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

'What Speaks to Me About Abundance': My Full Interview With Zohran Mamdani

With its projected heat index surging toward 110, New York City goes to the polls on Tuesday to choose the Democratic candidate for mayor. It’s a race that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be running away with. Fame and name recognition are potent assets in local politics, and Cuomo has both in ample supply. But polls now point to a dead heat wi…

Read more

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.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope, June 15, 2026

Electric car sales in 2026 are at record highs — but not in the U.S…

Read more

20 days 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

If I get sick, I'm moving to Malaysia

My husband and I showed up at the Malaysian hospital at 8:30 am and were given a checklist of things we wanted to get tested…

Read more

8 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.

Subscribe now

Share

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

Subscribe now

Share

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!

Subscribe now

Share

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…

Read more

a month 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…

Read more

a month 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…

Read more

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

Subscribe now

Share

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.

Subscribe now

Share

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!

Subscribe now

Share

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…

Read more

a month 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…

Read more

a month 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

The World Bank reports substantial progress on developing an interconnected grid linking 15 developing nations in West Africa, reducing electricity costs and wastage. Over 4,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines have been built, increasing access to electricity for 3 million people and allowing excess hydropower from Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire to be sold to help replace pricey fossil fuel imports in The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The World Grid is being built!

United States

A psychotic ultra-corrupt mafia of morons runs the White House, but people across America keep fighting, creating, innovating, and striving to build a brighter future!

A new “superwicking” ultra-efficient solar-powered desalination system has been invented by the Dr. Chunlei Guo lab at the University of Rochester! Microscopic grooves etched by femtosecond lasers on specially engineered black metal solar panels draw in saltwater to evaporate and be distilled into fresh drinking water while directing leftover salts onto predefined clearing regions. Amazingly, if you add hydrogen titanate nanoparticles in the grooves, it also selectively extracts lithium from saltwater, producing fresh water and a battery mineral from the same device!

After years of work, lab-raised hybrid “Flonduran” elkhorn corals will be outplanted at the Dry Tortugas islands of Florida! Nearly all of Florida’s elkhorn corals were wiped out by a marine heat wave in 2023, but elkhorns from a “rebel reef” in Tela Bay, Honduras have shown exceptional heat resilience, leading scientists to mix their genes with Florida strains. At up to 300 testing sites, the Flonduran cross-breeds’ resilience will be put to the test this summer. A great case of proactive conservation!

This newsletter has long covered Solein, the REVOLUTIONARY ultra-sustainable protein made by Finnish startup Solar Foods from microbes fed on carbon dioxide and clean electricity! As of June 2026, at long last, a Solein-based consumer product is now ON SALE in the United States! One flavor of protein powder from the Ambrosia brand now includes Solein powder, and will roll out nationwide this summer. WOW!

In a pleasantly surprising instance of functional and constructive bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives on June 2, 2026 overwhelmingly passed a package of related bills promoting the fast-progressing field of U.S. geothermal development! The Geothermal Energy Advancement Act, which now goes to the Senate, includes the text of six other previously proposed geothermal bills including the GEO Act fast-tracking vital geothermal permitting (which this writer has been pushing for since 2024), the STEAM Act giving geothermal wells on public lands the same priority categorical exclusion status that oil and gas wells already have, creating a new federal Geothermal Ombudsman and Geothermal Permitting Task Force to boost clean drilling, and more. The CLEAN Act, passed on the same day, would require the Department of the Interior to hold geothermal lease sales every year, again creating parity with oil and gas drilling. This is the best sign yet for geothermal as the one U.S. clean energy sector that hasn’t become an insane partisan target, likely due to all the opportunities for repurposing oil and gas drilling tech, companies, and workers in the growing clean drilling field. Let’s go!

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope, June 8, 2026

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed an excellent bipartisan package to accelerate U.S. geothermal energy progress…

Read more

a month ago · 12 likes

“This flexibility would expedite geothermal projects without undermining community input or environmental protections…

I appreciate my colleagues across the aisle who worked with us to pass this bill. At a time of extreme political polarization, this package shows that Congress can still come together on commonsense solutions to better the lives of the American people.”

— Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY-14).

The Acton-Boxborough school district in Massachusetts is pioneering a new vehicle to grid model! When idle during the summer, their 3 electric school buses will hook up to bidirectional chargers and act as grid-scale batteries storing excess clean electrons and sending them back out when extra power is needed! Great work.

After years of work, the CHPE international power line is now fully operational, bringing excess Canadian hydropower to help decarbonize New York City!

7 states have sued over the White House’s absurd and corrupt desperation move to pay developer TotalEnergies $795 million in taxpayer money to not build an offshore wind farm they had planned to construct off New York.

The Tumbleweed project in Kern County, California came online on June 1, 2026! It’s a pioneering 125 MW long-duration battery storage project that can fill up on extra clean electrons during the day and discharge power for eight hours straight at night. Across the nation, battery build-outs are bringing a new stability to U.S. grids. Great!

Tech megacorp Google has requested federal U.S. EPA authorization to release up to 64 million mosquitoes over 2 years across California and Florida. These “Debug” mosquitoes will all be males (only females bite) of the Aedes aegypti species, and will all have been sterilized with Wolbachia bacteria. Females mating with these males will lay eggs that won’t hatch, sharply reducing the population of a major vector for human diseases like dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Climate adaptation!

A possibly world-largest group of 5.5 million mining bees were found living in a cemetery in the town of Ithaca, New York — about the size of 200 honeybee hives.

A female California condor named B9, born in captivity and released into the wild by the Yurok Tribe in 2025, temporarily flew over the state border into Oregon in May 2026! She is the first wild-flying California condor in that state since 1904. The species saw spectacular conservation success since their nadir of 22 survivors in 1982. As of 2025, there are 607 individuals in the world, 392 wild-living. Excellent work!

Subscribe now

Share

All The Weekly Anthropocene text is 100% human-written and always has been.

Hundreds of thousands of small dams were built during the Industrial Revolution, but many are now completely obsolete and disused, doing nothing but sitting there, blocking fish passage, worsening flood risks, and keeping river water too warm with stagnant pools instead of free flow.

Now, record-high dam removals took place in both the United States and Europe in 2025! 100 dams were removed across America, reconnecting over 4,893 miles (over 7,800 kilometers) of river flow. Pennsylvania removed 14, Massachusetts 11, and Vermont 9. Highlights include major dam removals on the Winnebago River in Iowa, Brandywine River in Delaware, and Virgin River in Utah.

Across Europe, 602 river barriers including dams, weirs, and culverts were removed, reconnecting 2,324 miles (3,740 km) of rivers. Sweden removed 173, Finland 143, Spain 109, and the UK 35, while Iceland and North Macedonia removed dams for the first time in their history.

2025 also saw reintroduced Yangtze sturgeon spawning naturally on the Chishui River in China after over 300 dams on that tributary were removed in the early 2020s.

As the world accelerates into an electrotech future, removing the dam infrastructure of prior industrial ages is restoring biodiversity and building climate resilience!

Chile

The world’s only continental mainland-located colony of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) is found on the shores of the ironically named Useless Bay in the far-south Tierra del Fuego region of Chile. Penguins visited for centuries, but a breeding colony has only formed since 2010 thanks to the protection of local retired kindergarten teacher Cecilia Durán Gafo, who owns the land on these remote shores. She established and patrolled a private reserve, keeping out human harassers and training invasive minks and foxes to hunt elsewhere with meat scrap lures and deterrent dogs. Now, a team of 12 protectors is funded by ecotourism, and the colony has grown to nearly 200, with a record-high 23 surviving chicks in 2025. Great work!

India

In India, clean energy is powering a mega-nation’s rise like never before. India’s coal use is only 40% that of China’s at a similar state of development, and India is building solar farms at almost the same rate that China once built coal plants. Installed solar capacity has been rising by 40% per year, passing 150 gigawatts in March 2026.

The world’s-largest Khavda Solar Park is under construction in the Rann of Kutch, with a titanic 60 million panels (and a fleet of cleaning robots!) set to cover 280 square miles and produce 30 gigawatts (30,000 MW!) of energy once complete in 2029. Pumped hydro, battery storage, and transmission lines are beginning to be built out to efficiently store and deploy the sun’s bounty, and the government is incentivizing new domestic solar manufacturing. Clean electrification of the Indian subcontinent is a gigantic win for Earth, a transformative step towards a great Anthropocene! Superb.

Senegal

In 2021, scientists reintroduced 500 endangered African spurred tortoises (Centrochelys sulcata, the third-largest tortoise in the world) in Senegal, at the edge of the Sahara Desert, as part of an ongoing locally led tortoise conservation project. Now, satellite imagery reveals that the tortoises have transformed the landscape! Their deep burrows (reaching up to 15 meters long!) punched through the dried-out crust and let rainwater be stored in the soil, with green vegetation patches arising where the tortoises had dug. These ecosystem engineers directly helped reverse local desertification, a great new example of landscape-scale rewilding benefits. Awesome!

United Kingdom

In a historic first-ever wilding project, 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. A second reintroduction site is now in the works for Cumbria, near the Scottish border. In just a few years, the Blean bison have shaped a more complex and ecologically rich woodland-pasture mosaic landscape, with their natural behaviors directly increasing biodiversity. Bark stripping created standing deadwood habitat for woodpeckers, bats, and fungi, dust bathing created sandy habitat for lizards, insects, and wildflowers, and thinning shrubs like rhododendron let more sunlight to the forest floor, allowing new seeds to germinate. Superb work!

Here’s my 2024 interview on this project!

The River Wye, which runs about 130 miles and forms much of the border between England and Wales, just became the first river in the UK to be covered by a rights of nature charter from source to sea, endorsed by all local councils it flows through! It confers rights to flow, biodiversity, representation and freedom from pollution, concurrent with ongoing activism and litigation against industrial chicken farm and sewage pollution in the river. Ecologist Dr. Louise Bodnor has been appointed “Voice of the Wye.” A milestone in the global rights of nature legal movement. Great work!

The Greenford Tube train station in West London used to flood when it rained heavily. Then, in 2023, beavers were reintroduced to the area, the first beavers in West London for over 400 years. They swiftly dammed a local creek, creating a pond and wetland that now holds excess rainwater like a sponge, as well as providing habitat for newly arrived species of birds, bats, and butterflies! Flooding was reduced so much that the city scrapped plans for an expensive reservoir and levee. A great example of rewilding as a human-benefiting climate adaptation solution! Spectacular work!

Philippines

The Philippines appears to be enjoying a Pakistan-style grassroots solar super-boom in 2026! The archipelago nation imported more Chinese solar panels (over 4,000 MW worth!) than any nation in the world (except the Netherlands) in just January through April, and much of Europe gets solar panels through Dutch ports so the Philippines is likely the leader in within-country installation. Rooftop solar in the country has nearly doubled in the last twelve months, and will likely surge much further. Excellent news!

Czechia

Scientists in Czechia have bred new drought-resistant varieties of the nation’s famous Saaz hops, the basis of many local lagers. It’s a highly culturally relevant climate adaptation, as Czechia drinks the most beer per capita of any nation in the world.

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea has announced plans for a historically gigantic marine protected area, with the new Western Manus MPA set to cover 200,000 km² of Coral Triangle seas (an area larger than Great Britain!) with a strict no-take zone! These waters are lush with life, home to thriving coral reefs, hammerhead and gulper sharks, Cuvier’s beaked whales, orcas, manta rays, dolphins, seabirds, sea turtles, the colossal yokozuna slickhead fish, and much more. Fascinatingly, the boundaries of the future MPA were determined in part thanks to scientists tracking endangered grey reef sharks. Formal legal gazetting will soon begin. A giant leap for ocean conservation!

Japan

The brown bear and Asiatic black bear populations in Japan have risen to the tens of thousands in recent decades. In 2025, ongoing rural depopulation plus a sparse acorn harvest and failed beechnut crop that year caused a spike in bear incursions into farms and even town streets, with tragic, deadly results. A record-high 13 humans were killed by bears in Japan in 2025, leading to a domestic military deployment and 14,000 bears culled in a twelve-month period. Now, demand for Monster Wolf robots is sky-high, as the custom-made solar-powered shriek-emitting animatronic scarecrows are now widely used in Japan to keep bears away from crops and human settlements. A changing array of disturbing sounds and sudden movements “keeps them scary,” preventing wildlife getting used to it. Manufacturer Ohta is now developing new wheeled and handheld models. Robots increasingly play a vital role in human/wildlife coexistence, a trend likely to surge in upcoming years. Fascinating!

United States

The disgusting, incompetent, and treasonous crime lords in power continue to shame the nation, but people across America keep working to build a brighter future!

Agrivoltaics continues to progress across the United States! Illinois is becoming a particular hotspot thanks to recently passed laws both forbidding nonsensical local-level solar bans and fast-tracking permitting for community solar and agrivoltaics. The classic solar partner of sheep grazing remains predominant (sheep because cattle are heavy enough to break panels, goats chew wires, and sheep do neither), but many trials to find good arrangements for row crops are underway. Excellent work!

A floating solar project was built on Twin Lake Reservoir in Ohio. It will doubly help water security, with its clean power running the water treatment plant for the city of Lima, Ohio while its panels help conserve water by reducing evaporation and light for algal blooms on the reservoir! Floating solar is finally taking off in America, with specialist developer D3 Energy now boasting over 20 U.S. floating solar projects.

In less than a year, startup Antora Energy deployed over 200 heat batteries totaling 5 gigawatt-hours at an ethanol1 biofuel plant in South Dakota, creating one of the largest decarbonized industrial heat projects in America! Compared to a “giant toaster,” Antora’s system runs electricity from local wind farms to warm big blocks of solid carbon to store heat, which can then boil water to pipe steam to factories, and it will help replace steam from a nearby coal plant’s boilers. They’ve also developed a new “thermal market energy pricing rider” incentivizing the heat batteries to draw power when there’s extra electrons on the grid, keeping prices competitive. Nice work!

Hyundai is reportedly planning to mass-produce the Atlas model of humanoid robots from startup Boston Dynamics at their EV factory in Georgia, and furthermore to test the robots’ ability to help make electric cars at the same factory. Humanoid robots have already been deployed at several different Chinese EV-makers’ factories for over a year; this is a good sign the U.S. could catch up soon! In other U.S. robot news, the Hugging Face platform debuted bipedal robot legs for $2,500, with open-source software, blueprints, and 3D-printable parts, to help spur decentralized innovation. Extraordinary technological times.

Subscribe now

Share

Ember calculates that in April 2026, across all of human civilization wind plus solar generated more electricity than fossil gas for the first time ever! Wind and solar generated 22% of global electricity that month, compared to gas at 20%. Notably, this was the first full month of the Iran War and Hormuz fossil fuel crisis, which has starkly exposed the vulnerability of combustion and accelerated clean electrification. Solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet for 21 years now.

In 2025, 25% of all new cars sold were electric (fully or hybrid), with wide differences between national markets ranging from 97% in Norway to just 3% in Japan. Notably, China, the world’s largest car market, had 53% electric new sales. In 2026, EV sales have surged across much of the world in March and April as gas prices rose sharply.

On May 20, 2026, an overwhelming majority of the human nations of Earth voted for a non-binding United Nations resolution (sponsored by Vanuatu) endorsing the famed July 2025 International Court of Justice advisory opinion which found that a clean and sustainable environment is a human right, that governments had a legal obligation to protect a stable climate, and that poor countries harmed by climate change could be entitled to reparations. Notably, 141 nations voted in favor and passed the motion, 28 abstained, and 8 nations voted against it, including infamous petrostates like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the current U.S. regime. This resolution has no new legal effect, but it’s a powerful symbolic reminder that most of the world is on board with rapid clean electrification and striving to stabilize Earth!

Australia

A project to return platypuses to the Hacking River in a park south of Sydney began with the release of 10 individuals in 2023. Another 3 platypuses were released in 2025, and now another 4 in May 2026. With 17 reintroduced, 1 found dead, and 4 new puggles born in the wild, the estimated population now stands at 20. Great work!

Australia is experiencing a historic home battery boom, with a whopping 400,000 units installed in just the last 10 months, totaling 11.2 gigawatt-hours of new distributed storage. As the “Solar Sharer” three hours of free electricity is set to debut soon, these Australian households are at the leading age of a dawning “free electricity” era thanks to the epic advances of the renewables revolution! Superb news.

In April 2026, conservationists released up to 100 captive-bred eastern barred bandicoots (Perameles gunnii) on Philip Island near Melbourne, Australia. The species was formerly extinct in the wild on the Australian mainland, with the last survivors collected in 1991 for a captive-breeding program that mixed genes with relatives from Tasmania to establish a population now at over 2,000. The little marsupials’ burrows improve soil health, seed dispersal, and water retention, boosting the whole landscape!

The great interwoven clonally reproducing bed of Poseidon’s ribbon weed seagrass (Posidonia australis) in Shark Bay just off Western Australia may be the largest single living organism1 on planet Earth. It’s over 4,500 years old and has grown to cover an area the size of Paris, France, and is a vital habitat site for dugongs, imperiled Indian Ocean manatee relatives. When a marine heat wave struck in 2011, about 25% of it, an area the size of Manhattan, was tragically lost in a world-record die-off.

Community volunteers have been working for years to help restore the seagrass. And now, local Aboriginal Australian-led startup Tidal Moon is working to help restore Shark Bay and build an income-generating, ecosystem-supporting, and carbon-sequestering sea cucumber farm in the seagrass beds. They’ll hand-plant seagrass in barren patches with divers, and transplant heat-resistant seagrass fragments from shallow waters into deeper waters to build climate resilience. Fascinating work!

Australia & Tuvalu

Australia signed the historic Falepili Union treaty with the low-lying and rising seas-imperiled atoll nation of Tuvalu in 2023. Over 65% of Tuvalu’s small population applied for Australian visas under the treaty terms in 2025. In 2026, the first cohort of 280 Tuvaluans have now been accepted and are making their way to Australia — the world’s first formally welcomed climate migrants. Simultaneously, an Australian-supported project is actively using dredging ships to push up seabed sand to form new elevated land, an effort which has already expanded Tuvalu’s landmass by 10%.

Ghana

Agricultural yields for several vital staple grains have recently increased sharply in the fast-developing West African nation of Ghana, rising from less than 1.5 tonnes per hectare in the early 2000s to over 2.5 tonnes per hectare today. A major driver was a 2017 publicly funded initiative to distribute improved seeds, fertilizers, and other vital inputs. Improving agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important tasks in the world to fight extreme poverty and build climate resilience, and this is a great blueprint on how it can be successfully done! Great news.

Türkiye

Türkiye, which will host the global COP31 climate talks in November 2026, is rapidly scaling up renewable energy. Wind and solar provided 22% of electricity generation in 2025, and there’s a rapid grid-scale battery build-out to match. The Kalyon Karapınar solar farm, Türkiye’s largest (so far!) was built on desertified ex-farmland, provides enough power for two million people and is known for its architecturally innovative central control building, a reflective prism with a courtyard oasis. Awesome work!

Argentina

In Patagonian waters off Argentina, researchers have discovered one of the largest deep-sea cold-water coral reefs ever found! It’s about 1,000 meters deep, made up mostly of the rare coral species Bathelia candida. Just one mound covers at least 0.4 km2, about the size of Vatican City, and there seem to be many more still unmapped!

Restoration efforts have already begun in some patches damaged by fishing trawlers, installing substrates and 3D-printed coral replicas to attract fish and coral larvae colonists with transplants of coral fragments set to start next year. Superb work!

Two new jaguar cubs, born in the wild to two different females, have recently been spotted in Argentina! A great sign that the rewilding project begun in 2019 is working.

China

Our World in Data reports and visualizes that China added 497 terawatt-hours of new electricity generation in 2025, almost all from solar and wind. That’s new generation in just one year roughly equivalent to the output of the entire permanent electricity grid of Germany. The scale of electrotech build-outs is becoming truly epoch-making.

In April 2026, the government of China formally enacted new environmental metrics and inspections for provincial governments, making reducing emissions and coal consumption official parts of how officials are “graded” on doing their jobs. That’s some CCP bureaucratic inside baseball, but also a powerful sign that China’s world-changing electrostate turn is becoming institutionalized and will further accelerate!

Bangladesh

A group of architects based in Dhaka are teaching villages across low-lying and fast-developing Bangladesh how to build Khudi Bari, a new design of flooding-resistant tiny houses. They use local wood and bamboo, are elevated off the ground, and can be easily and quickly dismantled and relocated if necessary. Great adaptation work!

As dozens of power plants are currently shut down in Bangladesh due to lack of imported fossil gas during the Hormuz crisis, fast-growing solar is helping keep the lights on, particularly in the northern Rangpur region. Future potential is vast!

United States

A lawless ultra-corrupt mafia regime continues to disgrace and befoul the halls of power, but people across America keep fighting to build a brighter future!

The nesting season for sea turtles on the beaches of Florida runs from March through October. In 2026, the season has had a record-breaking start! The state’s FWC conservation commission reported that as of April 30, 2026, the Sunshine State had 1,008 nests of leatherback sea turtles, up by 4% from May 2025, 3 nests of Kemp’s ridley sea turtles, up from just 1 in May 2025, and a remarkable 1,450 nests of loggerhead sea turtles, up by 82% since May 2025. Green sea turtles nest later in the season, which is set to become a true banner year for chelonian restoration. Awesome!

Maryland, New Hampshire, and Connecticut just became the 5th, 6th, and 7th U.S. state to allow plug-in solar, passing measures allowing installation without overwhelming red tape! And the California State Senate has passed another such plug-in solar accessibility bill on a 35 to 1 vote! If (when???) it’s approved by the House and Governor, the largest state market in America will unleash clean energy for all. Absolutely excellent news! Here’s an action.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 20, 2026

Plug-in solar is progressing FAST, with major victories across America…

Read more

a month ago · 32 likes · 3 comments

Wind and especially solar are booming across ERCOT, the state grid of Texas, with solar’s share of generation rising from 4% in 2021 to 12% in 2025. The U.S. EIA reports that solar’s annual electricity generation (not capacity!) is set to overtake coal on ERCOT in 2026. Texas is now building more new solar than any other U.S. state, thanks in large part due to its “fair playing field” free-market permitting system for new electricity-generating projects that frees renewables to rise on their merits.

De-extinction startup Colossal has announced the hatching of 26 live baby chickens from their first-ever 3D-printed artificial eggs, a technological breakthrough that might someday enable the return of lost species like the giant moa whose chonky embryos could not survive in any living bird’s egg size. Extraordinary innovation work!

On March 25, 2026, a trail camera in the Minnesota woods near Voyageurs National Park recorded a female puma with three kittens, marking the first time in over 100 years that the species has bred in the North Star State! This may become a long-term breeding population, potentially boosting pumas’ nascent recolonization of the U.S. Midwest. Awesome news!

I’ll be doing a live chat with on Thursday May 28! Here’s the link.

I took the train from Mombasa to Nairobi on May 9, and spent the next few days writing up my articles on the incredible mangrove restoration work I’d gotten to visit with EarthLungs. On May 13th, I went on a dawn safari to Nairobi National Park. Ecotourism has become a rapidly growing economic driver for Kenya, and before leaving East Africa I very much wished to see a savanna ecosystem myself.

This is a protected area in extraordinary circumstances, an extent of wild megafauna-rich African savanna (home to over 100 mammal species and 400 resident and migratory bird species!) surrounded on three sides by the millions-strong human city of Nairobi1. Fences separate the park from the city to the north, east, and west. Only a patchwork of public and private lands on the south side of the park, across the Mbagathi River, provides open passage to the broader Athi-Kapiti Plains, allowing migration and thus preventing “islanding” and inbreeding — and this passage is becoming fragile as the city keeps growing. In 2025, the Kenyan government announced a new plan to restore this vital wildlife corridor connecting NNP to the Athi-Kapiti, including moving some public land to conservation management, acquiring private land for conservation, and building overpasses and underpasses to facilitate migration. There’s also a nascent biodiversity credits program paying Kenyan landowners near parks to keep portions of their land open and fence-free for wildlife passage.

On a symbolic level, this means that Nairobi National Park is practically a synecdoche for the Anthropocene all by itself. Giraffes and buffalo and hippopotamuses and great herds of impala antelope, a true iconic species-rich African savanna ecosystem, all roaming free at the edge of a capital city! The juxtaposition is stark: the runway of Kenya’s national airport is five kilometers from the park fence, and there are fully urban neighborhoods just hundreds of meters away from the fence boundary. Practically, this means that this park is astonishingly accessible on the ground. I booked a safari through TripAdvisor for just $35 per person, joining a group of four. They picked me up at 5:30 AM at an Airbnb in the city and drove to the park gate in just 30 minutes.

We’d hardly passed the gates before we saw a giraffe enjoying a morning browse at a tree, just a few hundred meters away from Nairobi apartment buildings.

The brown, almost russet, chisel-edged patches, the tufted little bony ossicones on the head, the dewy long-lashed eyes, the fragile-looking elegance of the great stretching legs and neck…it all added up to an extraordinary natural beauty.

I recalled that in 1414, the far-ranging treasure fleet exploration voyages of Admiral Zheng He famously brought back a live giraffe as tribute from Malindi (now part of Kenya) to the Ming Dynasty court of Emperor Yongle in Beijing, presenting it as the mythical qilin beast in real life. A giraffe really does look like a creature of legend sprung to life, far more improbable and marvelous-looking than a unicorn.

Giraffes were long thought to be one species, but in recent years genetic analysis has found that they are actually four species: the Northern giraffe, Southern giraffe, reticulated giraffe, and Maasai giraffe, comprising several recognized subspecies as well. Here in Nairobi National Park, we were seeing Maasai giraffes, Giraffa tippelskirchi. This species is categorized by the IUCN as Endangered, with a current population of about 32,000 individuals across Tanzania and southern Kenya. They saw an population decline of nearly 50% since the 1970s due to illegal hunting and habitat loss, but happily a 2025 report found Maasai giraffe numbers to now be nearly stable.

That’s about middling in terms of giraffe species population these days: as of 2025, the Northern giraffe had an estimated population decline of just 7,057 due to the wars in the Sahel, while the Southern giraffes have doubled to 68,837 thanks to robust conservation work in Namibia and Botswana.

As we moved on from the grazing giraffes, I looked behind our safari vehicle and caught a glimpse of a serval (Leptailurus serval) crossing the dirt track. The fierce little feline was a black-spotted golden streak almost glowing in the dawn's rosy light. In the middle distance, another giraffe was backlit by the rising sun.

We drove on, dawn moving into full tropical morning with jarring quickness. Our next new major wildlife encounter was deeper into the park, with several individuals from one of the famous “Big Five” species particularly prized as viewable wildlife.

The African buffalo (Syncerus caffer), a powerful herd ungulate, is sometimes also called the “Black Death” due to its reputation for deadly charges at human hunters (still a thing today). Its strikingly large horns are fused at their bases, forming a bone shield over the head like a mammalian pachycephalosaur. The IUCN ranks the species as “Near Threatened” with an estimated 400,000 individuals across large swathes of Africa, though the population is declining.

Interestingly, this species has already bounced back substantially from one near-death experience: the truly apocalyptic 1890s rinderpest epizootic. This multispecies pandemic killed most of the cattle in all of sub-Saharan Africa (with over 90% mortality rates in some areas!), plus an overwhelming majority of several wild hoofed mammal species including buffalo, causing socioeconomic chaos across the continent. Fortunately, rinderpest became the second-ever disease to be eradicated by humanity thanks to a concerted multi-decade global cattle vaccination effort. The last recorded case of rinderpest was in a buffalo in Kenya in 2001, this very species in this very country. The glorious defeat of rinderpest is not as well remembered as the first great victory, smallpox, perhaps because it’s a hoofed-mammal plague that doesn’t afflict humans, but it’s nonetheless an incredible triumph2 against senseless suffering.

After driving further into the park, past herds of graceful golden impala antelope and a few more browsing giraffes in the distance, we saw a rhinoceros.

It was a white rhinoceros, Ceratotherium simum. (The name isn’t actually a reference to color, but a corruption of the Afrikaans for “wide”). A group of two, one large and one small: a mother and child. White rhinos are the most populous of the five rhino species globally, with an estimated 15,752 individuals as of 2025. That’s up from as few as 100 in the early 1900s thanks to decades of dedicated conservation work, but down from around 21,000 in 2012 due to a deadly poaching surge in the mid-2010s.

The length of the mother's great keratinous horn was a testament to this park's security. In many protected areas (and even some zoos) conservationists have removed rhinos’ horns for their own safety in an effort to reduce the incentive for poachers to come and kill them.

After the mid-2010s poaching surge, Kenya has invested in better conservation security and its black and white rhino populations (over 2,000 individuals from both species combined) are now both steadily growing. In 2016, 1.35 tons of confiscated rhino horn were publicly burned at Nairobi National Park to symbolize Kenya's steadfast opposition to the illegal wildlife trade. (There had already been several public burnings of confiscated elephant tusk ivory in the park, starting in 1989). Kenya has lately installed highly effective FLIR thermal night-vision cameras in many protected areas to send rangers automated alerts of human and wildlife movements at night. In 2020 and 2022, zero rhinos were poached across all of Kenya.

The struggle to protect Africa’s rhinos goes on, but considerable progress has been made, and there are abundant reasons to be hopeful for further progress in the future. This mother was raising her baby in relative peace and safety, right next to a city of millions, despite the ridiculously high black-market value of the horns on her and her child’s heads. Coexistence is hard, but we know it can work.

A little while later, we came across some browsing giraffes again, this time even closer to the dirt track on which safari vehicles were permitted to drive.

You could even see the row of birds eating skin parasites off the giraffe’s neck. The indispensable iNaturalist citizen science app later informed me that they were red-billed oxpeckers, Buphagus erythrorhyncha, a savanna native known for eating blood-gorged ticks off impala, buffalo, giraffes, and rhinos.

Eventually, one of the giraffes got up from browsing and walked along the dirt track in front of our safari vehicle. We eventually pulled up right alongside it, and got some spectacular close-up pictures.

Soon after that thrilling proximity, we got a similar extra-close encounter with another African buffalo.

A lone male, its imposing bulk proclaimed a striking physicality as it lumbered down the dirt track, passing surprisingly near to the rear window of our vehicle and even following us for a few steps. Splashes and stains of gray-brown mud marked its fur and its great curving horns.

As the day wore on and full morning replaced the cool crepuscular period around dawn where many animals preferred to be active, our sightings of wildlife tapered off. After driving around the park for a while, we saw a group of ostriches in the distance, with a few more giraffes just visible on the skyline behind them.

Grey feathers marked a female ostrich; the males had black plumage and bright red skin on their necks. As we drew closer, the males moved away from the track, but the female didn’t seem as bothered by the proximity of our vehicle, and we got an excellent view.

The largest bird in the world, the sheer imposing size of her avian bulk reminded me that these were, technically, dinosaurs. When she raised her head, the park-traversing bridge segment of the Chinese-built Nairobi to Mombasa SGR railway was silhouetted behind her neck, another striking example of the unique situation of this periurban protected area.

The common ostrich, Struthio camelus, is ranked as “Least Concern” by the IUCN, with un-quantified but large and abundant populations spread across much of Africa plus a few ferals in Australia and numerous ostrich farms worldwide. The “sticking their heads in the sand” story is a myth, but their necks are so flexible (unlike, for example, giraffes) that they can lower them all the way to the ground, which can kind of make it look like they’ve buried their heads from a distance.

A little further along, we came across a pack of four black-backed jackals (Lupulella mesomelas), right on the dirt track and evidently unafraid of safari vehicles. A few had their pink tongues lolling out.

This species is widespread across the drylands of Southern and Eastern Africa. Like the coyote of North America, it’s a hardy canid opportunist, often persecuted by humans but still relatively common thanks to their resilience and flexibility.

As the safari wound to a close near midday, our guide drove us to a different ecosystem: a spreading pond with a fringe of marshy wetland, near the north end of the park. A very different species mix was present here than on the drier savanna I’d seen so far. Groups of Egyptian geese cackled at each other as they waddled along, and songbirds chirped in the bushes. A few distant crocodiles lounged on the muddy banks. Four plains zebras (Equus quagga) were socially grazing in the shade of a tree on the bank nearest our vehicle.

And in the middle of the pond was yet another example of iconic African megafauna. Pointing to the center of the waters, our guide called out “Hippos!”

At first, they were barely visible, with just tips of ears and nostrils poking above the surface like tiny island chains. Hardly distinguishable from the tips of sticks or even floating debris.

Then the guide drove us around to a different view of the wetland. Hippos deigned to surface a little more, and were clearly recognizable, with several majestic heads picked out in shades of gray and pink against the greenish water. A family of Hippopotamus amphibius, the notoriously aggressive semi-aquatic titans that the Greeks named “river horse.” They stay inactive and submerged in the water for most of the day, which helps avoid dehydration and overheating3, and come out at night for grazing. Today the IUCN ranks the common hippopotamus as Vulnerable, a step less imperiled than Endangered, with a roughly stable population of about 115,000 to 130,000 individuals in dozens of scattered habitat fragments across the African continent.

Soon after that, around midday, the safari came to a close. We left the park and within a shockingly short space of time were back in the fully urban developing-city environment of modern Nairobi. Just based on what I could see around me a mere minute away from the park gates, I’d never have guessed there was a savanna home to such magnificent creatures a stone’s throw away.

It was a fitting happenstance that the watery ecosystem patch was among the last spots I saw in the park, as it directly illustrates the fascinating interrelationships that sustain a species-rich savanna at the edge of a human city in the fractal pointillistic patchwork of variegated land covers and water-scapes that is Anthropocene Africa. The waterbody where I’d seen geese and zebras on the banks wasn’t a natural formation. It was the Hyena Reservoir, formed by the Hyena Dam, one of three permanent dams and seven smaller seasonal dams built within Nairobi National Park for ecosystem maintenance purposes. No hydropower was generated here: these are dams built entirely to benefit wildlife, providing living space for hippos and crocodiles and waterbirds plus drinking water sources for everything else. They weren’t just one-and-done interventions either: park authorities regularly check to see if they need de-silting. Water is life, and keeping more water around from the rainy season into the dry season meant that this park could keep being home to more of it.

This wildly abundant savanna ecosystem, an astounding spectacle of living viriditas, was in some ways under threat by humans, but was also being actively sustained and enriched by human landscape engineering. Nairobi National Park’s socioeconomic role in human society, as an income-generating jobs-supporting major tourist attraction for the city of Nairobi and the nation of Kenya, was actively protecting a multiplicity of its ecological roles, directly incentivizing humans to perform a beaver-like function of water management and habitat creation.

Artificial watering holes are becoming common in protected areas spanning dry forest and savanna ecosystems worldwide; a direct climate adaptation intervention to boost ecosystem resilience. I’ve previously interviewed a group installing solar-powered water pumps in India’s tiger reserves.

This is a paradigmatic example of the kind of “benevolent interventionist” mindset I strongly believe to be necessary for humanity to best help Earth’s biosphere to survive and thrive despite the many disruptions of climate change! I felt privileged to have seen it in action in Nairobi National Park, one of many landscapes in the modern world where wildlife and humans have negotiated a dynamic coexistence. Truly extraordinary work, and yet another case of under-reported deeply impactful hard-won environmental progress.

As electrotech adoption accelerates worldwide due to the manifold stupidities of the Iran War fossil fuel crisis, new data is underscoring how profound and far-reaching the global clean electrification shift has already become! Our World in Data has a great new visualization of Ember’s recent report that fossil fuel use for electricity declined worldwide in 2025, with clean energy meeting all new demand growth and then some!

And Bloomberg NEF notes that energy storage (mostly batteries) has crossed the “100 GW annually” barrier, with 112 GW (112,000 MW) installed worldwide in 2025. (54% of those installations were in China). The solar-to-storage ratio of annual global additions in gigawatts fell from 56 in 2016 (56 times as much solar as storage being built) to just 6 in 2025, as solar kept growing rapidly and storage grew even more rapidly from a lower base. The “solar power during the day, battery-stored solar at night” model is fully mature and increasingly dominating global energy systems. Humanity’s electrification just keeps accelerating!

“It only took four years for energy storage to increase annual additions to more than 100 GW from 10 GW, whereas it took roughly eight and 15 years for solar and wind, respectively. This record underscores growing market momentum and increased industry maturity.”

— Isshu Kikuma, BloombergNEF.

Colombia

The world’s first International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, in late April 2026. This unprecedented event brought together a “coalition of the willing” of 57 countries willing to commit to fully phase out coal, oil, and gas, with the conference thus avoiding fossil fuel lobby roadblocks and focusing on removing barriers to 100% clean electrification. The U.S., China, India, and major petrostates like Russia and Saudi Arabia did not attend, but the 57-nation coalition included the European Union, UK, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and many Latin American, African, and Pacific Island states, totaling over half of global GDP and one-third of global energy demand. Next year’s conference will take place in Tuvalu. Great work!

Singapore

The park-rich city-state of Singapore is home to a growing population of critically endangered Raffles’ banded langur monkeys (Presbytis formalis), one of Earth’s most imperiled primates. Numbers have doubled from around 40 in 2011 to 80 today, out of just an estimated 200-250 individuals worldwide. Local citizen science groups with hundreds of volunteers regularly survey and watch over the langur population, which has helped identify target corridor locations for a recently built overpass and rope bridges stretching over roads to link forest fragments. Another awesome example of wildlife-friendly modern cities becoming havens for biodiversity - Anthropocene arks!

Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, and is in a state of civil war between a military junta and jihadists. But it’s lately seen an incredible triumph for humanity: a globally supported rollout of new malaria vaccines starting in 2024 Now, two years later, early data indicates that malaria cases in the country fell 32% from 10.8 million in 2024 to around 7.3 million in 2025, and malaria deaths (mostly among young children) fell 44% from 3,523 to 1,979! This is a spectacular success, and it’s only just beginning! Malaria vaccines are an incredibly big win, both developing sub-Saharan Africa and protecting against climate change-spread diseases. Superb news!

[The malaria vaccine] has helped us save what little money we have. Just imagine what we used to spend on treatment every time malaria struck.”

— Rihanata Kouanda, Burkinabè mother.

Germany

Germany has completed the final lake in the epic Lusatian Lakeland ecosystem creation project, in which 23 former lignite coal mining pits over 14,000 hectares have been transformed with dedicated engineering into new lakes that serve as wildlife habitat, recreation areas, and water reservoirs ensuring nearby river flow in case of drought. This is now Europe’s largest artificial water landscape! The next step will be to connect it all with canals, forming a continuously navigable passage. This spectacular work isn’t quite rewilding, as there were no lakes here previously — it’s a particularly Anthropocene form of local terraforming, turning post-industrial wastelands into multipurpose benefactors for humanity and its biosphere. Great work!

Mongolia

The khulan (aka onager or Asiatic wild ass, Equus hemionus) has been absent from eastern Mongolia for over 65 years, blocked by the Trans-Mongolian Railway. In 2025, conservationists established a monitored fence-free safe passage point to allow khulan to cross the rails. Now, radio tracking and field observations confirm that several khulan groups are present east of the railway in 2026, expanding their habitat and boosting connectivity and resilience for the wide-ranging species. Excellent work!

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has achieved a new world record for ultra-energy-efficient desalination, getting fresh water from seawater with less energy use than ever before. Their new cutting-edge advanced reverse osmosis unit at the Yanbu desalination complex (partially solar powered!) has a capacity of 200,000 cubic meters of water per day, and record-low energy use of 1.55 kwH per cubic meter. Desalination is increasingly a core civilizational competency, slaking cities’ thirsts in a warming world. Great work!

South Africa

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have bounced back spectacularly since the dire decades of mass whaling, rising from less than 5,000 in the 1960s over 125,000 documented individuals today, above pre-whaling levels in many regions!

Now, the waters off South Africa have provided the best sign of recovery yet. In December 2025, photographers spotted a “super-group” of no less than 304 (three hundred and four!) humpback whales feeding together near Dassen Island — the biggest grouping of large whales ever recorded by humans. Notably, many of these whales had never been seen before, indicating that they are likely quite young (“10 tonne toddlers”) and that the population is growing fast. BRILLIANT news!

Angola

The Luau project has come online in eastern Angola, incorporating 31.85 MW of solar plus 75.26 MWh of battery storage! It will bring round-the-clock power to over 90,000 people with no need for fossil fuels. This is now Africa’s largest off-grid “minigrid” project, overtaking the Cazombo project completed last year also in Angola. Built with European investment, it’s located on the Lobito Corridor, a strategic railway project trying to bring Congolese and Zambian critical minerals to Atlantic ports. Clean electrification keeps on spreading in rural Africa! Great work.

Angola has designated a new 220 km² conservation area (twice the size of Paris!) protecting Afromontane forests around Mount Moco, its highest mountain. This is a particular lifeline for the rare Swierstra’s spurfowl bird, endemic to the region. Great!

Australia

The Victorian grassland earless dragon (Tympanocryptis pinguicolla) was believed extinct for 50 years, then rediscovered in 2023. Now, conservationists at Zoos Victoria have built a dedicated breeding center to safeguard the species’ future, already home to dozens of the little lizards and with a goal of growing the captive population to 500 individuals, about twice the estimated wild population. Excellent proactive work!

When scientists surveyed coral reefs at the Houtman Abrolhos islands in summer 2025, they expected to find mass bleaching and die-offs, as a deadly marine heat wave had ravaged corals across Western Australia earlier that year. They discovered a thriving island of resilience, with lab tests confirming that multiple species of local corals appear to have evolved extraordinarily strong heat tolerance! It’s unclear why (possibly something about the local algal symbionts?) but this could become a vital source of heat-tolerant corals to restore other reefs to survive the Anthropocene!

United States

The foul fossil-fueled flailing failures in power keep doing treasonous corruption and senseless sabotage, but people across America keep fighting to build a bright future!

Each year in the town of Bremen, Maine, artist Sue Schubel hand-paints about 500 photorealistic seabird decoys designed to lure species ranging from gannets to puffins to start new breeding colonies in suitable habitat. She’s been working on producing these surprisingly effective conservation tools for Audubon since 1996 and led the program since 2016. Audubon has sent decoys for 55 different seabird species to projects around the world, helping the resurgence of crested terns in China, masked boobies in Mauritius, and Atlantic puffins right nearby in Maine. AWESOME work!

Ribbed mussels are growing rapidly on the shores of Lynnhaven Bay, Virginia, helping filter out pollutants, reduce erosion, and feed wildlife. Water quality in the region has improved substantially in recent years, likely kicking off this virtuous cycle!

Fervo Energy, America’s enhanced geothermal pioneer startup, just held a very successful initial public offering (IPO), raising $1.9 billion and valuing the company at $7.7 billion. They have several “clean drilling” projects actively under construction.

The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) had a good breeding season in winter 2026, with 23 new baby calves born off the U.S. East Coast — the most since 2009. There are now an estimated 384 individuals in the species.

Two companies and two county governments in Texas have signed off on a new partnership to build a gigantic new advanced-reverse-osmosis desalination plant on South Padre Island with a capacity of at least 50 million gallons per day. This could potentially “drought-proof” the entire Rio Grande Valley region by providing a consistent supply of drinkable water from the Gulf of Mexico! Excellent work.

U.S. startup Atoco has unveiled its prototype water harvester, using cutting-edge nanocrystalline metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to collect H2O molecules from thin air. (There’s abundant untapped water in the atmosphere even in arid climates). Atoco’s shipping container-sized model can produce up to 4,000 liters of pure water per day at a cost of cents per liter, and a smaller off-grid model can be deployed at need to communities lacking clean water. They plan to make and sell 200 in 2027, with more to come. Atoco’s founder, Palestinian-American chemist Dr. Omar Yaghi, won a 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on MOFs. Spectacular work!

Subscribe now

Share

I wrote this entire newsletter on an informal “matatu” bus in Kenya!

On Friday May 8, my last day in the field with the awesome EarthLungs team, we visited their first and most developed planting site: Majaoni. I wasn't visiting a planting event today, but surveying the general day-to-day work at the most well-established EarthLungs mangrove nursery and the hub of the brand-new Beyond Trees projects, designed to provide a sustainable income flow to ensure that communities hired to replant mangroves didn’t turn to deforestation once the restoration work was done.

The Site Forester, manager of operations in this area, was named Eric, and the Tree Production Officer was named Juma. They gave me a guided tour of the Majaoni mangrove nursery - by far the largest that I had seen so far! Eric told me proudly that EarthLungs had restored over 200 hectares of mangrove forest at the Majaoni site alone since they began work here in 2023, with enviable 70% survivability among the seedlings they had planted here. It was now becoming a “mother site” sharing seedlings with other sites thanks to its bountiful nursery and many propagule-producing adult trees. When, say, extra Rhizophora mangroves were available at Majaoni and another site could plant them, they could harvest the seedlings or propagules from the nursery, pack them in nets for good aeration, and transport them by truck or boat.

Their standard protocol was to plant propagules directly in good-quality soils with regular tidal patterns, and cultivate seedlings for more difficult soil and/or hydrology conditions. Eric invited me to pluck several propagules straight from young Ceriops and Rhizophora trees in the nursery and prick them into the nearby mud (good soil here!) as we looked over the nursery beds of propagules and seeds growing into more robustly plantable seedlings.

A good mangrove nursery had to be in just the right spot, sheltered enough that the mangrove seedlings would stay in place but exposed enough that they'd still get watered every high tide, and with good topography and fast drainage so there was no stagnant water left behind. The main Majaoni nursery was surrounded by more mature mangrove trees, with a channel heading out towards the mid-distant Indian Ocean one end. After popping a propagule or seed into a tube of earth, it would normally stay under a shaded awning part of the nursery for three months, then get “hardened” in full UV-heavy tropical sun for one month before it was ready to replant. One corner was testing the effectiveness bamboo tubes to replace the (recyclable) black plastic they were currently using to contain and transport seedlings.

In addition to the Avicennia, Rhizophora, and Ceriops mangrove genera I had become familiar with over the last few days, this Majaoni nursery was also growing some I hadn’t seen before, like Xylocapas, Bruguiera, and Heriteria. Eric told me that unlike most mangroves, Heriteria was capable of thriving in entirely terrestrial conditions outside the intertidal zone, and they thus often planted it right on the shoreline.

Each species has different optimal conditions for their propagules or seeds to grow in. Ceriops and Rhizophora need organic matter-rich “black” clayey soil (the exact sort of mud I’d been finding it so challenging to walk through!), but hardy pioneer Avicennia can tolerate more sandy soils which would drive Ceriops seeds to dormancy. They’d trialed at Majaono some of the berm and trench work I’d seen at Mteza to help restore water flow in silt-degraded areas, and Rhizophora was particularly good for planting on those structures because they “pulled up” black soil to the surface where they grew.

In the lush Majaoni nursery, IIalso got my best view yet of several species among the charming inhabitants of the mangrove mud plain ecosystem.

There was a hermit crab, similar to those I’d often seen as a child on the beaches of New England, amid some Rhizophora seedlings, and also a mudskipper fish, a delightful little creature that I’d never seen in the wild before.

We were then joined by Nellie, the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Verification Officer, who explained her area of expertise. Basically, she was in charge of proving that the trees they planted were indeed planted and then checking up at intervals to see that they survived, and if not what killed them. As I’d previously seen at EarthLungs headquarters, she highlighted crab predation and drought as major mortality factors, with drought in particular getting worse due to climate change in the already hot and low-rainfall coastal regions of Kenya.

She gave me an in-depth explanation of her standard protocol. For temporary monitoring plots, the EarthLungs central office would send out some randomly generated GPS coordinate points within the polygon of the planting site. The first monitoring round occurred three months after the planting had taken place. Then the field staff would go to those coordinates, poke a stick in the center, measure a few meters’ radius around that with a rope, then tally all the planted seedlings there and note whether they were living or dead. Georeferenced photos served as proof of work, showing that at any random point within the work area trees really had been planted where they were supposed to have been planted. For permanent monitoring plots, they'd also keep measuring the same place at three-month interviews to establish a consistent time series, and collect extra data both on tree health (e.g. height, trunk diameter, number of branches and leaves) and potential mortality risks (e.g. local salinity levels).

After the nursery, I was passed between several EarthLungs experts to learn more about the multitude of new Beyond Trees projects being prototyped here. First, Eric showed me some early agroforestry efforts on the slope up from the nursery in the intertidal zone to the village on dry mainland.

They’d planted some bamboo plus several tree species seedlings here last year, including neem, mulberry, white oak, and the amazingly useful “miracle tree” moringa, along with lemon grass and vetiver grass. A belt of trees amidst farmland at the edge of mangrove swamps would help reduce erosion and prevent the “siltation” problem afflicting sites like Mteza.

As I watched the garden plots under the young trees, chickens acted as little rototillers scratching at the soil for bugs.

In the village itself, several different Beyond Trees project buildings clustered under the immense spread of an ancient gray-barked banyan tree.

There, I met Philip Msagha Nyange, a live-wire young innovator who was Head of Livestock for the EarthLungs Beyond Trees programs.

He first showed me their poultry house, in which chickens and guinea fowls pecked at grain and scratched at the ground together. The plan was an escalating gradual introduction to commercial poultry rearing, switching from the familiar local Kienyeji chickens to higher-yield breeds after two to five years of training, qnd then letting those higher-yield breeds disperse through the community's coops. Guinea fowl were also present; native to West Africa, they’re still a novelty in eastern Kenya. The goal was for each Beyond Trees community members to be able to produce two eggs per day for themselves, and also augment their income by selling extra eggs, chicks, and chickens.

There was also a nascent goat program, another potential enhanced income stream for post-restoration communities. Philip first showed me an empty new model goat house, just finished.

The bottom part of the walls was made from corrugated iron, as sold practically everywhere around Kenya. The top part of the walls was made from makonge, dried sisal planks, spaced to provide airflow. The roof was made from makuti, a thatch of coconut palm leaves. Goat waste fell through slats in the planks of the elevated floor. There were partitioned-off areas for birthing and suckling does, for kids, and for quarantine - any goat that might hurt or be hurt by the other goats. They'd feed by browsing the local outdoor vegetation, and there were plans to sow fast-growing perennial Napier grass as more forage fodder.

The old goat house currently had the goats in it. Just fourteen individuals right now, many of whom had just come back inside from grazing. The goal was for Beyond Trees communities to rear goats to get a cup of milk every day per person and sell the surplus. The Beyond Trees program would teach pest and disease control, nutrition, breeding, housing, management of land, and in general all production factors for higher-productivity goat-keeping. Much of the land around Mombasa wasn’t arable for cereal crops, but its vegetation could sustain dairy goats.

They'd brought in one buck and one doe goat from the renowned Somali Galla breed, known for being extra-large and drought tolerant with high yields of milk and meat, to improve the gene pool of the local community's goats. Philip said he was excited to see the “F1” first-generation hybrid.

Philip then showed me a smaller prototype side project that he was particularly passionate about: growing black soldier fly larvae in organic waste. A maggot ranch in a bucket. The larvae could be dried and milled to make animal feed, and their frass (droppings) could be used as fertilizer. He'd won a national Youth in Agriculture award for this “waste to wealth” project at the local Egerton University, and had high hopes of developing it further.

Unlike houseflies, which can spread numerous nasty diseases, black soldier flies don't spread pathogens that harm humans. Philip told me that he had won a scholarship that would empower him to soon go to Netherlands to study genetic engineering. (He'd previously tried to advance his agricultural studies in Nebraska, but was denied a visa in 2025). Philip's dream was to extract the bacterial-resistance genes for non-pathogenicity from black soldier flies and splice them into the genome of the faster-multiplying housefly, producing reasonably non-human-health-threatening maggots that would grow very fast to convert organic waste into fertilizer and animal feed at scale.

I was then handed on to Ben, the Majaoni site lead for apiculture (beekeeping). This was one of the more well-established parts of the new Beyond Trees program, already spreading from Majaoni to more sites in the fast-growing EarthLungs network. On several of our previous site visits to Vanga, Kuchi, and Mteza, the staff van trip I took had been joined by EarthLungs apiculturist Solomon bringing out additional hive boxes or some other beekeeping paraphernalia.

We walked a little ways away from the village center to come upon the apiary building. It literally buzzed with activity, filled with hive boxes that EarthLungs had acquired by encouraging the settlement of wild bees from the mangroves just downhill.

To acquire a new colony, they'd set out the empty hive box among the Avicennia trees and bait it with beeswax and aromatically attractive lemongrass oil. Sooner or later it would likely get colonized, and after a month of settling in the new hive would be carefully transported to the common apiary building for easy management and honey harvesting.

Interestingly, the local bees they were catching were not the now-globally-common European honeybee, but indigenous hives from the very strain widely known as the “African killer bee,” renowned for their aggressiveness and painful stings. I hadn’t quite put two and two together that those were the bees living wild in the local mangroves I’d been trekking around for the last few days.

For much of the year, these bees were foraging nectar directly from the flowers of the very mangrove trees that EarthLungs had lately restored. This was the rainy season (though I’d been lucky with long sunny stretches for parts of almost every day so far) and nectar-bearing vegetation to feed the bees was abundant. EarthLungs had already begun planting sunflowers near the apiary, which would be ready to sustain the bee colonies once the dry season hit and the mangroves would be pausing their production of nectar.

The overall business plan was to eventually build up to adding value with other apiculture products like beeswax, beeswax soap, beeswax candles, royal jelly, and bee venom. Currently, it was just honey. Their many hives could produce 7 to 8 kilos of refined mangrove nectar-flavored honey twice per year, and they'd only harvested honey from the Majaoni apiary twice so far: even the more established Beyond Trees project was still in its early stages. Ben had just packaged the second-ever harvest of EarthLungs mangrove honey last week. As wild-foraging bees, every harvest of honey had a slightly different color and taste depending on what exactly had been in flower at the time. Mangrove honey is a premium product, produced only at a few rare locations around the globe and apparently considered among the best nectar flavor profile inputs in the honey-tasting world, which helped substantially with the economic side of EarthLungs' plans to deploy apiculture widely as a Beyond Trees post-restoration community income stream. If all goes well, many communities employed for years on restoring mangrove ecosystems will receive beehives and tech support from EarthLungs to build a long-term reliable income stream not linked to deforestation.

Next, I went back to the village center and joined Mwaura, the EarthLungs employee in charge of the nascent mushroom-growing fungiculture wing of Beyond Trees. The first step in his process was assembling the growing substrate, starting with bales of wheat straw trucked in from nearby farms then running that straw through a chaff cutter and mixing in some wheat bran and cotton seed cake. Next the substrate was soaked for eight hours in a drum of water sprinkled with calcium carbonate.

Then the substrate was packed into plastic bags, which were then sterilized (don't want your edible mushroom farm to become just a mold farm!) by soaking in another drum with hydrogen peroxide and methylated spirits for forty-six hours.

Now, the bag of sterile wet substrate is finally ready to be inoculated with “mushroom spawn” from bottles of cultivated mycelium ready to spread to a new substrate and grow into fruiting fungal bodies.

After inoculation, the bags then spent twenty-one days sealed in an extra-warm incubation room, windowless and dark for optimal spread conditions. I got just a glimpse and a picture before the door was shut again.

Finally, they were moved to the shelves of the growing room, where a few slashes were cut in their plastic membrane to expose the contents to oxygen and encourage mushrooms to bloom out. The growing room was set up to maintain conditions of 98% humidity within a temperature range of 18 to 25 degrees Celsius.

This was all an absolutely brand-new months-old expansion for EarthLungs. In this whole process, they hadn’t actually gotten to the growing room stage yet! The growing room I saw was full of empty shelves. All the most advanced fungi they had were currently in the incubation room.

But they had already considered what would be necessary to roll out this fungiculture process at dozens, hundreds, or thousands of future successfully-completed mangrove restoration sites.

Notably, the just-built fungiculture growing building wasn't made out of concrete or even corrugated iron: it was old-school local vernacular architecture, with walls made from local mud sculpted into a framework of sisal planks. The roof was coconut palm thatch, an excellent heat shield and insulator for maintaining steady temperatures. Rows and rows of shelves made with local timber within were all currently empty, set to receive the first crop from the incubation room shortly.

I was impressed by the clear evidence that they'd really put a lot of thought into scalability and appropriateness for the context they were working in. EarthLungs is expanding fast from Kenya into Tanzania and now considerably poorer nation of Mozambique as well, and using readily available super-cheap materials like these would be critical in enabling possible grassroots exponential growth for this fungiculture model.

Even the choice of mushroom species to cultivate was an example of climate adaptation: they’d be growing white and grey oyster mushrooms because they could withstand the scorching heat of the Kenyan coast in the dry season much better than, say, button mushrooms.