the greatest kings and emperors of centuries past2 could ever have hoped for. You almost certainly are not starving to death for lack of food — you may be food insecure, but you are not “surviving on a handful of grain a day and then going to buy more and finding there’s no more for sale” food insecure, which was a precarious yet common state of being for much of humanity for thousands of years. You have unlimited light at night for almost nothing — the price of lighting has dropped by 99.9% in the UK since 1700, when it would take hours of work to earn the price of enough guttering candles to equal a few cents’ worth of modern lightbulb time.

There are so many more instances of this forgotten wealth in daily life. Just recently, there were several historic heat waves in France. I returned from East Africa right as it was starting, after a month-long trip where I had crisscrossed the Equator, and found temperatures higher than anything I’d encountered during my journey upon my return to northern Europe. My wife and I sweltered in our fifth-floor apartment, which had no air conditioner nor even a ceiling fan. We bought a standup fan — we named it Boreas, after the Greek god of cold winds from the north — and moved it between rooms to ease the heat wherever we stayed for more than a minute. We adapted behaviorally; we went out more in the evening, shuffled carafes of tap water in and out of the refrigerator throughout the day, and made cold-brew instant coffee before each bedtime and put it in the fridge overnight for the next morning. The fan and the fridge really really helped. We had more-or-less normal days despite the unprecedented heat.

Also, relatedly, for quite a few months after we moved in together, we were washing dishes by hand in a sink, with dish soap and a washable microfiber cloth. This got a bit tedious, and eventually I realized I was planning meals that I wanted to cook almost entirely around dishes-minimization, ideally with just one pot or saucepan. My wife did some ingenious DIY home plumbing work that I still don’t quite 100% understand that allowed our apartment to have enough water hookups for both a dishwasher and our existing laundry-washing machine. (The washing machine now drains into the bathtub). And that allowed us to make a change. When we finally got a dishwasher — it was, I think, March 2026 — it multiplied my enthusiasm for cooking at least tenfold, and it feels ridiculously luxurious to just load it and have clean dishes a few hours later. I have at least a faint glimmering of an idea how a 1950s housewife must have felt when consumer appliances for the home first became widespread at an affordable price. They really are a handy-dandy piece of practical magic, a brownie or Nis or house-elf to make everyday life just that little bit less full of drudgery.

Even freaking smartphones have become commonplace! They’re new enough that people still remark on it, it’s not exactly forgotten wealth, but still — a Library of Alexandria in the palm of your hand, a Lens of 21st-century Civilization, a scrying mirror in which to see all the glorious paladins of good and warped goblins of weirdness and gibbering demons of evil the Internet has to offer, a personal terminal to the schizophrenic global hive mind. Certainly not 100% good, but definitely an extraordinary thing for most of humanity to now have in the literal palm of their hand.

Solar panels and home batteries could become “forgotten wealth” like that. Very, very soon. In some households in early-adopter countries like Germany and Australia, they probably already are. Lithium-ion battery prices have declined by 99% already just since 1991, and we’re just scraping the surface of the incredible energy storage possibilities available. Not that far in the future, people around the world will be saying something like “Yeah, of course I have devices that generate and store enough free electricity to power my daily life, who doesn’t? I got a kit for 99.99 at the big-box store on the corner a few years back.”

On a more abstract note, access to healthy ecosystems and resurgent wildlife populations could become “forgotten wealth” like that too. In many places it already is, in a way, as a product of all our other forgotten wealth allowing us to care about animals for the sheer pleasure of witnessing their existence without having to see them as desperately needed resources for survival. In my parents’ New England home, deer and ducks and squirrels frolic in the garden with relatively little fear of humans. They wouldn’t have done that this town in 1910, when deer were over-hunted across America to the point of extinction fears, nor in a 1700s colonial farmstead or even a 1300s Native American camp, where there would have been fewer people but even more need to hunt them for food. In Paris, France, you can swim and see swans and read about rare mussels in the River Seine today, because of all the forgotten wealth that made the city rich enough to spend resources on building better sewage and water purification systems.

Many cultures have myths of a lost time of poverty-less abundance and peace between humans and animals, a Garden of Eden or Krita Yuga or Hesiod’s Golden Age. That may well lie not in the past but in the future, if we choose it. We are all much richer than we realize. We have traveled far on the halting, stumbling road to utopia, and I believe that humanity can and will fight and strive and innovate to progress further still, to heights yet undreamt of.

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This newsletter has previously reported on the extraordinary discovery of the rock dubbed “Cheyava Falls” by the Curiosity rover in the Jezero Crater of Mars. It’s sedimentary “mudstone” formed in a Jezero Lake around 3.6 billion years ago, and its redox reaction-formed “leopard spot” features strongly resemble those formed by microbes on Earth.

Now, Curiosity has found another highly suggestive sign of (past) life in this rock and two others nearby. UV laser spectrometry identified a dense carbon-rich substance that on Earth would be called kerogen, and is almost always formed by microbes.

It’s really amazing that there’s a rock on Mars displaying data that is at the very least strongly consistent with and suggestive of what you’d expect to see if there were billion-year-old fossilized microbes inside. We may not know for sure until the already-drilled-and-sealed core sample is recovered for further study by a hypothetical future Mars sample-return mission and analyzed by Earth’s more powerful microscopes — maybe in the 2030s if we’re lucky. What an extraordinary time to be alive!

The Big Picture: A Cultivated Duck Milestone

An international collaboration has achieved a new milestone in cruelty-free, ultra-sustainable cellular agriculture! Parima, a cultivated meat startup from France, worked with the Vow company in Australia to grow a record-breaking tonne-scale volume of Parima’s duck meat cell line in Vow’s world-largest 22,000-liter bioreactor located in Sydney. Notably, they managed this massive scale-up by growing duck meat cells not on a scaffolding, but as an undifferentiated biomass in a food-grade nutrient medium, very similar to classic fermentation like how beer is brewed. (Notably, no genetic engineering is involved. These are ordinary duck cells, grown elsewhere). Critically, the new economy of scale in the giant bioreactor meant that Parima produced this multi-tonne batch of clean duck meat at a per-gram cost 99% cheaper than their previous smaller-scale production runs. It’s a world-first successful example of industrial-scale, reasonably-affordable cultivated meat production! Awesome work.

Cell-cultivated “clean meat” is still a young, niche, and tiny field — but clean energy was that once, and now it’s remaking the world for the better. In years to come, this may be seen as an unheralded landmark in the story of a great new transformation!

European Union

Ember reports that in the month of June 2026, a record-high 25% of all electricity generation in the European Union came from fast-growing solar power (up from just 10% in June 2021)! It’s only the third month ever that solar has been the leading power source for the EU, after June 2025 and May 2026. Several EU countries notched higher records that month, with solar generating 34% of all power in Spain and 36% of all power in Germany. It was also the first month in the history of historically fossil fuel-heavy Poland when all renewables together generated more electricity than coal. This solar surge directly boosted climate adaptation as power demands rose in heatwaves!

The European Parliament has passed a long-awaited new EU law establishing a new “NGT-1” legal category for genetically modified crops with only a limited number of changes that could have occurred (more slowly) with conventional breeding (and explicitly not allowing of crops edited for pesticide tolerance or production in the new category). This new legal category will be treated like conventional crops, not subject to the EU’s existing highly-restrictive rules against “GMOs.”

This is an EXCELLENT new law, basically opening the door to rapid deployment of the fast-growing field of climate-resilient crops in Europe, from drought-tolerant maize (sorely needed right now as heatwaves strike EU farms) to disease-resistant potatoes. A prototypical abundance and climate resilience policy. Great work!

China

China’s Great Green Wall anti-desertification program continues to achieve unprecedented successes. Since 1978, workers have been building “straw checkerboards” to help stabilize shifting sandy soils enough to then plant seedlings across northern China. Over 300 million people have been employed in reforestation over the years, mostly part-time. The state reports that young forests planted by the program now cover over 500,000 square kilometers (an area larger than California!) and that desertified land in northern China peaked in 2000 and has declined substantially every year since. And as this newsletter has previously written, 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. Absolutely extraordinary ecosystem engineering work!

China has successfully tested a reusable rocket for the first time, with the first “booster” stage of a Long March-10B returning to a unique new “net” design of ocean platform after liftoff. They are the second country ever to achieve this: American companies, particularly SpaceX, have been operating reusable rockets since 2015. The Long March series is designed for China’s goal of a crewed moon landing by 2029.

Portugal

The 400-hectare Pangea elephant sanctuary in the Alentejo region of Portugal has welcomed its first resident: Julie, a female captured over 40 years ago who was the last circus elephant in Portugal. Europe’s first-ever large-scale outdoor elephant sanctuary plans to provide a more spacious, natural home for up to 30 former circus and zoo elephants, and furthermore will be a fascinating test case for “Pleistocene rewilding” as pachyderms historically roamed this lands tens of thousands of years ago. Awesome!

Côte d’Ivoire

The 52 MW Ferké solar farm has come online, with over 73,000 solar panels in the northern Tchologo region of fast-developing Côte d’Ivoire, near the border with war-torn Burkina Faso. Ferké will provide clean electricity to over 370,000 households in the region, as well as local schools, clinics, and businesses. The epic solarpunk uplift of Africa keeps on keeping on! A quiet but vast human developmental revolution.

Italy

A new report calculates that forests in Italy now cover over 100,000 square kilometers, mostly in less populated municipalities on the slopes of the great Alps and Apennines mountain ranges and adding up to over one-third of all Italian land area, after decades of extraordinary rewilding. As of the 2020s, Italy now has more forest than farmland for the first time since the Middle Ages.

Multiple iconic species are growing their populations, including wild boar, brown bears (among them an Apennine population that seems to have evolved to be smaller and less aggressive), lynxes, and wolves (in Italy, often hybridizing with escaped dogs as well). A fascinating new European wild is coming into being in the Anthropocene!

Mozambique

In spring 2025, a bold conservation team brought 16 cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) from South Africa to be reintroduced in the Panyame conservancy in western Mozambique on the banks of the Zambezi River. Despite a harrowing journey (full story here) and cheetahs’ notorious sensitivity to stress-induced deaths, all of them arrived safely. In 2026, two of them mated and Kazi is now the mother of three healthy cubs, a highly encouraging early sign for establishing a healthy population of speedster cats. Superb!

Oman

The Sultanate of Oman is now operating the world’s biggest polysilicon factory outside China. United Solar’s facility in the Sohar Free Zone is set to complete its scale-up by the end of 2026, reaching an annual production capacity of 100,000 metric tonnes of polysilicon — enough to make 40 gigawatts (40,000 MW) of solar panels. Polysilicon is the basic feedstock material used in making solar cells, and is an ultra-high-purity crystalline form made from regular silicon with chemical processes. The basics of electrotech civilization continue to diversify and spread around the world!

Argentina

The blue-winged macaw (Primolius maracana) was locally extirpated in Argentina, though it still thrives in Brazil. Now, a reintroduction program is working to restore the species to the Misiones rainforest in the north, using three strategies of rescuing trafficked birds, captive breeding, and training captive-born birds for wild living. 11 macaws are currently training in semi-wild aviaries, with the first release set for September 2026. Awesome rewilding work! South America may yet follow Europe in eventually becoming a continent-scale example of nature bouncing back.

Switzerland

Chinese startup EHang has completed flight trials of its pilotless all-electric EH-216S flying car model in the Ticino canton of Switzerland. Switzerland is now the 22nd country where EHang’s human-carrying mega-drones have flown. Ticino uses may soon include ecotourism, emergency response, and logistics in extreme alpine terrain. Electric flying cars are spreading around the world! Here’s my in-person report.

United States

Despite the fickle, foul, moronic, and murderous criminal cabal in power, people across America keep striving to build a brighter and nobler future!

The U.S. FCC has approved startup Reflect Orbital to go ahead with a one-time first-ever demonstration of a satellite that can turn night into day within any 3-mile circle. Later in 2026, they can now launch their Eärendil-1 satellite, which will use targeted mirrors to focus the sun’s light on any small neighborhood-size patch of Earth’s night side — like a much smaller and more focused version of the Moon’s light reflection. A major proposed application would be providing extra power-ups to preexisting grid-scale solar farms, sending them sunlight at night. Extraordinary!

After being passed by veto-proof bipartisan majorities in Congress, the landmark 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has now become law — without the petulant crime-lord president’s signature. It’s a major step forward in removing barriers to energy-efficient manufactured housing and building more walkable dense infill in cities, as well as establishing a permanent municipal-level disaster recovery grant program. This writer has been advocating for this bill for years now - VICTORY!

A mosquito control business in Silver Spring, Maryland (near D.C.) has released 600,000 male Aedes mosquitoes inoculated with Wolbachia bacteria, which renders them and all females they mate with infertile for the rest of their lives, quickly crashing the population of these spreaders of dengue and Zika. This fast-spreading light-touch zero-pesticide intervention keeps protecting more people! Awesome.

Colossal Biosciences has hatched twenty-six baby chickens from their world-first artificial eggs, which could one day be scaled up to help de-extinct the moa!

Leading balcony solar advocacy group Bright Saver is now selling a new series of zero-markup DIY balcony solar kits! A price discount for their membership will help support their plan to become an “AARP for clean energy access.” Currently legal in a fast-growing subset of states and open to “guerrilla” rebel installers in the rest! EPIC.

In the early 1980s, after decades of devastation by overharvesting and dams, fewer than 800 alewives (Alosa pseudoharengus, aka river herring) managed to make their way up from the sea along the Sebasticook River of Maine to spawn in upstream pools. In 2012, a commercial fishing moratorium was introduced, while community movements led to a surge of dam removals and fish passage installations across Maine. In 2025, nine million (9,000,000) alewives were recorded heading up the Sebasticook, and (strictly limited) community fishing has renewed centuries-old traditions. Awesome!

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It may have already come to your attention that the armed forces of democratic Ukraine have been absolutely kicking Russia’s totalitarian butt lately. It’s been years since Russia’s invasion in 2022 (already longer than all of World War I) but things may now be reaching a turning point.

America shamefully abandoned Ukraine in 2025, but Europe has stepped up, and Ukraine’s homegrown defense industry now leads the world in drone warfare. In 2026 so far, Ukrainian drone strikes have devastated Russian war machine infrastructure, from oil refineries to weapons factories, across the invaders’ country, with major strikes in St. Petersburg, Moscow itself, and Omsk in Siberia, over 2,500 kilometers from the front line. That’s like if the United States had invaded Mexico and the Mexicans were successfully drone-striking New York City and Boston. It’s a really, really, bad sign for Russia — and an extraordinary success for Ukraine’s heroic defenders. Russian supply lines to conquered Ukrainian territory in the Crimea are now seriously imperiled.

The Bulwark

The Wheels Are Coming Off Putin’s War

A FEW YEARS AGO, when there was still some leeway for acts of public dissent in Russia, some protesters against the Kremlin’s imperialist policy toward Ukraine carried signs that flipped the patriotic slogan Krym nash, “Crimea is ours,” into Nam krysh…

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a month ago · 376 likes · 36 comments · Cathy Young

Gasoline is being rationed across the country, and Russian horse breeders are seeing a surge of interest. Concerns are rising that Russian farmers may not be able to harvest their crops this autumn due to fuel shortages. Some Russian soldiers are posting angry online videos decrying abuse and torture by officers and threatening to turn their guns on the Kremlin. A major oligarch and Putin regime insider, Andrey Melnichenko, recently gave an unprecedented series of in-depth interviews to The Economist calling for an end to the war — while still living in Moscow!

Furthermore, as Bill McKibben highlights, the Russo-Ukrainian War increasingly resembles a proxy war between the renewables revolution and fossil fuels, with oil refineries the Russian “Achilles heel” and distributed solar and wind increasingly empowering Ukraine’s resistance.

The Crucial Years

Oil as Achilles Heel

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a month ago · 243 likes · 93 comments · Bill McKibben

It’s a very uncertain and changeable moment. Events like the abortive 2023 Wagner rebellion show that Russia’s state structure is fragile, and dramatic phase-shifts are possible. And I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I have absolutely zero special knowledge of Russia’s byzantine war-of-shadows internal power struggles — I don’t even speak Russian! I recommend expert Russia-watchers on Substack like , , and to get a more detailed perspective on the twists and turns of the Russian autocracy machine.

I don’t know if Russia’s defenses will collapse and Ukraine will retake Crimea in a month, or whether in a last desperate gambit Russia will try and escalate by invading a NATO member like Estonia (maybe at Narva). Or both!

I have no idea if Putin will be hanging dead from a lamppost next Tuesday or if he’ll cling on to power until the last breath of his withered corpse sometime in the 2040s.

But I do think I’m pretty good at pulling together lots of information on long-running trends to assemble a good big-picture gestalt sense of the direction things arre going. And structurally, in the long term, I think that energy economics, demographics, and geopolitics make it inevitable at this point that Russia’s importance in the world will continue to wane through the 21st century, and that further dramatic declines and phase-changes are very likely in general even if the specifics remain difficult to predict. I think that out-of-the-box-sounding outcomes like a Russian civil war or a Soviet-style breakaway of seceding nations are at this point more likely than Russia ever regaining the level of international economic and geopolitical importance it had as recently as 2010, let alone 1990.

It starts with fossil fuels.

Per MIT’s Observatory of Economic Complexity, over half of Russia’s entire national exports consisted of fossil fuels (in 2024, the most recent year for which data was available), and much of the rest was other raw materials like aluminum, iron, gold, and wood. There’s practically no value-add technology manufacturing at all. (When did you last hear about a cool new Russian-made car, phone, or video game? Exactly).

Modern Russia is basically an economy entirely propped up by fossil fuels. Take away the fossil fuels, and you’ve got a few minerals, some lumber, and a few crops.

In 2015, the late U.S. Senator from Arizona and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain famously said “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country. It's kleptocracy. It's corruption. It's a nation that's really only dependent upon oil and gas for their economy.”

That remains essentially true today, even more so now that their unprovoked and unsuccessful invasion of Ukraine has devastated millions of Russia’s youth and severed many of its remaining trade connections to the outside world. Russia mostly exports to Asian nations now, China purchasing the lion’s share and India and Turkey not far behind.

And, here’s the thing, all of those countries are doubling and tripling down on clean energy! The only other countries as devoted as Russia to opposing electrotech, places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and, sigh, the current U.S. White House regime, are doing it for the same reason: because they also produce lots of fossil fuels. They won’t be buying oil and gas from Russia, they’ll be desperately trying to prop up demand for their own fossil fuels — while, in at least Saudi Arabia and the U.S., also electrifying at home themselves despite fossil fuel incumbents’ best efforts to slow down progress.

The Electrotech Revolution

Electric Asia

Hello all, find below our new report: Electric Asia. We’re hosting a webinar to run through the findings today: 9am Brussels, 12:30pm Delhi, 3pm Beijing. You can sign up here…

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2 months ago · 41 likes · 2 comments · Daan Walter, Sam Butler-Sloss, Antoine Issac, and Kingsmill Bond

Asia's electrification just keeps accelerating. Pretty soon, cutting off imports of cheap Russian fuel will be only a minor inconvenience, perhaps an acceptable price to pay for a better relationship with Europe — or especially for a good relationship with rising defense-tech superstar Ukraine, which is already booking orders for missile-intercepting drone expertise from Gulf Arab monarchies worried about a resurgent Iran.

Russia’s not going to build a globally competitive technology industry to replace their leading commodity industry anytime soon. Russia’s remaining population is now anti-selected for competence and initiative. Their most freethinking minds have fled, and hundreds of thousands of their young men have been sent to die in the blood and the mud for an aging autocrat’s sadistic dreams of empire reborn. And Putin’s stupid wars have blown up their chance of trying the Dubai/Saudi Gulf route of leveraging oil cash to build entertainment or tourism economies, which was a very risky bet anyway.

Basically, in all the domains where the U.S. is falling behind China with respect to the electrotech future, Russia has the same problems but much worse. In fact, for seemingly every problem the U.S. has, from corruption to climate disasters, Russia has the same problems but much worse.

Russia is structurally screwed.

Once you file away the gushers of petro-money and the aging war machine it pays for, there isn’t that much of the Russian economy left. Selling lumber and raw minerals to China1? That’s as low on the value chain as it gets, the economic profile of a sub-Saharan African dictatorship.

And Russia is hilariously behind on the electrotech revolution rapidly becoming the basic operating system for human civilization. Russia has no backup plan. They’re well behind Pakistan or Indonesia or Egypt in terms of electrotech adoption, let alone the superpowers their leaders still strive to be counted among. EV sales are at 60% in China, around 33% in the EU, 10% in the U.S., and appear to be around 2% in Russia as of 2026. Europe is buying way, way, more Chinese EVs than Russia!

Russia built 0.1 GW (100 MW) of new solar power in 2025, bringing the national total to 3.1 GW (3,100 MW). For comparison, the United States built 43 GW of solar in 2025, more than 13 times Russia’s cumulative national total built in just one year! And of course that same year, China built 315 GW (315,000 MW) of new solar power, reaching a national total solar capacity of over 1,200 GW!

Russia’s lucrative internal fossil fuel companies like Gazprom are run by state-connected oligarchs who dislike competition, and they’re able to quash electric progress to a degree far more destructive than what their U.S. peers can manage.

The U.S. economy remains incredibly diversified compared to the Russian economy, and despite the current White House’s best/worst efforts to sabotage it with science funding cuts, the Hormuz crisis, and dumb tariffs, it will remain so for the foreseeable future. It’s still kind of worryingly high on fossil fuels, but much less so, and there are entire gigantic super-competitive U.S. industries where Russia barely tries. (Plus, the charts in this article are showing physical goods exports, not even including star U.S. “services” exports like Amazon Web Services or multitudes of LLMs)! The United States has an electrotech industry, has electric car startups like Slate and battery startups like Form Energy and solar foundries like First Solar, and Russia really doesn’t, at all, and isn’t even importing the Chinese stuff all that much.

The fall of fossil fuels is a sectoral and regional issue for U.S. politics (still a really big deal!!!), but for Russia it’s national and existential. Compared to China, the U.S. often looks like it’s falling behind, but compared to Russia, the U.S. is in absolutely spectacular shape. America’s recent geopolitical decline is meaningful, but looks to me to be mostly relative and mostly potentially reversible (so far, at least) while Russia’s geopolitical decline looks to me to be absolute, structural, and not reversible anytime soon, likely for at least the rest of the 21st century.

And that’s the economics. The demographics are just as dire. Russia looks very big on the map, but the actual population of human Russians is a lot smaller than it may seem. Russia’s demographics have absolutely collapsed lately. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Russia as of mid-2026 is home to 139.5 million people. That’s down sharply from Russia’s official number of 146.7 million in 2019. Russia today already has a smaller population than Bangladesh, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, or Indonesia, and will likely be overtaken by countries like Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the D.R. Congo by 2050 — less than 25 years from now. And there are good reasons to believe that Russia’s official population numbers may be substantially overstated, given a long history of suppressing inconvenient demographic data.

Certainly the anecdotal evidence suggests a massive manpower shortage. Russia’s child labor laws have been loosened since the invasion of Ukraine, and teenagers are now put to work building drones and generating AI propaganda. For years now, Russia has been running mass recruitment scams in Africa where they offer impoverished young men a visa to do civilian work in Russia, then force-draft them to fight on the front line. And of course, there’s the hideous war crime that is Russia’s kidnapping, indoctrination, and forced “adoption” of 20,000 Ukrainian children — a literal “population grab” in addition to a land grab, arguably comparable to the Iroquois “mourning wars” of the 1700s — and perhaps a harbinger of wars to come in a demographic-transition age where total human population is likely to peak as soon as the 2050s.

The Russian government is also actively trying to promote “pro-natalist” policies while simultaneously sending hundreds of thousands of their young men to die in a pointless war of aggression. (Russia has suffered an estimated 1.4 million casualties since their invasion of Ukraine). Russia has banned “child-free propaganda” and many regions are now paying teenage schoolgirls to bear children for the Motherland (seriously).

But it’s not working. Fertility rates are staying stubbornly low and lately falling even further in Russia (as well as other autocracies like China, Iran, and even North Korea). No government in the world has the practical capacity to send agents of the state to oversee all heterosexual intercourse to be sure they’re not using contraception! Independent estimates have calculated that Russia’s birth rate in 2026 was 38% below 2014 levels, and the country’s lowest for over 200 years.

And quite a lot of that shrinking Russian population, including many of the remaining sub-segments still growing, don’t primarily think of themselves as Russian. Russia is arguably best thought of as the Muscovite Empire, an amalgamation of conquered peoples subservient to a powerful colonizer, like a classic European colonial empire just overland instead of overseas.

Many of Russia’s internal subdivisions, places like Tuva and Kalmykia and Tatarstan and Chechnya and Sakha and Buryatia and Altai and Dagestan, have large populations (sometimes even majorities) of non-ethnic-Russians — and they’re often the parts of Russia with the highest remaining birth rates. Putin’s regime is of course well aware of this, and non-ethnic-Russians from these peripheral conquered nations have been disproportionately drafted and sent to die in Ukraine. That’s awful, but it may also backfire in producing lots of embittered veterans. We may yet see a “spring of new nations” in northern Eurasia akin to that which followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Obviously Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains a danger (though there are many reports indicating that Russian nuclear capabilities are rapidly degrading due to lack of maintenance and technological obsolescence) but nuclear deterrence has steadily held since 1945, and it’s notable that Russian threats to use nukes in Ukraine have repeatedly come to nothing despite multiple alleged “red lines” being crossed.

I am of course concerned about potential bad outcomes, but on balance I am excited and hopeful to see Russia further decline, and I would consider it a further positive if they (as peacefully as possible) splinter into many smaller states a la the breakup of the Soviet Union, with ethnoculturally distinct regions like the Idel-Ural Six, Tuva, the Caucasus, and Kalmykia seceding and ideally finding democracy in their liberation. I don’t wish harm to the civilian people of Russia, but I think that almost any outcome would be better for them in the medium to long term than the continuation of Russia’s current regime.

We essentially have one of the worst possible North Eurasian governance scenarios, “Russia as Mega North Korea,” right now! You can’t even reasonably make the classic harm-reduction “rather the devil you know than risky chaos” argument in favor of Russian stability, because the status quo is that they keep feeding their men into a meat grinder by using “human wave” attacks in a bloody futile effort to conquer Ukraine!

And then there’s the effect on the rest of the world. Russia has funded and promoted Internet propaganda in support of far-right movements around the world. The Putin regime is a maelstrom of corruption, linked to the worst actors in seemingly every other nation’s political arena. It’s hard to make definitive statements about geopolitical cause and effect given that we have access to only one historical timeline, but it seems at least plausible that one of the reasons the 1990s saw widespread momentum towards democratization across much of the world is that Russia was deeply weakened after the fall of the USSR and was unable to finance, propagandize for, and otherwise support authoritarian strongmen in other nations.

Russia is never going to be a superpower again in my lifetime. The trend of its medium to long-term further decline is, at this point, inevitable.

And I think that this is a very good thing for the future of human civilization and life on Earth — and indeed the Russian people themselves, who may yet see a new birth of freedom once endless flows of oil money and disposable manpower are no longer available to their would-be rulers.

Biology researchers at the University of Minnesota have manually assembled from standard chemical components a new model of tiny water droplets — about one-fourth the size of a grain of fine sand — that are enclosed by fatty lipid membranes and contain a custom-built set of nine “artificial chromosome” DNA plasmids totaling just 90,000 base pairs, a stripped-down minimalist genome coding for basic functions only. The resulting…entity…squirms around in a petri dish, grows in size, moves to engulf food, and can be divided to pass on copies of its genes to new blobs.

It’s a synthetic cell— built from scratch, not by evolution, with no ancestors. Very, very close to counting as an independent genesis of new life on Earth.

It’s called the SpudCell, and it’s generally seen as not quite 100% technically alive yet, because it can’t make its own ribosomes (the protein-assembling “workbenches” of the cell), and it degrades after five to six generations. They’re the first such project built from the bottom up with lifeless components, not by modifying a preexisting living cell. (For context, SpudCells can only survive in the lab, an environment with no threats and a constant food supply of key proteins. They’re highly fragile, destroyed even by brief exposure to air, so pose no danger to our established biosphere).

The research team has already formed Biotic, a new registered public-benefit institution founded to support and steward this new field. In addition to the extraordinary philosophical implications, hopes are high that this could someday lead to a living “ultra-renewable” technology sector of single-celled microbes custom-designed to automatically produce industrial feedstock chemicals, medicines, fuels, or even food proteins like Solar Foods’ natural bacteria already do. FASCINATING work!

Bolivia

Bolivia’s first-ever release of a jaguar into the wild occurred in June 2026! Yaguara, orphaned as a cub by wildfires in 2024 and raised by a sanctuary, was released into the Noel Kempff Mercado national park after honing her instincts in a semi-wild forest enclosure. The politically tumultuous Andean-Amazonian nation has the world’s highest level of jaguar poaching, and the up-front investment in this enclosure should provide a platform for future rescued jaguars to return to the wild. Excellent work!

Morocco

The largest-yet floating solar project in Africa has now come online at the Oued Rmel Dam reservoir high in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco! Its 13 MW of clean power will help supply the Tanger Med industrial port complex. That port is known as a major hub for Moroccan-made Chinese EV company exports to Europe, with factories linked to the port by Al-Boraq, Africa’s first high-speed rail line. Relatedly, the World Bank has approved funding for a new 300 MW/1,500 MWh pumped hydro “water battery” to be built as storage support for at least 1 gigawatt of new solar and wind in Morocco. Integrated electrotech economies are taking shape worldwide!

China

Commercial fishing was completely banned in the Yangtze River in 2021 (an unprecedentedly large-scale measure that involved resettling 231,000 fisherfolk) after decades of ecosystem devastation. Five years later, a riverine renaissance is rising, with a 2026 study (PDF here) finding that fish biomass has increased by 209% in the Yangtze from 2018 to 2023! The Yangtze sturgeon, declared extinct in the wild in 2022, has been seen spawning in the Yangtze once again after a massive captive breeding and reintroduction program. Extraordinary scale, speed, and effect!

Electric trucks are fast becoming commonplace in China, with cutting-edge sodium-ion batteries successfully tested in eighteen-wheelers and networks of ultra-fast battery-swap stations proliferating on major inter-city routes. Electric trucks made up one-third of all heavy truck sales in China in 2025, and the Ministry of Transport now targets 40% of China’s new heavy-truck sales and 20% of the nationwide heavy-truck fleet being electric by 2030! Decarbonization keeps happening faster and faster.

A linked pair of deep closed-loop geothermal wells have been drilled in Henan Province, likely an early sign that China is getting into enhanced geothermal projects.

China’s zero-emissions nuclear power plant fleet nearly doubled from 31.4 GW in 2016 to 58.7 GW online nationwide in 2026. That’s much smaller than its concurrent renewables build-out (China now has over 1,000 GW of solar alone), but it’s still more new nuclear than any other country in the world by far.

Based on patent filings, analysts believe that the cutting-edge new second-generation Blade battery from leading EV-maker BYD contains zero nickel, instead using new lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) chemistries — a major breakthrough , as nickel was previously considered indispensable in long-duration EV batteries.

BYD may soon acquire half of Volkswagen’s flagship factory in Dresden, Germany, as part of a broader effort to support local jobs and expertise as they expand in the EU.

The yellow-crested cockatoo1 is critically endangered, with only about 2,000 left in the wild across the Sunda islands of Indonesia and Timor-Leste. But there’s another population of the species, with around 200 feral pet descendants living in the parks of Hong Kong. A new study now finds that these urban cockatoos have unexpectedly high genetic diversity, meaning that they’re highly valuable for the future of the entire species. Immigrant species making good, once again! Fascinating news.

Canada

In 1913, the Squamish Nation were illegally evicted from a reservation on part of their ancient lands, a coastal inlet now within the city of Vancouver, Canada. In the 21st century, a court case returned a small patch of urban land — and the Squamish chose to build a world-leading carbon-neutral walkable housing development, cleverly using their new right to set their own zoning codes less restrictive than the surrounding city with no car-incentivizing height limits or parking minimums. The Sen̓áḵw project is now well under construction, with eleven giant new apartment towers set to house 9,000 people gradually rising over the city alongside new bicycle paths, seawall repairs, and street signs in English and Squamish! Spectacular work.

Benin

Located on the edge of the war-torn Sahel, Pendjari National Park in northern Benin (managed by leading conservation NGO African Parks) is one of the last strongholds for the imperiled West African population of leopards (Panthera pardus). Now, a new study analyzing six years of camera trap data from 2017 to 2023 has found a meaningful increase in leopard density, from 0.62 to 2.08 leopards per 100 square kilometers, suggesting that the park population is increasing. An encouraging sign!

European Union

A new study has found that several major air pollutants have steadily decreased across the European Union since 2015, as electrification keeps advancing. Sulfur oxides are now at less than half of their 2015 levels, and nitrogen oxides are now at less than 70% of 2015 levels, with smaller declines in particulate matter. Progress!

Bangladesh

The newly elected post-revolution government of Bangladesh has enacted sweeping new electrification incentives! Bangladesh has waived all tariffs on importing electric vehicles and EV charging stations from July 1, 2026 through June 2030, announced a 0% tax rate on the solar power sector until 2035, and furthermore raised taxes on fossil fuel vehicles. In the wake of the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis, electrification is clearly the smart geostrategic choice. And air pollution from constant traffic in the mega-city of Dhaka is notoriously horrific: this should help! Excellent work.

Switzerland

A recent trial in the Neuchâtel canton of Switzerland has produced world-first positive results for deploying solar panels in the unused space between the rails of train tracks. More than 11,000 trains have safely passed over the removable panels, and the airflow of the passage neatly removes dust and debris. French, Italian, and Korean railways are reportedly already interested in these new Swiss results. Great!

United States

Despite the despicable corrupt cabal in the White House, the people of America keep fighting, creating, and striving to build a brighter, nobler future for the next 250 years!

Washington State startup Crown Bees is providing native bee restoration as a service, selling mail-order bee houses, wildflower seeds, and live (regionally sourced) mason and leafcutter bees across America! Distinct from European honeybees, these native species are highly efficient pollinators for wildlands or gardens. Their online tool based on iNaturalist citizen science even identifies your local wild bees and how best to help them by planting local flowers! An excellent project for bottom-up rewilding.

The solar-powered Interceptor waste-eating robot boat model from The Ocean Cleanup is increasingly successful around the world, with 21 now operating in river mouths across 10 countries. An early Interceptor deployment in Bellona Creek, the outflow for the Los Angeles County urban drainage network, caught 143,710 pounds of trash in 2025 before it could enter the ocean. Awesome work!

New Jersey has passed a balcony solar bill with UNANIMOUS support in the state legislature, becoming the 10th U.S. state to advance such a bill through both houses!

Baker Hughes, in Texas, is one of the world’s largest oil field services companies. They’re a primary seller of drilling equipment to giants like Exxon and Chevron. Now, they’ve signed a major new deal with newly formed geothermal company Mantle Reach Power to supply rigs for 500 MW of new 24/7 clean geothermal electricity in the next 5 years — in addition to their 300 MW 2025 deal with pioneer startup Fervo! A fossil industry supplier pivoting fast to survive in an accelerating electrotech future.

Vermont has launched a first-in-the-nation state initiative to promote ultra-energy-efficient manufactured homes! Efficiency Vermont’s new Advanced Manufactured Home program certifies and provides a $3,000 builder’s incentive for new mass-produced modular homes that are all-electric, heat pump-equipped, and reduce energy use with up-to-date doors, windows, and insulation. Certified homes save their owners an average of $2,700 per year on energy bills compared to existing non-certified manufactured homes. Eighteen such homes from manufacturer Titan were installed in Brattleboro, Vermont in the month of June 2026 alone — for locals fleeing a vulnerable floodplain, in fact! A great model to scale up nationwide. Excellent work!

A landmark new study analyzing nine years of camera trap data has found that when pumas started visiting the tiny Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve of Bay Area California, it transformed the suburban forest patch’s entire food web. Coyotes and deer reduced their nighttime activity, gray foxes and brush rabbits became more active, and woody plant density (including everything from sagebrush to a native oak species) multiplied 64-fold in 17 years as deer browsing declined. Rewilding: powerful!

In waters right off the docks of downtown Miami, Florida, an urban proto-reef has formed, made up of astonishingly resilient “super coral” strains of brain, staghorn, and elkhorn coral that have shrugged off generally-lethal levels of acidic waters, heatwaves, and diseases. (There’s even a live Coral City Camera)! Researchers suspect it could be thanks to their heat-resistant “Ventura strain” of Durusdinium trenchii symbiotic algae, which is normally found in Pacific corals but may have ended up in Miami via hobbyist aquariums. Fascinating ultra-fast adaptation to the Anthropocene!

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Around midday on June 1, 2026, world-renowned science fiction author and three-time The Weekly Anthropocene interviewee Kim Stanley Robinson arrived in France for a five-day visit. (Fortunately, this was well before the record-breaking European heatwave of late June 2026, amidst which I sweat as I write these words). Knowing that I had moved to Paris recently, he had very kindly invited me (on the occasion of our recent January 2026 interview) to join him on the first two days of his excursion! I was thrilled and proud to meet such an inspiring figure face-to-face for the first time. My dad had been a Kim Stanley Robinson reader and fan since before I was born, once handing my child-self his tattered 90s-vintage copy of Red Mars, a book older than I was. I still have it. And now I was going on a trip with the author himself! Amazing! I felt immensely lucky.

Mr. Robinson was going to Brittany for these two days, a whirlwind tour during which he hoped to visit two extraordinary human creations. One futuristic, one Neolithic. I met him at the Gare Montparnasse train station in the early afternoon. Due to a flight delay, we’d just missed our originally planned train from Paris to the Breton port town of Lorient, but we got another one after waiting for less than two hours. Such are the wonders of the French passenger rail system!

Descending from the Lorient train station, we realized that it was nearly six o’clock in the evening, our invite time for a rendezvous by the docks, and we couldn’t make it across town on foot in time. Our hastily summoned Uber driver was a guy from Mali named Moussa. As he sped us from the Lorient train station to the docks, we chatted in French and he told me that he had a young daughter in France but could no longer return to Mali to see his extended family due to the recent escalation in the civil war.

Moussa dropped us off at the Lorient submarine base around 6 P.M. It was a hulking series of concrete blocks built by the Nazi Kriegsmarine in 1941, subsequently run by the French Navy for decades after World War II, then turned into a civilian marine industrial park in 1997. That was the only address we’d gotten, so Mr. Robinson and I walked out of the car idly chatting about where our quarry was located exactly amidst the maze of docks extending out into the harbor. We walked pier-wards, turned a corner, and suddenly there it was.

Unmistakable. The Tara Polar Station was unlike any seagoing vessel I’ve ever seen, to the point that I keep using terms like “vessel” or “station” in this article because “boat” or “ship” just don’t seem right. It was shaped like a giant buoy with a geodesic dome on top, a one-of-a-kind creation designed from scratch for overwintering as a long-term residence station amid the Arctic sea ice.

Mr. Robinson told me that his next novel would be set in the Arctic, and he was visiting this station for research! He immediately referenced the parallels between this effort and the historic Fram expedition, led by the really incredible Norwegian polymath Fridtjof Nansen. (Nansen was a cutting-edge scientist and explorer who also became a diplomat, humanitarian, and eventual Nobel Peace Prize laureate, leading efforts to help refugees in some of the worst crises of the post-World War I chaos).

The Fram, custom-built for Nansen’s expedition, included so many unique and unprecedented innovations, including an unusually wide and shallow shape, a windmill running an electric generator, a retractable rudder, and a near-complete lack of a keel, that it widely derided at the time as a positively insane contraption that could never work. In 1893, Nansen took the Fram to the edge of the Arctic ice cap near the New Siberian Islands. There, he intentionally let it freeze into the pack ice, with the hope that ocean currents would naturally carry the ice, and with it the ship, towards the then-unreached North Pole. They didn’t reach the pole, but a dogsled excursion from the Fram did set a new “Furthest North” record, valuable scientific observations were taken, and, perhaps most impressively, the ship and crew survived three years of being frozen in and sailed themselves home after emerging into open water in the North Atlantic in 1896. Nansen’s idea had worked — so well that the Fram would actually end up being used again on Roald Amundsen’s 1910-1912 Antarctic expedition that brought the first humans to the South Pole!

The modern Fram heir we were visiting today was the latest project of the Tara Ocean Foundation, which had previously gained acclaim for its original open-water research schooner Tara’s five major expeditions totaling 400,000 kilometers of sea travel. The Tara Ocean Foundation was founded in 2003 by Agnès Troublé, a fashion designer who was once among the richest women in France. Her fashion brand’s logo, a cursive agnes b, was inscribed on the side of the vessel. Multiple other funders had contributed particular equipment to the new Arctic research station we were visiting today, including several charitable foundations and the royal family of Monaco, who have long been known for their support of ocean science. Construction was completed at Cherbourg in 2025, and sea trials have been underway since. Now it was in Lorient, its “home port,” preparing for its first real voyage to the heart of the Arctic, where its twelve-person core crew planned to be frozen amid the sea ice for eighteen months.

We simply walked up to its mooring and waved hello at the folks on the deck, and were soon climbing a staircase to meet Daniel Cron, the incoming new captain of the Tara Polar Station. As we passed the outer wall of the dome, we saw bright red waterproof Arctic exposure suits hung up in a wardrobe with a device attached that automatically warmed and dried them.

On the adjoining wall, a jolly polar bear sign gestured to a rack of life jackets.

In that antechamber, intent-looking young people kept passing us back and forth during the introductions, carrying boxes of equipment, cables, or food. It was at this point we learned that the Tara Foundation, thanks to generous Agnès, offered fully funded research positions on their vessels, such that scientists wanted to study the oceans with them could just sign up without having to bring their own grant. A godsend in modern cash-strapped academia!

An engineer stopped by and paused our discussion for a moment while she gave a brief update to Captain Cron. A hum of purposeful activity continuously thrummed through the air.

From the entrance, we crossed the dome to the curving mess hall, the crew's main R&R area. Several young people, future crew members, were working on laptops. A calm French port was outside their window now; within a year, they would be gazing out these same windows into the depths of a polar winter, with this mess hall their sanctuary at every meal.

It was a cozy wood-paneled space, with numerous personal touches. A historic chart of a then-unmapped Arctic hung on the wall, fruit and cakes were poised on a counter, and a plush toy of the iconic French cartoon elephant Babar sat on a shelf.

The adjoining kitchen, or rather galley, was sparkling, with spick-and-span cookware, spice bottles, and appliances arranged on spotless steel counters. As in naval submarines and long-term space missions, food would be key to keeping morale up during a mission where people would live and work tightly confined in a plant-less, sun-less, self-contained environment for months on end. A little sticker on a door sung the praises of Reblochon cheese.

Next, we climbed a spiraling metal staircase into the wheelhouse. The bridge! The command center of the vessel. Captain Cron showed us the mix of electronic and manual readouts and instrumentation, with the maps on screen complemented by a serious-leaking paper navigation chart of the Breton coast on a nearby table.

After that, we descended two floors from the wheelhouse to the lab deck, the heart of the ship. At this point, it becomes necessary to append a plan of this vessel’s unique construction to better understand its form, function and mission.

The Tara Polar Station was essentially a giant doughnut-shaped dome-buoy, with a small “moon pool” circle in the center opening directly onto the seawater beneath.

It was built this way so that when it navigates to the high Arctic and lets itself be immured in the autumn freeze, it’ll have a small, manageable window on the ocean below, kept ice-free by the warmth of the ship. This is really important, because it could fill a key gap in climate science. This station could be the first to provide a consistent data series to answer the question: what, exactly, goes on under the Arctic sea ice during winter?

It’s a harder problem than it sounds at first. With the rise of solar power and satellite Internet, much of Earth’s open ocean is becoming increasingly studded with data-gathering drones, probes, and buoys, but not the Arctic in winter. For months and months and months, large swathes of the Arctic Ocean are still (so far) covered with meters-thick sea ice. Satellite radio signals won't propagate through that. GPS doesn’t work under the ice. National navies have all opted not to send their hugely expensive icebreaker ships or nuclear submarines on recurring months-long Arctic climate science duty (though there have been one-off science missions, there's no consistent long-term monitoring). Previous accessible-by-air research camps atop the sea ice, or the rare Fram-style ships (all hitherto without a moon pool) have found it incredibly difficult, energy-expensive, and dangerous to try and cut through ever-renewing ice every day to keep a channel to the deep open, and most have settled for one or two brief sample-collecting sessions before the hole freezes back up. And if you sent robotic probes there without a support ship to cut through the ice, how would they transmit data? How would they recharge, alone in the cold and the dark? You'd need Mars-probe level hardware, with an on-board nuclear reactor powering a giant drill or something, and nobody's willing to fund that. A custom-built ship would be cheaper.

Thus, humanity still doesn’t have that great of an idea of what goes on under the Arctic ice cap in the winter, and definitely doesn’t have a consistent sense of how the ocean chemistry and biology under the shrinking ice is changing over time due to climate change. Is the ecosystem “Atlantification” observed elsewhere extending below the ice? Are the vital base-of-the-food-chain plankton communities changing? Novel species irruptions? Dissolved oxygen levels? Salinity? Thermoclines? Are there any weird feedback loops occurring on the underside of the deep ice cap, as we’ve seen at the edge of some Antarctic ice sheets? We don’t really know.

The Tara Polar Station’s mission is to fix that. They have a twenty-year plan to provide a consistent time series of Arctic ocean health into the 2040s! For two decades, their continuously shifting crew and research terms will be spending eighteen-month periods in the high Arctic, each bracketed by a six-month resupply dash back to Brittany for food and fuel. This was the first supply period, with the first eighteen-month sojourn to begin this autumn. Truly epic.

There was a little blue handwritten sign over the moon pool that would soon lead to freezing seawater in the Arctic night, built to be diligently kept ice-free as a portal to a mysterious submarine realm. It read, in French, “Swimming Forbidden (Fishing Allowed).” I just loved that little personal touch.

The scientists working their told us that if you connected all six of their massive spools of industrial-grade cable, you could lower sampling equipment for as deep as one kilometer below the surface of the moon pool! They'll be deepening our datasets of sub-ice plankton and so on, not just in time by lengthening the possible observation period, but in space by going seriously deep.

Their ROV, the Ann, was from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. An undersea drone, of the sort that have been at the cutting edge, or rather reaching eye, of ocean science for decades now! It was just the right size to be deployed out through the moonpool and explore the dark under-ice polar seas beneath. An adventurer robot, seeking new life! Amazing.

The level below the lab deck was the engine room.

It was a glorious three-dimensional snarl of complex and expensive equipment.

They had a giant battery system in addition to their traditional fossil-fuel engine, running the ship's electronics and topped up on occasion by their own mini wind turbine on the hull.

They had a labyrinthine jungle-gym of pipes distributing water from their onboard desalination system.

I didn’t understand half of what I was looking at, but I was impressed by the manifest care in these utilitarian designs, the work of many hands striving to create and protect a bubble of curious, questing life to explore the Arctic ocean's long night.

So…I’d just seen an iconic dome-y design, an airlock entryway with exploration suits, a mess hall, a sickbay, engine room, bridge, sensor array, and on-board robot for exploring an alien unlivable ecosystem. All on an exploratory multi-year mission for the chance of helping out a planet at risk. During the mission, the crew will brave long isolation from outside aid, spend their days doing science while not having to think about money, and live and work together while maintaining their vessel.

The Tara Polar Station is, essentially, a real-world example of a classic Starfleet ship from Star Trek. It is just so cool that this exists!

Kim Stanley Robinson’s work has regularly featured efforts to create utopian spaces in extreme environments, from his novels’ Mars colonies and asteroid terraria and a flooded 2100s New York City to his nonfiction’s real-life examples like Antarctic research bases and Sierra Nevada conservationists. He also dwells on the novel economic systems that can be forged to provide the long-term public goods that don’t get properly valued under current paradigms of laissez-faire shareholder-centered capitalism, like the real world’s NSF grant funding of Antarctic research and the Basque “Mondragon” worker-owned-capitalist system that in Robinson’s future history become the basis for economic ownership on Mars. And now, privileged to join him on researching his next novel, I was getting to see a real-world example of the kind of unique endeavors that form the germ of his futuristic extrapolations.

Here and now, at the Tara Polar Station, a French fashion magnate’s personal passion for the ocean is on track to fund scientists working to give humanity an unparalleled window into the under-ice Arctic Ocean in the critical decades when we’ll really, really need to know how fast it’s warming! That’s pretty amazing.

This was a utopian space indeed, a place for the free and untrammeled practice of science. Almost a modern eremitic religious order in what it’s offering to young scientists: a place to live, to not worry about money, and to work full-time with people who share your passions to learn things that directly help humanity understand the future of the world they live on and what they should do about it. And with a practical purpose, not just self-cultivation: a holy mission to gain knowledge about one of fastest-warming and least-understood life-bearing reaches of the planet we all live on, nothing less! Fascinating stuff.

Mr. Robinson and I left the Tara Polar Station in high spirits1, reveling in the aesthetic and intellectual beauty of what we had just been privileged to see, and sauntered away from the docks in search of dinner. I was profoundly impressed by the man's energy: Mr. Robinson was in his seventies and this was the evening immediately after his overnight flight from California to France, but he was still traveling in a style very much like what I had recently done in China and East Africa. Solo, wearing all his trip inventory in one backpack, and ever-ready to walk a few kilometers more! He even mentioned that he was planning a Sierra Nevada backpacking trip for later this summer! I sincerely hope that when and if I attain his current age, sometime in the still science-fiction-sounding decade of the 2070s, I will have stayed in similar shape.

That evening, we had a fascinating conversation over pizza, at the only restaurant in Lorient we could find open at that late hour. Kim Stanley Robinson told me about how he and his wife had lived in Zurich for a time when she got a job at a university there, inspiring the setting of much of Ministry for the Future. Interestingly, he also said that none of his many novels had ended up progressing the way he had originally envisioned when starting to write them, with changed or entirely novel plot arcs and characters suggesting themselves when the book was well underway. Firmly on the “pantser” side of the Internet’s oft-posited “plotter vs. pantser” divide of novel-writing styles, essentially. He also seemed to know and have some personal anecdote about practically everyone involved in American science fiction in the latter decades of the 20th century. I learned that he had gone to see the original first-ever Star Wars movie in theaters in 1970s California with his mentor Ursula K. Le Guin!

The next morning, we departed from Lorient amid unpredictable weather, alternating between intermittent flashes of pouring rain and bright blue skies. We were going just a little ways east along the Breton coast, from the dockside town of Lorient to the tiny village of Carnac. When Mr. Robinson had made plans to visit the Tara Polar Station, he’d noticed that Carnac was close to Lorient, and had leapt at the opportunity to visit a longstanding “bucket list” historic site that he’d first read about as a child: the Carnac megaliths.

I hadn’t even heard of the Carnac megaliths before this trip, but once I started researching the site I couldn’t believe my ignorance. It’s the largest surviving megalithic site in Europe, known as “France’s Stonehenge,” and consists of a whopping 3,000 menhirs arranged in long straggling rows across four nearby fields. There are more than 10,000 within just six miles, beyond the core site. They’re all single standing stones, with no iconic three-piece trilithons like at Stonehenge, and they’re hewn from local granite. Variscite beads from the Iberian Peninsula and jadeite axes from the Italian Alps have been found at the site, implying that it had some form of significance widespread enough to attract valuable goods from across the continent. Now, sheep graze among the megaliths, and a visitor center plus marked trails invite the public's interest.

There were just so many of them. And they were so very, very old. It’s not even 100% clear if the people who raised the first of the menhirs here were practicing agriculture at all, whether they were part of the waning hunter-gatherer cultures or on the cusp of the rise of the early European farmers. A recent carbon-dating analysis at Le Plasker site, right next to the part of the Carnac megaliths we visited, estimated that they were erected between 4600 and 4300 BCE. Between 6,300 and 6,600 years ago! Due to that study, the Carnac region is now the home of Europe’s oldest known megaliths. Quite possibly there are older undated ones somewhere else, but as of the best available knowledge when I write this article, it seems at least plausible that the whole Neolithic cultural complex of standing stones started here, on the shores of Brittany.

For context, early wood-and-earth works were built at Stonehenge around 3100 BCE — over a thousands years later! — and the first standing stones were added over five hundred years after that. The Great Pyramids of Giza were built in the 2500s BCE.

So consider, say, the year 3000 BCE. Over five thousand years ago now, at the earliest glimmerings of the story of written language, when wheeled carts were hot new inventions and the pyramids were centuries in the future. In that half-unknown time, supposedly the semi-legendary Narmer had recently united the kingdoms of the Upper and Lower Egypt to become the first Pharaoh. Mesopotamia was at the dawn of the Sumer culture, with city-states like Uruk still independent centuries before the rise of the first empires under potentates like Sargon. The confluence of the Seine and the Marne that now holds Paris was just another tiny little village (if even that).

At that time, Carnac was already old, old, old. Quite likely already a pilgrimage site renowned across Western Europe, judging by its access to precious stones from distant parts of the continent.

So much about the Carnac site remains completely open to interpretation. Including that most basic of questions: why on Earth did people drag all these rocks here and stand them up in rows?

Was it a necropolis? Three thousand giant gravestones? Perhaps erected one by one over the years as chiefs or high priests died, or to commemorate major events like famines or plagues or wars? Was it a religious site? Some kind of mythical map? Some kind of trading floor, or gift-economy bazaar? A grand law-making site of proto-democracy, like medieval Iceland’s Thingvellir? Some kind of data-encoding record-keeping, like the knots in Incan quipus, immortalizing some important story, a king list, or origin myth? All of the above? None of the above?

It doesn’t seem obviously astronomy-related like so many other classic Neolithic sites: the Carnac menhirs don’t seem to have any special alignment vis-a-vis the Sun, other stars, or equinoxes, unlike the clear winter solstice sunrise alignment of Newgrange in Ireland or the many Stonehenge theories. The Carnac site is three thousand big rocks, roughly arranged into several parallel rows across four fields, not a precisely aligned clock or anything. What inspired people to do this? To be the first to do this, when they could have been doing something much more clearly relevant to survival?

Why did precious stones from across Europe end up here, brought thousands of kilometers by raw muscle power? Were they religious votive offerings brought by devout pilgrims? Tribute paid to some kind of governing authority with symbolic or practical power? A gift from a leader to a leader brought by a diplomat or emissary?

We don’t know.

After Carnac, we returned to Paris by train later on that Tuesday June 2, conversed a bit more, then went our separate ways. It was an inspiring and exhilarating little trip, and it was all, well, very Kim Stanley Robinson. It was like visiting one of his novels alongside the author himself for a few days, a pleasure and a privilege that helped re-calibrate my perspective on existence by widening my context window from the narrow sliver of spacetime in which I was born to cogitate on the deeper past and future of humans living on this wonderful planet and the many great endeavors they work towards.

I recalled a passage of world-building detail in 2312, my favorite of his many great books, where a group of humans living in a hollowed-out spinning asteroid chose to emulate Paleolithic hunter-gather lifestyles. That fascination with the mysterious of the deep past and the possibilities of the unfolding future was a hallmark of his work (and life), and in this brief trip to Brittany I’d gotten to experience an unexpected juxtaposition of the two. I feel very lucky to have had this opportunity, recharged with optimism about the unfolding future of humanity and its biosphere, and hopeful that this article will share some of that excitement with you, the readers!

Monday, June 22 was the hottest day in the history of France. Until the record was broken on Tuesday. Then again on Wednesday, with the temperatures in the capital reaching a shocking historic high of 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.5 Fahrenheit).

Paris, where I now live, was at the epicenter of this historic European heatwave. I felt it personally, nonstop. I feel it now, writing these words on Friday June 26. My apartment has no air conditioning, like most Paris apartments. We’ve made do with closing the shutters for shade, regularly switching out carafes of drinking water to cool in the fridge, and moving a newly-purchased fan between rooms to focus on us at all times.

As a personal challenge, emboldened by surviving the even-worse Delhi heatwave in June 2024, I went out every day, even bicycling into the city center and working on my laptop outdoors in a park for two days. (My computer briefly displayed a “System overheating” warning at one point soon after that). Horror stories of deaths from the heat, or from drowning after trying to escape the heat, soon began to fill the news. I was soaked in sweat from morning till night, as if I’d gone swimming in my clothes.

Needless to say, I support the rapid dissemination of air conditioning in Europe as a health and safety measure1. (For context, a recent report found that France had a national grid of 95.2% renewables-plus-nuclear zero-carbon electricity in 2025). If I were a French politician, I’d run on getting everyone a reversible heat pump ASAP.

I also see many signs of resilience, as life goes on for the millions of people affected. Sitting in the shade of a park’s trees brought an unexpectedly intense feeling of relief, enough to allow me to relatively comfortably remaining outside for hours on end. A widespread network of public drinking water fountains makes it easy to stay hydrated. Many businesses have installed water misters or clearly brand-new stuck-in-the-doorway heat pumps. Cafes are giving out iced water for free, often before I ask. There’s a sense of solidarity, like in the Maine of my childhood after heavy snow.

I’ve read about the broader changes taking place as well. The city of Paris has postponed its Pride march until September, and enacted temporary alcohol bans to prevent drunk people seeking heat relief in the Seine and drowning (as well as relieving pressure on hospitals in general). Nuclear power plants have temporarily closed due to rising temperatures in the river waters they use for cooling. (Again, solar-plus-batteries is rapidly becoming the least intermittent power source).

One of the world’s largest district cooling networks, Fraicheur de Paris, is distributing chilled water from the Seine through a network of pipes to cool major buildings, and it’s planned to triple in size and reach all arrondissements by 2022. And, during the zenith of the heat on June 25, a Paris court made a historic ruling finding major French oil company TotalEnergies liable for its Scope 3 emissions from consumers burning its fuel. In a few months, it might now be judicially ordered to reduce its fossil fuel operations and accelerate plans to transition towards renewables!

I finish this newsletter on Monday, June 29. The Paris side of the heatwave finally eased after a thunderstorm on Saturday evening. Today and yesterday in Paris were merely ordinary hot summer days. Dire, deadly heat will come again, likely within a few months as the “super El Nino” strikes the world this summer. But next time the city will be a little bit more prepared. And even more so for the next time after that.

Heatwaves are rough. Losses are tragic. But I believe humanity will learn to endure, and even thrive, despite these proliferating, punishing scourges of the Anthropocene!

Türkiye

By 2021, the rich Lake Tuz ecosystem in central Türkiye had been devastated by climate change. High temperatures plus low rainfall caused nearly the entire lake to dry up that year, causing thousands of newly hatched flamingo chicks to die as the historic major breeding ground for the species turned desiccated and inhospitable.

But in 2022 the Turkish government began an interventionist conservation effort to save the flamingo colony, drilling a well and running a 4-kilometer water pipeline using solar-powered pumps to create a water-rich hatching area for flamingo chicks. 2024 saw 4,300 flamingo chicks in this human-restored “kindergarten” area. And now in 2026, drone overflights have detected 5,000 flamingo chicks in the area! An EPIC testament to the value of bold action to protect ecosystems in fast-changing times.

Brazil

Traditional growers in the Amazon state of Pará in Brazil are increasingly producing local landraces of cacao grown under the canopy in forested floodplains, providing natural protection from pests and droughts as well as a richer terroir in the resulting chocolate. A cool emerging agroforestry success! Great work.

An international marine biology research expedition setting out from Brazil has discovered 31 new species in the midwater layer of the ocean, including nine jellyfish, seven comb jellies, seven siphonophores, four larvacean tunicates, and more!

Pakistan

The world-historic grassroots rooftop solar boom across Pakistan continues to amaze! Per a new Ember report, an astonishing 27 gigawatts (27,000 MW) of distributed solar (NOT on the grid) has been built in Pakistan in just the last two years! For context, 27 GW is about equal to the total capacity of all coal, oil, and gas plants EVER built in Pakistan!!! Absolutely extraordinary lightning-fast bottom-up progress.

This new solar more than covered a surge in electricity demand growth during those two years, as the economy kept growing, and is estimated to have saved Pakistan $12 billion in fossil fuel imports by February 2026 (so not even counting the Hormuz crisis). This solar surge is transforming Pakistani society, powering households, businesses, new irrigation wells, industry, a new frontier of EVs, and more.

In the world's fifth most populous country, home to over 250 million people, a brand-new decentralized clean energy system built in two years is now roughly equal to the entire decades-old fossil capacity of the grid! This is unprecedented. A parallel national solarpunk energy system emerging unplanned alongside the old grid! If this kind of solar surge can be replicated across sub-Saharan Africa, the future of Anthropocene Earth could be a lot cleaner and brighter than anyone expected. WOW!

Antarctica

A University of Southern Florida expedition has returned from six weeks in the waters off peninsular Antarctica collecting samples of the ascidian (aka sea squirt) Synoicum adareanum. That marine invertebrate has been found to be home to a bacterium which produces a unique toxin that seems to kill melanoma (skin cancer) cells while leaving other cells unharmed - in mice, at least. We got GLP-1 drugs from Gila monster lizard venom, and now we might soon get a melanoma cure from Antarctic sea squirts! This is why funding exploratory research is so important. Great work!

Libya

In 2017, local photographer Mohammed Almuntasir uploaded an 18-second video of a wild sand cat (Felis margarita) in the dunes of southwest Libya, deep in the Sahara Desert. It sparked international interest, as it was the first-ever evidence that the species existed in Libya. South African scientists joined Mr. Almuntasir on research expeditions in the unstudied and unstable region. Now in 2026, a new study details their findings, documenting sand cats at 13 sites in the Libyan Sahara with notably high sightings in the vast Wadi Almet valley. Fascinating guerrilla research work!

Lithuania

The Port of Klaipėda in Lithuania has commissioned and assembled on-site a 100% zero-emission 42-meter seagoing ship, the Rasa, to serve as a waste collector for bilge water and sludge from other ships in the harbor. It’s powered by both batteries and burning hydrogen produced with electrolyzers powered by solar panels, a fuel made right on its own docks. Zero fossil fuel backup on board. An awesome project!

Côte d’Ivoire

In the remote Taï National Park of Côte d'Ivoire, local scientist Christine Kouman is leading efforts to study and protect the critically endangered West African slender-snouted crocodile (Mecistops cataphractus). The rainforest stream-dwelling species is known for its unusual tree-climbing behaviors and its “gentleness,” with no reports of attacks on humans. Hopes are high that Taï, also home to habituated chimpanzees, emperor scorpions, and several rare birds, can become a major ecotourism destination.

India

The classic “ice stupa” idea emerged as a climate adaptation for Himalayan villages in the Ladakh state of India in the early 2010s. As melting glaciers grew less reliable as a water source, villagers piped water down-slope during the winter to refreeze into a handy mini “artificial glacier” to provide meltwater to crops in the spring.

Now, that ice stupa concept is getting some upgrades! The new Automated Ice Reservoir (AIR) system provides a plug-and-play ice stupa setup, with a solar/battery-powered combination weather station and control box to shut off pipe valves when temperatures drop too fast, avoiding the recurrent problem of cracked pipes. It’s also more efficient, spraying mist to freeze layer by layer with breaks to minimize loss to evaporation. 10 AIR projects were trialled in winter 2025, and they’re set to scale up!

The iconic Agave americana plant, native to Mexico and the southwest U.S., is now a naturalized “immigrant species” growing wild across the Deccan drylands of India after being introduced by humans decades ago. As a result, rural India is rapidly developing a grassroots tequila scene as small farmers learn Mexican techniques to brew liquor from wild-harvested agave. The Anthropocene delivers many surprises!

The Indian vulture (Gyps indicus) saw a devastating 99.5% population decline from the 1980s to the 2010s, poisoned by the new veterinary drug diclofenac becoming common in cattle carcasses. This has become a huge problem for human health, with animal corpses now rotting by the millions, spreading disease, and feeding a surge of dangerous feral dogs instead of being polished off by the vulture cleanup crew. Diclofenac was banned in India in 2006, and populations are slowly recovering. As of 2026, the Jayatu vulture captive breeding program is home to 740 vultures, set to be gradually released into secure tiger reserves to help renew wild flocks. Great work!

United States

A gang of ultra-corrupt morons and vandals still runs the White House (for now), but the people of America keep fighting every day to build a brighter future!

U.S. sales of heat pumps (basically electric reversible air conditioners) are set to overtake conventional ACs after a near-tie in 2025! Decarbonized heating and cooling.

The federal Climate.gov climate science database at NOAA was closed down in the 2025 U.S. purges. Now, a new nonprofit team of data archivist volunteers and former NOAA climate.gov admins has fully recreated a new public-facing website with all of this valuable climate data, available at climate.us. E pur si muove. Spectacular work!

The Green River Energy Center has come online in east-central Utah! It includes nearly 1 million solar panels and 484 battery units, totaling 400 MW of solar and 1.6 gigawatt-hours of battery storage. In addition to abundant and reliable clean power for 90,000 Utah homes, it’ll also generate $55 million over 40 years in property taxes for local schools. Absolutely excellent work!

Startup Slate Auto has released details and opened preorders for their new EV pickup truck. It’s highly customizable with an array of different color and accessory options, all starting from a utilitarian “Blank Slate” model priced at $24,950. This is an ultra-low price for the U.S., and Slate reports that it will still be profitable for them. Their under-construction factory in Indiana will be able to build 150,000 trucks per year. Deliveries will begin in late 2026. A MILESTONE for U.S. electric vehicle abundance!

In the deserts of Arizona, conservationists are digging six new ponds to provide vital habitat for the imperiled Chiricahua leopard frog (Rana chiricahuensis)! Awesome!

Abi Olvera served as a diplomat in the U.S. State Department for ten years, including as one of the core team negotiating directly with China. In 2025, she founded the DC Abundance Community, inspired by the hit book Abundance and dedicated to promoting “abundant housing, energy, science, and infrastructure.” She writes on Substack at .

I’m very interested in the basic philosophy of increasing state capacity that’s detailed in Abundance, and that you’re working on as part of the eponymous Abundance movement. And I feel like there’s been a lot of confusion about what this Abundance concept even is.

To me, abundance is sort of an ideology-neutral set of tools. A vision of government as a bottleneck detective, to quote the book.

A practice, that can be applied by a libertarian or a socialist or anything in between, of finding the weird kinks in the state and the economy that are preventing good stuff getting done and trying to un-kink them and get stuff working in a way that increases human flourishing, and build more of key things that are currently scarce.

So I see this as a set of tools but I feel like it’s sort of been sort of boxed in, in a way that the authors didn’t intend, to become seen as a political faction.

I’d love to know: what does Abundance mean to you?

I really love the way that you explained it, the ideology-neutral set of tools. That’s exactly what I’m trying to clarify and build.

I have noticed that people have said that there’s kind of now an abundance faction in Democrats. I admit it seems to lean center-left, but I don’t think that has to be the case. Specifically, one of my goals is to clarify, hey, there can be an abundance version of Medicare for All. This applies to things that are not center-left coded. I think it’s just happened more quickly in the center-left. I’m pretty optimistic about it.

It really does apply widely, but it certainly has been embraced more by the center-left.

Even if it’s been embraced more by the center-left, I think as abundance makes more of a name for itself, there’s more people in the left-left who kind of come out about it.

Derek Thompson

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a year ago · 193 likes · 4 comments · Derek Thompson

It’ll be more clear that it is trying to do exactly what you mentioned, which is prioritize fixing the big kinks that are impacting, not just the economy, but people’s lives. We recently had Derek Thompson at an event celebrating one year of Abundance. He mentioned that to him it was prioritizing the things that were impacting social good.

For example, that’s why I just wrote up a piece on occupational licensing.

If someone needs to move across states and they don’t have the occupational license, a specific type of training to be licensed in that state, oftentimes they can’t move with their family. Or they might have to move and end up unemployed for a year or two while some of the regulations kick in.

But worst of all, at least to me, because I have family members who have felonies, is that a lot of times there’s a requirement to be “morally upstanding” or something. But there’s no way to prove that! These things are just making it harder for people who already have it pretty hard.

Fundamentally, a lot of the things that the Abundance movement focuses on can sound really boring. Occupational licensing, that is not appearing on anyone’s bumper sticker. Restrictive zoning laws are a primary issue of abundance. And too-long permitting review cycles. It can make the average person fall asleep. But when you dig into the data, this is what’s stopping good stuff getting done!

By the way, I had a conversation quite recently with Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author. And he told me, “You know, just as a word guy, in terms of semantics, I don’t like the word abundance.” It seemed to him to have connotations of excess and greed. What do you think of that?

To sort of answer that question from Kim Stanley Robinson, I would say I want more of the things that truly make your life better. Housing isn’t just cheaper housing, it’s also being able to live near your family, near your work, being able to walk to work. I walk everywhere now!

Me too!

I live in a walkable neighborhood. And it’s totally changed my life. The fact that me going to the grocery store, me going to the post office, going into a coworking, it’s all by foot where I see people.

I have a community. This is a social good. This is more than just like an affordable house. Everything changed. My life was better!

It’s eudaimonia. It’s multi-dimensional human well-being.

Yeah, exactly. The things you don’t see if you haven’t been exposed to them. There’s more third spaces here.

I think of Abundance also as the things that you don’t even know you can expect.

GLP drugs have been huge!

It seems like they might be on track to help make a dent in obesity, which is a huge problem, and it predominantly impacts lower-income people. As GLPs become more accessible and also cheaper, that’s pretty great.

Faster science would be great in ways that we don’t know how to expect! It’s hard to make a vision around the things where you’re not sure exactly how they’ll come out. Like, clean energy abundance would mean people don’t even have to think about like energy bills, but then that also should have knock-on effects for manufacturing and businesses.

One thing I think a lot about whenever there’s new technologies is the case of semiconductors and chips. That started up here in the U.S. decades ago, but then other countries, the East Asian tigers, adopted it and manufacturing it helped them get out of poverty.

Asia has also become dominant in manufacturing clean energy, my bailiwick. Could you have imagined in the 1970s, when Carter was putting solar panels on the White House roof and Vietnam was just a war zone, that Vietnam would be a serious competitor to the U.S. in solar manufacturing in the 2020s? Our politics fumbled very badly to lose the initiative in that kind of high-value industry.

Walkable cities, that’s so incredibly important as well. You can walk across the entire city of Paris, France, home to millions, in three hours and a half. It’s the classic meme, right? “This kind of walkable mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities.”

Zoning laws, one of the big boring bogeymen of abundance, is what makes so many U.S. cities car-dependent, and not looking like Paris. Because it’s illegal here to build that many apartment buildings that close without parking lots!

Yeah! Exactly! Exactly.

I know that not everyone wants to live somewhere walkable. But it is under-supplied in terms of being available for people who want it! And even need it. A lot of people will end up needing it when they’re when they’re too old to drive, or if there’s another reason they can’t drive.

I also think that folks haven’t experienced how nice it can be!

I had a friend visit me from Michigan. She thought it was crazy that I walked everywhere and that I enjoyed it. We’re from Texas, where being outside is kind of a hundred degree ordeal. I grew up not even liking to go outside.

And then she came here and then, randomly, 20 minutes into one of our strolls to somewhere, she was like, “I get it now.”

We were literally walking among beautiful, gorgeous townhouses. Different colors and brick and tons of trees and then tons of cute dogs.

I think a lot of times people think density means what their downtown area looks like. And their downtown area might not have people living there! There’s a different vibe when you get grocery stores and people are just kind of walking throughout their lives rather than driving. I think she was expecting a lot of panhandling and a lot of feeling uncomfortable or something.

There’s often a wildly skewed perception of what life in big cities is like. The murder rate is way higher in Oklahoma than in New York City! People see a media highlight reel of every bad thing happening in a city, that’s not at all representative.

Zoning limits that most people don’t even realize exist have created a dire lack of the kind of urban housing that people just flock to whenever they get the chance.

Places that people pay huge amounts of money to visit for brief periods, places like Disneyland or really fancy college campuses for their kids, they are not full of parking lots. They are dense, walkable, mixed-use areas of the kind that are banned by single-family zoning laws in most U.S. cities.

Yeah, exactly. There’s even some zoning laws within places like D.C. that make it needlessly hard to live here.

There’s structural kinds of issue that abundance type of thinking can fix, and that’s why we don’t have enough three-bedroom apartments. Cities don’t supply enough three-bedroom apartments. This kind of makes it seem to people who want to start families that the city’s not amenable to them. But that’s not an inherent feature of cities. That’s like an accident of policy. I’m hoping the Abundance movement can fix this. Because then we can, you know, walk to the park! It’s just a nicer life.

I’d love to discuss your articles on Waymo, because they’re really good and they tie into this theme of how cars keep people poor.

I think self-driving cars have kind of become collateral damage in a broader anti-tech backlash. Because lots of big tech companies, like OpenAI, X, Palantir, are really doing horrible, evil things. But Waymo really looks like it could improve human flourishing on several metrics.

I know Waymo’s really expensive right now, but unlike Uber and Lyft, it doesn’t structurally need to be. I’ve also done separate papers on Uber and Lyft. Part of the reason why they’re expensive is labor, right? And the labor doesn’t get cheaper because labor is linked to a wage and living wage. But since Waymo doesn’t have that, Waymo could go the same path as other technologies.

The first ever cell phone in the late 80s was $4,000, which is $12,000 today but now that same “dumb phone,” right, it’s gonna be under $100. The same phone. Things that are just hardware tend to get cheaper.

I know Waymo is not just hardware, there’s like a human remote overseer with a ratio of like 70 cars watched by one person. But it’s a lot less labor than a car. And it’s like 90-plus percent safer in terms of injuries, crashes, fatalities. There’s a lot of studies already done.

It might sound crazy to believe that Waymo will get cheaper, but maybe it’s not going to be Waymo to get cheaper. Maybe it’s going to be some future budget autonomous vehicle company that’s competing with Waymo that competes on just making a shuttle from point A to point B.

There’s no reason not to have it be like that. And there is actually a precedent. We have had privately run or privately owned public transit options.

The private streetcar system that America had before the 1930s, you could have gone from one coast to the other coast entirely on streetcars if you wanted!

Wow, really?

Yeah, it was that well-connected. And it was privately owned. The streetcars even were helping them to pay to maintain facilities that they relied on.

It’s not crazy to think that a public transit option could be privately run. This also doesn’t preclude that later this could be another path for governments to do it. All we are doing is accelerating autonomous vehicles as a technology.

The reason why I think this is pretty important is because I know a lot of the Waymo discussion doesn’t tend to focus on the impact on working-class people. It’s mostly like in the bottom two quintiles of America where your car ends up taking up a lot of your mental bandwidth.

If there’s even just a path where you can instead borrow a car affordably just for the ride that you need, that’s insanely helpful!

When I arrived at the University of Richmond, I was on scholarship. I figured out how to get as close as possible via just buses, but oh man, getting from the bus stop to the university, it was a $50 cab ride, and it was insane to me to spend that much money! That was like an eight-hour weekday shift!

I also hope we get better buses. We should have both better buses and have autonomous vehicles, to be clear. But in Texas, the buses don’t often show up. Even in D.C., I think one out of seven times I take the bus, it just doesn’t show. And then it sucks because I end up having to pay for an expensive Uber. The cost of this transit makes it harder when you do rely on public transit.

We should want things that make it easier for people to live without a car!

I absolutely agree!

Also, pivoting, you have a record in America’s foreign service that’s really impressive.

You’ve represented the country on the ground in Senegal and in Egypt, and at the China desk in the State Department in DC.

Just based on my reading and my recent trip to China, I’m getting the general overall impression that China has been totally kicking America’s butt in global geopolitical, economic, and cultural market share lately.

I personally think that the Abundance toolset is in many ways similar to what China’s done to build a lot of stuff really quickly, and is one of the best hopes for keeping America competitive.

What’s your perspective on the international ramifications of abundance?

That’s a great point. I want to add one more bit about Waymo first, which is the main point I wanted to make. I think, because it happens in the bottom two quintiles, a lot of people underestimate how much mental bandwidth a car takes from you.

My brother, he used to work at Red Lobster, and his car broke down, and it was ridiculously hard for him to get to work on time. Taxis were crazy expensive, buses weren’t showing up, friends couldn’t always make it.

So he ended up losing the job at Red Lobster because of being late, not showing up because of the car broke down. But then he couldn’t afford to fix the car, right? Because that was the way to get money!

The people who are in the bottom quintile spend 38% of their income on their car, if they have a car! That’s one of the things that keeps people poor.

If you go through the Craigslist ads for cleaner, construction worker, jobs that are some of the lowest paid jobs, they often say reliable transportation is required. That’s one of the things that makes it really hard for people to have stable income.

I have family members who have to share a car. It’s really hard! In a two-parent household, it’s hard for the other parent to have a consistent job, because they can only do the job whenever their partner is at home and then they have to juggle that with child care. For a lot of people who have a car, driving everywhere is just convenient and the way things automatically are by default. When that’s not easy for you, it can literally be the limiting factor of your life.

And I’m not even including the people who can’t drive because they have seizures, or because they’re elderly and losing their sight, or whatever.

And lastly, this would be also a pretty big deal for disabled people. Some of the folks that have been most excited about or most vocal about helping the Waymo cause have been paratransit, drivers for disabled people.

It’s apparently really hard to get with rideshare drivers. There’s a lot of things you have to qualify for in order to serve as paratransit under the paratransit programs.

What ends up happening is that if you’re a paratransit customer, you’ll end up seeing a lot of cancellations and a lot of delays because not enough people who will qualify for being able to service it. Waymo kind of skips that.

On to your China question. I was shocked to see how affordable cars could be abroad. You’re seeing cars that like $10,000. Electric. The U.S. hasn’t been able to reap as much of the benefits of these cheaper cars.

They’re import-banned! You literally cannot buy the $10,000 EV in the U.S.

Yeah, oh man. I also think about just how bad that policy is in combination with how we accidentally set regulations encouraging big cars.

For most of the world a car now is this massively cheaper, much better performing thing than anything available in the U.S. right now. The bestselling vehicle model in Britain lately was a Chinese hybrid, the Jaecoo! This happened just in 3 to 5 years.

I have been really focused a lot on road fatalities. For that, there’s a whole bunch of weird reasons why our cars are very large. It’s not just consumer preference, it’s more that that’s what’s available to buy.

There’s not as much competition, not as many other cars coming in. The bigger cars are more lucrative, higher profit margin. And U.S. regulations set easier emissions standards for larger vehicles, like SUVs.

So to me, this is a pretty big abundance issue. A new car on average is now over $50,000 in the U.S. And BYD is selling cars for $10,000, right? That’s a pretty huge cost of living impact for people.

There are electric cars widely available in the world that are less than one-fifth the price of the average new car in the U.S., and they are just not allowed on U.S. shores.

And U.S. EV-makers just had their legs cut out from under them in last year’s OBBBA budget. A bunch of investments got canceled.

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2 months ago · 23 likes

Literally, the U.S. is in the worst of both worlds on electric cars. It is comically bad policy. Electric cars are like the exact opposite of abundance in the US right now. There’s deliberate scarcity. Oil billionaire Harold Hamm helped raise like a billion dollars for Trump 2024 campaigning, more or less openly to stop electric cars, and then he got to lead the Trump administration energy policy transition team!

I mean, this looks intentional. A lot of times in abundance issues, I find that things are unintentional.

Right? In climate issues, you have active opposition. But climate issues are abundance issues too. The fact that America has become a fossil fuel exporter, that there’s so much fossil fuel industry money floating around, has led to regulatory capture and active sabotage of electric competition in the U.S in a way that hasn’t happened in China or Europe.

ICE even raided an electric vehicle factory and deported hundreds of people on legitimate visas who were working to build electric vehicles for America!

I feel like I need to provide the Wikipedia and New York Times articles for that just because otherwise it sounds insane. It sounds ridiculously conspiratorial but it’s just what’s happened.

It’s crazy. This is so bizarre. The largest-ever U.S. immigration enforcement operation in a single location!

And it was against South Korean engineers! Like the least threatening demographic possible in terms of what people are concerned about when it comes to immigration.

This has also meaningfully pushed South Korea much closer to China. This has just been a massive multidimensional screw-up.

You know that saying, the axe forgets but the tree remembers? Americans forget when we do stupid stuff like this, but South Korea remembers. They remember 300 of their people being treated like animals and led away in chains.

The way policy is made these days, probably Stephen Miller said, let’s go after the immigrants making woke electric cars.

As far as I know, none of these people were actually even charged with any crime. These battery engineers were just dragged away in chains, from the EV battery factory they were building for America, and then deported.

That’s horrible.

Foreign investment in U.S. factories has declined even further since that event.

Oh, man. Yeah. That’s the kind of stuff I used to write about when it would happen in other countries.

The good news is, if we could just stop massively self-sabotaging, we’d actually be in a great position to compete on clean energy! Biden was ramping things up! We have tons of great people and resources.

Many people in America are still in this 2005 mindset where it’s like, oh, EVs, maybe they work, maybe they don’t. No! Almost the entire rest of the world has cheap great EVs and you don’t and it is your government’s fault!

Yeah. It’s kind of awful. I feel it. Because I’ve been abroad, I notice how much better, like, healthcare can be. And then we come back and we’re just used to it. We think that there’s no other way. We think that healthcare abroad must be like crazy long lines and all these things. And I’m like, no that’s not what it was like at all

Have you seen that viral article about the amazing cheap yet high-quality healthcare experience in Malaysia?

The Elysian

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9 months ago · 114 likes · 80 comments · Elle Griffin

Oh yeah, yeah, I love that piece.

“If I get sick, I’m moving to Malaysia.” It’s so good. I think people just do not realize that there’s now a spectacular healthcare ecosystem in places like Malaysia.

This is the kind of stuff Abundance exists to fix. To bring into existence the good things that America sort of tells itself it has but doesn’t actually have.

Yeah! Our lives could be a lot more affordable. Life could be a lot cheaper. And a lot less, having to deal with crazy amounts of, paperwork and lines and lack of clarity around pricing. That’s kind of all a policy choice!

Yeah, it is. It’s all a policy choice.

So the bad news is that it’s so frustrating that America doesn’t do it. But the good news is we know it can be done! We don’t have to invent these solutions, just implement them.

Like plug-in solar, balcony solar. In Germany, you’re allowed to buy small solar panels and just plug them into a wall outlet in your home so they start feeding power back into your house and reduce your electric bills. A movement started in Utah in 2025 for states to make it allowable in the U.S., and it’s taken off big in 2026!

Yeah! Popular in Europe, people in Germany say they saw a 15% drop in their bills.

And again, that’s illegal in most of the U.S.! You can buy an assault rifle, but you can’t buy a set of solar panels for your balcony.

That’s crazy.

I’ve been really impressed at Utah being such a leader in this kind of stuff. They’re also a bit of a leader in occupational licensing reforms.

It’s exactly like occupational licensing, actually. It’s just an artificial barrier to doing the thing. Regulatory capture.

Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s pretty recent, too. I can’t believe that that wasn’t legal before.

Yeah. People don’t realize.

They’re like, well, if electric vehicles were good, surely we’d be able to buy some cheap electric vehicles. Or if solar power works, surely I’d just be able to buy a kit for my house.

But you can’t. People can in other countries, like Germany or Australia or China, but they can’t in much of the U.S.

There is pending plug-in solar legislation in D.C., though, that might pass this year.

I’ll probably try to get this installed in my house. This is really cool. I’ve been pretty focused on cost-of-living, the poverty angle.

In Australia, rooftop solar now is actually cheaper than the cost of building out a power line from a centralized power source to a house. So if Australia had infinite free power at a centralized source tomorrow, nuclear fusion or the Tesseract or something, rooftop solar would still be cheaper.

That’s pretty big for rural communities especially.

I’m sorry, I’ve probably been talking too much! It just seemed really relevant to what you’re saying and what you’re working on.

No, no. This is really good.

Also, you’re running D.C. Abundance, and D.C. is one of the key jurisdictions in the U.S. that still has active plug-in solar legislation in this 2026 session.

Yeah, that’s true.

Although we’re thinking of changing the name because we’re more focused on national issues. We do want to focus on D.C. issues as well, but predominantly it’s the national issues, which is also why we have people in Virginia and Maryland as well.

We’re getting to the end of our planned time slot. Thank you for everything! It’s been a great conversation.

I appreciate it, Sam. It was really awesome!

Thank you so much! Live long and prosper.

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I’ve written several articles primarily about history (a longstanding passion of mine) in The Weekly Anthropocene over the years, whether as interviews, book reviews, segments of travelogues, or standalone deep dives. Here’s a collection of some highlights, in approximate order of publication date! Enjoy.

The Climate Crisis of 536 CE

Eunice Newton Foote, 1800s American Climate Scientist

Book Review: Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen

Book Review: Climate Capitalism by Akshat Rathi

The Rocketeers and Reformists of Mysore: Investigating India #7

The Hottest Day in Delhi’s History: My Final Days in India: Investigating India #10

Alexander von Humboldt Was Freaking Amazing

Who were the Garamantes?

The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Dr. Rhys Lemoine, Megafauna Rewilding Scientist

Missives from Mesoamerica #2: Axolotls & Antiquities

Book Review: How the World Made the West by Dr. Josephine Quinn

China’s Hydrological History. China Chronicles: Day 7

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Several recent news items raise hopes for the future of climate-resilient coral reefs! A landmark new study analyzing 45,000 coral surveys from around the world has identified and mapped nearly 166,000 km² of existing coral reefs, across 71 countries, that are showing promising signs of being capable of surviving and/or regenerating after climate change-induced stressors like bleaching, cyclones, and marine heatwaves. More than half of these particularly resilient reefs are found in just five countries: Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Bahamas, and Cuba, and only 28% are found in already protected areas, thus highlighting immediate conservation priorities. That study was presented at the recent Our Ocean conference, at which 9 African nations made new commitments to advancing future marine protected areas.

And there are already ocean scientists working to protect and spread the heat-resilient corals ready to survive the Anthropocene! Woods Hole scientist Anne Cohen is spearheading the Super Reefs project, a major new long-term effort currently using using divers and drone boat surveying to identify resilient individual corals, then clip fragments to replant at damaged Pacific reefs and grow new corals with heat-resistant genes. The long-term goal is to eventually create a “resilient reef blue corridor” spanning the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu. AWESOME work!

The Big Picture: Diarrhea Deaths Decreasing!

A new Lancet study calculates that even as the human population grew by billions, the global number of deaths from enteric infectious diseases (including diarrheal diseases, salmonella, rotavirus, norovirus, typhoid, and more) fell from 3.69 million in 1990 to just 1.27 million in 2023. Widespread improvement in clean drinking water and sanitation infrastructure, from pumps to toilets (particularly in India), plus global rollouts of new medicines like rotavirus vaccines, have sharply reduced this category of “fecal-oral” disease worldwide. Children particularly have benefited: in 1990, 53% of enteric deaths were children under five, falling to 30% in 2023. Excellent news!

Far fewer humans are pooping themselves to death, and that’s worth celebrating! Improved water and sanitation infrastructure is also a huge climate resilience win.

Cabo Verde

A new study has found that thanks to dedicated conservation work, the beaches of Boa Vista (an island in recent World Cup overperformer nation Cabo Verde) have seen an 80-fold increase in nesting loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) from 1998 to 2024! The 3 largest Boa Vista nesting sites reached an incredible 22,000 nests per km² of beach by 2021, the highest-density loggerhead nesting on Earth. AWESOME!

Australia

A gold mine in Western Australia just went 155 consecutive “engine off” hours (six and a half days) operating on 100% renewable energy with zero use of their fossil backup, thanks to a custom solar, wind, and battery microgrid from developer Zenith. Mine operator Bellevue Gold plans to produce the world’s first carbon-neutral gold!

A new species dubbed the “ballista spider” has been discovered in the rainforests of Queensland. Uniquely, it builds a spring-loaded silk “catapult” to snare a particularly aggressive local ant species and fire them into its web at over 15 Gs! Extraordinary.

Australia’s nationwide home battery boom continues to break records and lead the world. As previously chronicled, recently 400,000 home batteries were installed in just 10 months, totaling 11.2 GWh! Now, about 1 in 25 Australian homes has their own battery, and one in three have rooftop solar! Power to the people!

Malaysia

In the Penang state of Malaysia, conservationist Yap Jo Leen is repurposing old fire hoses into safe road-crossing bridges for endangered dusky langurs (Trachypithecus obscurus). Her project has so far installed three langur hose bridges, with the oldest, “Ah Lai’s Crossing,” now regularly used by nine coexisting species of wildlife and credited with reducing langur deaths on that stretch of road to zero! Great work.

Chile

The largest grid-scale battery system in the Americas (so far!) is now online in the Atacama Desert of Chile! The Elena project, including 624 battery containers totaling 3.5 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, is Phase 6 of the broader Oasis de Atacama project, targeting a total of 2.5 GW of solar plus 14.1 GWh of battery storage. Epic!

Italy

Flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus) have returned to the outer reaches of Italy’s famed Venice Lagoon thanks to years of work restoring degraded salt marsh ecosystems! 2025 saw nearly 24,000 flamingos overwintering in the lagoon, a record high and 6,000 birds more than 2024. Sightings could become more common near La Serenissima itself as numbers continue to grow. A great case study from the epic rewilding of Europe!

Scuba divers on a ghost net removal mission in the Strait of Sicily waters between Italy and Tunisia have captured a first-ever video of a great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea. The shark was described as “curious and not aggressive.”

Kyrgyzstan

The 175 MW first phase of the ROX Issyk-Kul solar farm in Kyrgyzstan has come online! Built by a Vietnamese company, it will be the largest solar farm in Central Asia (the “Stans”) at 1.9 GW (1,900 MW) when fully completed at in late 2028. Great!

Tanzania

The electric blue gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi, aka turquoise dwarf gecko) lives only in two small patches of screwpine (Pandanus rabaiensis) forest in east-central Tanzania, and became critically endangered by the 2010s after tens of thousands of the scintillating little creatures were collected for the pet trade. International trade in the species was banned under CITES in 2017, and that plus a local reforestation program is estimated to have raised the population back to pre-collection levels. Great work!

Spain & Portugal

In 2025, solar plus wind generated 44% of all electricity in Portugal, and 42% in Spain. Both Iberian nations have seen rapid renewables build-outs. Now, clean energy is directly shielding Spanish consumers from the high electricity costs that struck most of the rest of the world during the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis. Spain is now one of Europe’s cheapest power markets. Electrotech abundance! A great model to follow.

Liberia

The first-ever grid-connected solar farm in the deeply impoverished West African nation1 of Liberia is now online! The 20 MW Mount Coffee Solar Park, built next to a pre-existing hydroelectric facility, is tiny by global standards but a big deal for boosting reliable basic electricity access in Liberia. World Bank funding has already been secured to expand to 30 MW and add 12 MW of battery storage. Awesome!

Finland

Brilliant cellular agriculture startup Solar Foods has raised 77.8 million euros in grant and loan financing to build their Factory 02, When complete, it will expand their capacity to manufacture ultra-efficient protein Solein up to 6,400 tons per year!

Cambodia

The Mekong River is home to the world’s largest freshwater fish species, with the Mekong giant catfish, giant barb, and giant freshwater stingray all both capable of growing to hundreds of pounds in size and now endangered due to over-fishing. In 2025, conservationists in Cambodia deployed a nationwide hotline, app, and rapid response team to help free these rare fish when unintentionally caught as bycatch. From just November 2025 through February 2026, the team returned 92 individuals from four Mekong giant fish species — a great sign for both small-scale fisher communities’ support and a potential harbinger of rising populations! Superb work.

The ocean off Cambodia is being plundered by illegal bottom trawler ships. Now, the government has partnered with conservationists and local small-scale fishers to place hundreds of 2-3 tonne concrete blocks under the sea as “Fishery Productivity Structures” that will physically block, entangle, and disable trawler nets while acting (like wind turbines!) as ecosystem-enhancing artificial reefs. An amazing 1,250 such structures have been placed in the last two years! Brilliant proactive protector work.

United States

The ultra-corrupt morons in the White House still disgrace and enfeeble the nation, but people across America just keep working to build a brighter future nonetheless!

In California, fast-growing solar power generated more electricity than fossil gas in the five months of January-May 2026! Solar out-generated gas on 82% of days in that period, up from 21% in 2024, as gas generation fell by 60% in just two years. SUPERB!

Solar build-outs “taking away farmland” is a common attack line, and the main platform of popular faux-environmentalist Substack “House of Green.” A recent interactive map project has now calculated that solar arrays are currently above just 0.04% of total U.S. land area and just 0.07% of U.S. farmland, and there are zero states where solar occupies more than 0.5% of prime farmland. Nationwide, golf courses occupy three times more prime U.S. farmland than the solar arrays cleaning and stabilizing civilization! Plus, of course, solar panels actively improve the farmland below, via agrivoltaics or just making money on fallowing fields! Stats to keep in mind.

After years of work by animal rights activists, the infamous Ridglan facility in Wisconsin, which bred beagles for often-cruel cosmetics research, will shut down! All 475 dogs currently there will be moved to an animal rescue center in Florida.

Vermont has become the latest state to pass a balcony solar bill into law! Excellent.

As the foul White House regime keeps racking up humiliating losses, their anti-environment agenda is failing as well! An insane sabotage effort to dismantle the NSF’s 900-instrument Ocean Observatories Initiative has been halted for now after bipartisan backlash, and they appear to have abandoned one line of attack on already-under-construction offshore wind farms after a string of court losses. We resist!

California has fully completed the Nexus Project, installing 1.6 MW of solar canopies over two stretches of irrigation canal near Turlock in the Central Valley. This proof-of-concept will both generate clean power and help prevent water loss to evaporation!

Google-supported startup Energy Dome has announced a deal to build a 19 MW, 10-hour system of cutting-edge carbon dioxide-based battery for the Arizona grid. It’ll store power by pressurizing CO2 with excess electrons, then letting it turn turbines to generate more when needed. A welcome new long-duration energy storage innovation!

A new study has discovered that a mysterious underwater “thundering” sound in the Hudson River of New York is caused by the endangered Atlantic sturgeon having sex, caused by males thrashing as they externally fertilize eggs and amplified by their resonating swim bladders. This will allow new mapping of key spawning grounds!

Since opening in 2023, the car-free mixed-use neighborhood of Culdesac in Tempe, Arizona has proven to be a massive success! A light rail line goes straight to ASU and the Phoenix airport, while bikes, e-bikes, Waymo driverless EV service, and shared community EVs are available for transport nearer home. It’s still growing, to 760 units. The buildings are also all painted white, which along with good airflow in narrower streets has made Culdesac’s ground 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the asphalt in nearby suburbs. A truly SUPERB model of U.S. solarpunk urbanism!

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The 13th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on June 16, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Jan Rosenow, energy policy advisor to multiple EU governments and Professor of Energy and Climate Policy at the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford! The YouTube recording is above! Below are some excerpts from Jan’s recent articles on his new Substack, .

“Hot, growing, energy-hungry, often saddled with creaking grids and expensive imported fuel. The conventional assumption was that these countries would electrify the way the rich world did, through large centralised power stations and slow grid expansion. Pakistan suggests another path is not only possible but may be unstoppable once the price signals line up.

The optimistic view is that a country that spent decades short of power has, in the space of three or four years, built one of the most solarised electricity systems in the developing world, funded overwhelmingly by private money. There is also another more positive side to this. Not everyone adding solar is leaving the grid; some are gaining access to electricity for the first time.”

— Jan Rosenow

Bright Spots

Pakistan: the solar revolution nobody planned

Pakistan imported more Chinese solar panels than any other country on earth in 2025 (except for the Netherlands through the port of Rotterdam but destined for across the EU). No subsidy programme drove it. No national rooftop scheme. No feed-in tariff. People just did it…

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2 months ago · 106 likes · 1 comment · Jan Rosenow

“The durable answer to fossil fuel volatility is to depend less on internationally traded fuels and more on electricity that can be generated at home from wind and sun. Every factory that electrifies is a factory less exposed to the next price shock. That is the framing I think gets industrial electrification out of the “too hard” box and into the “why are we waiting” one.”

— Jan Rosenow.

Bright Spots

Industry: from hard-to-abate to ready-to-electrify

Every time the gas price spikes, a part of European industry goes quiet. The 2022 gas crisis forced factory closures and shifted production across the continent, and many energy-intensive sectors never fully recovered. More recently, tensions around the Strait of Hormuz were a reminder of how exposed industry still is to fuels it does not control. The u…

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2 months ago · 102 likes · Jan Rosenow

“Spain did not just add renewables on top of a fossil base. It substituted. The fossil curve has been falling, year after year, while the renewable curve has been climbing.

2022 also a turning point for wholesale electricity prices in Spain: The Iberian exception capped electricity prices initially to below EU27 average prices but even after the mechanism ended Spain widened the price gap further.”

— Jan Rosenow.

Bright Spots

Spain just became one of Europe's cheapest power markets. Here is how.

In the first four months of 2026, the average wholesale electricity price in Spain was €44 per megawatt-hour. In Italy, it was €127. In Germany, €96. In the UK, €103. Spain is now cheaper than France, well below the central-European bloc, and within striking distance of the Nordic hydro-and-nuclear heavyweights that have always topped the cheap-power le…

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3 months ago · 151 likes · 28 comments · Jan Rosenow

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This article is extremely dark and disturbing, very much unlike my usual subjects. But I think it’s an important one-time exception. Read on only if you’re comfortable with that.

Years ago, I used to deeply admire Elon Musk.

It’s hard to remember now, but in the early and mid-2010s, he was one of the most inspiring figures in America fighting climate change. He was building cool electric cars! Reusable rockets that actually worked! He was like a real-life Tony Stark!

Then he went down the rabbit hole of hatred and insanity. Or maybe was always there and just showed it, who knows. In the second Trump administration, inaugurated in January 2025, Musk was given legally questionable authorities to slash executive branch program funding as head of the meme-inspired “DOGE” program.

One of the top priorities of DOGE, in Musk’s own words, was “feeding USAID into the woodchipper.” With maximum speed and no warning, he cut almost all funding to the United States Agency for International Development, which funds food and medicine for the world’s poorest in refugee camps and desperate villages around the world. It accounted for just 0.3% of U.S. federal spending in 2024. Some of the programs it administered, like PEPFAR which provided AIDS relief to millions, were among the most cost-effective ways of saving human lives in the history of the world.

One of the noblest things this or any country has ever done was destroyed in weeks.

Here’s what happened next.

“The impacts of the cuts were immediate and tragic.

Health clinics and emergency ambulance services shuttered overnight.

Clinical trials were deserted.

Thousands of healthcare workers lost their jobs. Lifesaving food and medicine was left to expire in warehouses.

According to conservative estimates, in the year since USAID was dismantled, 750,000 people have died as a result of the cuts.

For the first time in a generation, more children died in one year — 2025—than in the previous year.”

— Nicholas Enrich, USAID whistleblower, The Boston Globe.

Boston University has developed an “Impact Counter” tool tracking all USAID and global public health cuts driven by Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew in 2025, and their impact in the following year. Some studies have warned of potential long-term impacts over the next decade ranging into the millions of deaths, but that’s not counting national and NGO efforts, which have already begun, to fill the gap left by USAID’s rapid and unplanned destruction.

So this is the extremely conservative estimate. The bare minimum. Not what might happen, but what has already happened, from early 2025 to early 2026. The people who have already been killed when the United States abandoned its duty of care because a billionaire wanted it to.

Elon Musk caused, in one year, 780,000 human deaths, most of them children.

That’s about in the middle of the range of estimated death tolls for the Cathar/Albigensian genocide of 1209-29, Armenian genocide of 1915-17, the Bangladeshi genocide of 1971, or the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Putting another way, between four and five Guatemalan genocides.

Or one-tenth of one Holocaust.

And that’s just the deaths.

“The sudden and severe foreign aid cuts imposed this year by U.S. President Donald Trump, along with funding reductions from other countries, shuttered thousands of the camps’ schools and youth training centers and crippled child protection programs. Beyond unwanted marriages, scores of children as young as 10 were forced into backbreaking manual labor, and girls as young as 12 forced into prostitution. With no safe space to play or learn, children were left to wander the labyrinthine camps, making them increasingly easy targets for kidnappers. And the young and desperate were picked off by traffickers who promised to restore what the children had lost: Hope.

In a sweltering building not far from the cramped shelter where her husband tortures her, Hasina plays nervously with the strap of her pink mobile phone case, emblazoned with the words “Forever Young.”

She is still young, she says. But the aid cuts forced her into womanhood and into a nightmare. Not long after marrying her husband, she says, he isolated her from her family and began to beat and sexually abuse her. She daydreams daily of school, where she was a whiz at English and hoped to become a teacher. Now, she is confined largely to her shelter, cooking and cleaning and waiting with dread for the next beating.”

— Associated Press article on the impact of USAID cuts in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh.

In Kakuma, a vast refugee camp near the South Sudan border, starting in spring, our documentary team followed clinicians and families inside the stabilization unit at Clinic 7, where the sickest children come. Because of the termination of U.S. support, the World Food Programme’s supplies had been reduced to forty per cent of minimum needs, and cases of acute malnutrition had surged. Two-thirds of the clinic’s community health workers were laid off, hobbling the early-detection system that once saved most children before they needed acute care. Clinic 7 is where we met Rovina Naboi, who had fled South Sudan with her family. In our short film, she reveals what it was like trying to keep her desperately ill daughter, Jane Sunday, alive in a system that has broken down.

— The New Yorker, “Rovina’s Choice.”

I genuinely believe that if this information, this widely reported publicly available information, were truly broadly comprehended, if every single human alive could obtain a genocide museum-level visceral understanding of the pointless mass suffering that this man has inflicted, Elon Musk would not be able to go out in public anywhere on the planet without being justifiably killed by a lynch mob.

Elon Musk did not order men to go shoot those children in the head or cut their throats with machetes or choke them to death in gas chambers. But he did (illegally) order men to snatch the food from their mouths and the medicine from their veins, despite overwhelming evidence that it would directly cause their imminent deaths. Perhaps the closest comparison is the Holodomor of the 1930s, in which three to five million Ukrainians were killed by Stalin’s deliberate imposition of famine conditions.

At this point, praising Musk for Tesla and SpaceX is like praising Hitler for Volkswagen and V-2 rockets. It may be completely true as far it goes, but it’s missing the bigger picture in the most morally outrageous manner possible. Yeah, they’re real and impressive technologies! Yeah, they could develop into stuff that’s really useful for civilization! Reusable rockets are cool and important even though Musk ran SpaceX, just like rockets in general are cool even though Hitler ran the V-2 program.

But that’s REALLY REALLY not the most notable thing about this guy’s impact on the world anymore! The hundreds of thousands of literal actual human children that he actually really caused to die pointless tragic deaths are the most notable thing about this guy’s impact on the world! No amount of good tech startup management can ever possibly even come close to excusing that!

Unlike Hitler, it’s possible Musk may not even have hated the hundreds of thousands of children he killed — though the increasingly ultra-racist tone of his social media argues otherwise. It’s possible he disbelieved the warnings about USAID’s importance, that this mass murder was caused not by intent but by history’s worst case of ignorant, lazy and callous indifference.

I think popular Substacker Scott Alexander wrote an excellent response to that hypothetical excuse, which I shall now quote at length.

“Politics is nasty and sometimes involves lies. But the thousands of doctors, nurses, and charity workers who give up more lucrative careers elsewhere to save lives in the developing world are some of my heroes. I’ve talked to many of these people (see my father’s story of his time in this world here) and I couldn’t do what they do for a month, let alone a whole career. When Trump and Rubio try to tar them as grifters in order to make it slightly easier to redistribute their Congress-earmarked money to kleptocrats and billionaire cronies, this goes beyond normal political lying into the sort of thing that makes you the scum of the earth, the sort of person for whom even an all-merciful God could not restrain Himself from creating Hell…

I have delivered medicine in a Third World country. I’ve helped treat patients who were definitely going to die within a year, for want of medication that would be routine anywhere else. I’ve looked in parents’ eyes while telling them their kid wasn’t going to recover. It sucks…

I think if Elon had the same experiences I had, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night for fear that he had accidentally cancelled PEPFAR. He would have been calling his lieutenants at odd hours of the morning, all through the winter and early spring, saying “Hey, you definitely didn’t cancel the developing world medical funding, did you?” and the lieutenants would respond “Elon, you’ve asked me that four times tonight already, please stop obsessing over this.”

— Scott Alexander Siskind, medical doctor with experience in developing countries and very popular Substacker.

In my personal opinion, Elon Musk has become far, far, far worse than Osama bin Laden. He has killed orders of magnitude more innocent children.

I don’t support the death penalty, though this case has tested that principle more than any other. I would prefer that everyone involved in this atrocity be charged for their crimes against humanity in a modern vision of the Nuremberg trials, and ideally jailed for multiple life sentences.

Musk is not quite history’s greatest monster. But he’s pretty high on the list, definitely in the top 1002. It is obscene beyond words that he is also the world’s first trillionaire.

That’s my comment on the SpaceX IPO.

Vote blue in November.

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1

A 2024 United Nations report found that as public health advances, the number of child deaths around the world reached an all-time low in 2022—not just the rate, but the number! Over 12 million human children under the age of five died in 1990, but only around 5 million died in 2022, despite the human population growing from less than 5.5 billion to over 8 billion in that time.

The 2025 atrocity of USAID cuts killing 500,000 of the world’s poorest children is heinous and unforgivable, but in the very long-term big picture it will appear, like COVID, as an anomalous year or two of horror in the long-run trend of fewer and fewer child deaths. Of course, that’s no excuse. I’m just sharing it to provide some context, and hopefully comfort those readers who have made it this far in such a painful article.

World-leading think tank Ember is increasingly widely recognized for its deeply researched reports on the accelerating global electrotech revolution! One highlight visualization from their recent “A clean break” report underscores the vital yet underreported dematerialization (aka ephemeralization) aspect of that epic upgrade. One container ship full of solar panels will generate 10 terawatt-hours of electricity over the next 20 years (at least), while you’d need to burn twenty tankers of liquified natural gas (one per year!) to generate that same amount of power with fossil fuels. Similarly, one container ship of modern electric cars will replace 840,000 barrels of crude oil over 15 years, or 56,000 barrels per year. This is why importing electrotech is geostrategically smart even if you’re getting it from a frenemy like China!

Living more lightly on the Earth, not just metaphorically but literally. AWESOME!

Another great new Ember report, Electric Asia, (here’s the slidedeck and here’s their Substack summary!) notes that in addition to the titan of China, other Asian nations like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Thailand are now ahead of the “West1” on key electrification metrics like EV adoption, solar as a share of power, and (collectively) in electrotech manufacturing.

“Strip China out, and the rest of Asia still outbuilds the world in solar modules and battery components...

Economics, security and industrial opportunity now all point in the same direction. Asia holds half the world’s people and 4% of its oil and gas, but three quarters of the electrotech factories that can replace the fuel it lacks.”

— “Electric Asia.”

Indonesia

In response to the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis, Indonesia is accelerating one of the world’s most ambitious and rapid solar build-out plans, with President Prabowo Subianto targeting 100 GW (100,000 MW!) of new solar to be built between 2026 and 2028. For context, Indonesia has only 1.5 GW of installed solar right now. Land is being prepared for large-scale solar farms in Java, and small-scale arrays in rural villages are proliferating. If this can get even close to its target, it’ll be revolutionary!

Indonesia has granted formal airworthiness certification to the V2000CG cargo-carrying eVTOL model made by China’s AutoFlight. This model, essentially an “electric flying truck,” will soon be used for inter-island freight transport in Indonesia. It’s the first foreign regulatory approval for any Chinese eVTOL company!

When the Lagan-Pagindar road in northern Sumatra, Indonesia was upgraded in 2023, it brought vital access to schools and hospitals for remote human villages, but became an impassable barrier splitting a population of 350 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) into two smaller Siranggas and Sikulaping forests. In 2024, conservationists built 5 rope bridges over the road. Species ranging from macaques to gibbons to squirrels came to use it, but not the precious orangutans.

Now, a young male orangutan has been recorded crossing one bridge! It’s the first-ever camera evidence of this species using a human-made wildlife bridge, raising hopes that this low-cost solution can be more widely deployed to re-link “islanded” forest fragments and boost the genetic future of our red ape cousins. Excellent news!

Honduras

National Geographic has chronicled brilliant local herpetologists in Honduras who have devoted themselves to conserving the rare local jade palm pit viper (Bothriechis thalassinus), a beautiful two-foot shimmering-emerald serpent that is poisonous but has never been known to kill a human. The HonduHerp group has already purchased a mountaintop near the town of Santa Rita to create the Tierra del Tamagás reserve, established “thalassinus” breeding pairs at a zoo in Tegucigalpa, and are spreading their research and community engagement efforts far and wide. Brilliant work!

Afghanistan

Even in brutal Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, solar power is beginning to spread and improve quality of life in impoverished rural areas. The United Nations SESEHA Afghan development program has completed projects bringing decentralized clean energy to 344 schools and 126 health centers without reliable grid access, directly protecting students from heatstroke and patients from power cuts. EPIC work!

Brazil

Deforestation across all of Brazil in 2025 has fallen to 985,000 hectares (aka 9,850 km², only 289,478 hectares of which were in the Amazon biome), a 21% nationwide and 23.4% Amazon deforestation decrease since 2024! Environmental law is back.

And 2026 looks to have seen ongoing declines, per the DETER monitoring system. This year is on track for the least Brazilian Amazon deforestation since 2014. Superb!

Netherlands

At a historic family dairy farm in Schipluiden in the Netherlands province of Zuid-Holland, a testing system of bioreactors growing animal cells is now operational. It’s the world’s first cell-cultivated meat production facility on a preexisting animal farm, and is part of a strategy to win broad support for “decentralized” kill-free meat production in the EU by ensuring benefits for the existing agriculture sector. Mr. Corné van Leeuwen became the first person on Earth to receive funding for adding cultivated meat to his farm. Spectacular work, hopefully a model that can scale up fast!

The Indian Ocean Whale Necropolis

The Chinese Academy of Sciences’ deep-sea exploration submersible Fendouzhe, which recently charted new “hadal” trenches and explored the Arctic seabed, has now discovered an unprecedented “whale necropolis” in the Diamantina Fracture Zone of the Indian Ocean, seven kilometers under the surface and far off the southwest coast of Australia. Amazingly, they found (across 32 dives) at least 476 fossilized whale remains, mostly deep-diving beaked whales and including some extinct species dating back 5.3 million years, interspersed with five recent modern “whalefall” carcasses feeding a rich ecosystem (likely including many new species!) dominated by bone-boring worms, vesomycid chemosynthesis-based clams, and brittle stars.

It’s unclear how this site formed (it definitely way predates industrial whaling), but hypotheses include the seafloor “V-shaped” topography funneling sinking corpses into the area and/or ultra-low sedimentation keeping fossils visible. Fascinating!

Mozambique

Poachers killed the last rhinos in Mozambique in 2013 — but in 2022, reintroduction efforts began in Zinave National Park, once stripped of all its large wildlife and now managed by the Peace Parks Foundation as a hub of successful rewilding! On June 6, 2026, the Zinave rhino rewilding program reached its conclusion as nine female white rhinos were brought to Zinave, bringing the park’s white rhino population to 39 and joining 22 black rhinos already rewilded. Both species now have viable breeding populations, with 5 black and 2 white rhino calves already born at Zinave. Great work!

France

SolarinThau, the world’s first combination floating solar array and oyster farming platform, has been installed for trials in the Thau Lagoon on the southern coast of France. It may scale up to a new income stream for the local shellfish sector. Cool!

On June 9, 2026, the government of France announced the creation of seven new protected areas and the expansion of two existing ones. They include several small patches of notable forest in “Hexagon” mainland France plus the gigantic new Armontabo Rocky Peaks reserve in French Guiana, which protects 156,290 hectares of South American rainforest and inselbergs — an area larger than Hong Kong. Great!

Australia

An extraordinary new species of fish has been discovered in Australia’s legendary Great Barrier Reef. It’s just 4 to 5 centimeters long, strikingly orange, carnivorous, has a snout nearly as long as its body, and covered in hundreds of hair-like filaments likely evolved as camouflage to resemble floating algae. Solenostomus snuffleupagus was thus named for the classic Muppet character. We live in a world of wonders!

United States

The filthy forsworn flailing failures in the White House continue to shame and befoul the nation, but people across America keep building a brilliantly brighter future!

In May 2026, fast-growing solar generated 12.8% of all U.S. electricity, and still-declining coal generated just 12.2%. That’s the first month EVER in American history where solar generated more power than coal! Momentum is strong: solar plus batteries were 91% of new-built U.S. power-generating capacity in Q1 (Jan-Mar) 2026. Notably, in that Q1, 74% of new-built U.S. solar capacity was in states that had voted for the current President in 2024 — underscoring the ever-widening gap between nonsensical anti-renewables partisan rhetoric and practical economic reality. Much of America votes for maniacs who sabotage solar, then still builds solar farms anyway!

The newly upgraded Qcells solar factory in Cartersville, Georgia has begun commercial production of American-made solar cells, the core components that are assembled into solar panels! Within months, this factory will be able to make 3.3 gigawatts (3,300 MW) of solar cells, more than doubling the entire national solar cell manufacturing capacity of 3 GW. Domestic U.S. electrotech keeps striving upwards!

U.S. automaker titan General Motors is moving further into the grid-scale battery business, partnering with bold startup Peak Energy to develop and deploy cutting-edge sodium-ion battery chemistries at their R&D center in Michigan! A preexisting joint venture, Ultium Cells, with GM and Korean company LG, will also start producing lithium iron phosphate (LFP) grid-scale batteries within the month. GM is repurposing former EV batteries and developing vehicle-to-grid software.

Ridership on existing U.S. public transit system has risen sharply in 2026 so far, likely due to the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis. The Bay Area has seen regional train ridership grow by 11%, Chicago transit by 11% as well, and Boston rail by 13%. Awesome!

Researchers in Texas created a 17-foot tornado-like “fire whirl” to test the technique’s potential use in more rapidly cleaning up future oil spills. Original thinking, for sure!

The University of Minnesota has built a wind-powered green fertilizer pilot project, using clean power to run two electrolyzers splitting hydrogen molecules from water (H₂O) and combine it with nitrogen from the air to form ammonia (NH₃), a key input for fertilizers in modern high-output farming of staple crops like corn. Great!

A new report from the Trust for Public Land calculates that America’s urban parks bring substantial benefits to their cities, providing $3 in economic value for every $1 spent on local government park and recreation budgets. Parks increase local property values, drive traffic to small businesses and community events, provide public health benefits ranging from exercise space to extreme heat mitigation, and act as “sponge” terrain to reduce flood damage after climate disasters. Awesome!

In July 2025, construction began on a wildlife overpass bridge in Siskiyou County, California, offering a safe migration route over a high-roadkill stretch of the State Route 97 highway. It’ll be finished in fall 2026, but wildlife are already using it, with three mule deer photographed crossing in May 2026 between construction periods. Awesome!

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A landmark new study on mangrove forests, published in Science and analyzing satellite imagery from 1984 to 2023, has unexpectedly found that global mangrove coverage shifted from net loss to net gain around the year 2010, thanks to a combination of effective restoration and habitat protection efforts, natural regeneration, and warming temperatures increasing their range. Adding up years of changes from many different areas of gain and loss around the world, over 12,000 km² of mangrove forests were destroyed from the 1980s through 2010 but most of that area was grown back in the next decade, with net loss from the 1980s through 2020s now at just 849 km². In short, mangroves declined until 2010 and strongly recovered since!

China, the U.S. Gulf Coast, Australia, and Brazil all saw expansion of their mangrove cover in recent years, Indonesia achieved overall stabilization, and Nigeria is still declining. Furthermore, the proportion of closed-canopy mangrove forests, the most carbon-dense and life-rich, has grown by 20% since the 1980s. A superb turnaround for a globally vital fisheries-boosting and coast-shielding ecosystem! Spectacular news.

Check out my recent in-person reporting on mangrove restoration work in Kenya!

“After decades of loss, we're finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves. This highlights their strong resilience and their potential as a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation and coastal protection.”

— Dr. Zhen Zhang, Tulane University.

The Big Picture: EVs

A record-high 28% of new cars sold globally in 2026 are on track to be battery-powered (including both full EVs and plug-in hybrids)! Global rates vary, with an expected 60% in China, around 33% in Europe, and still just 10% in the U.S. Disruptions from the Iran War are accelerating global sales. Electrotech keeps moving!

Argentina

A rare “pale whale” calf was photographed in the Golfo Nuevo breeding site lagoon of Argentina, a young southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) born with black spots on white skin instead of the usual white spots on black skin. Once devastated by industrial whaling, the population of this species has epically rebounded from as few as 300 individuals in the 1920s to an estimated 13,600 today. Spectacular news!

Ukraine

As Ukraine gains new momentum in its defense against brutal Russian invaders (Russian oil refining is nearly at a standstill after waves of Ukrainian drone strikes!), the Energy Act for Ukraine Foundation keeps building solar/battery microgrids to keep hospitals and schools running even during bombing and grid blackouts! Recent projects include the Odesa Perinatal Center (which saved 62 children’s lives in Jan-Mar 2026 alone!), a heart surgery center in Kropyvnytskyi, an eye surgery center in Mykolaiv, a maternity hospital in Cherkasy City, and the Borodianka Lyceum. Ukraine is at the forefront of building deep societal resilience with electrotech. Superb work!

Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum

Ukraine is Not Losing

Last week I went to Kyiv to attend a security conference, meet friends and also take some time, as I have done in the past, to learn more about the tools the Ukrainians are creating to fight the war (see here for my article about long-range drones, and…

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2 months ago · 899 likes · 26 comments

The Bulwark

Yes, Russia Is Losing the War in Ukraine

FROM LATE 2023 UNTIL LATE 2025, I got a jittery feeling every time I pushed back against the prevailing narrative of Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. That line was quite commo…

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2 months ago · 529 likes · 62 comments · Cathy Young

Laos

Twenty-seven young Asiatic black bears (aka “moon bears,” Ursus thibetanus have been rescued from an illegal and horrifically cruel bile farm in the Southeast Asian state of Laos! It’s the largest such rescue in Southeast Asian history. The young bears can likely never return to the wild, but will live out their lives at the renowned Luang Prabang Wildlife Sanctuary, which now plans to buy land for more forest enclosures. Extraordinary and noble work!

Chinese state media reports that the fully electric high-speed railway linking the major cities of Laos with China has passed the milestone of 100,000 train runs since its launch in 2021, with 73 million passenger trips. A link to Thailand is being built.

Ecuador

A brand-new species of octopus has been discovered by an undersea ROV drone off the famed Galápagos Islands of Ecuador. Microeledone galapagensis is strikingly blue, tiny enough to fit in a human palm, and has unusually small, stubby arms. Awesome!

Thanks to modern LIDAR, archaeologists are now studying a lost ancient civilization in the Upano Valley of Ecuador, where since 3000 BCE an Amerindian people built thousands of earthen mounds linked by a “checkerboard” of roads and interspersed with farm fields and drainage canals, in a fascinating model of “garden urbanism.”

Albania

Mass peaceful protests dubbed the “Flamingo Revolution” have erupted in aspiring EU member candidate Albania in opposition to a plan by the Kushners, an infamous American oligarch family, to build a luxury resort in the protected wetlands (and major flamingo breeding grounds) of the Vjosa river delta. Go for it, protestors!

Canada

In an extraordinary discovery, scientists in Newfoundland have found that the severed “tube feet” of some sea cucumbers appear to have a form of “tissue immortality”, surviving for years (and counting!) despite separation from their original body and actually growing in mass and “eating” amino acids absorbed directly from seawater. They may play a role in scientific research like the famed HeLa cell line. Fascinating!

West Africa