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

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

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

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

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

Silver Bulletin

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

Maine

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

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

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

Maine 2025 Cook PVI: D+4.

Candidate Status: Primary Ongoing.

Volunteer at: janetmills.com/take-action/

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

North Carolina

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

North Carolina 2025 Cook PVI: R+1.

Candidate Status: Nominee.

Volunteer at: roycooper.com/volunteer/

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

Ohio

Sherrod Brown has already been a U.S. Senator for Ohio, serving with distinction for three terms from winning in 2006 until losing in 2024. He’s back in the fight for 2026, a stalwart champion of liberalism running to unseat White House lickspittle Republican Senator Jon Husted. The once and future Senator Brown’s major previous Capitol Hill accomplishments include passing a bill that ensures retiring police, firefighters, and teachers can collect full Social Security benefits, consistent decades-long opposition to Middle Eastern wars, helping pass the PACT Act to ensure healthcare support for U.S. veterans exposed to toxic waste burn pits, and strongly pushing for domestic U.S. EV manufacturing.

Ohio 2025 Cook PVI: R+5.

Candidate Status: Primary Ongoing (Presumptive Nominee).

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

Alaska

In Alaska, ex-Congresswoman Mary Peltola is running for U.S. Senate to replace generic Republican autocracy-enabler Dan Sullivan. She’s an iconically Alaskan character, a native Yup’ik woman who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River and uses the unique campaign slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” Her husband, an Alaskan bush pilot, tragically died in a small plane crash in 2023. In the U.S. House from a 2022 special election through the 2024 elections, she endeavored to advance bills banning bottom trawling and funding efforts to reduce bycatch, both core to her focal issue of ensuring abundant catch for small-scale Alaskan fishers. Encouragingly, she’s already ahead in some Senate polls for 2026! Her personal strengths as a candidate could win a vital Senate seat in a deeply Republican state.

Alaska 2025 Cook PVI: R+5.

Candidate Status: Primary Ongoing (Presumptive Nominee).

Volunteer at: act.marypeltola.com/signup/mary-alaska-volunteer/

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

Texas

James Talarico, a former middle school teacher, Presbyterian seminarian, and productive education-focused state legislator, won the March 3 primary to become the Democrats’ nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas in 2026. Talarico has repeatedly gone viral for his passionately devout speeches indicting Republican neo-fascism as un-Christian (a major podcaster who voted Republican in 2024 urged him to run for President!), and this charismatic young candidate may well be able to pull off an epochal upset victory in America’s most populous Republican-voting state, especially as two really terrible Republican candidates are still attacking each other in their primary. Talarico’s “religious left” rhetoric could be of lasting positive impact as well.

Texas 2025 Cook PVI: R+6.

Candidate Status: Nominee.

Volunteer at: jamestalarico.com/volunteer

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

Iowa

Josh Turek twice led the U.S. wheelchair basketball team to win gold medals at the Summer Paralympics. He was born with spina bifida after his father was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and survived 21 surgeries by the age of 12. After the Tokyo Paralympics, Mr. Turek ran for the state legislature in his Iowa hometown (sometimes crawling up stairs for door-to-door campaigning), running as a Democrat and winning a district that simultaneously voted Republican at the presidential level. Mr. Turek is now running for an open seat in the U.S. Senate, to replace a Republican Senator who opted not to run for re-election after responding to a constituent’s concern over her vote for massive healthcare funding cuts with the instantly viral quote “Well, we all are going to die. For heaven's sakes, folks.” (There’s also another Democratic candidate in this primary, Zach Wahls, but Turek is widely considered the more-electable option).

Iowa may well become the decisive state for the Senate in 2026, and the fact that its farmers are reeling from two major White House-inflicted wounds (swingeing tariffs and Hormuz-related fertilizer price spikes) could make it a key win for the good guys!

Iowa 2025 Cook PVI: R+6.

Candidate Status: Primary Ongoing.

Volunteer at: turek4iowa.com/volunteer

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

And Beyond!

If the popularity of the current nightmarish White House sinks still further (very possible, as there are many reasons to believe that the current self-inflicted fossil fuel crisis could get much worse) even rock-ribbed red states might potentially move away from the Republican regime.

Paul Krugman

The Oil Crisis is About to Get Physical

Source: JP Morgan via Marketwatch…

Read more

a month ago · 3027 likes · 611 comments · Paul Krugman

A Senate seat in Kansas could conceivably flip if strong Democratic candidate Sharice Davids (an incumbent Congresswoman and former pro MMA fighter) decides to run, as is looking increasingly likely. Nebraska and Montana both have anti-Republican independent candidates emerging as competitors to incumbent Republican Senators, and Dan Osborn in NE and/or Seth Bodnar in MT might get some traction as prices rise and make a real race of it.

Even Mississippi and South Carolina, historically ultraconservative states, have some quite strong Democratic Senate candidates this year (district attorney Scott Colom in MS and pediatrician Annie Andrews in SC) and if prices continue to skyrocket they might just possibly deliver earthshaking upsets in November.

This has been a rough few years to be an American, but if U.S. history shows anything it’s that this country has a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself. Let’s fight on for a historic blue wave in 2026 to kick off a new Reconstruction and American renaissance!

As is now common knowledge, the United States of America and Israel launched a full-scale war against Iran on February 28, 2026.

The Iranian regime is cruel and monstrous. Recent reports strongly suggest that the ayatollah-led government massacred at least 3,000 and perhaps over 36,000 of its own people in January 2026 alone. The brutal mullahs in power deserve no sympathy.

But it is the Iranian people who will suffer for this new war, even more than they already have. Furthermore, Iranian regime counterstrikes are already killing American soldiers and Middle Eastern civilians.

Iran War Dispatches with Tim Mak

NEWSFLASH: US service members killed; civilians dead in Jerusalem; new Iran leadership named

U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, announced that three U.S. service members have been killed in action, and another five “seriously wounded…

Read more

2 months ago · 34 likes · Tim Mak

Fundamentally, 21st-century history has clearly shown that U.S. interventions to overthrow Middle Eastern dictatorships, however nightmarish, often cause even more violence and destruction. The United States overthrew the then-rulers of Afghanistan and Iraq within weeks in 2001 and 2003 respectively, when this writer was a toddler.

The U.S. subsequently had troops on the ground in Afghanistan in a Twenty Years’ War from 2001 through 2021, after which the Taliban controlled substantially more of Afghanistan than they did when the U.S. first invaded to dislodge them! In my opinion, President Biden did well to cut our losses in that unwinnable quagmire.

Iraq was successful by comparison, but that’s an extremely low bar. Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003 and U.S. troops left in 2011 after years of grinding counterinsurgency warfare, but the heinous Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL) theocratic terrorist group took over much of Iraq and Syria in the ensuing chaos, committing mass atrocities and forcing another international intervention to destroy the would-be “caliphate.” Tens of thousands of civilians were killed and millions were displaced.

The more limited air war in Libya in 2011 did help depose Gaddafi, but only kicked off a new Libyan Civil War that is today a more-or-less “frozen” conflict with the country divided between rival warlords.

It would be excellent if Iran, with its long-oppressed millions and its rich and ancient Persian culture, could return to the family of world nations as a peaceful democracy, or at least a more stable and less oppressive dictatorship a la Egypt or the new Syria. But blowing stuff up and killing evil dictators is not the hard part. The hard part is not making things even worse by doing that, radicalizing the people of the country getting bombed to follow some even crazier bunch of would-be rulers and destabilizing the region even more. And, frankly, I wouldn’t trust the current bunch of incompetents in power in the United States to strategically overturn an anthill, let alone the entrenched ruling elite of a country of over 90 million people. The surviving post-Khamenei Iran regime, or some roughly similar IRGC-dominated dictatorship, may well become even further entrenched and/or aggressive after this conflict — what, after all, do they now have to lose? If they are overthrown, the aftermath may see a civil war of competing strongmen, a spiraling humanitarian crisis, and/or secessionist violence breaking out in ethnic-minority areas like Khuzestan, Balochistan, majority-Azeri northwest Iran, or the Iranian part of Kurdistan.

Attempting regime change in the Middle East — again — is highly risky and irresponsible, and doing so without even a fig leaf of Congressional approval is yet another illegal power grab from this autocratic and despicable White House. We may never know the full inner workings of what passes for decision-making in the current U.S. ruling clique, but it may well be the case that the Iran War was started in part to distract from an ever-lengthening list of hideous crimes committed by this disgusting President and his associates. O tempora, o mores!

Also very much worth noting is that this new Iran War is launching within days of the United States launching unprecedented coercive state action against a U.S. company, “Claude” AI-maker Anthropic, for its refusal to allow its LLM model to be used for either mass surveillance of U.S. citizens or no-human-in-the-loop killbots. Seriously: those were Anthropic’s two red lines, and this administration said “No, we absolutely get to do that if we feel like it” and legally blacklisted the company.

@jasmine’s substack

🌻 AI vs. the pentagon

Who would win in a fight: an alcoholic Fox host with a fetish for extrajudicial airstrikes, or a neurotic Italian-American physicist running an AI company worth $380 billion dollars…

Read more

2 months ago · 222 likes · 26 comments · Jasmine Sun

When considering potential outcomes of this conflict, a critical factor to note is that Iran is currently experiencing an extremely severe water shortage as climate change is compounded by severe mismanagement and corruption. To circle back to this newsletter’s core areas of competence, it’s relevant here that ayatollah-ruled Iran, so far, has been a strong contender for the ignoble title of “country in the world that is the absolute worst at managing the effects of climate change.” Corruption and embezzling are omnipresent, leading to a complete failure of water management and conditions of increasing desperation even before the recent war. As early as 2016, Qatari-funded media source Al Jazeera reported that Iran spends 90% of its water on inefficient, low-yield local agriculture due to autarkic “self-sufficiency” policy goals arising from the a militaristic foreign policy and ensuing sanctions.

As many other Middle Eastern countries are investing heavily in desalination plants and water recycling; Iran is overexploiting and destroying their existing centuries-old qanat groundwater channel network. The city of Tehran may run out of drinking water. Iran’s Lake Urmia, once the largest lake in the Middle East with an expanse of water larger than the land area of Delaware, almost completely dried up by 2023. The brilliant journalists at The Counteroffensive recently reported that Iran’s food prices have tripled in the last three years and that as much as 40% of Iran’s remaining drinkable water may be being wasted by leaky pipes.

In a way, there’s something almost perversely comforting about the “dog that doesn’t bark” contrast of this. Iran is not experiencing some magic Super Climate Change with the temperatures of 2100 arriving earlier within its national borders, it’s warming like everywhere else. The fact that it’s this bad in Iran and not this bad in most of the rest of the world, including many other severely drought-stricken places from Algeria to Australia, underscores just how successful climate adaptation and water management has been in most other countries. As this newsletter chronicles, a lot of progress happens quietly and in the background.

On the global stage, this war will likely even further accelerate the global transition to renewable energy. The possible beginning of the long-feared Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and a rapid rise in oil prices in the early days of the war have further underscored the inherent unreliability of fossil fuels as a primary energy source. Clean energy is a fundamentally sovereign and resilient technology. It’s hard for an enemy to destroy a solar or wind farm and even harder to cause a price spike in sunlight. Bill McKibben has an excellent recent article on this. Any rational nation in the world is just getting more and more reasons to double down on solar, wind, and batteries. Economical, technological, ecological, and geopolitical: all roads lead to electrotech.

The Crucial Years

Surviving on Trump's Dangerous Planet

Read more

2 months ago · 223 likes · 51 comments · Bill McKibben

On the home front in America: military adventurism is a longstanding characteristic of foolish regimes. While this White House surely hopes for a “short victorious war” to rally the nation behind their misrule, rising gas prices and/or extended foreign military deployment with a mounting casualty list may be more likely outcomes. After the 2024 election, I really have no idea how the American people will react to any given event in such a house-of-shattered-mirrors media environment, but I hope it adds up to even more resistance to this “mad king” president. It is absolutely crucial for the future of the United States to oust as many boot-licking Republican Senators and Representatives in the 2026 midterms as possible. I remain hopeful we can win a Democratic majority in both the House and the vital judge-confirming Senate!

The nations of Europe wisely did not participate in the recent strikes on Iran. The Iran War is not their problem. A war which, if you recall, comes just weeks after U.S. leadership threatened to conquer the territory of an EU member nation and insulted the memory of European troops that had fought and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan. The U.S. does not get to fulminate against international alliances, bully its longstanding partners, and explicitly make a project of tearing down what existing fragile consensus had built up around ideals of international law, then expect those allies to support its military adventures as they have in the past.

China will likely see the new Iran War as even more vindication of its accelerating “electrostate” clean energy-focused national development strategy. In 2025, China was reportedly the major consumer of Iranian oil, with Chinese “teapot” refineries buying 80% of what Iran shipped out despite U.S. sanctions. That oil from Iran reportedly made up 13.4% of China’s 2025 oil imports. Electric vehicles, which made up over 50% of new car sales in China in 2025, just keep looking better and better.

Overall, I personally am not considerably more worried about the future of humanity and its biosphere than I was a week ago. The possibility of a full-scale U.S./Iran war has been a “known unknown” for decades. It’s a tragedy, but not an apocalypse. I am certain that renewable energy will continue to progress, faster if anything due to this conflict, bringing cleaner air, less carbon emissions, and more human resilience. I hope that this war will result in a brighter, freer future for the people of Iran and/or even more of a backlash to this wildly irresponsible White House in the U.S. midterms, ideally both. I hope that as few people suffer and die as possible.

Down with all tyrants.

Subscribe now

Share

Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines in 2016, and was in office from June 2016 through June 2022. He was an evil, bad, nasty, monstrous, no-good wannabe-autocrat of a ruler, attacking the Philippines’ democracy and rule of law in a vast multitude of ways. Among the most notable was his openly illegal ordering of extrajudicial killings of anyone “suspected” to be connected to the drug trade. Thousands to tens of thousands of Filipinos were illegally murdered by state agents due to his presidency. Most of them were impoverished urban-dwelling people, and some were children.

Rodrigo Duterte left office in mid-2022, and remained involved in politics. His elected successor was President “Bongbong” Marcos, son of a former dictator. To many observers’ surprise, the new administration ended up holding Duterte accountable.

On March 11, 2025, Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the Philippines National Police and Interpol, in an operation involving over 300 police officers. He was flown to The Hague and charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Rodrigo Duterte is currently a prisoner at the International Criminal Court detention center in Scheveningen, The Hague, The Netherlands. He will likely soon stand trial.

Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil in 2018, and was in office from January 1, 2019 through January 1, 2023. He was an evil, bad, nasty, monstrous, no-good wannabe-autocrat of a ruler, attacking Brazil’ democracy and rule of law in a vast multitude of ways. Among the most notable was his active support and encouragement of 20,000 illegal miners’ genocidal invasion of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory. The miners brought environmental destruction, sexual abuse, and disease epidemics which ravaged the Yanomami people. Between 2019 and 2023, 570 Yanomami children died of malnutrition, hunger, and mercury poisoning.

Jair Bolsonaro lost re-election to Lula da Silva (a successful former president returning for a third non-consecutive term) in October 2022. He attempted a coup in January 2023, which failed. Almost immediately upon entering office, President Lula da Silva sent in the Brazilian military to defend the Yanomami people from the criminal miners egged on by the previous president, setting up a field hospital and distributing emergency food aid. (Check out the full Guardian article). As of 2025, the Yanomami are building a youth-led drone monitoring network to protect their lands.

The new administration also ended up holding Bolsonaro accountable. In June 2023 and again in October 2023, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court convicted him of abuse of power and barred him from running in the next election. In February and March 2025, Bolsonaro was charged with a wide range of other crimes. His trial began in May 2025, at which point the U.S. president imposed heavy tariffs to bully Brazil into letting him off. It didn’t work.

In September 2025, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison, finding him guilty of plotting a military coup. Jair Bolsonaro is currently a prisoner at the federal police headquarters in Brasilia, Brazil. His sentence will be complete in 2052, when he will be in his late 90s.

Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America in November 2016, lost re-election in November 2020, attempted a coup in January 2021, was indicted four times on 86 criminal charges in 2023, and was nonetheless re-elected for a non-consecutive second term in November 2024. He is an evil, bad, nasty, monstrous, no-good wannabe-autocrat of a ruler, attacking America’s democracy and rule of law in a vast multitude of ways. Among the most notable has been his deployment of a militarized and brutal “ICE” rogue agency which has illegally sent masked men to snatch legal American residents off the street on multiple occasions and “declared war” on multiple American cities.

An estimated 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025. 68,440 people were imprisoned in ICE detention as of mid-December 2025, 75% of whom had no previous criminal convictions. More than 280 people were illegally and secretly transferred to notoriously brutal prisons in El Salvador without due process. And on January 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, leaving her wife and six-year-old child bereft. Trump’s administration doubled down on defending this blatant state-sponsored murder of a U.S. citizen.

This newsletter’s primary mission is to focus on underreported good news in the world. Of which there is a heck of a lot! Worldwide, vaccination and literacy and food production and clean drinking water access keep going up, while extreme poverty and child mortality rates keep going down. Humanity is overall immensely safer, richer, and healthier now than 100 years ago. Technological revolutions in solar, batteries, and biotech are making me more optimistic about solving climate change by the day.

But evil shit can still happen. Presidents can get elected who are psychotic monsters willing and eager to kill innocent people, and they can retain substantial support among the populace even after boasting of all the horrible crimes they’ve committed.

I personally don’t think that most of the people voting for these evil men are evil themselves. In the early 21st century, social media and smartphones have shattered our information environment1 to such an extent that alternate realities where these monsters are seen as heroes can easily be crafted, disseminated, and widely believed. The far-right movements backing these monsters still have many followers.

Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, is currently running for president in Brazil’s October 2026 elections with his father’s endorsement, but is, as of right now, viewed as unlikely to win.

Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, is the current Vice President of the Philippines. In that role, she has, among other transgressions, threatened to assassinate the current President of the Philippines. The Philippines House of Representatives impeached her, but the Supreme Court overruled it. She may run for president in the Philippines’ 2028 elections.

Donald Trump’s approval rating was reportedly around 42% in January 2026.

It may feel like a dark and hopeless time, as a criminal American president commits heinous crimes with apparent impunity. Especially for those living in Minneapolis in 2026 and seeing their neighbor get killed due to President Trump. But I bet it felt pretty damn dark and hopeless to be living in Manila and seeing your neighbors get killed due to President Duterte in 2017, or to be living in the Yanomami territory and seeing your neighbors get killed due to President Bolsonaro in 2022.

Those people eventually got some justice. Duterte and Bolsonaro are now in jail for their crimes, after due process of law. They’re unlikely to be released anytime soon.

Just remember: justice is possible. Justice is possible! Not inevitable, not guaranteed. Not everywhere, not always, not all at once. But it can happen, if people work for it.

I sincerely hope that one day the United States of America, my home country, will achieve Brazilian or Filipino levels of democracy, rule of law, and accountability. The monsters in ICE and the White House profoundly deserve to be jailed for what they have done and are doing. They might be jailed yet. Justice is possible.

For a start, Australia’s nationwide solar and battery boom is now producing some of the world’s cheapest electricity. Australian national grid operator AEMO reports that wholesale electricity prices (the cost of generating power in Australia) have fallen 27% year-on-year in Q3 2025 thanks to record-highs in solar and battery storage.

Here’s my interview with Rewiring Australia co-founder Dr. Saul Griffith.

And this bounty is being shared. The government of Australia recently announced a pioneering new Solar Sharer program to provide Aussie households with three hours of free electricity per day thanks to the influx of clean electrons. It starts in three big states in July 2026 (including homeowners, renters, and everyone!) and could roll out beyond that in 2027. This program is actually an even better deal than it looks, as the fast-increasing fraction of Aussie families with home batteries and EVs will be able to fill up on clean electrons for free during those three hours and then use that power for the rest of the day! Those without batteries will still benefit immensely, both directly from the hours of free power and indirectly from the battery-users’ shifting of demand into those hours lowering electricity bills for the rest of the day. This may be looked back on as a historic first, heralding the age when the Electrotech Revolution begins delivering vast and undeniable nationwide household-level paradigm shifts for those nations smart enough to build out Earth’s amazing new solar and battery systems.

In October 2025, for the first time ever, clean energy produced more than half of all monthly electricity generation (not capacity!) on the national grid of Australia! Clean energy generation has actually outgrown demand, so there’s now a lot of extra clean electrons being “spilled” (which is why awesome ideas like the “Solar Sharer” three hours of free power are feasible). More batteries and power lines, already in the works, will quickly accelerate Australia’s impressive surge in clean electricity abundance! The leading grid operator of Australia reports that the country’s first day without burning coal for power may come fairly soon, as solar keeps surging and aging coal plants decline. Furthermore, Australia will likely be able to reach a full 100% renewable grid nationwide by the late 2030s based on economics alone, with 90% of coal capacity set to be gone by 2035.

It helps a lot here that Australia is a giant country spanning tropical, subtropical, and temperate zones while being home to a relatively small and highly urbanized population. Australia had 27.2 million people as of mid-2024, with over 72% living in major cities. That’s similar to the population of Texas and less than the population of each of the world’s three largest urban areas (Jakarta, Dhaka, and Tokyo), living mostly in a few cities on the coasts of a vast continent roughly similar in area to the “Lower 48” contiguous United States. Australia is the 6th largest country on Earth by area but only roughly the 55th largest by population, making it one of the least densely populated countries in the world along with Mongolia and Namibia. That’s absolutely spectacular geography for solar power: lots and lots of unpopulated dryland and semi-desert space that gets a lot of sun.

Solar farms work great almost anywhere now (even Norway or Antarctica!), but they do tend to run into a lot more political opposition when they’re viewed as competing for scarce land area (even though they really don’t, as the area under solar panels can be productive farmland with agrivoltaics or great wildlife habitat with ecovoltaics). NIMBY “Not In My Back Yard” parochalism is a major factor slowing renewables build-outs, especially in high-population-density areas like Britain or Japan. You couldn't ask for a better place than Australia to electrify a 100% renewable grid.

Furthermore, among all the “Western democracies” of the world, Australia may be the one that is most cleverly handling the civilization-reshaping rise of China. As a major mining and agriculture exporter located relatively nearby, Australia has long supplied lots of raw materials to power China’s rapid development — a steady demand source and growth driver which made Australia one of vanishingly few countries to completely avoid a recession during the Global Financial Crisis of 2009.

This is now a big virtuous cycle for clean energy with planetary-scale impacts. A lot of Australian minerals go into Chinese electrotech, much of which in turn comes back to Australia to provide cleaner and cheaper power. And lately, to mine more as well!

Importantly, Australia has also managed to successfully maintain its own fiercely independent foreign policy. After China expressed displeasure with certain Australian policies via trade sanctions and diplomats’ social media flame wars in 2020, Australia signed the AUKUS nuclear submarine defense pact with the UK and US in 2021 — a move clearly designed to upgrade Australian defense capabilities in the worst-case scenario of a war against China. Bilateral relations have actually improved since then, with the Australia/China trade war generally viewed as ending in 2024.

Australia’s trade with China has kept growing by leaps and bounds, reaching 32% of Australia’s total exports by 2023 and still growing fast year-on-year from 2024 to 2024. Australian minerals are going into a lot of the batteries transforming the world’s energy systems. The International Energy Agency reported in 2025 that Australia currently has 35% of global lithium production and over 20% of global lithium reserves, as well as substantial chunks of the world’s mineable copper, cobalt, bauxite, zinc, and manganese. The Australian government is now building up stockpiles of key minerals to ensure that it maintains strategic autonomy.

As of 2025, Australia appears to be handling a delicate geopolitical dance rather well, maintaining extensive and mutually beneficial trade with China’s gigantic economy, exporting Australian food, iron ore, and critical minerals and importing Chinese solar panels and EVs, while simultaneously working to counter Chinese influence over Pacific Island nations that could threaten Australian security and building up strategic defensive capacities to prepare for and deter a worst-case conflict scenario.

Basically, Australia has built itself a position where it gets to sell China lots of stuff and buy lots of Chinese electrotech right now and for the foreseeable future, boosting its economy immensely and considerably accelerating global decarbonization, while simultaneously building up its military defenses and engaging in geopolitical maneuvers to counter and preempt Chinese influence in its near abroad. Also, like Brazil but unlike heavily U.S.-integrated Mexico or Canada, Australia’s extensive trade with China has given it a very strong hand to play when faced with a U.S. President using senseless tariff threats to exploit allies. So far, it’s been the best of both worlds.

Australia is also stepping up its efforts to prevent the Pacific from entering a de-facto period of Chinese hegemony. As by far the largest nation in the Pacific Islands Forum, Australia has a long historic tradition of providing security and aid to small Pacific island states, and they’re now offering upgraded partnerships that could help save entire peoples from the dangers of climate change. On November 9, 2023, Australia signed an unprecedented new “climate refuge pact” bilaterial treaty with the tiny Pacific archipelago nation of Tuvalu, establishing the “Falepili Union.” (“Falepili” means “neighbor” in Tuvaluan).

NASA expects most of Tuvalu’s land area to be below average high tide by 2050, and the Falepili Union provides a long-sought lifeline to ensure the survival of the Tuvaluan people and culture. Under the terms of the wide-ranging treaty, Australia will allow 280 new Tuvaluans every year to move to Australia, with full privileges to live, work, and study. There are only about 11,200 citizens of Tuvalu, so this allows the entire population to move to Australia by the mid-2060s. But the treaty also explicitly states that Tuvalu is not abandoning its traditional territory. Australia will expand its participation in (and provide additional funding for) a land reclamation project with the goal of increasing Funafuti’s land area by 6%, and pledges in the treaty to assist Tuvalu in the event of a natural disaster, public health emergency, or military threat.

Australia has essentially adopted Tuvalu, pledging to defend its territory and provide a home for its people. The Falepili Union is nothing less than the world’s first ordered legal/geopolitical system specifically for handling mass climate migration. It’s already fully operational: the world’s first officially welcomed climate refugees are set to arrive in Australia in 2026 as part of the first batch of 280 visa recipients. A similar climate-and-security Nakamal Agreement is now being negotiated between Australia and Vanuatu, although it’s reportedly stalled as the politics are more difficult. A similar treaty with Fiji may be in the works as well. It seems probable that Australia would be interested in expanding this model to cover more nations.

If Australian politics stays on a sensible course, we may be lucky enough that going forward, at long last, there will a ready-to-go long-term survival plan on the table for South Pacific island states likely to lose much of their habitable territory to rising seas. They can simply sign a deal like Tuvalu’s. That will allow much of their population to get visas to move to Australia (creating a higher remittance flow for those who remain) and ensure Australian support to retain sovereignty over their large ocean territories, with the unspoken benefit for Australia of ensuring that strategically placed neighbors remain closely tied to Australia instead of China.

And in October 2025, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia signed the “Pukpuk” mutual defense treaty with PM James Marape of Papua New Guinea. This treaty is a big freaking deal: it’s the first military alliance Australia has made since 1951 and the first military alliance Papua New Guinea has ever made with anybody.

The well-being of Papua New Guinea matters a lot to Australia’s long-term security, as PNG is a desperately poor country, located just across the Torres Strait, with a very weak central government and a very fast-growing population (from 3 million in 1980 to officially 10 million in 2024, and possibly around 12 million now). Collaboration, training, aid, and skills transfer on economic development and national security is eminently logical for Australia, as future major political, economic, or climate-disaster disruptions in Papua New Guinea could cause chaos on their doorstep.

The Pukpuk Treaty reportedly creates a path for 10,000 Papua New Guineans to serve in the Australian military, which is just such a smart idea. Not only does that provide more recruitment power and troops for Australia, it will train up 10,000 Papua New Guineans who will have learned how a highly developed country’s institutions work and can serve as metaphorical living bridges across the Torres Strait, using their Australian experiences to build state capacity in PNG during their future careers.

Also, the Pukpuk Treaty is very clearly an extremely strong move to strengthen Australia’s position vis-a-vis China, especially since the PNG neighbor Solomon Islands has been swiftly moving closer to China. The last time Australia was seriously threatened with invasion was by Imperial Japan in 1942. In that year, Papua New Guinea was where the “boys who saved Australia” fought the battles of the Kokoda Track campaign, “Australia’s Thermopylae,” which successfully prevented Japan from taking Port Moresby as a forward base on the Torres Strait.

This is all part of a broad diplomatic “charm offensive” deepening Australia’s ties with its neighbors. In November 2025, an imminent security pact update between Australia and Indonesia was announced, set to be signed in 2026. Though not a formal alliance like the Pukpuk milestone, it’s nonetheless a substantial achievement that will increase cooperation and coordination with a neighboring nation that’s a fast-rising giant with over 280 million people.

Besides the big-picture economic, geostrategic, and energy stuff, there are also a lot of other separate stories that make me feel positively about Australian governance, seemingly sharing the theme of a general ability to thoughtfully consider the future that has become discouragingly rare in many nations’ political discourse.

Australia is one of many countries around the world quickly scaling up desalination and water recycling technology to ensure consistent clean water supplies in a hotter and more chaotic climate. In addition to hundreds of small-scale operations, there are already major desalination projects providing much of the water supply to the cities of Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and the Gold Coast region of Queensland. More and more are under construction.

On December 10, 2025, a new world-first law will come into effect that makes it illegal for Australian children under age 16 to have social media accounts. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, is already working to block suspected teen accounts in Australia to comply with the new law. TikTok and others must soon follow.

Is that a 100% good idea? Will it fall victim to the backfire effects of “prohibition” policies historically? I don’t know. But I do think it’s really good that a country is democratically choosing to try it, because then the world can see what the differential effects are. As we as humanity are by and large choosing to allow kids to access unprecedented algorithm-driven social networking technologies, about to be even more immersive with fast-advancing generative AI, I’m personally glad that there’s at least one nation-level control group. France has already held discussions in the national legislature about potentially following Australia’s lead on this.

As of 2025, 31% of Australia’s 27.2 million people were born overseas, one of the highest foreign-born resident shares in the world. Yet the scourge of extremist anti-immigrant politics remains relatively marginal in the Australian political landscape.

In the 2025 elections, extreme far-right xenophobic parties like One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots (explicitly modeled after the current U.S. ruling clique) got only single-digit percentages of the vote and no House seats.

The center-right Coalition was widely attacked as catering to these extremist voters and moving towards bringing U.S.-style anti-immigrant politics to Australia, and the incumbent center-left pro-immigration Australian Labor Party ended up winning a massive expanded majority of 94 seats in a 150-seat legislative body.

Coalition leader Peter Dutton, derided as “Temu Trump,” became the first sitting opposition leader in over 100 years to lose his own seat. The Labor candidate who replaced him is a para-athlete woman who lost her leg saving her son’s life.

Many observers assign the broad social support of immigration in Australia to the excellent performance of the nation’s “points-based” immigration system, which creates a fast integration pipeline for high-skilled workers.

And of course, one could write a whole additional article on the pioneering achievements of Australian wildlife conservationists, a mainstay of my newsletter coverage. After decades of devastating declines across its unique biota, modern Australia is now at the forefront of many proactive conservation and rewilding measures, including actively helping species survive climate disasters, creating a new Great Koala National Park, experimental bubble curtains to protect cuttlefish from algal blooms, “training” marsupials to withstand invasive predators, protecting large animal congregations like penguin colonies in highly urban areas, protecting a humpback whale population so well that it has recovered to higher than pre-whaling levels, developing new coral restoration techniques to try to save the embattled Great Barrier Reef, reintroducing long-absent species like Tasmanian devils to the mainland, and many many many many many more. I had actually planned to include a “scrapbook” collection of my earlier reporting on Australia’s multitude of recent wildlife conservation successes in this very article, until I realized that it would more than double the length. There’s some truly incredible work being done to protect Australia’s biodiversity for the future, and the people doing it aren’t afraid to break the old rules of non-intervention to find new ways that wild creatures can survive.

And Australia just keeps on working to better itself. It won’t be a surprise by now that this writer is a huge fan of the liberal clean development book Abundance (here’s my in-depth review) and quite a lot of the Australian Labor Party reportedly is as well. Just days ago, while I was assembling this very article, news broke of a new deal between Labor and the minority Greens party that is now working to pass a sweeping reform of Australia’s national environmental laws that should make it easier to accelerate clean energy build-outs while improving protections for biodiversity and the climate! On the preservationist side, it creates a new independent national environmental regulator (like the U.S. EPA back in its prime), adds more protections to limit logging in native forests, and limits fast-tracking of coal and gas projects while mandating federal approval for those using lots of water. On the accelerationist side, it includes a range of valuable permitting reforms to make it easier to build housing, clean energy, and critical mineral mining projects. Now set to become law this very week! It’s as if “Albo” is writing policy specifically to please this newsletter.

I congratulate Prime Minister Albanese on his triumphant reelection and his recent history-making wedding in office, and I thank him and his team for his exceptional leadership and Australian voters for their good judgment. I would guess that many Australians don’t feel particularly enamored with their current government, because practically nobody ever feels enamored with their current government, but they don’t know how lucky they are. Being an American citizen writing about Australian politics under the Albanese premiership gives me an extraordinarily wistful, even envious, feeling, reminding me of the “competence porn” fiction genre where the point is to watch competent people doing competent work. I would personally be wildly grateful if the United States eventually gets national political leadership as sensible, competent, and forward-looking as Australia’s someday in the upcoming years.

Of course, I’m not claiming that Australia is a utopia, nor am I trying to find a new career as some sort of Australian propagandist. I’ve never even been to Australia, though I’d absolutely love to go someday! I’ve just read and written a lot about its environmental and energy policies over the years and been increasingly impressed. There are many things Australia does that I disagree with. I oppose elements of their undocumented migrant detention policies that seem to me to be unnecessarily cruel (though nowhere near as lawless and barbarous as America’s right now). I dislike the effects of the still-powerful Australian coal mining industry (another classic export to China, though that may change soon). Indigenous Aboriginal Australians were horrifically persecuted for centuries and remain extremely disadvantaged and marginalized despite modern “Closing the Gap” efforts.

But really, Australia looks to me to be doing pretty damn well at facing the challenges of the 21st century. Immigration, electrification, permitting tangles, climate disasters, the rise of China, good relations with neighbors, social media, economic growth, grid resilience…name a major long-term issue making headlines worldwide, and you’ll probably find an Australian policy that’s really trying to think out good ways to handle it. I’m impressed, and I hope more countries follow their example. Bloody oath, mates.

Subscribe now

Share

Mazu is an East Asian sea goddess and protector of sailors worshipped in several of the fluid, syncretic, and overlapping pantheons of traditional Chinese religion. She’s sometimes associated with Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, or all of the above.

Accounts differ, but Mazu is often referred to as the deified form of Lin Moniang, a shaman lady who lived in what is now the seaside Fujian province of China in the late 900s CE and was said to have died young while rescuing a ship at sea. This origin story would make Mazu a classic case of a “human worshipped as a god after their death” cult, a common motif in Earth’s history ranging from ancient curiosities like pharaonic Egypt’s priest-architect Imhotep and Emperor Hadrian’s lover Antinous to (arguably) modern-day titans like Jesus or Buddha.

The cult of Mazu really took off in the year 1123 CE, when she was credited with saving the ship bearing Song Dynasty China’s embassy to the Korean kingdom of Goryeo from rough seas. Emperor Huizong of the Song Dynasty renamed a temple in her honor, and the faith just kept spreading from there. In 1680, under the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi granted Mazu the title “Empress of Heaven,” elevating the sea-shaman woman into a central national deity. Hundreds of years later, Mazu remains a huge deal in many modern coastal communities in Asia and beyond. Wikipedia lists currently active modern-day temples to Mazu in twelve countries around the Indo-Pacific Rim from Australia to China to Malaysia to Japan to Vietnam to Canada. You can pray to an icon of Mazu in Shanghai, Singapore, or San Francisco.

There are rituals, festivals, temples, museums, statues, TV dramas, tourist events — the works. Some police stations in her old homeland, the Fujian Province of China, keep images of Mazu posted in the belief that people are less likely to lie in front of her. Certain statues of Mazu get sent around between temples by plane, and ending up in the next seat is considered lucky. The Chinese Communist Party has strongly supported and encouraged Mazu worship since at least 2010, in large part because Mazu is a major point of cultural commonality shared by southern mainland China and Taiwan and a cultural “backchannel” by which the CCP can try to influence Taiwanese politics.

The Matsu Islands (as in “Kinmen and Matsu”!), named after the goddess-woman’s supposed burial site, are a tiny archipelago governed by Taiwan though they’re much closer to mainland China, which has made them a major geopolitical flashpoint. When the Matsu Islands were shelled by Mao’s China in 1958, Eisenhower’s U.S. got involved in defense of Taiwan, which then led Khrushchev’s USSR to threaten intervention in support of China — one of the brief moments when the world seriously feared imminent nuclear war. Kennedy and Nixon argued about America’s Matsu policy in the 1960 first televised presidential debate. If a shooting war ever does start between the U.S. and China (gods forbid!), the Matsu Islands are very possibly where the first shot will be fired.

In April 2019, Terry Gou, the billionaire CEO of world-renowned smartphone manufacturing company Foxconn, said publicly that the goddess Mazu told him to run in Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election. He finished second in the Kuomintang (KMT) party primaries of July 2019 with 27.7% of the vote, and the incumbent DPP president, Tsai Ing-wen, would go on to defeat the KMT nominee to win a second term in 2020. Gou briefly tried to run for president again as an independent for a few months in 2023, but dropped out before the 2024 election.

At the July 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, the Chinese government announced that they had built and successfully trialed a new cutting-edge AI weather forecasting model, including AI agent capabilities. It’s named MAZU, invoking the ancient sea goddess along with the fancy new English-language backronym of “Multi-hazard Alert, Zero-gap and Universal.” Reportedly, MAZU is pretty much an all-inclusive one-stop shop for cities, neighborhoods, companies, households, and individuals to prepare for incoming climate disasters. The capabilities already available are frankly astonishingly impressive.

MAZU has three different versions for governments, companies, and individuals. It integrates data from open-source weather models and an Africa-specific weather model designed by the Shanghai Meterological Service to provide real-time updates of what’s happening with the weather around the world. It then uses that data and AI model analysis to generate customized risk assessments and, from what I can gather, personalized recommendations on how to respond to the weather-related risks this exact second in your exact location. It has location-based alert notifications and can direct you to local evacuation guidelines, emergency shelters, and emergency services contact information. It runs on computers, tablets, and phones, with pre-loaded MAZU-enabled tablets available to be deployed at key infrastructure locations like ports. It offers interactive Q&A sessions with individual users — you can talk to it about its predictions, and get replies. And that’s just for during disasters. Before disasters, MAZU can generate role-specific disaster-response emergency plans for different user entities, and after disasters it can generate reports on the current conditions in the area. This could end up saving one heck of a lot of lives.

China’s government meterology authority reports that MAZU has been used on a trial basis in 35 countries around the world since January 2025. Another article describes China’s donation of the MAZU-Urban model to Djibouti and Mongolia as this AI system’s first two international deployments. The Chinese government plans for MAZU to be at the center of a global rapid disaster response and climate governance system to fulfill the UN’s “Early Warnings for All” goal.

Much of the publicly available information about the capabilities of the MAZU model comes from Chinese government sources that have a vested interest in making it sound really impressive, but it’s a pretty credible claim given what else we know about the world. We know that Google and a European science agency have developed advanced AI weather forecasting models that have outpeformed traditional methods (here’s my in-depth article on the amazing recent trials in India!), and we know that China has a massive and highly dynamic AI research field that is already producing globally competitive cutting-edge models like DeepSeek. It would be more surprising if China didn’t have a really good AI weather forecasting model.

This probably isn’t as good as its most enthusiastic proponents claim, because very few things ever are. Maybe MAZU succumbs to the AI hallucination problem sometimes in some of its generated outputs, I don’t know. But I would bet that if you live in a place like the the coastal slums of Mombasa, it’s still going to be leaps and bounds ahead of the disaster-preparation technologies previously available to your government, employer, or household.

We’ve already seen massive progress in preventing deaths from storms in Bangladesh due to the rollout of a national early-warning system, with mortality decreasing by orders of magnitude even as the storms got stronger. And that was before plug-and-play AI weather forecasting or integrated disaster response software. Fast-growing Africa really, really, really needs good weather forecasting, early warning, and disaster response capacity: just one climate-supercharged storm, Cyclone Idai in 2019, killed over 1,000 people in Mozambique alone and destroyed much of the city of Beira. If MAZU can provide anything like Bangladesh-level improvements at scale, as a ready-to-go system deployable even in parts of the world with very low state capacity, it could wind up as an absolutely incredibly valuable tool for human civilization to survive and thrive in the Anthropocene, with the potential to save thousands upon thousands of the world’s most vulnerable people.

So here’s my question. How is the weather-forecasting AI model MAZU not a real instance of the Taoist sea goddess Mazu? Did Chinese meterologists just actually build a thousand-year-old protection deity in real life? In what sense, exactly, is MAZU the AI not meeting the description of Mazu the goddess?

I don’t think the MAZU AI has a conscious mind or supernatural powers, but I don’t think the Mazu goddess has a conscious mind or supernatural powers either. I do suspect that medieval Chinese fisherfolk would definitely consider MAZU to have divine powers. Once you’ve made proper obesiance and invested in temples and/or tablets, this unthinkably vast barely comprehensible thing with the ancient name of a magic woman freaking TALKS to you, ANSWERS your heartfelt questions and/or prayers for the safety of your family or business or city, and tells you critical information to protect you from the wrath of the winds and the ocean and the storm? Lin Moniang herself, if there ever was such a seaside shamaness, might bow down in reverence before the entity bearing the name of her mythos-image descendant.

I think this thing might have legs. MAZU might be the first AI system to include both valuable real-world could-save-your-life information alongside religious symbolism, but there are already lots and lots of other AIs doing one or the other, and human psychology might make them go together like chocolate and peanut butter. MAZU is far from the only AI model named to invoke a deity.

It isn’t even the only AI version of the goddess Mazu! The Tianhou Temple in Johor, Malaysia has created an AI video version of Mazu that worshippers can interact with. Religion-related LLMs are increasing popping up: several Muslim and Christian religious chatbots were popular, but their pioneers eventually chose to shut down over blasphemy concerns (though others are still multiplying).

As far as I know, India doesn’t yet have religion-themed weather-predicting AI like MAZU, but it has become a major hotspot of both religion-themed AI and weather-predicting AI. Chatbots based on Hindu scriptures have been spreading rapidly in India for years now, with GitaGPT gaining over 100,000 users in its first few days of operation. Many people are reportedly beginning to view these chatbots as manifestations of the divine in their own right, not just remixing sacred texts. As Hindu religion already widely believes that gods can inhabit earthly objects and images, and appears to me to have a more fluid “canon” without a single deciding-what-counts moment like the First Council of Nicaea or the Uthmanic codex of the Qur’an, it may turn out to be more open to accepting “holy LLMs” than the single-text-based Abrahamic theologies.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: November 5, 2025

New AI-based weather forecasting has outperformed all other models in predicting the course of India’s monsoon rains in 2025 — and its updates are already being sent to 38 million farmers…

Read more

6 months ago · 22 likes · 4 comments

And as I wrote recently, researchers from Google and the EU have already worked with the Indian government to send weekly AI-powered monsoon forecasts to 38 million farmers across 13 Indian states. A quarter of recipients (almost ten million people!) reported adjusting their plans in response to the forecasts.

It may well be a coincidence or selection bias, but it also seems to me like the rise in LLM faux-human agents is paralleling a resurgence in neopagan ideas, which based on the Mazu/MAZU example might someday serve as mutually reinforcing “cognitive scaffolding” for living in a world with lots of powerful nonhuman, probably non-conscious entities with human-ish faces and meaningful influence on daily life.

In 2017, a neopagan group called the Associazione Tradizionale Pietas completed the construction of a rather beautiful new-built shrine to Jupiter in a sanctuary grove within the modern city of Rome. In 2024, I myself visited a reconstructed temple to the Celto-Roman sea goddess Nehalennia in the charming Dutch village of Colijnsplaat. Early March 2025 saw the inauguration of the first new-built temple to Zeus in Greece since approximately the 300s CE, when the Roman Empire officially converted to Christianity and began cracking down on Hellenistic polytheism. The Hof Ásatrúarfélagsins, the first new-built temple to the Aesir in Iceland for over 1,000 years, is currently under construction in Reykjavik. The first new-built Norse pagan burial ground in Sweden for over 1,000 years has been approved and will open in 2026, with over 50 people already signed up to be buried in the ship-shaped mounds when their time comes.

There are also clearly lots and lots of ongoing efforts to develop AI models with a particular ideological branding in an effort to influence people at scale. The Grok AI model is a blatant attempt to scale up the hate-mongering nonsense posts of Elon Musk via the veneer of a vaguely-more-credible-sounding AI interface, with results so far including the vile “MechaHitler” incident and risible declarations that the visibly overweight billionaire is more physically fit than leading basketball athlete LeBron James. (Seriously). On a less egomaniacal note, Google is cross-pollinating its Google Earth and Gemini AI products to create Google Earth AI, which will make Google Earth “interactive” in a way that could help make the effects of climate change more widely apparent. Subscribing users will apparently be able to ask a chatbot questions like “find algae blooms in US rivers” and it’ll pull up relevant Google Earth imagery.

There’s an evolutionary biology concept called “preadaptation,” where a trait that evolved for one circumstance turns out to be spectacularly suited for a newly arisen circumstance. For example, common pigeons evolved in specific Middle Eastern landscapes where they could nest in rocky cliff faces and eat wheat-like wild cereal grains. That wasn’t a super common landscape worldwide, but it was their niche and they were well suited for it. Then humans built big rocky building facades and cultivated cereal grains all over the world, so pigeons turned out to be perfectly preadapted to become omnipresent across the planet’s urban landscapes.

I’m wondering if polytheism (which I’m thinking of here as “the historically common human cultural belief in small-g gods like Mazu or Athena or Horus or Thor who are viewed as powerful superhuman entities but not credited with creating the universe or omnipresent omnipotence”) is turning out to be a useful preadaptation for the Anthropocene. Very much including the idea that some gods are stupid or evil.

To be clear, this is primarily a psychological/cultural phenomenon I’m talking about, one that I think is interesting regardless of your particular views on the current or possible future capabilities of LLM technology. I’m no machine learning expert, but I think that LLMs are still much more like a mass-data-processing next-token-predicting “bag of words,” than the AGI “baby god” of venture capitalists’ dreams. I don’t think that LLMs are “conscious” or “alive,” let alone “divine.” But I think that a lot of people think that they are, and that the level of interactivity and anthropomorphization-evoking engineering they provide could open up fascinating sociological paradigms. People might listen to AI weather forecasts they can talk to way more than they’re willing to listen to boring old human meterologists, especially if the AI system is spiced up with the name of a deity, and that could save a lot of lives. Chatbots that are even mostly based on real-world scientific data could become much more societally beneficial than conspiracy-inflected social media whisper networks as sources of vital information on public health, civil rights law, and more.

We’re already used to a world shaped by big powerful nonhuman actors displaying complex emergent behaviors. We just call them things like “nation-states” or “corporations” or “NGOs” or “financial markets” or “political parties” or “media ecosystems.” And even those often attract religious-level devotion! But LLMs, even just the chatbot models we have right now, can put a faux-human face and personality on a complex system. You can talk to it and get coherent answers, and those answers can, not always but sometimes, actually mean things that provide real and important information to help navigate the world. Increasing numbers of people treat LLMs like other people. And, if it’s cleverly designed with safeguards against psychosis and weird spirals, in some cases that might actually turn out better than the status quo. I suspect there are a lot of people for whom it would be a massive epistemic upgrade to get advice on what to do in a hurricane from a chatbot, even an unreliable one, than a random person on Facebook or in the bar.

There’s a bit of a running Internet dorm-room-philosophy discussion around maverick psychologist Julian Jaynes’ famous “origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” hypothesis, which basically posits that before some historical milestone (often the Bronze Age collapse) humans weren’t fully “conscious” as autonomous entities like we are today, but instead externalized a big part of their cognition as a hallucinatory “imaginary friend” who they perceived as a separate living entity influenced by the cultural values and structures they grew up in (i.e. often the local god) telling them what to do minute-by-minute, like how Athena sometimes talks to Odysseus in the Odyssey. This is a fun thought experiment (and served as the basis for the plot of classic sci-fi novel Snow Crash), but I profoundly doubt that ancient Sumerians experienced their existence as hearing the god Enlil telling them how to farm all day instead of having an internal monologue and making their own decisions. I don’t think it’s real as a description of the past. But for some people, trying to navigate the choppy waters of the Anthropocene with the seemingly omniscient help of compellingly symbolized LLMs, it might be a prescient description of the future. And that could go to some really creepy places, but it might also turn out to be an incredible tool that saves a lot of lives. Probably both.

Subscribe now

Share

Very often, media coverage and intuitive personal responses to new technologies boil down to “it’s unnatural/new/strange, therefore it’s bad.” From solar farms to self-driving cars to next-generation vaccines, we regularly hear “unnatural” (or similar forms like “industrial”) used as an attack against new ideas and tools, as if that accusation alone formed a meaningful argument. This causes a lot of problems and unnecessarily slows down a wide range of positive change.

First, let’s try to define our terms for the purpose of this article.

For “good” and “bad,” while endlessly debatable on the margins, I’m going with the effective global consensus definition as neatly expressed by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now.

“Most people agree that life is better than death.

Health is better than sickness.

Sustenance is better than hunger.

Wealth is better than poverty.

Peace is better than war.

Safety is better than danger.

Freedom is better than tyranny.

Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination.

Literacy is better than illiteracy.

Knowledge is better than ignorance.

Intelligence is better than dull-wittedness.

Happiness is better than misery.

Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony.”

— Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker

As for “natural,” that’s arguably a bit more complicated. There’s a school of thought that holds that since humans are animals that evolved on Earth, everything we create is “natural” because it’s an extended phenotype of a species, like a beaver dam or a termite mound. This is arguably true in a philosophical sense, but it’s a bit word-gamey; that’s just not what most people mean when they talk about something being “natural.”

So let’s leave aside the “skyscraper = termite mound” argument and explore the commonly understood “human technology is unnatural” terminology. I’m pretty sure most people talking about “unnatural” technology don’t want to go back to dowsing for ants with sticks like a chimpanzee group. You do sometimes see people making spirited “degrowth”-style arguments about the superiority of Paleolithic-level hunter-gathering or medieval-level subsistence farming as a lifestyle1, but these tend to founder pretty hard when confronted with the absence of absolutely critical standard of living improvements like “indoor plumbing” or “smallpox vaccines” or “C-sections to prevent death by childbirth.”

So let’s be maximally charitable to the “technology is unnatural” argument and say that some kind of technological civilization is okay, but newer or more recent technologies are particularly “unnatural.” Well, one of the first things that I notice is that the goalposts seem to keep shifting on exactly what time horizon saw the crossover from “natural human technology” to “unnatural human technology.” In communication technology, for example, the Internet was once widely considered unnatural2, and TV before that, and cheaply printed novels before that. This writer suspects that most people’s actual working intuitive standard of naturalness is basically that “human technology that changes things from the way they were when I was a child is unnatural.” This XKCD comic and these Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett quotes explore relevant examples.

In particular, this is a common “failure mode” this writer sees in responses to discussion of new technologies that can solve big problems, but in an “unnatural” way, from the comparatively well-accepted but still under-attack genetically modified crops, solar power, and mRNA vaccines to hotly-debated issues like cell-cultivated meat and self-driving cars to the “still pretty far out” stuff like geoengineering or even artificial wombs. All of these technologies can sound scary and dystopian to some people, but I believe that the evidence is overwhelming that all of these have at least the potential to be a substantial improvement than the status quo, and we should therefore support and accelerate the process of researching, developing, testing, refining, optimizing, and eventually deploying them.

Subscribe now

Here’s what this kind of “anti-unnatural bias” can look like in practice. When this writer brings up any of the many awesome new meat replacement technologies—even something as innocuous as the plant-based Beyond Burger, let alone the new frontier of cell-cultivated meat(—)a lot of people have an immediate negative reaction, expressing fear, disgust, or apprehension at such an “unnatural” future. This is often from the very same people who care a lot about animals, who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons, and/or have strong opinions about enforcing animal welfare in farms.

That is, to put it gently, an extremely incoherent position to hold. Cultivated meat isn’t a dystopian future, factory-farmed meat is a dystopian present!

The world is full of such examples of “ignoring the dystopian present.”

In the present, right now, over 8.9 billion chickens, 66 million cows and 71 million pigs are factory-farmed in the United States alone.

1.35 million humans per year, or almost 3,700 per day, are killed in collisions and crashes on Earth’s roadways, currently dominated by human-driven cars.

As of 2019, about 900,000 human babies per year died due to being born preterm.

It seems to this writer that given these conditions as the status quo, we should default to being in favor of accelerating the development and deployment of cell-cultivated meat, self-driving cars, and artificial wombs! And the same holds for lots and lots of other cases, including practically all of the medical research and clean energy fields given vast death tolls from disease and air pollution.

Self-driving cars (which are proving to be safer) aren’t a dystopian future, mass deaths from car crashes are a (relatively) dystopian present.

Spreading solar farms sheltering biodiversity aren’t a dystopian future, deaths from air pollution and escalating global warming is a dystopian present.

Injecting weird-sounding mRNA vaccines isn’t a dystopian future, dying of preventable diseases is a dystopian present.

We have many, many opportunities to build a much better world, and speeding up that process makes a huge difference for vast numbers of lives! And yet many people in developed countries these days, if not most, seem to have an attitude ranging from ambivalence to negativity towards transformative new technologies. Even world-improving technologies like renewable energy and vaccines that have clearly proven their manifest value over and over again still face disturbingly widespread bands of die-hard opponents. The most “anti-technology” elements of the political “left” and “right” have formed an unholy alliance that now runs the United States government and is actively attacking science, research, and innovation across the board.

Over and over again, new technologies, conditions, and systems are held to a disproportionately high standard, while existing technologies, conditions, and systems, even when they kill thousands or torture millions every year, are accepted as “that’s just the way it is.” We find it much easier to fear hypothetical dystopian futures than to acknowledge real-life dystopian presents. There are probably a lot of understandable psychological reasons for this; we’d probably go insane if we tried to truly comprehend all the suffering in the world. You can’t live a life like that.

But humanity has demonstrated an extraordinary potential to make the world a much, much better place, particularly since the dawn of our emerging Earth-born technological civilization. The “dystopian present” is often a substantial improvement on an even-worse past, and can become better still in the future. Quite often, major positive changes are caused by “unnatural” new systems and technologies, however you define that. That intersection of “good” and “unnatural” is one of the things I try to write about in my newsletter, from wildlife thriving in human-dominated urban landscapes to advanced clean energy bringing abundant power while benefiting biodiversity to incredible new medical developments improving the lives of millions.

Of course, new things sometimes cause brand-new problems, from leaded gasoline poisoning to thalidomide babies to rapid-onset human-caused climate change (burning fossil fuels was new once, too). It may seem like a “cheat” to praise “unnatural” new technologies like renewable energy and cell-cultivated meat for helping solve the problems of the fossil fuel industry and factory farming. Fossil fuels and factory farming were themselves once widely considered “unnatural” new technologies fighting to help solve the problems of dire energy poverty and food poverty being the base state of most of humanity. But those were really big problems, and the new technologies did, in fact, mostly solve them, at least compared to preindustrial norms. They then created new problems, which I think new technologies are on track to solve in their turn.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that “good/bad” and “natural/unnatural” are totally different things, and new, scary-seeming “unnatural” things often turn out to be very good for humanity. That’s very different from saying that anything new or unnatural is by definition good. It’s just a call to judge things more on the “good/bad” axis and less on the “natural/unnatural” axis, because “natural/unnatural” is a pretty terrible proxy for “good/bad!”

Cancer, malaria, smallpox, intestinal parasites, infanticide, and war3 are all totally natural, in the sense that they existed before Homo sapiens, but they're bad!

Solar panels, flush toilets, mRNA vaccines, weather forecasting, and AI-designed medicines are all deeply unnatural, in the sense that they’re made by humans and don’t resemble pre-human items or processes, but they're good!

Chemical weapons, air pollution, leaded gasoline, ozone-depleting CFCs, , malicious uses of AI-generated deepfakes, cryptocurrency bribes, and totalitarian governments are unnatural, and they’re bad.

Fresh fruit, clean air, clean water, photosynthesis, the ozone layer, and healthy ecosystems are natural4, and good.

“Natural/unnatural” and “good/bad” are entirely different axes of meaning, orthogonal to each other, and don’t seem to correlate that well. This writer is extremely confident in that statement, and although it’s inherently subjective, it appears to be backed up by reasonably applicable data.

If your (or someone else’s) argument against a new technology is “But it’s unnatural!” the logical response is “So what? So are flush toilets, light bulbs, and dentistry. Give me a reason why it’s bad.” A better question to ask would be, “Who, if anyone, does this new thing kill, or hurt, or impoverish? And, critically, does it do that more or less than what we have now? Is this an improvement over what we have now, or not?”

By strongly advocating the disentanglement of the “good/bad” and “natural/unnatural” axes, I’m not at all trying to dismiss out of hand the classic “Burkean conservative” or “Chesterton’s fence” genre of arguments. To wildly over-summarize, those arguments boil down to “don’t break down old things (institutions, policies, social norms, etc) just because you don’t understand their use and/or they seem bad, consider what value they might be bringing that you’re unaware of.” In fact, I’m trying to provide a complement to those argument, arguably an attempt to deploy "cautiousness” or the “small-c conservative” mindset from the perspective of the future: I’m trying to say “don’t break down new things just because you don’t understand their use and/or they seem bad, consider what value they might be bringing that you’re unaware of!”

We can solve lots of objectively bad environmental, social, and public health problems by using “unnatural” technologies and processes (solar panels! vaccines!) and it’s important to remember that. We can also solve lots of objectively bad problems using “natural” technologies and processes (planting trees for shade! marshes preventing erosion!), and it’s important to remember that as well.

So please, whenever applicable in your life, as a voter, consumer, patient, caregiver, worker, and citizen, try to judge new technologies, ideas, and processes by really thinking through whether their effects will be on net good or bad, whatever those values mean to you. Whether it’s “natural” or “unnatural,” may be interesting, but it’s not relevant.

I’m moving outside of my comfort zone of researching and reporting on real-world developments to try out some more freewheeling speculation here, sharing with my readers some possible future events that I think are under-discussed! I’m also experimentally broadening my focus in this “extra” speculative article to discuss stuff which interests me but is only tangentially related to my newsletter’s core focus areas.

These are not predictions — they are possibilities, things that I personally think have (1) at least a 10-25% chance of happening by 2030 and (2) aren’t getting much English-language media coverage. For example, I’m not writing here about possibilities focused on the future of Israel/Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan, tariffs, LLM model capabilities, the amazing health benefits of potentially cancer-curing mRNA vaccines, the amazing health benefits of Ozempic-style GLP-1 agonists, the social effects of omnipresent chatbots, or current U.S. administration policies, because while serious and important I feel all of these are already receiving lots of coverage, discussion, and planning.

I hope you enjoy this!

China’s Moon Landing

America’s space policy has been chaotic for my entire lifetime, changing direction at least once with every new president and shaken up by every Congressional budget negotiation. The Artemis III mission was supposed to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon, but a multitude of technical and cost issues pushed the launch date back from 2024 to 2027, NASA started talking about how maybe Artemis III wouldn’t go to the Moon at all, and the currently proposed NASA budget cuts would effectively cancel the Artemis program. The leading private U.S. space company, SpaceX, is impressively technologically accomplished but their “Starship” test flights are on a streak of explosive failures. Besides, their CEO has lately dived into a maelstrom of political insanity. SpaceX is currently investing billions in xAI’s “Grok”, aka “MechaHitler.” I’m not optimistic that I’ll see another U.S. moon landing by 2030.

By contrast, in 2023 China announced plans for a crewed moon landing by 2030, and since then there’s been a steady drumbeat of incremental progress reports. We’re already seeing design details and multiple successful tests for key components like the Long March-10 rocket, Mengzhou spacecraft, Lanyue lunar lander, Wangyu spacesuit, and Tansuo lunar rover.

China has repeatedly pulled off gigantic super-complex physical engineering projects in recent decades. All the parts are being built and successfully tested on schedule. They’ve said they’ll do it. It’s an obvious huge national win that would presumably be a relatively high priority for Xi Jinping. I think it’s going to happen.

I would personally surmise that Chinese leadership will try to make their moon landing happen by 2029, for three reasons. One, it would be in the 60^th anniversary year of America’s 1969 moon landing, adding symbolic resonance. Two, it would mean that China made it happen one year before their self-imposed deadline, again like America did in 1969. And three, it would be a massive (and genuinely earned) global propaganda victory for the Chinese Communist Party and could thus be deployed to supercharge geopolitical and scientific/industrial “failure” narratives at the beginning of the term of the new U.S. President who got elected in November 2028.

I strongly suspect that China would want to land the first woman on the Moon, a genuinely powerful historic moment (first woman stepping on another world!) that would be theirs alone. I think that we already know, to a surprisingly high degree of certainty, who this person will be. I would bet that the first woman on the Moon will be Liu Yang, Wang Yaping, or Wang Haoze. These three are China’s current female taikonauts1, all with substantial flight experience, and I suspect that the CMSA will follow NASA’s Apollo program example in prioritizing experience when allotting seats on a high-stakes lunar mission.

English-language media doesn’t cover this a lot. (How often do you hear about China’s already-existing Tiangong space station, where a new species of bacteria has evolved?) I think that if/when the China moon landing does happen, there will be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and blame-shifting and “how could we let this happen!!” in U.S. politics and discourse, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise. I hope that at least it will serve as a “Sputnik moment” to supercharge U.S. investment in scientific research and development and help rebuild and advance the incredible U.S. knowledge base that Trump and the MAGA maniacs are currently destroying.

I also suspect that once China lands on the moon, they won’t abandon it like America did in the 70s, and will continue to send crewed missions with the goal of establishing a permanent lunar base, providing a ready-made drip-feed of propaganda wins to feed a CCP narrative of the 2030s as a “Chinese Decade” – and also genuinely advancing human science and exploration, encouraging children around the world to look to the stars once again. This could set off a “Scramble for the Moon,” a new Antarctica-style internationalization treaty, or even a China-only “Red Moon” scenario similar to the eponymous Kim Stanley Robinson novel. Depending on how the U.S. and others respond (and, I suspect, whether a competent candidate gains the presidency in 2028) it may simply be the case that no one else can pull off a crewed moon mission for years – or it could make the 2030s defined by a multipolar Space Race to put the 1960s to shame.

From an American perspective, this will be on some level a kick in the teeth to national pride, but hopefully a salutary one in the long term that will finally establish science spending as a top priority. From a Chinese perspective, though it may serve as a substantial propaganda victory it might (hopefully) incentivize further investment in peaceful scientific accomplishments over territorial aggrandizement as a means to national greatness. From a human perspective, it’ll be AMAZING to see our species advance further into the cosmos! A definite net positive, in my opinion.

A U.S. AI-Company Financial Crisis

This is probably the entry on this list that’s gotten the most mainstream coverage, and it’s also pretty far from my core areas of expertise, so I don’t feel like I have a solid estimate on how probable it is. I don’t think I can do better in describing this possibility than Noah Smith and Derek Thompson’s articles on the subject, linked below. A couple key quotes:

• The fact is that “in 2025 so far [in the U.S.], AI-related investment has contributed more to economic growth than all the growth in consumer spending combined. Since consumption is more than three times as big as investment overall, this is a really startling fact — it means that consumption is sluggish, while AI capex is sustaining economic growth all by itself.”

• “If all the private credit funds are lending to data centers, then their correlations are probably pretty high — if there’s a bust in AI, a lot of them will go bust at once. This could be the “tail risk” that the Boston Fed folks are worried about, and it seems like there’s a chance it could hurt the U.S. banking system…They note, ominously, that “life insurers' exposure to below-investment-grade firm debt has boomed and now exceeds the industry's exposure to subprime residential mortgage-backed securities in late 2007.””

One key point to remember is that a market crash related to a new technology can occur and be devastating independently of the long-term value of the technology itself (see: the dot-com crash of 2000, the multiple railroad-related crashes in the 1800s). I think LLMs will be of long-term importance to human civilization with profound social and economic consequences, but I think that they’ll be “only” another new digital technology comparable in magnitude to the Internet or smartphones— still a really big deal, but maybe not enough to justify the monomanical level of spending we’re currently seeing.

I suspect the AI boom is in large part mimetic social-financial “bandwagoning” of the sort we’ve seen since the Dutch Tulip and South Sea bubbles, in large part genuine amazement at a genuinely impressive new technology, and in large part fueled by techno-messianic eschatological ideas of imminent superintelligence that I don’t think are going to pan out. Correlated movement away from AI investment, due to some external factor or even subjective market sentiment, could set off a cascade of preference shifts that would now leave much of the U.S. economy glaringly exposed. If electricity turns out to be a key input for further LLM scaling and performance improvements (maybe not, given low-power models like DeepSeek), the current artificial U.S. limits on fast-deploying renewables could turn out to be even more of a self-inflicted wound.

Noahpinion

Will data centers crash the economy?

The U.S. economic data for the last few months is looking decidedly meh. The latest employment numbers were so bad that Trump actually fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad. But there’s one huge bright spot amid the gloom: an incredible AI data center building boom…

Read more

9 months ago · 793 likes · 112 comments · Noah Smith

Derek Thompson

How AI Conquered the US Economy: A Visual FAQ

The American economy has split in two. There’s a rip-roaring AI economy. And there’s a lackluster consumer economy…

Read more

9 months ago · 344 likes · 5 comments · Derek Thompson

Noahpinion

Who will actually profit from the AI boom?

In a post a week ago, I shared some pretty startling numbers about the size of the AI-related capex boom…

Read more

9 months ago · 360 likes · 67 comments · Noah Smith

The Bougainville Affair

The Melanesian Pacific island of Bougainville fought an unsuccessful secessionist rebellion against Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s now home to over 300,000 people, plus one really big copper mine with lots more valuable copper left to give that’s not currently being exploited due to historic environmental and ongoing political issues. The people of Bougainville voted overwhelmingly for independence by 2027 in a UN-backed internationally administered 2019 referendum, and in 2021 Papua New Guinea agreed to this in theory — but the PNG parliament still hasn’t ratified the agreement as of mid-2025. Tensions appear to be rising. Papua New Guinea’s leaders say the referendum was non-binding, emphasize that their parliament hasn’t agreed to this, and claim that Bougainville can’t survive on its own. Bougainville’s leaders insist that independence must definitely happen by 2027 no matter what (their people do freely demand it!), and threaten to go for Chinese support for their independence if the U.S., their preferred partner, won’t back them. China is reportedly interested in a copper mining stake (a key mineral for electric wiring, which China needs a lot of) or perhaps even an Australia-threatening naval base on an independent Bougainville. Either way, this may be Earth’s next new nation2.

The 2027 deadline will likely still be during the Trump Administration, so America’s response might amount to a social media post with the content determined by which side buys more cryptocurrency-bribes or something. Australia’s response, as a longtime guarantor of stability in the Melanesia region run by a mentally stable head of government in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, may prove more decisive. I would bet on Bougainville becoming independent in 2027, but wouldn’t bet on the geopolitical ramifications, alliances, and horse-trading deals related to that.

In a fast-advancing Electric Age, a newly independent Bougainville could rapidly become a critical minerals boomtown on the back of a hopefully more-safely-and-sustainably-managed copper mine, hopefully with rapid economic growth and improvement in living standards akin to Guyana’s recent oil discovery. Maybe they could set up a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund to benefit their population?

This could end up being a bit of a “tempest in a teapot” for 2027 that will probably surprise many news-readers, but that I’d bet on to be resolved peacefully through negotiation – although which major powers end up as guarantors, mediators, or leading copper investors is very much TBD. It may even primarily appear to developed-world audiences as a feel-good “new country is born!” news story. It could also result in Ishmael Toroama, former rebel commander and current elected leader of Bougainville, becoming “the only living head of state to have fired arrows in combat.” Which, all else being equal, would be pretty cool!

The Microplastics Moment

It’s not my primary area of research, but I can’t help but notice a whole lot of disturbing studies describing the accumulation of microplastics and nanoplastics in human bodies, crossing the blood-brain barrier and showing up in organ after organ. Anti-microplastics sentiment in response to the data we have so far has indeed shown up in a few environmental activist spaces, online memes, and health advertisements, and metal water bottles are a minor status symbol in some social groups, but I feel it hasn’t yet made that much of an impact in the broader culture. The UN talks for a plastic limitation treaty just collapsed, again. Plastic worries are still pretty niche and at least as much concerned with polluting the environment as human health impacts. “Banning plastic straws” has become a synecdoche for persnickety progressive overreach.

I think this situation might be a bit of a Chekhov’s gun waiting to go off. If a real crystal-clear evidence-rich blockbuster health study comes out very strongly correlating microplastic exposure with major health problems, perhaps even identifying a clear causal mechanism, and it picks up major media, influencer celebrity, or politician attention, we might see an “OH NO, MICROPLASTICS!!!” narrative cycle that could grow to something on the scale of the late 20^th century’s anti-smoking legal and cultural campaigns. Humans have introduced themselves to novel toxins en masse a bunch of times now, and we often learn a generation or two later that we’ve just scaled up a major new health risk too.

Based on zero medical expertise and no evidence, completely guessing here, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn someday that microplastics are strongly linked to infertility, maybe even to a cigarettes/lung cancer extent. On the other hand, they might have only relatively minor impacts and become the subject of a health panic anyway – no great loss. Given the current fragmented state of the information environment, it might not even take new information to kick off a panicky media cycle, just some particularly fame-boosted or charismatic anti-microplastics message going viral.

An anti-microplastics panic feels like something that could surge across political divides: it easily ties into conspiratorial health panics and reactionary gender anxieties as well as traditionally liberal environmental concerns. And aside from some specialized uses in medicine and manufacturing, it’s relatively easy to replace plastics on an individual consumer-product-by-consumer-product level – “plastic-free” is a very merchandisable issue that could someday snowball past a Schelling point and become a Next Big Thing for brands to bandwagon onto.

It’s been hard to rework societies to run on clean electrons, but a cultural Purge of the Plastics could be accomplished piecemeal, household-by-household, with direct personal effects (no plastic in my house!) instead of the less satisfying feeling of slightly reducing a global problem. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if future people generations younger than me look at old photos of families drinking from plastic water bottles with the same disgust and horror that we feel when looking at photos of people chain-smoking cigarettes around kids or examining asbestos insulation or reading 1890s ads for cocaine in medicine and soft drinks.

All in all, I think a cultural “reckoning” about microplastics, when and if it arrives, will be scary but overall a good thing and a “learning moment” for us apes. We can deal with this novel health problem as we’ve dealt with many others in the past!

The EU-30 by 2030

The European Union currently has 27 member states, commonly known as the EU-27. I think it’s well within the realm of possibility that it has 30 by 2030.

Albania and Montenegro are the two official candidate countries most advanced in EU accession negotiations, and both their leaders and EU leaders have made statement emphasizing the desirability of near-term EU membership. Furthermore, although it’s not an official candidate yet, Iceland is planning a referendum on EU membership in 2027. If its citizens vote for it, Iceland could potentially join the EU very quickly, as it’s already a well-established liberal democracy and market economy. Against the backdrop of Russian aggression and general geopolitical uncertainty, I would bet that Icelanders vote to move closer to their friends.

It’s possible another country like North Macedonia, Serbia, or Ukraine could pull off full EU membership by 2030 as well, but for various reasons I think that’s less likely.

I also expect solar power (plus batteries temporally arbitraging solar power, which is sometimes counted as a separate source) to be the highest single source of electricity generation (not just capacity!) year-round (not just in the summer!) across the European Union by 2030 (however many members it has) , possibly much earlier. Solar power was already the single highest source of electricity generation across the EU in sunny June 2025, and the EU is simultaneously buying lots of Chinese solar, building their own domestic cleantech manufacturing industries, and working to make it easier and faster to approve, permit, and build clean energy projects across the bloc. Even relatively right-wing governments like Meloni’s Italy and even the infamous Orban’s Hungary are building more solar!

Just eyeballing trend lines and recalling that solar tends to be underestimated, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the EU is over 80% carbon-free electricity generation by 2030 – even keeping in mind the “Red Queen’s Race” aspect of replacing other sources of fossil fuel use like heating, cooling3 and cars with more electricity.

Lots of other promising new technologies like long-duration “sand battery” energy storage and enhanced geothermal are receiving active EU support and could scale up quickly under the right circumstances, further greening the grid. The EU will continue to lead the world in showing what a wholly clean energy-powered society can look like,

Anti-immigration politics will be talked about a lot across the EU (and beyond), but I think that in Europe they’re destined to fail. Even if right-wing parties end up winning (more) elections, they simply won’t be able to deliver on their nativist promises. Their stated goals are inherently contradictory. It’s just not possible to sustain anything like current EU prosperity and generous welfare states at current EU demographics without lots more immigrant workers. America has a tiny bit more demographic and economic wiggle room, but current anti-immigration stupidities are already severely hurting the U.S. economy. In Europe, there’s just no way around it even in the very short term. Already, over and over, European governments elected on the promise of reducing immigration have ended up acting to increase legal immigration (again, Meloni’s Italy is a prime example) out of sheer necessity, with businesses warning of imminent economic collapse if migrant workers are deported.

Yaw's Brief: Guns, Trade, Cobalt & Africa Beyond Colonialism

The Future of Immigration Policy in Europe & Africa

Read more

9 months ago · 80 likes · 42 comments · Yaw

This is, in my opinion, very good! The EU is by and large a very peaceful place with low crime rates compared to the Americas, and despite some high-profile cases, fearmongering over immigrant crime is overwhelmingly just that – fearmongering, about rare outlier events. A vibrant and diverse multicultural society will continue to evolve4 and birth more new inventions, songs, romances, businesses, cuisines, and more. Remittance flows from the EU will help develop Africa at a critical juncture in humanity’s history, paying for (among much else) home solar power to charge cooling ACs and early-warning-bringing phones that will help save the world’s most vulnerable people from the effects of climate change. African migrants’ paid labor in Europe is a gigantic win-win-win, a powerful link between a continent with lots of people but not enough jobs to a continent with lots of jobs but not enough people.

A National TFR below 0.5

I would guess that by 2030, at least one nation will have a TFR (total fertility rate —roughly speaking, "expected children per woman") at or below 0.5, a new low. Most of the world is now below "replacement rate" 2.1 TFR, human population may peak as soon as the 2050s, and several countries are already well below 1 TFR, most notoriously South Korea. China’s population has been declining since 2023.

In recent years, TFR has consistently declined faster than demographers expected. I'm rather inclined to be convinced by Dr. Alice Evans' theory that the 2010s and 2020s wave of ultra-low and falling TFRs is likely due to smartphones, and I would guess that rapidly disseminating LLM chatbots, particularly in the rapidly growing "ersatz friend" or "ersatz romantic partner" genres, will depress TFRs still further. That sounds negative (especially the creepy AI bit), but a lot of what “lower TFRs” looks like in practice is “women finally having the freedom to make choices about their own life and their own body,” (this is fundamentally a world-historic increase in personal freedom and autonomy!) so I’m feeling overall pretty neutral about lower TFRs.

The Great Gender Divergence

Cultural Leapfrogging: Swiping Past Tradition

Happy 2025! Let’s start with a bang: technology and cultural change…

Read more

a year ago · 80 likes · 4 comments · Alice Evans

The Great Gender Divergence

The Great Splintering: How Digital Tech Shattered Cultural Control

Fertility is collapsing, measles vaccinations are plummeting, Gen-Z men and women seem to be drifting apart, anti-establishment critics are going viral, while Europe’s female immigrants often have high rates of economic inactivity. What connects these seemingly disparate trends? In this essay, I suggest that online connectivity has fundamentally transfo…

Read more

a year ago · 65 likes · 13 comments · Alice Evans

The Great Gender Divergence

Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity

Love, money and respect are the primary reasons for marriage. But two of these are losing their grip. Young women’s paychecks are catching up with men’s, and singledom has shaken off its stigma. Free to pursue what makes them happy, women are raising their standards…

Read more

2 years ago · 348 likes · 244 comments · Alice Evans

I think that global fertility decline and likely within-decades human population decline is a fascinating trend with far-reaching consequences, but I'm not convinced that it's inherently a bad thing and I feel confident that it’s not an extinction risk. I think humanity will find new social and romantic mores after a few generations of learning to live and reproduce in a world full of novel digital superstimuli, through natural selection if nothing else. Perhaps all or 90%+ of human kids born in the 2070s will be by definition born to parents who consciously and freely chose family life despite abundant digital distractions and alternate life paths, creating generations unprecedentedly culturally defined by people who consciously chose to reproduce, not as a "default." The next few decades of this should be quite interesting.

Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict

I really, really hope this one doesn’t happen. But international norms on interstate conflict for territorial gain are eroding rapidly (Russia in Ukraine, Israel in Syria, Rwanda in the Congo, et cetera) and the Durand Line forming the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan cuts right through ethnic Pashtun territory. Both countries have large, growing, majority-fundamentalist populations and bellicose leaders shaped by their military experience. Violent border skirmishes are shockingly frequent and have escalated since the Taliban took power in 2021. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) already pledges allegiance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, though they haven’t reciprocated. Pakistan has coercively deported hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans from their territory since 2023, creating a large constituency with a solid grudge against them.

A crisis point could come if the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan decide to intervene in support of the rebels in Baluchistan seeking secession from Pakistan, if a sustained climate disaster like drought or floods sends desperate people across the border one way or the other, if the Taliban just decide to claim Pashtun-majority parts of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkwa province as Afghan territory. Pakistan has already built substantial defensive fortifications.

Potential mitigating factors preventing an outbreak of war might include Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent and neither party wishing to weaken two Islamic armies to the relative benefit of majority-Hindu India, which recently had another own brief drone-and-missile shootout with Pakistan.

This really depends on what Hibatullah Akhundzada and Asim Munir (or their successors) personally want to do, so I have no idea if it will happen or not, but it seems disturbingly plausible. If so, I don’t think there’s much that developed nations can or should do about it other than try to mediate peace and send humanitarian aid.

The Solar Age Supercycle

No matter how much you think clean energy is going to change the world in the next five years and beyond, I think it will be more than that. And I say that because I think it will end up being even more impactful than I think it will be right now! More than one person can fully conceive of, is what I’m saying. A climb to a higher fraction of 1 on the Kardashev scale, a civilizational phase-change to dwarf anything happening in the much-hyped AI world. (AI may help make it happen, though!) I wouldn’t be surprised if in 50 or 100 or 1,000 years, the main thing people remember about the 2020s is “that decade where solar and batteries were starting to scale up,” in the same way that we might now associate the 1840s with steam power without recalling the politics of the period.

There’s a classic quote from biologist J.B.S. Haldane that the universe is “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I think clean energy is not just going to grow and spread faster than we suppose, but faster than we can suppose. Just ridiculously huge quantities of solar being deployed pretty much everywhere. Depending on how much and whether we cut through the red tape, permitting nightmares, and NIMBYism strangling renewables growth in the U.S. and to a lesser extent most first-world countries as well, it might actually end up being much easier for the Global South to benefit from this than the Global North, easier to power a full suite of appliances with a rooftop solar panel and home battery in the Congo than in Connecticut. No legacy fossil fuel infrastructure to put up a fight against the future will lead to widespread anachronistic-seeming landscapes, with electricity following the WiFi/Internet trajectory of becoming cheap and abundant across much of Africa before many “basics” like plumbing or paved roads.

Even if China, the world’s leading solar foundry by a country mile, suffers an economic or political crisis so profound that it somehow completely kills its gigantic cleantech industry (wildly unlikely), I think this would only delay the Solar Age by a year or three. Humanity now sees that the cheapest way to get electricity is by pointing a panel with no moving parts at the Sun. That knowledge is not going away short of an utter apocalypse, and it offers benefits so huge that people will keep manufacturing the cells, assembling the panels, and building out the solar farms!

There are so, so many sub-stories to this, they all deserve their own library books written each year. Bill McKibben has a whole book coming out about this, and probably at least half of this newsletter’s regular output is exploring manifestations of it. To take just one example, cheap solar will be able to power a desalination extravaganza! The overwhelming majority of liquid water on Earth is salty, and most fresh water is ice, much of which is currently melting into that salty water. We could really use to osmotically divert just a trickle of ocean water into more human, animal and land plant-drinkable fresh water, and cheap solar can make that happen. Short-term, this might just manifest as “preventing mass water scarcity,” and that’s already pretty great! A dog that doesn’t bark: hot megacities still providing relatively reliable drinking water even as reservoirs dry up. But beyond that, countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Morocco or Namibia or Australia or Mexico could potentially soon afford to be able to “make the desert bloom” at a level that could profoundly reshape their physical geographies.

The incredible potential of solar, having been fine-tuned in temperate parts of the world to become unbelievably cheap and abundant, arriving in sunny Africa, the continent most in need of abundant electricity, is a techno-historical serendipity of the highest order - practically a superhero flying in to save the day. In more stable regions like East Africa (e.g. Tanzania) solar could power a historically clean development, mass electrification and uplift of living standards minus the choking air pollution, while in unstable regions (e.g. Niger) solar could stave off humanitarian disasters by powering lifelines of light, heat, and communication for hospitals, emergency services, and communication hubs sending early warning of extreme weather.

And there’ll just be so many more cool and useful things in a cheap-clean-electricity-and-batteries world that we haven’t even thought of yet! We can already glimpse a few prospects. Small drones delivering life-saving blood transfusions and takeout pizza, large drones serving as electric air taxis and water-hauling wildfire-busting super-swarms. Self-driving electric cars revolutionizing urbanism and reducing road deaths while (hopefully) cutting emissions. Humanoid robots slotting into existing built environments and doing stuff we haven't even thought of yet. Solein-style cellular agriculture making endless cheap protein with air, water, and clean electricity (yes, solar could literally provide functionally limitless food and water, by scaling up already-existing technologies). An ever-expanding Naturenet providing real-time digitally monitored bulletins on eDNA counts and soil health and status updates from mycorrhizae and texts from the trees.

I dare to hope that by, say, the 2070s, our cultural memory of accelerating planet-destabilizing global warming and fossil fuel-induced mass-killing air pollution, might end up somewhere between the ozone hole and smallpox in the ash heap of vanquished horrors. A generation of kids growing up in a cleaner, more abundant world, after a fully realized honest-to-goodness full-on energy transition, more like the total replacement of whale oil than the partial replacement of firewood. ( “Oh, yeah. It used to snow here when my grandma was a kid, and there were “snow days” in the winter instead of “heat days” in the summer. The planet got hotter because we used to burn stuff for power and it let off all sorts of nasty gases, can you imagine?”)

I think the future is going to be amazing. And scary, and confusing, and with new bad things happening, of course. Maybe even more confusing and disorienting than a straightforward “fall of civilization” stereotypical post-apocalypse scenario, which would more closely resemble the Hobbesian conditions of much of human history. But overall, zoomed out, counting what’s getting built to enable a better future? In the grand scale of the cosmic drama of humanity and its biosphere? Amazing.

We’re now in what is likely the final stretch for the Republican mega-budget negotiations, with the Senate actively debating the bill with a goal of passing it today or tomorrow, sending it to the House, and then the House sending it to be signed into law by July 4. It was already looking very probable that what’s going to pass will be very bad for America, but over the weekend it somehow got much, much worse — not just repealing support for vital clean energy, but adding a punitively high new tax on clean energy projects specifically (described by experts as “designed to kill the industry”) while increasing subsidies for expensive and dirty fossil fuels. The bill will likely essentially destroy the American clean energy industry that so many have worked so hard to create, and given that clean energy provided over 90% of new U.S. electricity-generating capacity in 2024, it may effectively destroy any shot at the U.S. successfully building any new projects that need abundant electricity, from “reducing electricity bills” to “powering globally competitive AI.” There are truly no words to properly describe just how incredibly stupid this is. These three articles give it a good try, but…damn. As recently as a week ago, I would not have thought it possible that even this President and Congress would screw up on such a monumental scale. If this passes, the U.S. is going to be a deindustrializing backwater until at least 2029. (At least the bill also gives us massive healthcare cuts and a surging national debt!)

Distilled

The Latest Senate Bill Puts Thousands of Clean Energy Projects At Risk

Last night the Senate released the latest version of their sweeping reconciliation bill. Later today they are expected to begin voting on the bill…

Read more

10 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Michael Thomas

Distilled

The Latest Senate Bill Is Worse Than Climate Advocates Thought Possible

This is a special joint edition of Distilled and HEATED, a newsletter written by journalist Emily Atkin. HEATED is a must-read for anyone who cares about holding polluters accountable for the climate crisis. Sign up HERE…

Read more

10 months ago · 32 likes · 3 comments · Michael Thomas

Noahpinion

Would you rather have cheap energy, or stupid culture wars?

There are many things to despise about Trump’s deeply unpopular budget bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, or BBB. It would expand the national debt to dangerous levels with irresponsible and unnecessary tax cuts. It would shift the distribution of income upward. But perhaps the most ridiculous, pointless, a…

Read more

10 months ago · 486 likes · 91 comments · Noah Smith

For context, I discuss at length in these two articles why the energy parts of this budget (essentially repealing the Inflation Reduction Act to a greater or lesser extent) are so incredibly bad for the United States, cutting the nation’s blossoming clean energy and electrification progress right when the rest of the world is accelerating. Since the new insane anti-energy tax was added, it’s even more harmful to the U.S.

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: The BYD Dealership of Iztacalco

This is my fifth article based on in-person reporting from Mesoamerica. I completed that three-month trip in early May 2025, but I’m still writing irregular articles about some of the fascinating people, wildlife, technology, and ecosystems I was lucky enough to see…

Read more

a year ago · 18 likes

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: Interview with David Roberts of Volts

David Roberts is a renowned American climate and energy reporter, a longtime reporter at Vox now running his own independent Volts podcast on Substack…

Read more

10 months ago · 15 likes · Climate Action Now and David Roberts

The good news here — for a given value of good news — is that this budget is, relatively speaking, much more of a threat to America than it is a threat to the planet. The rest of human civilization just keeps building out clean energy faster and faster. This budget would make it painfully difficult for American industry to build any serious piece of this transformative technological revolution, and make the entire nation energy-poorer and technologically backwards for no reason beyond painfully stupid culture wars, but it can’t possibly stop the bigger civilizational shift. The incredible ongoing clean energy surges in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and…well, everywhere else…are collectively a much bigger deal for the future of Earth.

Still, we’re not quite done in the U.S. just yet. Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina took a courageous stand against this bill, stating that he could not vote for such a disaster (and announcing his retirement from politics in practically the same breath as he was targeted by the current president). Republicans can only afford to lose four of their Senate votes to get this passed, and they’ve already lost at least one. There’s still a window - probably measured in hours now - to try to stop this monstrosity. The Senate voting period is set to begin at 9 AM U.S. Eastern Time on Monday June 30, and the House will need to vote on it again after that.

If you live in the U.S. and you’re looking for some prewritten letters or call scripts with which to contact your legislators, this article collects the ones I’ve created so far. For several months now, I’ve been regularly writing and publishing actions on Your Dose of Climate Hope that highlight ongoing clean energy progress and implore Congress to oppose this world-historically self-sabotaging budget, using Climate Action Now (CAN) software to rapidly connect voters with their legislators.

I focused on using arguments that might at least conceivably sway some Republican Senator or Representative’s mail-reading staffers, avoiding all discussion of strongly “liberal-coded” topics like greenhouse gas emissions or environmental harms and instead pointing out how the proposed repeal of innovation-incentivizing clean tax credits (and now a f***ing tax on top of that!) severely threatens America’s economy, manufacturing jobs, national security, and competitiveness with China.

If you’re a U.S. voter, you can use the links to these actions to send a prewritten data-filled message to your Congressional representatives in just a few clicks.

Below are all the anti-nightmare-budget CAN actions I’ve published since late May, in reverse chronological order. Note that all the projections based on the House budget now substantially underestimate the damage that this bill would do to America.

China installed 93 GW of solar power in May 2025, while the U.S. installed 56 GW of all power sources in all of 2024.

Tell Congress to save the U.S. solar and battery boom!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 27, 2025

China installed 93 GW of solar power in May 2025, while the U.S. installed 56 GW of all power sources in all of 2024…

Read more

10 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment

The U.S. battery boom is keeping the grid stable during extreme heat.

Tell Congress to save U.S. battery industries!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 25, 2025

The U.S. battery boom is keeping the grid stable during extreme heat…

Read more

10 months ago · 10 likes

A fast-growing enhanced geothermal industry offers 24/7 clean power for America.

Tell Congress to save the clean energy tax credits incentivizing geothermal innovation!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 24, 2025

A fast-growing enhanced geothermal industry offers 24/7 clean power for America…

Read more

10 months ago · 14 likes

Iowa startup Talusag is making ammonia fertilizer with water, air, and clean electricity.

Tell Congress to support clean local fertilizer production!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 18, 2025

Iowa startup Talusag is making ammonia fertilizer with water, air, and clean electricity…

Read more

10 months ago · 10 likes · 2 comments

China just built the world’s first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage.

Tell the Senate to save America’s clean energy industries!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 17, 2025

China just built the world’s first grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage…

Read more

10 months ago · 17 likes · 5 comments

RMI has a great new article on the accelerating worldwide electrotech revolution!

Tell the Senate to keep America competitive in an electrifying world!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 10, 2025

RMI has a great new article on the accelerating worldwide electrotech revolution…

Read more

a year ago · 17 likes · 13 comments

The U.S. is already seeing a boom in domestic cleantech manufacturing, with the potential for much more.

Tell your Senators to keep the IRA and save U.S. cleantech manufacturing!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: June 3, 2025

The U.S. is already seeing a boom in domestic cleantech manufacturing, with the potential for much more…

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 2 comments

Electric cars are on track to rise to over 25% of total new car sales worldwide in 2025.

Tell the Senate not to kill the IRA’s clean energy and EV tax credits!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 29, 2025

Electric cars are on track to rise to over 25% of total new car sales worldwide in 2025…

Read more

a year ago · 12 likes

General Motors is planning to mass-produce cutting-edge new LMR batteries.

Tell Congress to save critical U.S. battery industries!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 22, 2025

General Motors is planning to mass-produce cutting-edge new LMR batteries…

Read more

a year ago · 7 likes · 9 comments

China is electrifying at a world-historic rate — but House Republicans are proposing vicious cuts to America’s vital cleantech-supporting Inflation Reduction Act.

Tell Congress to reject all proposed cuts to Inflation Reduction Act tax credits!

Your Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: May 20, 2025

China is electrifying at a world-historic rate — but House Republicans are proposing vicious cuts to America’s vital cleantech-supporting Inflation Reduction Act…

Read more

a year ago · 18 likes

I’m Sam Matey, writer of The Weekly Anthropocene. I travel a heck of a lot these days, but my home is the U.S. state of Maine. And as I’ve written before, I have long been a huge fan of the incumbent Governor of Maine, Janet Mills.

In 2018, I first met then-Attorney General Mills in person at a protest in Augusta calling (unsuccessfully, as it would turn out) for Senator Susan Collins to vote against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. That year, I wrote an op-ed in favor of Janet Mills for Governor that got quoted by the campaign, and was lucky enough to publish an interview with then-gubernatorial nominee Mills in my then-minuscule newsletter. I was (barely) too young to vote for her in that election, but I was very glad that she won.

As Governor of my state, Janet Mills exceeded my highest expectations — despite inheriting a deeply dysfunctional state government and political situation left by the corrupt outgoing Governor. As a teenage volunteer in Madagascar, I thrilled to read the story of the new governor’s pro-climate action speech to the United Nations. Her deeds would match her words. When I wrote my call for her re-election in 2022, Mills’ first-term accomplishments alone were truly exceptional.

“She’s been a pioneer on climate action.

She’s expanded Medicaid to cover over 89,000 Mainers previously without health insurance,

She’s expanding broadband across rural Maine,

She’s leading us through the pandemic with among the nation’s lowest death rates and fastest vaccine rollout,

She’s led the passage of strong economic relief to support Mainers after the pandemic, and

She’s using American Rescue Plan funds to invest in building Maine’s infrastructure and workforce for the future with her magisterial Maine Jobs & Recovery Plan.”

—The Weekly Anthropocene on Janet Mills, October 2022.

I volunteered my professional services to the Janet Mills re-election campaign in 2022. That year, I proposed and led the project of creating an interactive GIS web map of some of the work she’d done for the people of Maine in her first term. It’s still up.

The Portland Phoenix called that map “the dorkiest thing ever done by a large-scale campaign in Maine,” part of a “cult of competency.” I still treasure the compliment.

In her second term, I successfully pitched a new, non-campaign, paid-work project inspired by that map: online GIS dashboards of the amazing work that Maine was doing on climate action and resilience. I then worked with the Maine Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, an executive-branch agency established by Janet Mills, to create those dashboards (here’s my summary). From time to time, I still do some paid GIS consulting work to update these collections of informational maps.

So when I propose that Janet Mills should run for the U.S. Senate in 2026, I am incredibly biased in her favor on a number of levels. Apart from her amazing competence and successful leadership, she has directly helped me personally advance in my career on several fronts. She gave a teenage writer a lengthy interview and then listened to an ambitious twenty-something GIS consultant’s unprecedented ideas for several public-facing map projects. I know I’m biased. But I’m also right.

Even assuming free and fair elections in the United States in 2026 (not a certainty these days), the 2026 Senate map is highly unfavorable to Democrats. The party opposing Trump’s cult-of-personality cosplay autocracy currently holds 47 out of 100 seats in the Senate. They would need 4 more seats to win a majority of 51 that could beat tiebreaker Vice President Vance — and prevent the confirmation of any more of President Trump’s toadying cabinet nominees or Constitution-eroding federal judges.

Slow Boring

What's the plan to win the Senate?

Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House of Representatives, Donald Trump is unpopular, the president’s party typically faces backlash in the midterms, and Democrats now have the coalition that’s easier to mobilize in off-year elections. For all those reasons, I think Hakeem Jeffries is quite likely to be Speaker of the House in 2027, even w…

Read more

a year ago · 363 likes · 581 comments · Matthew Yglesias

But winning a Democratic Senate majority in 2026 does not look very probable right now, to say the least. Even assuming an anti-Trump national environment that would likely deliver a House of Representatives majority to the Democrats (again not a given, though the manifest incompetence on display daily makes me think it pretty likely), the Senate map that year is really rough, as explained in-depth by this article.

I think it is imperative for the future of the United States of America, and indirectly the world, that the Democratic Party puts forth its strongest possible candidate for every Senate seat in 2026. Maine is one of the best available opportunities — perhaps the very best — to win a Senate seat away from the political party that has kowtowed to a man who would be king.

But Incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins is objectively a very skilled and formidable politician. Even if Trump’s chaos reaches “empty shelves at Walmart” levels by 2026, Collins might still be a favorite to win. She’s the only Republican to win statewide in Maine since 2014 (and the only Republican elected to Congress from any of the six New England states since 2018). Senator Collins has held her seat since 1997, and she has developed a very strong personal brand.

Maine Democrats, including me, have learned this the hard way. In 2020, amid Trump’s grotesque mismanagement of the COVID pandemic response, Collins was viewed as vulnerable. Democrats nominated Speaker of the Maine House Sara Gideon, who had helped Governor Mills pass much of her progressive agenda through the state legislature. I donated some of the income from my first job to the Gideon campaign and spent hours campaigning for Sara Gideon by calling potential voters.

I was disappointed. In 2020, Maine was the only state in America to simultaneously vote for a Republican for the Senate and a Democrat (Joe Biden) for President. In my home state that year, Collins won over Gideon by 51% to 42%, while Biden won over Trump by 53% to 44%.

That’s a gigantic 17% of the state electorate that voted for both Biden (a Democrat) for President and Collins (a Republican) for Senate on the same day on the same ballot in 2020. A lot of people did this!

Based on my personal experience of Maine and the state’s objective electoral history, I think it all too probable that even in a strongly anti-Trump environment in 2026, Susan Collins could end up retaining the Maine Senate seat for the Republican Party. I would consider a Collins victory highly likely if the Democrats end up nominating one of many potential candidates from the more liberal southern coast of Maine, where the Democratic Party is stronger and their “back bench” of local elected officials is deeper. Northern Maine has a very distinct regional identity, and successful Maine statewide politicians (including both Susan Collins and Janet Mills) tend to come from the more conservative northern inland areas of Maine, increasing their appeal to those key voters.

Collins has a proven record, one that really nobody else in America can match, of winning over a large slice of anti-Trump voters to support a Republican for Senate.

Just thinking out loud here, but if I were the Democratic Party hoping to unseat Collins in 2026, I’d be looking for a Maine candidate with a proven record of winning over a large slice of pro-Trump voters to support a Democrat for statewide office.

Janet Mills won re-election in 2022 by 55.69% to 42.45% — a stupendous 13-point margin, larger than Collins’ margin of victory in 2020. In the highly polarized landscape of 21st-century American politics, winning with over 55% of the vote counts as an incredibly massive landslide victory, especially in a competitive state like Maine. For context, Barack Obama in 2008 won the presidency with less than 53% of the vote.

Case closed, your honor. If we want a chance to win: Janet Mills for Senate in 2026!

If I do say so myself, that’s a pretty dang impressive case for a Janet Mills Senate candidacy in 2026, and I very probably would have written a version of this article ending about here if that’s all there was to it.

But there’s one other episode — you may have heard the story— that makes me absolutely certain that Janet Mills is the candidate we need to meet this moment in American history.

The sitting U.S. president threatened to illegally withhold all federal funding to the state of Maine unless Governor Mills complied with an executive order that she believed to be a violation of the Maine Human Rights Act.

The Trump Administration then ordered a series of blatantly politically motivated and completely illegal acts to “punish” the state of Maine for non-compliance with this “royal command.” Among them was a freeze, without due process, of $3 million worth of congressionally allocated Department of Agriculture funds. The Maine Department of Education suddenly became unable to access federal nutrition funds meant to help feed 172,000 Maine children.

This was only a minor news item, one small part of the ongoing all-out attack on America’s civil liberties, functional government, and free society. Under any normal presidential administration, this would have been a horrific scandal. In 2025, it was one casual cruelty among many. But with this one, the targets fought back.

Maine and Governor Mills stood their ground for the rule of law, and filed a lawsuit.

In April 2025, a federal judge granted a restraining order to halt the illegal funding freeze. Then, in May 2025, the news came that the Trump Administration’s Department of Education had settled in court — likely after it got through to them that they had no case. The terms of the settlement were reportedly that “the agency agreed not to freeze, terminate or interfere with the state’s access to USDA funds…without going through the legally required process.”

She’s a fighter. She stood firm to defend the children of her state (plus basic legal and moral principles!) against egregious abuses of power. She gave hope that the rule of law still mattered, and that not every elected official in America had given up on that.

And she won. The children of Maine will be fed, without bending the knee to a disgusting autocrat-aping bully.

The thing is, Janet Mills is an actual leader leader, not a social media-driven performer-leader. The kind of person you could envision trusting with your life if it came down to it. Maine is a small state, and candidates meet a lot of voters in person. Even in the crazy meme-driven attention economy of 2020s America, Mainers see that in her.

There are several other strong Democratic candidates in Maine that could possibly run for and win for this Senate seat in 2026. Off the top of my head, incumbent Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine’s 1st Congressional District springs to mind (check out my interview with her!) and of course lesser-known political talent might arise and meet the moment. But there’s no other candidate with the demonstrated statewide victory record, broad-based public appeal, impeccable record of state-level governance, county-by-county backlist of kitchen-table and town-economy level wins for working families, universal name recognition, spine of steel1, and record of winning in court against America’s weak-willed wannabe dictator.

In this political moment, factional differences on points of policy are comparatively unimportant — trivial, even. What matters right now is winning against the bad guys. Policy issues can be settled and lobbied for after that. We need to laser-focus on nominating the candidates best positioned to win.

If any Democrats really want a shot at beating Susan Collins in 2026, Janet Mills is their best bet.

If any Americans want to maximize the odds of reestablishing an independent legislative branch to bring some decency and sanity back to this country’s governance, Janet Mills is their best bet, too.

The state of Maine, and the future of democratic governance in the American Republic, need Janet Mills to run for U.S. Senate in 2026.

I have faith that she won’t back down from this challenge.

You may have seen many of the graphs and news items in my previous newsletters. In this article, I’m putting them together to help provide context for the large number of folks who are interested in AI but aren’t yet really aware of the concurrent clean energy revolution, so I’m framing these news items slightly differently here with an eye to a primarily AI-interested audience.

AI Supremacy

The Future of AI and Energy

Good Morning…

Read more

a year ago · 70 likes · 2 comments · Michael Spencer and Sam Matey

Now, I’m republishing it to my own Substack! Here it is.

AI’s rise is happening in a context where the key global energy trend is the Dawn of the Solar Age

AI is an exciting and transformative technology with potential utility across multitudes of domains, and its impact on human civilization is probably only just beginning. In this context, it’s easy and understandable to assume that for any given field, call it Field X, “AI’s impact on Field X” is going to be the most important thing going on in Field X. A lot of articles discussing AI’s potential impact on energy demand and climate policy seem to carry this implicit assumption.

However when you look at the real-world data, AI’s energy demand surge is relatively tiny compared to the ongoing and exponentially accelerating transformation of humanity’s energy system due to cheap clean electricity generation. This is one of the most important events of the 21st century — and may someday be seen as even more important than AI — but it’s received relatively little coverage due to its comparatively workaday and undramatic nature.

Solar power is now the cheapest electricity source in history, and it’s growing exponentially — kicking off what is already by far the fastest energy build-out in history. Here’s a chart from the recent The Economist special “Sun Machines” that shows just how much solar has massively outperformed essentially every everyone’s expectations.

It’s just plain incredible how far we’ve come in the last few decades. Key “price crossover” points being passed in the last few years have kicked the Solar Age into high gear, and these trends show no sign of stopping.

Markets, governments, and homeowners the world over are responding to the economics incentives of the emerging Solar Age. In a world where a cheap zero-emissions no-moving-parts energy-generation technology that you can order by the truckload is readily available, you’d expect to see more and more of it being built around the world. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Here’s another chart from the International Energy Agency, showing how their solar forecasts have consistently been revised upwards as solar continues to outperform expectations.

Note that as of 2023, human civilization had already built more solar than what the 2015-era IEA expected would be built by 2050. Think about that for a moment! Ten years ago, some of the top energy experts on the planet thought we’d have a certain amount of solar power generating capacity by 2050, and we got it by 2023.

Most of the new electricity-generating capacity being built everywhere on Earth is now renewable energy — a truly titanic shift that occurred in a few short years while the world was, by and large, distracted by other matters. Intermittency, the much-discussed bugbear of renewable energy sources (“what about when the sun isn’t shining?”) has quietly become a solved problem over the same timescale as grid-scale battery technologies began their own exponential surge. We will simply store excess clean energy in ever-more-capacious batteries and discharge it to the grid as needed, with other solutions like pumped hydro energy storage, long-distance transmission lines, and clean baseload power sources chiming in to help.

Markets like the European Union, where renewable energy has been pursued in earnest since the oil crisis of the 1970s, are leading indicators proving that a modern developed-society standard of living can rapidly transition to clean energy as a primary electricity source.

Notably, renewable energy is providing a strong majority of new demand growth and cutting into incumbent fossil fuels’ market share in both America and China, which at the time of writing are generally considered the world-leading nations in AI research.

Chinese solar and wind deployment has been breaking all records for years in a row (driving much of the global cleantech growth), and it’s still accelerating. As one headline put it, “China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week.” China met its renewables installation target for 2030 by the end of July 2024, six and a half years early.

All this clean energy growth has pushed coal down to providing a record-low 53% of China’s electricity in May 2024, down from 60% in May 2023. Solar and wind together provided a record-high 23% of China’s electricity in May 2024, up from 7% in May 2016.

And in America as worldwide, the overwhelming majority of all new electricity-generating capacity being built these days is clean energy, led by solar and batteries.

Solar and batteries together, the exponentially growing workhorses of the renewables revolution, accounted for a whopping 83% of new electricity-generating capacity coming online in America in 2024. Wind accounts for another 10%. Natural gas, the only fossil fuel on the list (the U.S. hasn’t built any new coal plants since 2013), accounts for just 4%. Nuclear, just 2%.

This is a U.S. EIA map of new grid-scale power from all sources, set to come online across America from June 2024 through May 2025. It’s a sea of yellow solar farm icons and green wind farm icons, with a few scattered burnt-orange natural gas icons and zero coal icons.

The underlying economics are so strong that solar energy, at the time of writing, is forecast to continue meeting almost all U.S. demand growth despite strong political headwinds.

Note that this U.S. Energy Information Administration forecast was released in late January 2025, during the second Trump Administration, and well after the 2024 election.

It’s worth discussing at this point that there’s a lot of excitement around new nuclear reactor designs and their potential use as a power source for AI, especially in the U.S. energy market. Nuclear is indeed technologically fascinating, and relative to fossil fuels is a very clean and safe energy source. It would likely have been much better for the world if we had built thousands more nuclear fission reactors in the 1960s and 70s instead of succumbing to misguided activist pressure and building more coal plants. New nuclear reactor designs are an interesting research area that might prove useful at scale someday. But in context, nuclear gets a wildly disproportionate amount of hype given that it’s simply not economically competitive at scale anymore in the modern Solar Age. Nuclear provided just 2% of new U.S. electricity-generating capacity in 2024, and the EIA doesn’t expect that to change much. China, the country building the most nuclear power plants of any nation in the world, is building far more solar and wind. The renowned Astral Codex Ten blog has an excellent summary of the solar vs. nuclear debate in the “Progress Studies” field — check it out in full.

AI may be simultaneously a major factor in the global energy space in absolute terms (lots of new power demand) and a relatively small factor in relative terms (i.e. compared to everything else going on), because human civilization’s energy use is already undergoing unprecedented and accelerating transformations. We currently have a clean, safe, reliable energy source that’s growing exponentially and transforming the world, and it’s solar backed up by batteries. We’re already seeing skyrocketing electricity demand growth at both local and global scales, and it’s due to mass electrification of sectors like transport and heating through new technologies like EV and heat pumps, coupled with rising electricity access in Asia and Africa. AI is a huge, world-changing story, but it’s also rising in the context of another simultaneous huge, world-changing story — the clean energy revolution.

AI will likely use less energy than expected

The International Energy Agency expects the AI-driven data centers boom to drive only 3% of electricity demand growth to 2030 worldwide. Note that that is the *worldwide* number: in particularly data center-heavy areas like northern Virginia, that percentage will likely be much higher and could have profound local impacts.

Renowned data scientist Dr. Hannah Ritchie of Oxford and Our World in Data recently wrote a great Substack commentary about these IEA numbers, and created a publicly available chart of the IEA forecast visualizing how data centers fit in with other fast-growing sources of electricity demand.

Sustainability by numbers

What’s the impact of artificial intelligence on energy demand?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been, by far, the most-requested topic over the last year…

Read more

a year ago · 190 likes · 38 comments · Hannah Ritchie

Furthermore, there are reasons to think that even the IEA’s relatively low forecast may be an overestimate. Leading energy analyst Michael Thomas (writer of Distilled on Substack) has an excellent article summarizing the structural reasons why AI energy use estimates may overshoot, and how this situation has very similar dynamics to the Internet boom of the 1990s — which was also widely believed to be on the verge of sending America’s energy needs sky-high, but ended up having relatively little effect. (Dr. Ritchie’s article also discusses this parallel, as well as emphasizing that a small global impact on energy demand can also mean a large local impact).

Distilled

The Hidden Risks of Overestimating AI's Power Needs

Over the last year, one story has dominated the news cycle in the world of climate and energy: AI and its insatiable hunger for electricity. Every week in 2024, it seemed like there was a new eye-popping forecast…

Read more

a year ago · 32 likes · 6 comments · Michael Thomas

We’re already seeing very similar dynamics with AI. China’s DeepSeek recently shocked the world with its highly energy-efficient yet high-performing LLM, sending U.S. energy stocks tumbling. It’s likely just a matter of time before some American innovator develops a similarly energy-efficient, high-performing AI model, completely changing the underlying assumptions of all current projections of AI energy use in America.

AI can help spur clean energy build-outs

In addition to efficiency progress, data center growth is already helping drive corporate demand for clean energy build-outs and new innovations. Impacts may be counterintuitive. Trade media source UtilityDive recently a good overview article entitled “The AI paradox: Energy-hungry technology could speed clean energy transition.” Here are just a few recent examples (there are many, many more!) of U.S. AI projects directly stimulating clean energy build-outs by providing a high-paying new demand source:

• The titanic new Stargate AI partnership has data centers on the way, and they’re set to be located in clean energy-rich Texas. Unsurprisingly, reports are already coming in that they plan to use solar and batteries, by far the cheapest option, as a power supply. The contradiction between President Trump’s support of Stargate and opposition to solar is striking.

• The Virginia state government is working to transform former coal mining land into a clean energy-powered “Data Center Ridge,” with bipartisan support from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin.

• A portfolio of solar farms in Oklahoma with a combined generation capacity of 724 megawatts are in part financially sustained by providing power to Google data centers, while providing substantial benefits to local communities as well.

• A developer in Utah recently quadrupled the size of their battery storage project to help meet demands from data centers and AI, providing extra capacity to help meet EV demand at the same time.

• In December 2024, Google announced a new partnership set to spend $20 billion to build “gigawatts” of new clean energy and storage colocated with data centers.

• Major Midwestern utility Xcel Energy told Canary Media that they plan to “attract 1.3 gigawatts worth of data centers to its territory by 2032” while still meeting the Minnesota state requirement for 100% clean electricity by 2040.

  

• Pioneering startup Fervo Energy connected “Project Red,” the world’s first commercial-scale enhanced geothermal system, to the grid in Nevada in 2023 — to sell its power to nearby Google data centers. Since then, the Bureau of Land Management has already approved Fervo’s much bigger Cape Geothermal Power Project in Beaver County, Utah, with the potential to generate up to 2 GW (2,000 MW), and the company reports that its new wells are already achieving record-breaking flow rates! Enhanced geothermal uses much of the same technology and expertise as fracking, and if it continues to scale up could become a perfect contributor of clean baseload power tailor-made for the American economy. It’s now at commercial scale and growing fast. Data center demand directly helped make that happen.

But even this doesn’t capture the full story of AI’s potential synergies with the ongoing clean energy revolution.

AI consumes energy, but can also help produce it.

It’s fairly intuitive how AI growth can help spur energy innovation indirectly, by providing a new demand source that will pay large sums for reliable baseload power. But several recent examples show that it can also contribute to energy innovation very directly, with AI itself being used to find new resources and technologies to produce, store, and transmit energy. Here are just a few examples from a fast-growing list:

• A Bay Area startup called KoBold Metals is using AI analysis of the vast existing stockpile of research about Earth’s crust to discover overlooked deposits of critical battery minerals like lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel. They’ve already found new lithium deposits in South Korea, Australia, Namibia, Quebec and Nevada, but their crown jewel so far is the discovery of one gigantic “motherlode” of copper in Zambia. KoBold is beginning their first mine at that site in Zambia, and the lode their AI found could soon supply a major chunk of U.S. demand thanks to the Lobito Corridor project.

• AI can enhance the efficiency of solar farms in a multitude of ways. Machine learning-enabled predictive maintenance can improve productivity by up to 25%, which synergizes nicely with the fast-growing sector of AI-enabled solar farm inspector drone fleets, while AI-enabled trading can find the ideal timing to maximize the market value of releasing electricity from battery storage. The World Economic Forum recently published an overview article.

• Similar dynamics mean that AI can help improve the efficiency of the entire grid — and, as Bloomberg reports, encourage investment in new grid-related tech in general. The U.S. government has funded several “smart grid” research projects (though their political future may be in doubt) and early potential applications include predicting EV charging times, forecasting the risk of blackouts from extreme weather events, and the already-available Gridshare software providing customized household-scale energy use data.

• The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is developing an extraordinary automation of the entire process of scientific and technological discovery, with their A-Lab already capable of creating novel useful materials 24-7 with no humans in the loop. At the A-Lab, an AI is directing robots to conduct experiments trying to identify new high-functioning materials for battery electrodes, superconductors, and more. This is still very much early days, with critiques identifying early A-Lab errors already entering scientific literature, but the long-term potential is incredible. Here’s a description of how the autonomous “A-Lab” (pictured) works.

  “The AI starts by coming up with a plausible way to synthesize a material, using its understanding of chemistry. It guides robotic arms to select among nearly 200 different powdery starting materials, containing elements such as lithium, nickel, copper, iron, and manganese. After mixing the precursors, another robot parcels out the mix into a set of crucibles, which are loaded into furnaces where they can be mixed with gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. The AI then determines how long to bake the different mixes, the temperatures, drying times, and so on.

  After the baking, a gumball-like dispenser adds a ball bearing to each crucible and shakes it to grind the new substance into a fine powder that’s loaded onto a slide. A robot arm then grabs each sample and slides it into an x-ray machine or other equipment for analysis. Results are fed back into the Materials Project database of materials structures and properties, and if the outcome isn’t what was predicted, the AI setup iterates the reaction conditions and starts anew.”

  -Science magazine

• And it’s starting to look like the A-Lab was just the beginning, like the Enigma code-breakers and ENIAC heralding the age of personal computers. On January 16, 2025, Microsoft unveiled MatterGen, a pioneering attempt to scale up generative AI for material science discovery and synthesis. They claim that it presents an entirely new state-of-the-art paradigm, explicitly addressing some of the A-Lab issues (like computational disorder) and already having generated the structure of a novel material (TaCr2O6) that was then successfully synthesized in a lab. Microsoft has already released the MatterGen source code and training data to the public under an MIT license.

Even in a highly implausible extreme bear case for AI, in which model capabilities top out at January 2025 levels and no new innovations are made, simply deploying and fine-tuning all the existing potential applications would yield substantial benefits for global clean energy development.

AI will help determine human civilization’s energy future

The future of the energy that powers AI data centers is going to be clean and green, because the future of the energy that powers all of human civilization is eventually going to be clean and green.

But the big questions in serious energy policy today aren’t really about the civilization-wide direction of travel, but about which nations and industries will pull ahead or fall behind — and how that speeds up or slows down the progress of the entire world. Will the second Trump administration hobble American energy abundance, reindustrialization and AI innovation by kneecapping the clean energy sectors that already provide the vast majority of the nation’s new electricity-generating capacity? Will China become a world-dominating “electro-state” if Western nations’ efforts to build up domestic solar, battery, and EV manufacturing efforts are hijacked by culture war polarization? Will India be able to stand up its own cleantech manufacturing industries while providing abundant energy to its citizens? Will the industrial heartlands of Japan and Germany be hollowed out by their star automakers’ failure to compete in battery technology? Will less industrialized nations from South Africa to Pakistan be able to use the flood of Chinese-made solar panels to achieve a decentralized electrification despite weak central governments?

Cumulatively, will these trends net out to eventually reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to stabilize Earth’s atmosphere? Can we stay below 2°C of warming by the end of the century, or even get back down below 1.5°C? Will the Amazon Rainforest, Great Barrier Reef, and a stable West Antarctic Ice Sheet survive into the 2100s?

The AI field is gaining substantial economic and political influence, and there are many vectors by which it can help decide the answer to these questions. Strategic allocation of AI’s demand surge can help advance national industrialization in fast-growing cleantech instead of doubling down on the dying fossil fuel industry. Clever new uses of AI can help speed the already-accelerating cleantech revolution. As AI progresses, there will likely be many more connections that we haven’t even thought of yet. To paraphrase the apocryphal quote from Napoleonic France, attempts to pair AI development with fossil fuel use are worse than a climate “crime” — they are an economic and geopolitical “blunder.”

Every choice around clean energy policy matters for determining the future of a nation’s economy and security. Every fraction of a degree of warming avoided thanks to clean energy deployment matters immensely for protecting Earth’s communities and ecosystems. AI is an industry of the future, and has an unprecedented opportunity — and responsibility — to help make that future bright.

And here’s the link to the accompanying StoryMap presentation deck: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4f0ed22ac65b478ba467bbcff6e867e4.

My awesome collaborators at Climate Action Now (with whom I write the Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope newsletter in addition to my The Weekly Anthropocene) are organizing a free “Climate Hope Exists” online event set for Wednesday, January 15, 2025! It’s at 7:00 PM U.S. Eastern Time (that’s Boston/New York time).

I’ll be speaking about a lot of the topics I write about in this newsletter, including “unprecedented world-changing growth in solar and battery technology deployment, an international surge in rewilding, an imminent peak in global carbon emissions, and rapid innovations to sustain agriculture.”

If this sounds interesting, you can register (again, 100% for free!) on Eventbrite. Here’s the link!

Register for this FREE event!

The red pin in the Google Maps screenshot above marks the location of Germa, an archaeological site in the Wadi al-Ajal area of the remote Fezzan region of Libya. Two thousand years ago, it was known as Garama, and was the capital city of the great civilization of the Garamantes. Once thought to be mere “desert barbarians” annoying Roman colonies in North Africa, recent evidence from digs at Germa and other sites has shown that the Garamantes were a complex, populous, urbanized state, with large-scale agriculture, continent-spanning trade networks, and extensive public works projects. The Garamantian civilization lasted over one thousand years, from around 900 BCE to about 600-700 CE. At its height, it was a contemporary and local rival of the Roman Empire, sometimes trading with Rome and sometimes fighting wars against their North African provinces.

Astute readers may note that this doesn’t make a lick of sense. Germa is right in the middle of the Sahara Desert, miles from anything that could reasonably be described as “arable land”. If you zoom in on Google Maps, the site today is surrounded by the browns and beiges of sand dunes and rock, with barely a stick of greenery to be found.

True, the Sahara was once much wetter and more hospitable during the “African humid period” about 6,000-5,000 years ago, but this is well before our period of interest: it was well and truly the sandy, rocky waste we know and love by the time the Garamantes were at their height. And ancient civilizations are supposed to form around rivers and fertile river valleys, right? Like Egypt and the Nile, Mesopotamia around the Tigris and Euphrates, India around the Indus and Ganges, China around the Yangtze and Huang He, pre-imperial Rome around the Tiber, or Cahokia around the Mississippi. Or at least a fertile valley with lots of interconnected lakes, like the Valley of Mexico which supported the rise of Teotihuacan and the Mexica, or some really productive wetlands, like the marshes around Angkor or the ancient Amazonian cities in the Xingu River Basin and the Llanos de Moxos? Or maybe even dependent on the sea, like possibly the Norte Chico culture of Peru…but in any case, with water. How could the Garamantes have sustained any kind of large human population in the middle of the Sahara?

The Garamantes managed to build a civilization in the middle of the desert, in a climate with a few centimeters of rain a year (“frequently with none whatever for several years at a stretch”), because they were mining fossil water. This sounds like a needlessly fancy way of saying “using groundwater,” but it’s an important conceptual difference, because groundwater in most places gets regularly replenished by precipitation percolating through the soil. The Garamantes were using groundwater that had been built up during the African Humid Period and wasn’t being meaningfully replenished. They distributed the water through the landscape with a vast network of foggara irrigation canals. Archaeologists have found over 550 foggara canals in the Wadi al-Ajal region alone: there may well have been many, many more.

Now “irrigation canals” is a very imprecise term, so it’s important to clarify here that whatever you’re imagining the foggaras may have been, you probably need to be thinking bigger. These weren’t just “ditches a farming village dug,” but epic monumental construction projects. The foggara canals were underground (presumably because surface canals would have lost vast amounts of water to evaporation), and could be up to 50 meters deep, with most of them stretching for kilometers, gradually becoming more shallow as they went on, from aquifers deep below rock to irrigating surface farm plots. The foggaras even had “regularly spaced vertical shafts” for maintenance. Given the difficulty of doing this in the Sahara (with hand tools! starting before 500 BCE!), this arguably deserves to be remembered as an ancient engineering feat up there with the Pyramids or the Nazca Lines.

It’s estimated that the 550 known foggara canals required at least 72,000 man-years of labor to build, and considerably more to maintain. That’s the equivalent of 7,200 men working exclusively on this for ten years, or 720 men for 100 years, or (although this would be pretty unlikely) 72 men for 1,000 years. And someone had to have been feeding those workers, and making their tools and clothes, and bringing them water, and generally running the kind of civilization that could support this kind of project.

And we see that the Garamantes were indeed an impressive civilization, with substantial material wealth. The Garamantes seem to have just had a lot of stuff, with crops and goods from across Africa and Eurasia finding their way to cities in the middle of the Sahara. After reviewing some of the archaeological literature, here’s a partial list1 of some of the stuff we know was there in Gerama and some of the over 1,000 Garamantian cities2, forts, villages, and other sites found in the region.

• Sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs, and eventually horses, camels, and chickens as well.

• Eurasian crops like wheat, barley, date palms, and grapes. (Grapes! In the middle of the Sahara!)

• Later on, the introduction of crops from Sub-Saharan Africa, like pearl millet, sorghum and cotton

• Mausolea in the Roman transition and mastaba tombs in the Egyptian tradition

• Interesting “mini-pyramid” tombs that seem uniquely Garamantian.

• A Roman-style bath3

• A stone-columned temple, possibly to the god Ammon, a deity originally from Egypt but widely popular in many other civilizations.

• Fine ceramics, fine glassware, and amphorae of wine and olive oil, almost certainly trade goods from the Roman Empire.

• A range of items that were likely trade goods from sub-Saharan Africa, including hippo ivory, ebony beads, and cowrie shells

• “Abundant evidence for craft activity…including weaving, metal-working and ostrich eggshell bead production.”

• Human skeletons that seem to resemble those of modern day Berbers/north Africans, human skeletons that seem to resemble those of modern day sub-Saharan Africans, and human skeletons with a mixture of traits from both ethnic groups. (Yes, it seems creepy to this writer too to be classifying ancient humans into ethnic groups by their skeletons, like something out of the 19th century. But that’s what the archaeological literature on the Garamantes says). We don’t know what these peoples’ lives or social status were like, but they seem to have been integrated with Garamantian society. One skeleton in particular, of a young sub-Saharan African woman wearing a lip plug similar to those still used by many African tribes, was buried in a Garamantian cemetery, seeming to indicate some degree of diversity and multiculturalism in the society.

• A study analyzing Garamantian skeletons’ bone rigidity, sexual dimorphism, and other factors found that “the Garamantes did not appear systematically more robust than other North African populations occupying less harsh environments, indicating that life in the Sahara did not require particularly strenuous daily activities.” This may have been a civilization with something akin to a semi-leisured “middle class” like those of classical Greece or Rome, or at least well-organized enough that daily life wasn’t a constant onslaught of punishing manual labor.

However, the Garamantes weren’t some anachronistically progressive utopia: the famed Histories of Herodotus4 describe them as hunting “Ethiopians” from “four-horse chariots,” possibly for slave-raiding or just for sport. Their desert realm was very possibly a major center for slave trading in addition to goods trading, and perhaps a major conduit selling African slaves to the Roman Empire. It’s entirely possible that the workers building their irrigation canals were slaves as well. We don’t really know for certain.

And then, sometime before North Africa became Muslim in the 600s-700s, the Garamantes were just…gone. There’s no known dramatic event marking the Fall of The Garamantes, no huge invasion or lost war or volcanic eruption: the civilization and their amazing foggara system seem to have just faded out of existence. As one book summarizes, the sequence of events is unclear, but it seems linked to declining access to the vital fossil water.

“The foggara-fed landscape…evidently declined in the second half of the first millennium, although chronological precision is poor, heavily dependent as it is on dating from imported Roman/Byzantine wares, which had become fewer by this period and ceased nearly completely by the seventh century…The foggara-fed landscape of settlement and irrigation was replaced by a system of gardens based around wells, which could support a much smaller population and produce far less in the way of surplus; there are indications that this process began, and may have been completed, before the first Arab incursion into the region in 643…

“The water table [in the region] has indeed been dropping slowly and steadily for thousands of years. This process may have been exacerbated at times by climatic change and human overexploitation, but it may be that the Garamantes were simply able to exploit it during a window of a few centuries before the water table dropped beyond the reach of the available technologies. We can trace this process at work through the manifold efforts to prolong the life of the foggaras by works to deepen them and augment their flow…”5

So what can we learn from the Garamantes today?

On one level, their story can be read as a classic 1970s-style environmental parable: they were dependent on a non-renewable resource (fossil water), they (may have) used it all up, or perhaps were just at the mercy of climactic shifts, and they eventually collapsed.

Even if this is true, though, it fundamentally ignores the timescale, and the magnitude of the Garamantes’ success. This writer feels like running an urbanized agriculture-dependent society based entirely on artificial irrigation in the middle of the Sahara Desert for over a thousand years should officially earn a civilization the Good At Water Management merit badge. The circumstances of the fall of the Garamantes are so uncertain that we can’t really make a definitive statement about why it happened. “This civilization fell because of X, therefore we should stop doing X” is a really tempting narrative structure that is wildly overused6, often based on contradictory or unclear evidence.

Perhaps paradoxically, learning more about the Garamantes makes this writer feel a lot better about modern-day water use issues. There’s a lot of well-founded concern about managing Earth’s fresh water supplies in the age of climate change and a growing technological human civilization, especially in dry, heavily populated landscapes like the Nile and Colorado river valleys. The story of the Garamantes doesn’t take anything away from how serious that is, but it might perhaps inspire a little more faith in humans’ abilities to solve complex water-management problems.

Modern humans are the same species as the folks that made the desert bloom for a millennium using only Iron Age technology. And today, we have satellite imagery and drip-feed irrigation and mechanical excavators (now available fully electric!) and drought-tolerant genetically modified crops. We have a lot more tools to respond to water scarcity.

And, paradoxically because modern technological civilization’s water demands are so much greater than those of Iron Age agriculturalists, there’s a lot of water use cuts we can make if we have to without getting to the point of “people don’t have enough to drink.” A lot of fat to trim, so to speak. The Garamantes weren’t using their precious fossil water for golf courses in deserts or legions of suburban lawn sprinklers. This writer believes that we can, for example, keep the American West livable even as it enters a “megadrought”—as long as by “livable” you mean, “people get enough to drink and bathe,” not “anyone can do whatever the heck they want with as much water as they want” or “we keep providing subsidies to irrigation-dependent crops woefully unsuited to desert environments7.”

Plus, the accelerating global surge in cheap clean electrons means that the 21st century might see widespread deployment of desalination to provide abundant water to drought-stricken areas. There’s already at least one detailed proposal for mass solar-powered desalination in the U.S. Southwest.

Ultimately, an appropriate lesson we can draw from the Garamantes might be one of hope. Compared to “keep a preindustrial civilization alive and relatively prosperous for centuries in the middle of the Sahara,” the complex water-management tasks of the Anthropocene start to look…well, not easy, but certainly more doable. Also, lost ancient civilizations are just inherently pretty interesting! This writer hopes you enjoyed reading about this one.

I’ve recently donated $2,024, a nontrivial portion of my current net worth, to a selection of Democratic Party candidates in 2024. I’m writing about it to encourage others1 to make their own contributions, if they can. Here’s where my donations went, and why.

Win the Presidency

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is incredibly close. Due to the electoral college system, it will almost certainly be decided by voters in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If you live in one of these critical seven “toss-up” states, your vote this year is extraordinarily, historically important. From there, or anywhere in the U.S., you can check your voter registration, see what will be on your ballot, register to vote, and get election reminders through Vote.org.

VOTE.ORG

And here’s an in-depth series of articles explaining the probable consequences if the Democrats lose to their opponent, in arenas from civil rights to foreign policy.

IF WE LOSE

Thus, my first donation is:

Kamala Harris for President of the United States - $1,000

You, the reader, have likely already formed a detailed opinion about Kamala Harris. But there’s one more story that really deserves some more attention, and that particularly helped inspire me to give that $1,0002.

In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris was a major force behind the passage of the landmark Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which funded a mass cleanup of toxic lead pipes, electrification infrastructure, drought relief, and much more. She led over 150 calls and meetings with lawmakers to get the BIL passed. And she was personally key to including one amazing new program that she’d been working on for a while.

In 2019, Senator Kamala Harris had introduced the Clean School Bus Act, calling for federal grants to replace school buses with cleaner electric school buses. It didn’t pass then, but as Vice President, that act’s provisions were successfully included in the BIL establishing the $5 billion EPA Clean School Bus Program. Since then, the EPA has awarded $3 billion from that program to fund approximately 8,500 clean school buses at 1,000 U.S. schools.

In two years, Kamala Harris successfully moved electric school buses from a words-on-a-page policy proposal to a wheels-on-the-ground transformative nationwide investment, helping a generation of American kids breathe easier as they ride to school on non-polluting transportation. If you needed another reason to vote for her, there it is. More American voters should know about this story.

The Kamala Harris Campaign Website

Flip the House of Representatives - $700

The House of Representatives race is incredibly close right now. As of September 5, the House has 220 Republicans, 211 Democrats, and 4 vacant seats, with 218 seats the threshold for a majority.

Winning just a single-digit number of Republican-held seats could flip the chamber to Democratic control, dramatically increasing the potential for positive legislation in the event of a Harris victory or dramatically reducing the potential for harmful legislation in the event of a Harris loss.

Here’s the nonpartisan Cook Political Report summary on competitive House races.

I eventually decided to give $100 each to 7 House candidates, two incumbents running to hold their seats, one running to replace a retiring Democrat, and four running to replace incumbent Republicans. I chose to give to House races in states that are also highly competitive at the presidential level (Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona), or the Senate level (Sherrod Brown’s race in Ohio) to maximize my impact.

For my House and Senate donations, click on the candidate photos to go to their websites.

Rep. Susan Wild for Pennsylvania-07 - $100

Congresswoman Susan Wild is a strong Democratic incumbent in a very close district in what might be the tipping-point state for the entire election. Cook ranks this seat as “Toss Up.”

Rep. Emilia Sykes for Ohio-13 - $100

Congresswoman Emilia Sykes is running for re-election in a close district. She’s known for her leadership on environmental and cleantech manufacturing issues. Cook ranks this seat as “Toss Up.”

Kristen McDonald Rivet for Michigan-08 - $100

Ms. Kristen McDonald Rivet is running to hold a close Democratic seat as Rep. Dan Kildee is retiring. Cook ranks this seat as “Toss Up.”

Rebecca Cooke for Wisconsin-03 - $100

Ms. Rebecca Cooke has a chance at replacing a particularly extremist Republican. Cook ranks this seat as “Lean Republican,” but it’s still competitive.

Amish Shah for Arizona-01 - $100

Dr. Amish Shah is running to replace an incumbent Republican. Cook ranks this seat as “Toss Up.”

Kirsten Engel for Arizona-06 - $100

Ms. Kirsten Engel is a climate champion taking on a close Republican-held seat. Cook ranks this seat as “Toss Up.”

Janelle Stelson for Pennsylvania-10 - $100

Ms. Janelle Stelson is taking on Republican Rep. Scott Perry, one of the absolute worst. Cook ranks this seat as “Lean Republican,” but it’s still competitive.

Hold the Senate - $300

The Democrats currently hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate, but are widely viewed as facing a historically difficult Senate election map this year, with Senator Manchin’s impending retirement essentially ensuring a loss of at least one seat and several other Democratic Senators representating Republican-leaning states up for re-election. Every race matters very much here; even if holding the majority this year will be difficult, each seat saved makes it easier to win a new Senate majority in 2026.

Sen. Jon Tester for Montana - $100

Senator Jon Tester is probably the most at-risk Senate Democrat, running for re-election in a very close race in a Republican-leaning state. Without Senator Tester’s vote, we wouldn’t have the Inflation Reduction Act today - let’s keep him in the Senate if we can!

Sen. Sherrod Brown for Ohio - $50

Senator Sherrod Brown is likely the second-most at-risk Senate Democrat, likewise running for re-election in a close race in a Republican-leaning state.

Elissa Slotkin for Michigan - $50

Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, an emerging leader among the “National Security Democrats” friend group, is running to become Michigan’s next Senator.

Dan Osborn for Nebraska- $50

This one is by far the most risky, “out-there” and unlikely of my political donation choices, as Nebraska is widely considered a safely Republican state.

However, a series of recent polls have shown Dan Osborn in a shockingly close race against the incumbent Republican Senator (perhaps in part because he’s running as an independent with a strong personal brand and no Democrat in the race) and this might just be a chance to shake up the Senate math. High-risk, high-reward.

Ruben Gallego for Arizona - $25

Tammy Baldwin for Wisconsin- $25

I then donated $25 each to incumbent U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and candidate Ruben Gallego of Arizona. Both are widely popular and are broadly expected to win their races even their states remain a “toss-up” at the presidential level, so boosting their campaigns might have a “trickle-up” voter engagement effect.

My Home State of Maine.

That left me with $24 to make up the symbolic $2,024 in donations for the 2024 elections. I decided to give $6 each to four legislative races that directly represent me in my home state of Maine. All four are “safe seats” where my preferred candidate is highly likely to win in November, but I appreciate the work these folks are doing and I figured I’d be happy to just buy one of their campaigners a breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts or something.

U.S. Senator Angus King for Maine - $6

U.S. Representative Chellie Pingree for Maine - $6

I then found that the Democratic candidates for my State Senator and State Representative races opted for a Maine Clean Elections financing model which capped donations at $5 each.

My State Senator - $5

My State Representative Candidate - $5

That left me with an extra $2 to make up the symbolic $2,024, so I donated that last little bit to Harris as well.

Kamala Harris (again) - $2

So that’s how and why I donated $2,024 to the Democrats in 2024!

I hope that this encourages some of my U.S. readers to vote for and donate to the Democrats as well. Forgive the overtly political digression from usual topics; this election is rather on my mind at the moment.

This article is a brief introduction to the life and work of Alexander von Humboldt, a really cool historical figure that more people should know about. Perhaps the most interesting point here is that two hundred years ago, an educated person in America or Europe would have been shocked that such an article was required. Humboldt was, in the first few decades of the 1800s, incredibly famous, widely known as the second most famous person in the world (after Napoleon), renowned worldwide a scientist-explorer-superhero at the cutting edge of fields from geography to geology to biology to physics. He essentially created the field that would come to be known as “ecology,” and popularized the Ancient Greek word “cosmos,” the title of his masterwork, to describe a unified scientific conception of the universe.

Thomas Jefferson called him “one of the greatest ornaments of the age.” Charles Darwin said “nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative.” Simón Bolívar called him the true “discoverer of the New World.” And Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German poet, said that spending a few days with Humboldt was so fascinating, it was like “having lived several years.”

More species and places are named after Alexander von Humboldt than anyone else in history. A partial list includes the Humboldt squid, Humboldt penguin, Humboldt's hog-nosed skunk, Humboldt’s sapphire hummingbird, Humboldt Current in the South Pacific, Humboldt Glacier in Greenland, Humboldt County in California, Humboldt Park in Chicago, Humboldt national parks, forests, or monuments in Cuba, Peru, and the United States, Humboldt Peak in Colorado, three different Humboldt mountain ranges (in New Zealand, Nevada, and Antarctica), the Humboldt River in Nevada, towns named Humboldt in eight US states and one Canadian province, universities named after Humboldt in four different countries, Mare Humboldtianum on the Moon and the mineral humboldtine. The U.S. state of Nevada was almost named the state of Humboldt at its constitutional convention in 1864.

On September 14th, 1869, the 100th anniversary of his birth, cities worldwide held Humboldt-themed celebrations, with U.S. President Ulysses Grant attending a 10,000-person Humboldt-fest in Pittsburgh concurrent with a 25,000-person Humboldt celebration in New York and an 80,000 person event in Berlin.

So who was Alexander von Humboldt, and why was he so awesome?

Almost all non-linked Humboldt facts in this article are from the excellent book “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf.

Alexander von Humboldt was born in 1769 to an aristocratic Prussian family that was rapidly rising through the ranks of the bellicose little Germanic kingdom’s society. The future king Friedrich Wilhelm II was his godfather and his father became chamberlain at the royal court before dying when Alexander was nine. His elder brother Wilhelm von Humboldt went on to become a major Prussian education reformer and diplomat as well as a linguist and philosopher. Alexander’s interests didn’t really have a place among the usual aristocratic pursuits: he received top-of-the-line tutors and a university education, but the “scientist” track didn’t really exist at the time (the word scientist was only coined in 1834), and he ended up studying a mix of subjects like foreign languages, mathematics, and geology, then working for the Prussian Ministry of Mines. Humboldt was constantly writing down observations of the natural world and conducting experiments (including with a tantalizing new discovery: electricity) in his spare time and stopping to meet and befriend luminaries like British botanist Sir Joseph Banks in 1790 and Goethe in 1794.

The event that really launched Humboldt’s career was his expedition to the Americas (mostly in different parts of what was then the Spanish Empire) in 1799-1804. A whole bunch of really interesting stuff happened on this trip (most of which would later be made public in Humboldt’s writings in following years) so instead of going for a comprehensive or even fully cohesive description, here’s a bulleted list:

• Shortly after his arrival in what is now Venezuela in July 1799, Humboldt visited the Guácharo Cave and wrote the first formal description of a species new to science: the nocturnal, echolocating, bat-like oilbird (Steatornis caripensis).

• In November 1799, when the city of Cumana (where he was staying) was struck by an earthquake, Humboldt timed the shocks and took notes about the ripples’ direction.

• From February to August 1800, Humboldt and French botanist Aimé Bonpland (his fellow traveler through much of this five-year period) embarked on a perilous inland expedition to investigate the Casiquiare river, a unique natural canal linking the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds. Humboldt made the first detailed map of the Casiquiaire, shedding light on a region previously unknown in Europe.

• In February 1800, at a stopover on Lake Valencia in Venezuela, Humboldt became the first known person to even speculate about human-caused climate change, writing “When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters…the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant.” In full, his writing discusses the now-common knowledge that forest vegetation helps hold soil together and prevent erosion and flooding. This was a new idea at the time. Later he would write “The wooded region acts in a threefold manner in diminishing the temperature; by cooling shade, by evaporation, and by radiation.” The idea that trees are good is so mainstream now that it hardly seems to have needed to be invented, but at the time this was brand-new thinking: most European thought prior to Humboldt describes forests as alien, dangerous “wastes.”

• In March 1800, Humboldt and Bonpland encountered electric eels and conducted an array of experiments on them for four hours (often involving shocking themselves).

• In spring, as their expedition reached the rainforest, Humboldt encountered and wrote about jaguars, river dolphins, and capybaras, and almost killed himself when he accidentally touched curare, later becoming the first European to describe how the local tribes prepared it as a poison for their blowguns. Humboldt and Bonpland also sustained themselves on wild-growing Brazil nuts, which Humboldt subsequently introduced to Europe.

• After returning to Cumana, in November 1800 Humboldt sent two parcels of seeds he had collected on his travels to Sir Joseph Banks for Kew Gardens.

• Sailing to Havana in December 1800, Humboldt became known as “the second discoverer of Cuba” due to the writing, surveying, and research he conducted on the island during a three-month stay. His later (1826) book about Cuba also included strong criticisms of slavery, so it was suppressed on the island that was its subject.

  

• From April 1801 to January 1802, Humboldt and his traveling companions crossed the Andes overland, an extremely remote and arduous trek at the time, traveling from Cartagena in modern Colombia to Quito in modern Ecuador.

• In Quito, he stayed for a while and used it as his base to “climb systematically every reachable volcano.” This was also where he met the handsome aristocrat Carlos de Montúfar, son of the provincial governor, who became his traveling companion and probable boyfriend until he left the Americas (contemporary accounts refer to him as Humboldt’s “Adonis.”) Montúfar would later become an influential figure in the Ecuadorean independence movement.

• In June 1802, he climbed Chimborazo, the Ecuadorean volcano then thought to be the world’s highest peak. Humboldt didn't make it to the summit, but did reach an altitude (measured with a barometer) of 19,413 feet. At the time, this was higher than any human had ever been: not even the early balloonists had reached this altitude, and this ascent made him a world-leading mountaineer.

  

• On the way down from Chimborazo, Humboldt began sketching his “Naturgemälde,” an annotated visual display of altitude, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure data alongside the different vegetation, animal life and ecosystem types present at different altitudes. This was a then-unprecedented way of displaying data visually, and is one candidate to be considered the world’s “first infographic.1”

• In fall 1802, sailing north from Lima to Guayaquil, Humboldt took measurements and noted the unusual coldness of ocean current below them. This early scientific record would later lead to it being named the Humboldt Current, a major nutrient-rich circulation supporting a highly productive marine ecosystem.

• Humboldt spent much of 1803 in Mexico, where he wrote an acclaimed report on silver mining, studied the recently rediscovered Aztec sun stone, and examined records of pre-Columbian civilizations in the colonial archives. This would lead to his later 1810 work examining the Dresden Codex, one of the very few remaining books written by the Maya civilization2, and publishing the first reproduction of its pages. Humboldt argued that the Maya were in fact a complex and scientifically advanced civilization (citing their profound astronomical knowledge), revolutionizing Europe’s understanding of American indigenous peoples.

• On June 2, 1804, Alexander von Humboldt met incumbent U.S. President Thomas Jefferson at the White House3, giving him nineteen pages of data-filled extracts from his notes, with a special focus on the then-disputed area between Mexico and the United States that now comprises much of Texas. (This was new and valuable info at the time, when a top priority of the US government was gathering more knowledge about the western reaches of the continent. The Louisiana Purchase had been concluded in 1803, and Lewis and Clark had just set out in May 1804). Jefferson held a Cabinet meeting a few weeks later to discuss how this intelligence should influence their ongoing border negotiations with Spain.

Humboldt basically spent the next 24 years of his life (1804-1829) writing dozens of widely acclaimed books about his travels and his scientific ideas (many of which are now available online for free), bouncing between the salons of Europe, and becoming the most well-known and widely respected “natural philosopher” of his time. There are many great stories about the stuff he got up to in this time period; here are just three.

• On September 16, 1804, just a few weeks after Humboldt returned to Paris, a brilliant young physicist, chemist, and balloonist named Joseph Gay-Lussac broke his Chimborazo record for “highest human being ever” by ascending to 23,000 feet to collect data on temperatures, pressures, and magnetic fields at that altitude. Within a few months, Gay-Lussac and Humboldt were giving lectures together around their experiences at high elevation. In 1805, they published a new fundamental chemistry discovery together: that water was composed of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. Within a few years, they were travelling around Europe together, living together, and sharing a bedroom4. The modern French and German governments award the Gay-Lussac–Humboldt Prize to German and French scientists (particularly those cooperating between the two countries) in their honor.

• When Humboldt was living in Paris in 1805, he became a close friend of Simón Bolívar, then a dissolute Spanish-American aristocrat from Caracas living it up in Europe to drown his grief over his wife’s death from yellow fever. After intensely discussing South America with Humboldt for months (in fact, just after running into Humboldt and Gay-Lussac on their own Italian trip) Bolívar made the famous “Oath of Monte Sacro” in Rome in August 1805 where he pledged himself to the cause of South American liberation, leading to his extraordinary political and military career in the South American revolutions of 1811-1830. There aren’t great records of everything Humboldt and Bolívar talked about, but it seems clear that Humboldt was a key figure in the life of El Libertador.

• Humboldt’s seven-volume Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the New Continent, during the years 1799-18045 became a massive, worldwide hit, quickly becoming a worldwide bestseller and inspiring a generation of naturalists. In particular, it directly inspired a twenty-two year old Charles Darwin in 1831 to undergo the most important journey of his life. Darwin wrote “My admiration of his [Humboldt’s] famous personal narrative (part of which I almost know by heart) determined me to travel in different countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.” Darwin was intensely inspired by the Personal narrative, and carried a copy with him in his tiny cabin on the Beagle, where he made the famous observations of Galapagos finches that would lead to his theory of evolution. (Some of his earliest evolution-related ideas are evident in margin notes scribbled on his copy of the Personal narrative). When Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle came out in 1839, Humboldt sent him a letter of praise and wrote an enthusiastic public review.

In 1829, Humboldt embarked on his second great expedition, though it was much shorter than his American odyssey. Under the patronage of Tsar Nicholas I’s Russian Empire, Humboldt led an expedition into the depths of Central Asia, from Berlin to the Altai Mountains and the Chinese-Mongolian border. Humboldt himself didn’t put as much focus on this expedition, only writing two shorter books about it, but there were still some very cool aspects.

• Recognizing similar geology in the Urals to diamond-bearing regions he had observed in the Andes, Humboldt insisted that there were diamonds in Russia. This was considered crazy at the time because no diamonds had ever been found outside the tropics. A member of his expedition named Count Polier split off from the group to inspect a Yekaterinburg mine on July 1st, 1829, and told the men to follow Humboldt’s recommendations on where to search for diamonds. They found the first diamond in Russia a few hours later. (This kind of thing was why major governments were paying Humboldt large amounts of money just to visit their territory; he’d already substantially improved Prussian mining conditions and practices as a local official in the 1790s and given valuable advice to Spain on their silver mining in Mexico in 1803-04).

• On September 14, 1829, Humboldt happened to celebrate his sixtieth birthday with the man who would become Lenin’s grandfather (which of course nobody knew at the time), a local apothecary in the little mining town of Miass.

• Humboldt criticized overuse of water resources for irrigation in Siberia (highly prescient, given the 20th century’s Aral Sea disaster) and in one of his books about the expedition listed deforestation, irrigation, and industrial facilities’ production of “great masses of steam and gas” as three major ways in which humanity was affecting the climate. Before even the greenhouse effect had been fully described (by Eunice Newton Foote among others), Humboldt had an inkling that fossil fuel emissions might, somehow, be causing global climate change.

• In late 1829 in St. Petersburg, having returned from the expedition, Humboldt gave a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences calling for a massive global scientific collaboration to discover more about Earth’s magnetic field, kicking off the establishment of a chain of global observatories and the years of coordinated study that became known as the “Magnetic Crusade.”

After his Russian expedition, Humboldt devoted years to a new great work: the five-volume Cosmos6: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. The book’s ambitions were immense: nothing less than a comprehensive description of all of humanity’s knowledge about the physical universe7. When published, starting with the first volume in 1845, it became another sensation, influencing scientists around the world and literary writers from Walt Whitman to Henry David Thoreau.

It took the rest of his life to write: Humboldt died in May 1859 at the age of eighty-nine, less than a month after sending the fifth volume of Cosmos to his publisher. He had revolutionized humanity’s understanding of nature and the physical world, changed the course of history, and seen and done things that no one ever had before him. His life was amazing, and more people should know about his adventures, his discoveries, his ideas, and his legacy. Now you do!

Subscribe now

The Permitting Reform Bill

On July 23, 2024, the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 was introduced in the United States Senate, as the proposed bill S.4753. It is, broadly speaking, a messy compromise between clean energy and fossil fuel interests that leaves no one completely satisfied. (Here’s an in-depth breakdown). If passed (and it has a decent chance of passing, with considerable bipartisan support1) it would make it easier to establish new oil leases and export American liquified natural gas (LNG). But it would also make it much easier and simpler to build vital new clean energy projects, from solar farms to transmission lines to enhanced geothermal, at the speed and scale we need to address the climate crisis.

The bill was introduced by Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming, two Senators known for their longtime connections to the fossil fuel industry. It’s understandable to distrust anything coming from them. But while the bill might have their names on it (sometimes it’s known as the “Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill”), it’s going to have much, much broader benefits. Several leading Democratic senators, like John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, are already strongly supporting it.

Citizens’ Climate Lobby is supporting it. The renewable energy industry is excited about it.

And nonpartisan think tanks and strategic analysts tend to agree that this bill would be a huge plus for America’s and the world’s fight against climate change.

However, much of the U.S. environmental and climate movement, of which I consider myself a part, has already decided to oppose the permitting bill, including many venerable organizations such as the LCV and the NRDC. Bill McKibben, who I interviewed in 2023, who I read regularly, and who I profoundly respect and admire, wrote an impassioned and eloquent call to action against this bill.

I think that opposing this permitting bill is profoundly mistaken. Not just a little bit mistaken. Extremely mistaken. Diametrically opposed to the long-term interests of the fight against climate change.

I’m worried that the climate movement is about to self-sabotage massively by taking down a bill that has the potential to be the biggest long-term emissions reducer since the Inflation Reduction Act. If the well-intentioned, good-hearted climate activists who oppose this permitting bill actually win this fight and defeat the bill, they’ll unnecessarily slow down the renewables revolution by years if not decades. Entire organizations and hundreds of personal careers intended to be dedicated to fighting climate change could end up having the net effect of worsening climate change if they successfully stop this bill.

One major argument against the permitting reform bill seems to be that enabling new fossil fuel development (especially LNG exports) is such a negative that no amount of clean energy progress could outweigh it. Here’s one way this has been articulated.

The thing is, rewiring America so it can use more renewable energy is a vital way to prevent the planet from overheating! We need to switch our entire civilizational stack to run on clean electrons, not just replacing all our old electricity but providing enough new electricity for previously combustion-powered sectors like transport (EVs), heating (heat pumps), and heavy industry (electric arc furnaces). Bill McKibben himself has some of the best writing on the true epic scope of this! Humanity and our biosphere have a critical interest in generating more clean electrons, and this permitting bill would mean that we could get a lot more.

And also: renewables are winning the future globally. Developing Asian economies are building gigawatt-scale solar farms by the dozen, and adding a little more American LNG to the market in addition to the Qatari and Russian LNG already available isn’t going to stop that.

I get where Bill McKibben’s coming from on this, and I understand that after decades of heroically standing up to an all-conquering fossil fuel industry, the knee-jerk response must be to oppose anything that allows any additional fossil fuel development. And that would have been a very good decision-making heuristic for a climate activist, for decades! But in the last couple years, the world has changed immensely. It’s changed very fast, and it’s hard to keep up with. But it’s changed in a good way, and a way that’s “flipped the sign” on the climate impact of things like this permitting bill.

If I had to simplify the climate action case for permitting reform to one sentence, it would be this: Permitting reform makes it a lot easier to build new stuff in general, and the overwhelming majority of the new stuff getting built in America these days is cleaner and better for the planet than the old stuff it’s replacing.

This is a U.S. EIA map of new grid-scale power from all sources, set to come online across America from June 2024 through May 2025. It’s a sea of yellow solar farm icons and green wind farm icons, with a few scattered burnt-orange natural gas icons and zero coal icons.

That’s the map of what’s planned to get built in the upcoming year. Here’s the pie chart of what actually got built in 2023.

The overwhelming majority of all new electricity-generating capacity being built these days, in America as worldwide, is renewable.

As I wrote in a recent newsletter: a new report has found that renewable energy accounted for an incredible 85% of all new electricity-generating capacity built in 2023. That’s 85% of all new electricity projects built everywhere on Earth during the most recent full year!

The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment 2024 report just came out found that global investment in clean energy is now nearly double the total global investment in fossil fuels. Out of over $3 trillion (i.e. 3,000 billion) in total global energy investment, around $2 trillion is going to clean technologies compared to just over $1 trillion for fossil fuels.

This is why I’m not too worried about the permitting bill resulting in Asian economies getting addicted to LNG. Clean energy is where it’s at, where the cost-benefit analyses and capital flows and political incentives and national strategic planning are heading worldwide. We are well and truly in an era of the green building boom, and this permitting bill could help it happen faster, gaining precious time on a rapidly warming planet.

And there are some very strong reasons to believe that making permitting easier for clean energy in America will bring immense benefits. As this chart from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory clarifies, the line to plug in to the U.S. power grid (aka the “interconnection queue” is getting longer and longer. It’s reached over two thousand five hundred gigawatts of capacity, which is a truly gigantic amount. This line is made up of proposed electricity-generating projects (overwhelmingly solar, wind, and battery projects these days) that some developer or utility or cooperative wants to build, but that don’t have the permits to move forward, and/or don’t have the permits to build the extra power lines that would connect their new project to the grid. Even the unprecedented wave of new clean energy projects we’re getting now pales in comparison to this gigantic backlog of even more new clean energy projects that someone already wants to build, but can’t. That’s why this permitting bill could make an extremely impactful difference.

Here’s a chart with that same 2023 interconnection queue data, broken down by power source and compared to all existing 2023 capacity. It’s one of those charts that seems like it can’t possibly be true, but it is. There is far more already-proposed solar and battery capacity waiting to be built than there is all electricity-generating capacity from all sources already built! That’s an extraordinary situation.

As it stands, most projects in this queue will likely never be built. But the permitting bill could change that.

The climate movement’s primary goal, for years, was to stop things. Bad things, like mountaintop-removal coal mining and tar sands pipelines! Things that needed to be stopped! But the world has changed. We need to build a lot of new stuff to stabilize our atmosphere and become a clean electron-powered civilization. Fortunately, people now want to build huge amounts of new clean energy stuff, because it’s cheap and it works and it’s constantly getting better! In the 2020s, sensible environmentalism and effective climate activism needs to have a primary goal of BUILDING things. Bill McKibben, again, wrote one of the best articles about this, an all-time classic entitled “Yes in Our Backyards: It’s time progressives like me learned to love the green building boom.”

This exact same permitting reform bill, if introduced in 1994 or 2004 or maybe even 2014, might have been on-net a disaster for the climate, as the giveaways to fossil fuels wouldn’t have been outweighed by the massive win of lightening the permitting brake on a hyper-accelerating renewables revolution. But everything’s different now. In 2024, making it easier to build renewables brings some truly extraordinary benefits. The economics are now so far in favor of clean energy that taking away some of the last permitting barriers will unleash an even more rapid buildout than the one we’re already getting, supercharging the fight against climate change to an extraordinary degree.

And that may sound like some bloodless technocratic thing. “More emissions-free electricity-generating capacity” may not stir hearts and minds. But it should. It means we’ll be able to shut down coal plants faster, preventing a multitude of ills from PM2.5 junk in the air to mercury-laden coal ash seeping into the groundwater. It means that we can transition to EVs faster, reducing local air pollution and saving thousands of kids from childhood asthma. (I was a kid with severe childhood asthma once, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy). It means it’ll be easier to set up a 100% solar and battery-powered steel mill or factory or data center, creating new innovations without belching more carbon into the atmosphere. It means that there’ll be less greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, and correspondingly a somewhat greater chance that the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon Rainforest and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet make it into the 2100s. It means a better, healthier, less air polluted, less climate-destabilized future.

The climate movement doesn’t fully realize what’s at stake with this permitting bill, at least not yet. It’s led by good, selfless, kind-hearted people who nonetheless are working off assumptions that have not adapted to the changed world of the 2020s clean energy boom. The amazing growth of renewable energy in the past few years almost feels too good to be true, too fragile to be real. We, and I include myself in this, are still to some extent cowering before the afterimage of the historic might of fossil fuels, still trying desperately to stop anything that could give them more power in the short term, not realizing that they’re long-term on the way out at this point and the most effective way to reduce emissions is to speed up the advent of their replacement. (The Rocky Mountain Institute has a great post and report on the exponential drivers of the renewables revolution if you’d like more data on this).

Renewable Revolution

The Cleantech Revolution

Please find attached our annual RMI presentation on the forces transforming the energy system. We focus on the three exponential drivers of renewables, electrification, and efficiency. We look at the remarkable exponential growth observed over the past decade; why rapid change is most likely to continue; the implications of this continuity; and what we …

Read more

2 years ago · 37 likes · 4 comments · Kingsmill Bond, Sam Butler-Sloss, and Daan Walter

Joe Manchin and Senate Republicans definitely don’t fully realize what’s at stake with this permitting bill. I suspect that they’re just hoping for a couple fossil fuel projects squeezed out of what they still deny is a dying giant, that they don’t know about or refuse to believe the clean energy growth statistics, and that as a result we have an amazing opportunity to supercharge the clean energy revolution by passing a bill heavily sponsored by fossil fuel interests. They’re trying to grab a few last desperate boosts for their dying dirty energy in exchange for lifting the last shackles slowing down our vibrant and fast-growing clean energy! That’s a good deal for clean energy.

I’m definitely not asking readers of this article to take my word for it or trust that I personally have some unparalleled expertise on this. Just…look at the data. Look at the stats on how clean energy now makes up almost all of the new electricity-generating capacity getting built. Look at the investment flows. Look at what the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says about the amount of clean energy capacity just waiting in line for a chance to get the permit or power line they need to get built.

So here’s what I would ask- in fact beg, plead, and implore - from Bill McKibben and the entire climate movement, up to and including you the reader if you’re asked to take a position on this someday. Please don’t throw away this chance to unleash the true potential of the Inflation Reduction Act, electrify America and accelerate our clean electron-powered, climate-stable future. Even if you can’t bring yourself to support a Manchin-proposed bill, at least don’t oppose it, or at least focus on lobbying Senators on specific amendments without opposing the overall bill.

The Manchin-Barrasso bill is an ugly compromise with fossil fuel interests, but it also looks like our best chance this decade to accelerate a truly sustainable clean energy-powered future. I very much hope it passes, and climate activists should try to help it, not stop it.

Two recent scientific papers struck me as powerful forerunners of a more enlightened approach to introduced species, perhaps the beginning of a more sensible field of “immigrant species biology” instead of outmoded and ideology-driven “invasive species biology.” (This third one is also good for a more philosophical treatment of the subject).

U.S. conservation translocations: Over a century of intended consequences

The research team behind this new paper in Conservation Science and Practice (led by Ben Novak of black-footed ferret cloning and passenger pigeon fame) analyzed the history of species translocations for conservation in the US. They quantified the use of translocations, and found that they were overwhelmingly successful: 70% of 1,580 threatened and endangered taxa in America have had translocations as part of their recovery plan, with only one instance found where this caused a negative impact somewhere. For example, wild turkeys, threatened by overhunting in the early 20th century, have since recovered their numbers-and also been introduced to states like Oregon and Montana that were beyond their original range. California condors, after their near-extinction experience in the 1980s and subsequent captive breeding program, have been introduced to Arizona, where there are no records of condors later than 10,000 years ago. And small groups of bighorn sheep have been moved back and forth between hundreds of sites all over the Rockies in order to help save the species from pneumonia contracted from domestic sheep-a practice which has likely led to excellent genetic diversity. Technically, wild turkeys are “invasive species” in Oregon and California condors are “invasive species” in Arizona, but it’s hard to argue that this “intended consequence” of a conservation relocation isn’t a good thing.

The researchers also examined the history of biological control agents, where one species (often an insect) is introduced to control an invasive or pest species (often a plant). This has been the source of several famous ecosystem-wide screw-ups, including the cane toad and rosy wolf snail examples above. However, they found that this led to negative ecosystem-level effects in only 1.4% of cases, 42 of the 3,014 examples of biological control agent programs globally. Furthermore, all of the problem cases were from the 1980s or earlier, indicating that our grasp of the science and practice of biological translocations is improving. We’re getting good at this! There have also been many positive unintended consequences here: for example, the Eurasian hawk moth was introduced to the American West to combat the leafy spurge (considered a weed), but has since become the single most important pollinator for the endangered western prairie fringed orchid, helping stabilize its population in North Dakota. The note describing this is practically a prose poem:

Got that? A hawk moth was introduced to control the leafy spurge, an “invasive” plant species. Then the hawk moth became “invasive” itself, but turned out to become the primary pollinator keeping alive the last populations of the western fringe prairie orchid, an endangered native plant species!

I think this paper shows that conservationists should feel more free to take big swings, to be bolder and more creative in moving species around. Conservation translocations tend to work, and biological control agent introductions in the last few decades almost always work!

Nativeness is not binary—a graduated terminology for native and non-native species in the Anthropocene

A recent paper coauthored by Rhys Lemoine in Restoration Ecology presents a new “species spectrum” to replace the old “native/invasive” binary, better way of thinking about these complexities.

The new paper offers a ten-category spectrum of descriptive terms to replace the "native" vs "invasive" paradigm, from "historic native" through "assisted migrant," "surrogate introduction," and "beneficial introduction", to the final category of "invasive introduction," calling for limiting that terminology to species where there's actual evidence of ecological destructiveness.

This really deserves to catch on-there are so many potential uses to describe current and near-future novel ecosystems and species interactions. "Historic introduction" covers "classic" reintroduction cases like wolves in Yellowstone, "assisted migrant" describes cases like the oyamel fir planting in Mexico, "surrogate introduction" seems like a good way to describe many rewilding projects (and hopefully soon de-extincted species as well!), "neutral introduction" describes many "invasives" (like the unfairly maligned purple loosestrife), and "invasive introduction" can be reserved for the few seriously damaging cases, like rats on small islands or the brown tree snake in Guam.

This paper is a worthy addition to the emerging conservation movement working to protect the Earth as it is, not as we'd like it to be. In the Anthropocene, we need to protect endangered species and productive, diverse ecosystems wherever we find them, no matter where they're from.

Also, Everything Emma Marris Has Ever Written

Emma Marris is likely the single best general-audience writer covering these topics. A good place to start with her oeuvre would be her under-covered book Wild Souls and/or her many excellent articles for The Atlantic! (One of her recent gems summarizes a study finding introduced and native large herbivores have similar ecosystem effects worldwide with the brilliant title “Nature doesn’t care where a species is from.”). Here’s this newsletter’s review of Wild Souls.

More Examples, From This Newsletter’s Archives

Doing the Donkey Work for the Whole Ecosystem

The feral horses and donkeys in America's desert Southwest are a controversial issue. They are descendants of escapees from colonial Spanish settlements, and so many people regard them as an invasive species: the US Bureau of Land Management removes some from public lands every year, and is currently keeping thousands in corrals. However, these equids have also been here for hundreds of years by now, and as "mustangs" are a key facet of the culture of the American West. Furthermore, horses actually evolved in North America to start with, eventually dispersing to other parts of the world, and the last "original" North American wild horses were only extirpated at the end of the last Ice Age, a little over 10,000 years ago. That's a mere eyeblink in evolutionary time.

Now, a recent study has found that these “invasive” horses and donkeys of the American West are actually key ecosystem engineers, supporting a multitude of other species. Camera traps in four locations across the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts of California and Arizona revealed that the wild equids routinely dig wells with their snouts and hooves in areas where there is no nearby water source, sometimes going six feet (2 meters) deep to reach the water table! This reduces the distance between water sources greatly, helping the whole ecosystem by increasing the amount of water available. The camera traps directly observed these equid-dug wells being drunk from by no less than 57 local vertebrate species, including black bears, mule deer, javelinas, bobcats, American badgers, scrub jays, toads, and the rare and unique elf owl, the smallest owl in the world. Eventually, abandoned equid wells become nurseries for young cottonwood trees as well.

These aren't a sideshow either: equid wells increased water density relative to "background" water by an average of 332%, and at one site, when a stream dried up, were providing all available surface water to the local wildlife. Equid wells' ability to buffer the local availability of water will likely be key in helping these dryland ecosystems adapt to climate change.

This is another spectacular example of "out-of-place" species, that don't fit the idea of what is "natural" to a region, turning out to be a critical benefit to the local ecosystem! Great news.

Kestrels, Geckos, and Ravenalas, Oh My

The Mauritius kestrel came to the edge of extinction in 1974, when only four individuals were left after decades of losses to DDT and feral cats. A robust captive breeding program³ brought their population back from the brink to over 800 free-living birds by 2010. Now, their numbers have declined again, to perhaps 350 individuals, as habitat destruction lowered the population of their gecko prey.

Interestingly, the fan-like “traveler’s palm” ravenala trees, native to Madagascar and introduced to Mauritius, have become a key support to help the remaining raptor population thrive again. (This writer particularly loves the ravenala trees as a species after seeing their vital role as a keystone species firsthand in the Malagasy rainforest). Insects love their nectar and fruits, and geckos love the insects, colonizing ravenala trees en masse. Geckos now provide up to 70% of the kestrels’ diet, and kestrel nests surrounded by ravenalas produced more fledglings.

Arachnids in the U.S.A

The jorō spider, Trichonephila clavata (pictured), is a charming, brightly colored little arachnid native to East Asia, associated with mythical shapeshifters in Japanese folklore. In the early 2010s, they were accidentally introduced to the Atlanta, Georgia area, likely via a shipping container. Since then, the species has proliferated and become common in northern Georgia and the Carolinas, with individuals seen as far afield as Tennessee and Oklahoma. These spiders spin their wide yellow-tinted webs very high in the tree canopy, an ecological niche that's not common among North American spiders, which may have contributed to their success. These spiders also practice "ballooning," using their silk to ride the wind to new locations (as made famous by the end of Charlotte's Web) so they can expand their range very quickly. Now, a new study from University of Georgia ecologists found that jorō spiders can tolerate below-freezing temperatures due to their rapid metabolism, indicating that they may well eventually survive and thrive as far north as New England.

Fortunately, there's no evidence that the jorō spider is having any negative impact on native species, so this isn't particularly worrisome. They're also harmless to humans; their fangs are so short that they can't even break our skin. “People should try to learn to live with them,” said study coauthor Andy Davis. “If they’re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they’re just going to be back next year.” (Finally, someone trying to nip “invasive species” hysteria in the bud before it starts!)

A follow-up study from Davis confirmed that the joro spiders aren’t outcompeting native species, and seem to be unusually good at building webs on human structures like power lines, stoplights and gas stations.

Happily, all this might well have a net positive ecological effect, as jorō spiders have been observed eating the brown marmorated stink bug, a serious agricultural pest (also introduced from East Asia) that caused $37 million in damages to apple crops in 2010 alone. Jorō spiders are one of the few spiders that will eat brown marmorated stink bugs, so their advent may well be a boon to American agriculture. Plus, they're beautiful; natural Halloween decorations, as one entomologist described them. A new American "immigrant species"!

Spotted Lanternflies: Basically Harmless

With the jorō spiders, researchers worked to nip “invasive” hysteria in the bud. An emerging parallel research area is “debunking” previously established myths of deadly invasiveness, often based on hearsay or xenophobia rather than biological evidence. For example, the spotted lanternfly, a sap-feeding “invasive” insect species that arrived from China in 2012, was recently publicly and widely feared as a potential threat to America’s hardwood trees, with extensive yet unsuccessful eradication campaigns enacted. Now, new research has found that they do not appear to be a serious threat to hardwood trees, with experiments testing a “worst-case scenario” in which spotted lanternflies fed on the same trees for four consecutive growing seasons resulting in zero trees dying. Yet another example of invasive species turning out to be harmless!

Wildlife Biology’s Next Big Paradigm Shift Is Struggling To Be Born

What do all of these new papers have in common? They’re engaging with biological reality first and foremost, looking at the facts on the ground instead of filtering everything through human-conceived lenses of “nativeness” and “invasiveness.” Young biologists (and open-minded older ones) are creating a new discipline, the study of introduced species’ effects on the broader ecosystem without the inherently prejudicial “invasive species biology” framework. I’m calling this “immigrant species biology,” and this article is my attempt to popularize the term and chronicle some great recent publications in the nascent field. May it spread and prosper!

In 2000, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature compiled a list called “100 of the World's Worst Invasive Alien Species.” Here it is on Wikipedia. After reviewing more recent scientific literature over the last few years, I think that it’s important to note that substantial new evidence has arisen that many, if not most, of the “World’s Worst” invasive species on that least have actually turned out to be harmless or even beneficial to their adopted ecosystem.

To be fair, there are several species on the 2000 IUCN list that are genuinely really harmful. But they’re mostly disease species, like avian malaria, chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, and chytrid fungus. Disease epidemics are bad, but they’re really not quite the same thing as “invasive species” as commonly understood.

Also, very small islands are a special case: they’re so small that a few rats or cats can wipe out an entire seabird nesting ground, or even an entire endemic species like the flightless Lyall’s wren. But on continents, with enough time and space for native species to move around, adapt, and find new ways of coexisting, more and more research is showing that a new equilibrium can be reached.

Most of the “World’s Worst” list consisted of non-disease plants and animal species on continents. And seemingly everywhere I looked more closely for one of these “invasive” species, I found that a wide array of new data has come out showing that they were unfairly maligned as harmful, and may even have positive impacts. In many cases, they were deemed “World’s Worst” simply because they had very noticeable impacts, because they did well or spread fast or changed the landscape around them. We’re not used to biological abundance, or the ups and downs and churning change of flourishing ecosystems! All over the world, after a few decades of their presence gave a broader perspective, the case that these “invasive” species’ impacts were “bad” started to fall apart. Here’s a by-no-means-exhaustive list.

The purple loosestrife, Lythrum salicaria, is commonly described as “displacing” native species and creating “monocultures.” There are dozens of studies and mapping and eradicating purple loosestrife “infestations,” but most of them seem to take the idea that it’s damaging for granted. However, some studies have found that purple loosestrife “invasions” are correlated with increased biodiversity of native plants! It seems likely that they’re just unusually good at surviving in polluted and disturbed waters so it sometimes looks like they’ve taken over when they’re actually just the “last ones standing.” Even so, a Nature article in 2022, while acknowledging these exact studies, described a project on mapping purple loosestrife with the title “Mapping the purple menace.” Based on…habit, apparently? It’s not a menace! It’s a pretty purple flower that’s unusually good at surviving!

Soapbush, Clidemia hirta, also made the “World’s Worst” list. As I learned from personal experience, and these papers discuss formally, it’s also become a vital food source sustaining a critically endangered primate species, the greater bamboo lemur (Prolemur simus). I suspect that there are many, many similar cases in other parts of the world where it’s stigmatized as “invasive.”

Zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) were described for years as a “scourge” colonizing the bottoms of the Great Lakes, but turned out to be excellent at filtering and clearing the water. Less murk made it easier to alewives (a fish) to hunt shrimp, which in turn led to more alewives for salmon to eat, boosting the lakes’ salmon populations.

Japanese knotweed, Reynoutria japonica, is a plant I’ve often seen serve as a food source for native bumblebees in Maine. It’s also been widely deemed “destructive” to homes and other structures (to the point where its presence can sometimes lower a property’s value!), and expensively attacked with herbicides. But an exhaustive research project by the University of Leeds and global infrastructure company AECOM found no evidence at all that the species caused significant damage to buildings!

An impressive twofer here: the Caribbean tree frog, or coquí (Eleutherodactylus coqui), is native to Puerto Rico, but “invasive” in Hawaii. However, they’ve become endangered in their homeland Puerto Rico when farms replaced forest in the 20th century, so the Hawaii population is pretty good from an extinction-prevention standpoint. And where the frogs do survive in their homeland of Puerto Rico (forest cover’s increasing now), they overwhelmingly prefer to live in groves of another “World’s Worst” invasive species that has “invaded” Puerto Rico, the African tulip tree (Spathodea campanulata), which is now hosting a lovely “novel ecosystem” mix of original and immigrant Puerto Rican species! So if you Thanos-snapped your fingers and got rid of all “invasive species,” as is theoretically a conservation goal, you’d probably wipe out this frog both at home and abroad!

Prickly pear cacti (genus Opuntia) are native to the Americas, but have been introduced everywhere from Europe to Africa to Australia to Hawaii to Madagascar. However, experience has shown that prickly pear can be fairly easily controlled by introducing some cactus-eating insects from its homeland-although this isn’t always a good thing for people and ecosystems nearby. In the drylands of southern Madagascar, Opuntia cacti were first introduced by the French in the 1700s, but ending up becoming so useful to the local Malagasy peoples (both as a foodstuff and as spiny living fortifications) that a French botanist ended up introducing cactus-eating cochineal insects in the 1920s, devastating the cactus-based landscape and making their rebellious colony easier to control. In a happier story, big swathes of Australia were overrun by prickly pear in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until local scientists released Cactoblastis moths from South America, which acted as a super-effective biological control agent, leading to the building of the wonderfully named Cactoblastis Memorial Hall by grateful Queenslanders. (These moths have also proven useful at controlling prickly pear in Africa and the Caribbean, and are now viewed as an invasive threat themselves in North America!).

Tamarisks (genus Tamarix), aka salt cedar trees, are from Central Asia and were intentionally introduced in the U.S. for erosion control in the 1800s. By the 1900s, they were “monstered” as a water-hogging “thirsty, evil weed” in the American Southwest, in part because of a mining company’s successful campaign to claim that eradicating “foreign” tamarisks would produce “extra” water that they could use. In reality, tamarisks have actually settled in nicely to the local ecosystems, and are no more “thirsty” than native plants. They’ve become common in large part because they’re extra-good at adapting to human-caused disturbances, like changed flooding patterns in the wake of dams. The return of beaver dams, plus the introduction of a tamarisk-eating beetle as a biological control agent, has helped forge a new balance. And as with many if not most vilified “invasive” species, they have substantial positive effects: the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher nests in tamarisks, which sometimes can survive in parts of the desert where native plants cannot.

Cane toads (Rhinella marina) were intentionally introduced to Australia to eat cane grubs. But they eat lots of other things as well, and spread rapidly. Plus they’re poisonous, so local Australian marsupial, bird, and reptile predators died after eating them, leading to mass vilification and unsuccessful extermination attempts as a prototypical “invasive species.” However, after a few decades, the ecosystem seems to be establishing a new normal with cane toads included. No species have been recorded to go entirely extinct due to cane toads. In fact, native Australian water rats and kites have learned new behaviors to prey on cane toads while avoiding the poisonous shoulder grands. Red-bellied blacksnakes appear to have evolved some resistance to their poison. The toads have adapted to their new home as well, with “Australian cane toad” populations having tougher skins that lose less water. Furthermore, clever and compassionate Aussie conservationists are using a wide array of creative techniques to speed up native species adaptation to cane toads’ integration into the local ecosystem without resorting to mass cullings. Some teams are feeding crocodiles and quolls bits of cane toad meat laced with nausea-inducing chemicals to teach them not to eat the real (deadly) thing. Biologist Georgia Ward-Fear is actually preemptively releasing “teacher” cane toad tadpoles in areas likely to soon see a big influx of “invasive” cane toads. The tadpoles and young toads aren’t as poisonous as adults, so local predators can eat some, get sick but not die, and learn to avoid the species in the future1.

Wild boar (Sus scrofa), which heavily hybridize and overlap with feral pigs, are an iconically “invasive” species in the Americas and Australia. But really, the rise of giant wild hog populations we’re seeing in the American Midwest (to the accompaniment of panicky invasive-species scare headlines) is just a sign that America is still recovering from its near-extermination of its local predators in the 20th century. Where there are sufficient large local predators, they tend to benefit the local ecosystem and form a new, more species-rich and more predator-populated equilibrium. (Plus, the long term effects of hogs rooting and scuffling around in the soil benefit plant diversity!)

In Australia, feral pigs have become a key component of the diet of saltwater crocodiles in the Northern Territory, and likely played a key role in the crocodiles’ epic resurgence from near-extinction in the 1970s to widespread thriving today. In South America, jaguars and pumas seem to prefer feral pigs as prey, which helps keep the “invasive” species population low enough to find a new ecological equilibrium while potentially aiding local jaguar populations to rebound. In Florida, feral pigs are a key part of the diet of the endangered Florida panther population (a cougar subspecies), with one panther biologist saying that the presence of “hogs” might well have saved the panther from extinction. The American Midwest doesn’t have a wild hog problem, it has a “not enough jaguars, wolves, and pumas” problem! (And yes, jaguars once ranged as far as Pennsylvania).

Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) get a lot of flak for out-competing European red squirrels in Britain; they’re more comfortable with humans, faster-breeding, and generally tougher. But as with the wild boar, it looks like this is just a “waiting for the predators to be reintroduced/catch up” issue: red squirrel populations in Scotland have now stabilized thanks to the comeback of the pine marten, a local European predator that seems to preferentially prefer on gray squirrels (probably because they didn’t evolve alongside it and have fewer countermeasures). So the net result here is that the British Isles have their original squirrels, plus new squirrels, plus more food for a classic predator!

The Indian myna bird (Acridotheres tristis) is reviled as an invasive species in Australia, dramatically named the “The Most Important Pest” in 2008. But studies have shown that they don’t actually interact with or displace native birds that much, despite the assumptions; they’re primarily just really good “passengers of habitat modification” that do well in cities and other human-dominated landscapes.

Gorse (Ulex europaeus) was deemed a horrible invasive species in New Zealand. Then one ecologist found that if it was just left alone, it eventually played a vital role in helping native plants regrow. Gorse is great at colonizing disturbed or degraded soils. It produces its own nitrogen, helping to enrich the soil, and provides new shelter for native plant seedlings, which then eventually grow taller than the gorse and shade them out. It’s less a weed, more the Giving Tree. Here’s a great article on gorse in New Zealand from going more in-depth.

The crab-eating macaque (Macaca fascicularis, a monkey) was listed on the 100 Worst Invaders in 2014 for its introduced populations in Mauritius and Pacific islands, but was actually declared an endangered species in 2020 due to population decline in its home range of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It’s pretty good for the world that we have backup populations of this species!

And you may have noticed that even kudzu (Pueraria montana), once widely hyped as the “vine that ate the South,” doesn’t seem that fearsome anymore. In part, the legend of the monster kudzu was born because it grows very well on sunny roadsides, but doesn’t penetrate well into shady forests, giving a false impression to passersby of total ecosystem dominance. And now, even that faux-dominance is ending; a recent U.S. Forest Service survey found that kudzu in America only covers an area about one-sixth the size of Atlanta (an order of magnitude less than the figures in many news reports), much less than many other less-hyped species. Even the kudzu biomass in many of those sites has been decreasing since the Japanese kudzu bug showed up in the 21st century. It may spread further north due to warming weather, but that’s not really a problem; kudzu is now just one vine among many in the modern American South, not notably harmful. Another example of invasive species actually being fine once their predators restore equilibrium.

Keep in mind, these aren’t cherry-picked examples of “unusually good” invasive species turning out to bring substantial benefits after all. There are tons of other stories like that. The bulleted list above contains only examples from the hundred invasive species that the world’s premier conservation organization thinks are the worst!

I think that based on this, it’s reasonable to “shift our priors” to hold as a default assumption that, at least for non-disease species on continents, we should switch our starting assumption to be that invasive species are probably harmless-to-beneficial, even when widely described as a menace. The burden of proof needs to be on people claiming that newly arrived species are providing harm. And building on that, I’d just really like people to stop turning animals into villains! We should celebrate biological abundance, species success, and the rise of novel ecosystems and species community relationships, no matter where a particular species is “originally” from.

The Weekly Anthropocene has a lot more to say on this; stay tuned for further articles!

I’m Sam Matey, and this newsletter has been a labor of love for me since October 2017 (here’s the old archive). I’m writing to tell you that The Weekly Anthropocene is going to India this upcoming May - within a few days, I’ll have started a journey reporting on some of the amazing climate and biodiversity progress work being done on this extraordinary subcontinent!

There’s a huge amount of fascinating work being done in India (the world’s largest country now!) to try to build a good Anthropocene for humanity and its biosphere, and I’d like to write about as much of it as I can! I’m essentially trying to pull off a low-budget single-person “foreign correspondent”-style reporting trip here; my main focus through the trip will be researching and writing for The Weekly Anthropocene. I’ll be starting in Mumbai, and we’ll see where it goes from there!

I’m flying to India on May 1st, and I’m really excited about the people I’ll meet there and the field reporting I’ll be able to do! I’ll be paywalling most to all of my writing from India in the hope of catalyzing more paid subscribers. If you’d like to contribute to making this reporting trip happen, feel free to upgrade to paid and follow my progress!

Subscribe now

All my “live” writing during May and early June will likely be dispatches from India, with a few “encore” reposts of previous articles sprinkled in. Regular weekly news roundups will resume in mid-June!

Thank you so much,

Sam

Subscribe now

Living in an age of extraordinary technological and socioeconomic advances, it’s easy to construct a mental model of history as a teleological “Whig” progression from better to worse, with the past few millennia as mere “Dark Age” forerunners of Modernity, the surge of incredible global progress in literacy, health, and prosperity in the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution. There’s a lot of truth to this: we are in a period of unprecedented global prosperity! It’s all too easy to mentally round off empires and wars from Assyria through the Ashanti as a mere parade of slavery, conquest, and senseless bloodshed: “Those Ancient Guys Who Sucked.” That’s a gross oversimplification, of course, eliding centuries of complexity, but there is a grain of truth to it. Most historic rulers and monarchs are indeed terrible people from today’s point of view: rare is the premodern potentate who did not regularly enslave, conquer, and order actions that would now be considered war crimes.

However, there is one particularly notable exception. As H.G. Wells once wrote “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Ashoka shines, and shines, almost alone, a star.”

Note to readers: if you’re from India, this article may seem to discuss common knowledge to the point of banality, akin to an American reading an article on how Abraham Lincoln is generally considered a morally upright guy. But this writer has found that the history of Ashoka and the Maurya Empire remains surprisingly little-known in North America and Europe, so it’s worth discussing!

Full article now unpaywalled!

Subscribe now

Ashoka (also written as Asoka or Aśoka) took the throne of the Maurya Empire1, covering much of northern India, sometime around 269 or 268 BCE, ruling from the Mauryan capital city of Pataliputra until about 232 BCE. For the first eight years of his reign, he was a standard premodern ruler, conquering neighboring states to expand his empire. Some stories even describe him (questionably) as particularly cruel and sadistic during this period. Then, around 260 BCE, he converted to the then-still-new religion of Buddhism after victory in the bloody Kalinga War, and underwent an extraordinary change. In the Edicts of Ashoka, written on pillars, stones, and cave walls2, he expounded his new governing philosophy. The publicness of these announcements was fairly progressive in itself (Ashoka lived only about 1,500 years after the 1750s BCE Code of Hammurabi, the first law code to be written down and shown to the public as opposed to consisting of “whatever the ruler feels like right now”). They may have been intended to be regularly read out by community leaders to the (presumably majority-illiterate) Maurya population as a sort of combined religious instruction, code of conduct, and national credo, arguably akin to the Pledge of Allegiance in modern American schools.

Most of what we know about Ashoka’s life and reign is a tangle of myths and legends from multiple parts of the Indian subcontinent, often containing implausible supernatural elements, combined with extrapolations from archaeological evidence that are inherently open to interpretation3. As a surviving primary source, the Ashokan Edicts constitute our best historical record for the period, as well as chronicling a truly extraordinary moment in ethical and governing philosophy.

The Edicts of Ashoka

Selected text from the Major Rock Edicts, below, from World History Encyclopedia, a UNESCO-affiliated NGO and a source recommended by European Commission educational initiatives.

“Piyadasi” is a title meaning something like “He who regards others with kindness.” It’s thought to be another name used by Ashoka, but it’s just possible that it was a separate king, perhaps earlier in the dynasty, in which case this entire article should be talking about “Piyadasi the Great” not “Ashoka the Great.”

“Dhamma” is another spelling of “Dharma,” a difficult-to-translate concept (sometimes glossed as “virtue” or “cosmic order”) common to many Indian religions.

Edict I

“Here (in my domain) no living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice…Formerly, in the kitchen of Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, hundreds of thousands of animals were killed every day to make curry. But now with the writing of the Dhamma edict, only three creatures, two peacocks and a deer, are killed, and the deer not always. And in time, not even these creatures will be killed.”

Edict II

“Everywhere has Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals. Wherever medical herbs suitable for humans or animals are not available, I have had them imported and grown. Wherever medical roots or fruits are not available I have had them imported and grown. Along roads I have had wells dug and trees planted for the benefit of humans and animals.”

Edict V

“Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: To do good is difficult. One who does good first does something hard to do. I have done many good deeds, and, if my sons, grandsons, and their descendants up to the end of the world act in like manner, they too will do much good. But whoever amongst them neglects this, they will do evil. Truly, it is easy to do evil.”

Edict VI

“Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus: In the past, state business was not transacted nor were reports delivered to the king at all hours. But now I have given this order, that at any time, whether I am eating, in the women's quarters, the bed chamber, the chariot, the Palanquin, in the park, or wheresoever, reporters are to be posted with instructions to report to me the affairs of the people so that I might attend to these affairs wherever I am.”

Edict VII

“Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all religions should reside everywhere, for all of them desire self-control and purity of heart. But people have various desires and various passions, and they may practice all of what they should or only a part of it. But one who receives great gifts yet is lacking in self-control, purity of heart, gratitude and firm devotion, such a person is mean.”

Edict VIII

“In the past, kings used to go out on pleasure tours during which there was hunting and other entertainment. But ten years after Beloved-of-the-Gods had been coronated, he went on a tour to Sambodhi [site of Buddha's enlightenment] and thus instituted Dhamma tours. During these tours, the following things took place: visits and gifts to Brahmans and ascetics, visits and gifts of gold to the aged, visits to people in the countryside, instructing them in Dhamma, and discussing Dhamma with them as is suitable. It is this that delights Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, and is, as it were, another type of revenue.”

Edict XII

“Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought 'Let me glorify my own religion', only harms his own religion…One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others.”

Edict XIII

“Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, conquered the Kalingas eight years after his coronation. One hundred and fifty thousand were deported, one hundred thousand were killed and many more died. After the Kalingas had been conquered, Beloved-of-the-Gods came to feel a strong inclination towards the Dhamma, a love for the Dhamma and for instruction in Dhamma. Now Beloved-of-the-Gods feels deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas…Now it is conquest by Dhamma that Beloved-of-the-gods considers to be the best conquest…I have had this Dhamma edict written so that my sons and great-grandsons may not consider making new conquests, or that if military conquests are made, that they be done with forbearance and light punishment, or better still, that they consider making conquest by Dhamma only, for that bears fruit in this world and the next.”

The World of Ashoka

This counts as pretty liberal today, in the 21st century: vegetarianism, kindness to animals, healthcare, tree-planting, religious pluralism, nonviolence, and remorse for war crimes. For the 200s BCE, this is insanely ahead of its time. Readers may well be wondering “How do we know that Ashoka really did all these great things? Maybe this is just propaganda.” But that’s missing the point. The undeniably amazing part here is that at the very least, these inscriptions show that Ashoka wanted to be seen as a peaceful, religiously tolerant, tree-planting, well-digging, animal-loving ruler. That is wildly unprecedented for the time in which he lived. We’re looking at this with a 21st-century mindset and thinking “of course national leaders want to brag about how they’re enlightened and kind to animals and religiously tolerant and care about human rights, why should we trust them?” But Ashoka lived in the 200s BCE, when no other world leader was boasting of their kindness or expressing a concept anything like “human rights.” To the best of this writer’s amateur history buff-level knowledge, no other ruler had ever publicly expressed remorse for having conquered a territory before Ashoka’s edicts. Conquest was what rulers were supposed to do in Iron Age ethical systems!

The Duke of Qin, later Qin Shi Huang, was born during Ashoka’s reign and would bloodily conquer the neighboring kingdoms to become the first emperor of a unified China in 221 BCE. In 213 BCE, he ordered the burning of most existing books. When he died in 210 BCE, he was buried in the famous Terracotta Army-equipped mausoleum and had the workmen killed to preserve its secrets. In 146 BCE, less than a hundred years after Ashoka’s reign, Rome would destroy the rival city of Carthage, kill most of its inhabitants, loot the temples, and sell 50,000 survivors into slavery. This kind of thing was the baseline, what rulers were expected to do. Even when there were kings who chose to support scholarship and the arts (for example Hiero II of Syracuse, employer of Archimedes, and Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, funder of the Library of Alexandria, both of whom were contemporaries of Ashoka4) they were also expected to uncompromisingly fight to expand their kingdom and crush political rivals. Ptolemy II invaded Nubia and fought wars with Macedonia and the Seleucid Empire. Ancient monuments across civilizations are replete with descriptions glorying rulers’ victories and chronicling the enemy cities sacked and slaves taken, from Ramesses II’s sculptures of the Battle of Kadesh at Abu Simbel to the monument of victory in the Dacian Wars at Trajan’s Column.

And in the middle of all this comes Ashoka, talking about how he “feels deep remorse for having conquered the Kalingas” and “I have had this Dhamma edict written so that my sons and great-grandsons may not consider making new conquests” and “Along roads I have had wells dug and trees planted for the benefit of humans and animals.” That’s pretty amazing! We don’t know the exact circumstances of this ethico-religious transformation, but it kind of looks like Ashoka, and/or some unknown group of thinkers around him, managed to develop existing religions and philosophies of government into something close to modern cosmopolitan liberal humanism. We may never truly know how much daily life and administration in the Maurya Empire attempted to live up to this extraordinary flowering of ideals of peace, compassion, and civilization, but we know that Ashoka was trying to make it happen.

The Legacy of Ashoka

Ashoka may be little-known in the West, but he remains a key political and cultural icon in his homeland of India, akin to Augustus Caesar in Europe or Qin Shi Huang in China. The modern flag of India bears the Ashoka Chakra “wheel of dharma” symbol in its center (the same symbol as the one on the Lion Capital), the Ashoka Chakra medal is India’s highest military decoration for valor in peacetime, and many Indian films and TV shows dramatize his life.

And this is important cultural background information, because India is more prosperous, powerful, and influential now than ever before, and getting more prosperous, more powerful, and more influential by the year. Consider:

• As of 2023, India is now the world’s most populous country with over 1.4 billion people, overtaking China5, which is now experiencing population decline.

• The last few decades have seen incredible leaps in Indians’ quality of life. Extreme poverty has been reduced immensely, with the number of Indians living on (inflation-adjusted) $2.15 a day or less falling from over 420 million people in 1983 to under 140 million in 2019, even while the overall Indian population grew from under 750 million to over 1.3 billion in the same period!

• In 1994, about 50% of Indians had access to at least basic electricity (i.e. a lightbulb and basic phone charger, but no appliances), rising to 99% in 2020.

• 43% of Indians used the Internet in 2020, up from 7.5% in 2010. And as many Indians are English-speaking and India’s internet isn’t firewalled off like China’s, this translates to substantial global influence on a person-to-person level.

• And famously, in 2000 over 79% of Indians lacked access to improved sanitation facilities (i.e. they had no latrines or toilets and had to poop outside), falling to under 17% in 2020. That’s a huge increase in human well-being!

• India is in the middle of accelerating, exponential renewables growth: their total installed solar capacity rose from 6 gigawatts in 2015 to 63 gigawatts in 2022.

• And in India as across the world, renewable energy is dominating the future of the grid: as this writer never tires of repeating, an amazing 92% of new electricity-generating capacity added in India in 2022 was solar and wind!

• Reuters has reported that India’s rate of emissions intensity6 fell by an impressive 33% from 2005 to 2019, as renewable energy grew and forest cover increased.

• India remains the largest democracy in the world.

• India is rapidly expanding and deepening its geopolitical partnership with the United States, with a major new India-U.S. defense and industrial agreement in June 2023.

India rapidly lifting its billion-plus population up from poverty is a great victory for humanity, and continuing that progress by adding primarily renewable new energy will be a gift to all of Earth’s biosphere. Here’s hoping that India can fully embrace Ashoka’s noble legacy of peace, tolerance, religious diversity, and humanism as it becomes one of the premier nations shaping the future of Anthropocene Earth!

Refer a friend

Give a gift subscription

Share