The Big Picture: Resilient Reefs!
Several recent news items raise hopes for the future of climate-resilient coral reefs! A landmark new study analyzing 45,000 coral surveys from around the world has identified and mapped nearly 166,000 km2 of existing coral reefs, across 71 countries, that are showing promising signs of being capable of surviving and/or regenerating after climate change-induced stressors like bleaching, cyclones, and marine heatwaves. More than half of these particularly resilient reefs are found in just five countries: Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, the Bahamas, and Cuba, and only 28% are found in already protected areas, thus highlighting immediate conservation priorities. That study was presented at the recent Our Ocean conference, at which 9 African nations made new commitments to advancing future marine protected areas.
And there are already ocean scientists working to protect and spread the heat-resilient corals ready to survive the Anthropocene! Woods Hole scientist Anne Cohen is spearheading the Super Reefs project, a major new long-term effort currently using using divers and drone boat surveying to identify resilient individual corals, then clip fragments to replant at damaged Pacific reefs and grow new corals with heat-resistant genes. The long-term goal is to eventually create a “resilient reef blue corridor” spanning the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu. AWESOME work!
The Big Picture: Diarrhea Deaths Decreasing!
A new Lancet study calculates that even as the human population grew by billions, the global number of deaths from enteric infectious diseases (including diarrheal diseases, salmonella, rotavirus, norovirus, typhoid, and more) fell from 3.69 million in 1990 to just 1.27 million in 2023. Widespread improvement in clean drinking water and sanitation infrastructure, from pumps to toilets (particularly in India), plus global rollouts of new medicines like rotavirus vaccines, have sharply reduced this category of “fecal-oral” disease worldwide. Children particularly have benefited: in 1990, 53% of enteric deaths were children under five, falling to 30% in 2023. Excellent news!
Far fewer humans are pooping themselves to death, and that’s worth celebrating! Improved water and sanitation infrastructure is also a huge climate resilience win.
Cabo Verde
A new study has found that thanks to dedicated conservation work, the beaches of Boa Vista (an island in recent World Cup overperformer nation Cabo Verde) have seen an 80-fold increase in nesting loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) from 1998 to 2024! The 3 largest Boa Vista nesting sites reached an incredible 22,000 nests per km2 of beach by 2021, the highest-density loggerhead nesting on Earth. AWESOME!
Australia
A gold mine in Western Australia just went 155 consecutive “engine off” hours (six and a half days) operating on 100% renewable energy with zero use of their fossil backup, thanks to a custom solar, wind, and battery microgrid from developer Zenith. Mine operator Bellevue Gold plans to produce the world’s first carbon-neutral gold!
A new species dubbed the “ballista spider” has been discovered in the rainforests of Queensland. Uniquely, it builds a spring-loaded silk “catapult” to snare a particularly aggressive local ant species and fire them into its web at over 15 Gs! Extraordinary.
Australia’s nationwide home battery boom continues to break records and lead the world. As previously chronicled, recently 400,000 home batteries were installed in just 10 months, totaling 11.2 GWh! Now, about 1 in 25 Australian homes has their own battery, and one in three have rooftop solar! Power to the people!
Malaysia
In the Penang state of Malaysia, conservationist Yap Jo Leen is repurposing old fire hoses into safe road-crossing bridges for endangered dusky langurs (Trachypithecus obscurus). Her project has so far installed three langur hose bridges, with the oldest, “Ah Lai’s Crossing,” now regularly used by nine coexisting species of wildlife and credited with reducing langur deaths on that stretch of road to zero! Great work.
Chile
The largest grid-scale battery system in the Americas (so far!) is now online in the Atacama Desert of Chile! The Elena project, including 624 battery containers totaling 3.5 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, is Phase 6 of the broader Oasis de Atacama project, targeting a total of 2.5 GW of solar plus 14.1 GWh of battery storage. Epic!
Italy
Flamingos (Phoenicopterus roseus) have returned to the outer reaches of Italy’s famed Venice Lagoon thanks to years of work restoring degraded salt marsh ecosystems! 2025 saw nearly 24,000 flamingos overwintering in the lagoon, a record high and 6,000 birds more than 2024. Sightings could become more common near La Serenissima itself as numbers continue to grow. A great case study from the epic rewilding of Europe!
Scuba divers on a ghost net removal mission in the Strait of Sicily waters between Italy and Tunisia have captured a first-ever video of a great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea. The shark was described as “curious and not aggressive.”
Kyrgyzstan
The 175 MW first phase of the ROX Issyk-Kul solar farm in Kyrgyzstan has come online! Built by a Vietnamese company, it will be the largest solar farm in Central Asia (the “Stans”) at 1.9 GW (1,900 MW) when fully completed at in late 2028. Great!
Tanzania
The electric blue gecko (Lygodactylus williamsi, aka turquoise dwarf gecko) lives only in two small patches of screwpine (Pandanus rabaiensis) forest in east-central Tanzania, and became critically endangered by the 2010s after tens of thousands of the scintillating little creatures were collected for the pet trade. International trade in the species was banned under CITES in 2017, and that plus a local reforestation program is estimated to have raised the population back to pre-collection levels. Great work!
Spain & Portugal
In 2025, solar plus wind generated 44% of all electricity in Portugal, and 42% in Spain. Both Iberian nations have seen rapid renewables build-outs. Now, clean energy is directly shielding Spanish consumers from the high electricity costs that struck most of the rest of the world during the Hormuz fossil fuel crisis. Spain is now one of Europe’s cheapest power markets. Electrotech abundance! A great model to follow.
Liberia
The first-ever grid-connected solar farm in the deeply impoverished West African nation1 of Liberia is now online! The 20 MW Mount Coffee Solar Park, built next to a pre-existing hydroelectric facility, is tiny by global standards but a big deal for boosting reliable basic electricity access in Liberia. World Bank funding has already been secured to expand to 30 MW and add 12 MW of battery storage. Awesome!
Finland
Brilliant cellular agriculture startup Solar Foods has raised 77.8 million euros in grant and loan financing to build their Factory 02, When complete, it will expand their capacity to manufacture ultra-efficient protein Solein up to 6,400 tons per year!
Cambodia
The Mekong River is home to the world’s largest freshwater fish species, with the Mekong giant catfish, giant barb, and giant freshwater stingray all both capable of growing to hundreds of pounds in size and now endangered due to over-fishing. In 2025, conservationists in Cambodia deployed a nationwide hotline, app, and rapid response team to help free these rare fish when unintentionally caught as bycatch. From just November 2025 through February 2026, the team returned 92 individuals from four Mekong giant fish species — a great sign for both small-scale fisher communities’ support and a potential harbinger of rising populations! Superb work.
The ocean off Cambodia is being plundered by illegal bottom trawler ships. Now, the government has partnered with conservationists and local small-scale fishers to place hundreds of 2-3 tonne concrete blocks under the sea as “Fishery Productivity Structures” that will physically block, entangle, and disable trawler nets while acting (like wind turbines!) as ecosystem-enhancing artificial reefs. An amazing 1,250 such structures have been placed in the last two years! Brilliant proactive protector work.
United States
The ultra-corrupt morons in the White House still disgrace and enfeeble the nation, but people across America just keep working to build a brighter future nonetheless!
In California, fast-growing solar power generated more electricity than fossil gas in the five months of January-May 2026! Solar out-generated gas on 82% of days in that period, up from 21% in 2024, as gas generation fell by 60% in just two years. SUPERB!
Solar build-outs “taking away farmland” is a common attack line, and the main platform of popular faux-environmentalist Substack “House of Green.” A recent interactive map project has now calculated that solar arrays are currently above just 0.04% of total U.S. land area and just 0.07% of U.S. farmland, and there are zero states where solar occupies more than 0.5% of prime farmland. Nationwide, golf courses occupy three times more prime U.S. farmland than the solar arrays cleaning and stabilizing civilization! Plus, of course, solar panels actively improve the farmland below, via agrivoltaics or just making money on fallowing fields! Stats to keep in mind.
After years of work by animal rights activists, the infamous Ridglan facility in Wisconsin, which bred beagles for often-cruel cosmetics research, will shut down! All 475 dogs currently there will be moved to an animal rescue center in Florida.
Vermont has become the latest state to pass a balcony solar bill into law! Excellent.
As the foul White House regime keeps racking up humiliating losses, their anti-environment agenda is failing as well! An insane sabotage effort to dismantle the NSF’s 900-instrument Ocean Observatories Initiative has been halted for now after bipartisan backlash, and they appear to have abandoned one line of attack on already-under-construction offshore wind farms after a string of court losses. We resist!
California has fully completed the Nexus Project, installing 1.6 MW of solar canopies over two stretches of irrigation canal near Turlock in the Central Valley. This proof-of-concept will both generate clean power and help prevent water loss to evaporation!
Google-supported startup Energy Dome has announced a deal to build a 19 MW, 10-hour system of cutting-edge carbon dioxide-based battery for the Arizona grid. It’ll store power by pressurizing CO2 with excess electrons, then letting it turn turbines to generate more when needed. A welcome new long-duration energy storage innovation!
A new study has discovered that a mysterious underwater “thundering” sound in the Hudson River of New York is caused by the endangered Atlantic sturgeon having sex, caused by males thrashing as they externally fertilize eggs and amplified by their resonating swim bladders. This will allow new mapping of key spawning grounds!
Since opening in 2023, the car-free mixed-use neighborhood of Culdesac in Tempe, Arizona has proven to be a massive success! A light rail line goes straight to ASU and the Phoenix airport, while bikes, e-bikes, Waymo driverless EV service, and shared community EVs are available for transport nearer home. It’s still growing, to 760 units. The buildings are also all painted white, which along with good airflow in narrower streets has made Culdesac’s ground 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the asphalt in nearby suburbs. A truly SUPERB model of U.S. solarpunk urbanism!
Fun fact: two countries in the world have capital cities named after U.S. Presidents. One is of course the United States itself, with Washington D.C. named after George Washington. The second is Liberia, with Monrovia named after James Monroe. The history is fascinating.
What an uplifting read! This is a lot of positive info. Kudos.
I often save your articles to read as my last mental input of the day. An antidote to the daily disasters and incredible incompetence of the MAGA monsters.
Thanks again, very interesting.