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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by for .

Mike Sowden, in his own words a “Yorkshireman, travel writer, former archaeologist, now chronic misadventurer and tedious enthusiast” writes Everything is Amazing, a popular science Substack.

Everything Is Amazing

A newsletter about asking better questions & a romp through science in search of a good "wow!" you can feel down to your boots.

By Mike Sowden

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

Here’s my previous interview with Mike Sowden in 2025.

2026 so far has shown some interesting differences in political cultures between the UK and the US, especially as it relates to climate change and clean energy.

Obviously we’ve got a maddeningly corrupt administration in the U.S. White House right now, sabotaging renewable energy and throwing money at fossil fuels.

And while the UK often gets criticized for having a lot of problems, one thing it’s done quite well on lately is renewable energy. The UK has phased out coal, built world-leading offshore wind farms, and just recently UK sales of EVs overtook sales of gasoline-powered cars. In 2025, renewables generated over 50% of UK electricity for the second year in a row.

What’s your take, as someone living in the UK? How are you feeling about the early days of your new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham? What do you think about differences in U.S. and UK approaches to the renewables revolution?

I’m originally from the town of Hornsea on the east coast, which gave its name to two of the biggest wind farms, and the last time I visited my aunt there, I went for a walk along the beach at night, and it’s spectacular seeing those massive farms out there now, like a glittering village floating 75 miles offshore!

Even within the U.S., there are vast differences. I saw that California is now generating over half of its electricity from solar! I mean, that’s astonishing.

And the more that happens, the more it sends a clear signal to other political leaders to pay attention. I feel like that’s the point where they realize that this stuff is cheaper.

As you’ve been saying, in Australia, it’s now cheaper to stay off-grid rather than to connect to the grid. And they have hours of free electricity every day.

So there’s this economic incentive to do all these things. If politicians like Andy Burnham at the moment could just realize fully what the economic incentive is, leaning harder into this stuff instead of seeing it as, oh, it will be nice, but first of all, we need to solve this and we need to solve that. I feel like as a new prime minister, this is not what he’s focused on.

One of his pledges to get into power as mayor was to get people off the streets and stop rough sleeping in the winter. And he’s now talking about doing that nationally by Christmas.

So he’s trying to eliminate homelessness. That’s a wonderful, worthy cause, and good on him for doing it. He’s dealing with these social issues that are really important, but we’re not hearing what he’s going to do about renewable issues. So at the moment, it’s all kind of a big question mark. Apart from, he has already said that he is going to honor the existing oilfield licenses that are in place. I don’t think he’s said he’s going to open new ones.

But he isn’t like Reform, our, I would say, far right-wing party. Reform in its upper echelons has people who are climate change deniers. Richard Tice, who’s the second in command of Reform, is openly an anthropogenic climate change denier.

In the U.S., people like that are in the White House! To me, the UK looks lucky.

And rough sleeping, like everything else, is a climate issue. The people who die in heatwaves or other extreme weather are often rough sleepers, people at the margins of society like that. I loved your article with that breakdown of exactly what happens to your body in extreme heat. So that is also directly saving people from climate impacts.

Everything Is Amazing

This Is Your Body If It Overheats.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, wonder and, amongst other absurdities, unexpectedly undiscovered islands…

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2 months ago · 139 likes · 27 comments · Mike Sowden

Absolutely. Everything is underpinned by climate change at the moment. Global warming is going to affect every part of the economy as well as every part of society. It’s not a separate issue. It’s an issue that feeds into everything else and it exacerbates and amplifies all the problems that are existing already.

So let’s hope he realizes this, and has people in the government who are scientifically informing him in the right way. These are not separate issues, this is not a nice-to-have. This is not a, oh, we need to reach this target in the next 10 years, but for now, let’s focus on these things. It’s not like that. It’s literally, it underpins everything.

What was your experience in the 2026 European heatwaves?

Well, it’s been crazy. I’m up here in Scotland, I live in the south of Scotland. I’m on the west coast. It’s quite a cool climate. When it got really hot, it got up to about 28 degrees Celsius here [82.4°F], which is unheard of in this region, but it’s cool compared with what the rest of the UK and especially southern England was dealing with. I mean, they had 38.1 degrees [100.58°F] a few weeks ago!

And that’s outlandish. There was a scientist from the Met Office went on record in saying that the climate of the 20th century for the UK is gone. This is it. Summers are now going to be four degrees warmer on average in the south of England. It’s just different.

But the thing that always interests me is that any time that you have a condition which is a pressure upon human beings, they tend to react with innovation. It’s an accelerant. It’s a catalyst. So all of this has really hammered home how inadequate so much of our building structure is. There’s been a lot of stuff online essentially mocking Europeans for not having aircon, the way that it is in the States, but there is an interesting point there. Why doesn’t every UK home have a heat pump?

I remember when I was traveling about a decade ago, I was traveling through Europe and I was staying in places that get really cold. A friend in Luxembourg, I was staying there and with windchill it was like minus 15°C [-5°F] or something outside. She had a house with enormous plate glass windows. And in this country, we tend to associate plate glass with heat loss. The less windows you have, the warmer your house is. That’s kind of the way that Brits would generally think. But because of the way her house was designed to keep the heat in and to regulate temperature in all sorts of smart ways, there was just so much light. We could see outside and we could just see everything was frozen and trees were splintering with the cold. But inside, everything was toasty warm and everyone was wandering around in barefoot. I feel like there’s so many lessons to learn for Brits in the way that houses are built.

It’s a pressing concern, because it’s clear that we’re going to have warmer summers. And because of everything going on in the Atlantic, we shall see what happens there. Our temperatures are going to be more extreme.

This is the thing that climate scientists have been talking about for decades. This is a consequence of all the energy going into the system. The fluctuations, the variance.

We’ve got to get used to the fact that in the UK, we don’t now live in this very comfortable little range of temperatures that we used to have, where you have people having garden parties and stuff. It’s going to change. We’ve had our temperatures blunted by the Gulf Stream, which tends to keep everything relatively moderate. But now we’re having to face all that. I’m really interested to see what that does to the way that houses are built.

And obviously if we need new air conditioning technology and new temperature regulation technology generally, we’re going to need more energy. Our energy prices right now are going up. So it’s like, okay, we need more infrastructure for more energy. We need more focus on that.

The UK just legalized plug-in “balcony” solar earlier this year, along with several U.S. states!

I’ve been working on that issue closely. It’s small scale, but important. That allows people to set up their own little household power plants, like in Germany.

Everything Is Amazing

Magnalia 02: Fun With The Sun

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter that allows me to ask unlikely questions like “what if we flip our maps around when we cross the equator?” and “what if architecture was invisible? and “what if we could breathe through our rectums…

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2 months ago · 85 likes · 12 comments · Mike Sowden

Yeah, and the way that, and I wrote about this recently, the way that solar panels are getting more efficient. There’s been all sorts of breakthroughs in just how much energy you can generate with a solar panel from a certain amount of sunshine.

And every time that happens, the effectiveness of solar kind of moves up the world. Places like Scotland formerly weren’t getting enough sunshine to really make it viable, Now we are, because of the efficiency. So it just extends the range that these technologies can be put into place. And it’s terrific.

Solar panels up in Orkney will work economically now! Orkney is covered in wind turbines, really, and that’s the main source of power up there, but they could use solar panels now.

Solar keeps getting better and batteries keep getting better! It’s amazing.

There’s been a really big push across Britain towards rewilding, and there’s been some really impressive milestones on that lately. Beavers in London for the first time in 400 years. The British bison reintroduction project just moved European bison to a second site in England, the first one in Kent, the second one in Cumbria What are your thoughts?

I’m fascinated! I’m very encouraged by it all. But it’s also needed.

Ask An Adventurer

Talking about "Unwilded" with Alastair Humphreys & Mike Sowden

Listen now

a month ago · 6 likes · 6 comments · Alastair Humphreys and Mike Sowden

Alistair Humphreys, the adventurer, he wrote a new book called Unwilded.

Everything Is Amazing

Why It's Fun To Actually *Do* Something

One of the dangers of writing a newsletter about the wonders of science is sometimes you stumble over an idea you just can’t get out your head…

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a month ago · 84 likes · 14 comments · Mike Sowden

One of the things he found was, he was looking at the tree coverage across the UK. As soon as you start looking for trees, you notice their absence. I live on a street with hardly any trees. There’s a website, Tree Equity Score UK, where you can check out the tree density rating for your particular street. My street is 60 out of 100, which is low. Only one point more than my local airport, which is ridiculous.

There’s so much that is in nature that if we just kind of rolled it out in a concerted way would solve a lot of problems. I was looking at the science of methylobacteria in fog. Researchers had a look at radiation fog, which is the type that forms above where the ground is warm. The ground is warm and the air is cold, the radiation fog forms above it, just in this very thin layer.

And it’s very temporary, but there are bacteria in that fog!

Everything Is Amazing

Magnalia 03: Oh Hell, There's Something In The Fog

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, wonder and weird lights in the sky that aren’t actually there (sorry…

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22 days ago · 62 likes · 8 comments · Mike Sowden

When these conditions form, the bacteria essentially has a breeding frenzy and then it feeds. It feeds and it replicates over a very short amount of time. And what it feeds on includes formaldehyde, which is air pollution. It is essentially de-smogging the air, which is a remarkable thing.

That got me interested in looking at other forms of bacteria that can do things. And there’s a form of bacteria that was under the ocean, at the edge of a volcano under the ocean off Sicily, a bacteria that consumes CO₂ at an astonishing rate.

Ah, yes, yes, I wrote about this!

Okay, well, what can we do with that? Maybe study it, make sure it’s safe to release, and then just go!

It sounds radical, but this is something that you were talking about when you were talking with Kim Stanley-Robinson. Geoengineering is something that humans have been doing for thousands of years.

Exactly. And as it happens, the UK government is now arguably the world leader in funding geoengineering research. The UK founded a new science agency, ARIA, the Advanced Research and Innovation Agency. It’s fairly small grants, but they have funded, where no one else is funding, several preliminary projects working to actively test methods to cool the climate.

And right now, the U.S. isn’t doing this. If China’s doing it, they’re not announcing it publicly. The European Union isn’t doing it. The UK is willing to try! Thank you.

Some of this is just talking about it, community engagement, but some of this is actually working on stuff. There’s a project in Nunavut, Canada trying to deploy a low-cost way to refreeze sea ice at scale that’s funded by this.

The blessing and the curse of fighting climate change is that it is global, so that you need the whole world to help on it, but also when one part of the world stops helping, other parts can step up.

So your government, your tax dollars, not mine, are funding some of the more innovative things happening in climate repair research right now!

That’s encouraging. Yeah, and geoengineering itself, I feel needs a bit of a PR campaign to really get to the heart of why people are worried about it. Because essentially, they’re worried about it because they look at somebody like Elon Musk and think: let’s not have anyone like him in charge of anything like this. And they’re absolutely right.

Yeah, absolutely. Let’s not have him in charge of anything.

But there are all sorts of interventions that go on. These things need to be looked at. The risk assessment has changed. I feel like we’re now at the stage where we have to try a lot of things.

I agree. Kim Stanley Robinson also said that “geoengineering” is a rather unhelpful umbrella term. It’s as if we described everything from a trowel to a nuclear bomb as “tools” and then said, okay, do you want tools to manage your garden?

There are proposals that would be hard to reverse and change the whole Earth at once, like orbital mirrors or stratospheric sulfur injection type proposals, all the way down to stuff that is really more common sense, local and reversible, like potentially iron fertilization of phytoplankton in the ocean, or trying to protect ice from melting. It’s a huge spectrum of things.

I mean, if you make a hill, you’re doing geoengineering! If the hill is big enough, you’ll change the way that the environment, the atmosphere interacts with the land. Everything is geoengineering. This idea of geoengineering, it really needs to be unpacked into all the different things that it encompasses.

In a way, it reminds me, when I was an archaeologist, there was always the debate of conservation versus archaeology.

Conservation is like, let’s leave it in the ground, let’s leave it for future generations, let’s not do anything, let’s not destroy it. Versus archaeology. Which conservationists might demonize as total destruction, because when you dig a site, you essentially disassemble it. You might even just literally destroy it. If it’s soil that’s been sifted and you’re getting the ancient pollen out, you’re collecting the information, but you’ve destroyed the site.

This is always a very interesting debate within archaeology, but you can’t have just have one side or the other. The two are a dance together.

And this is what human beings do. We do intervene within the environment and we affect our environment with our actions. It’s just about how we do it.

Do we do it intentionally, knowingly, using science, or do we do it just by not caring?

To shift to something different, I really enjoyed your articles adding to the discussion about AI use.

Everything Is Amazing

Shields Up, Stupid.

1. In the second chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea (1968), the aspiring wizard of the book title is having a really bad day…

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3 months ago · 121 likes · 34 comments · Mike Sowden

I personally never, ever use AI in my writing. I’ve just made that a bright, clear line. With Substack’s new Pangram AI-detector thing, I can prove it!

I’ve always just felt that that really fundamentally misses the point. “AI can write for you,” to me that’s sort of like saying that AI can look at a beautiful sunset for you or that AI can eat a delicious meal for you.

The thing is, I got into writing because I want to do writing. I want to spend my time engaging with these ideas, and writing is one of the best ways to do that.

There’s a difference between intelligence and wisdom. If you narrow the metrics enough, a Texas Instruments calculator has more intelligence than a human.

Could you expand on that some more?

This was really jumping off from an essay that Adam Mastroianni wrote about different types of intelligence.

Experimental History

Infinite midwit

The better AI has gotten, the less anxious I’ve become…

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5 months ago · 1214 likes · 148 comments · Adam Mastroianni

I find it very difficult to talk about AI, because I’m from the perspective of somebody who is not interested in using it.

I’m having far too much fun doing these things that people at the AI companies are saying, “You know, you don’t have to do these things anymore.”

I’m thinking, but I want to! That’s the whole point! I enjoy them! Why are you trying to take this away from me and pretend that this is a chore? Because it isn’t a chore. It’s not a chore for me to learn to write better. It’s actually a necessity because I feel like I’m a good enough writer to do what I want to do, but I can certainly see how much better I need to get in the long run.

And the fastest way for me to do that is to sit with a piece of writing and kind of struggle with it. Sit with an idea and struggle to put it down and craft it into a story that I know is going to convey what I actually think.

Everything Is Amazing

Trust Yourself And Sit On It

Hi. This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about using curiosity to tune out clickbait, remember what really matters, and just occasionally, be the very best carrot you can be…

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7 days ago · 77 likes · 13 comments · Mike Sowden

I don’t want a machine to do that for me. I certainly don’t want a machine to tell me how to do it without explaining why. And the why is the thing. That’s the wisdom. The why is what you learn by becoming a better writer.

Exactly. Automating away the struggle leads to bad things. A new study just found that homework scores are now anti-correlated with exam results, because the people getting perfect scores on homework now are people who got AI to do it for them!

Yes. Just today, that’s a chart that’s going viral from The Economist. They’re looking at Chinese students. And in China, from what I gather, there’s an incredible amount of pressure for kids to do well academically. Yet now they’re finding that if they rely on AI to do the work and get the results, they’re not learning and they’re not getting the results at the end.

AI use to do homework is rising, but the people who are doing it are finding that they’re not learning. They’re not putting it into their head. So when they sit down at the end in an exam, you haven’t learned the ways to think and the muscle memory of engaging with these ideas, and you don’t have access to AI, you’re stuffed. If they’re relying on AI to perform that skill, then they can’t do that skill without AI.

All these companies have got in and said, well, you can’t live without AI, oh, in the future, you won’t be able to imagine a life without AI. People are rejecting that.

There’s some interesting disconnects. It’s very easy to feel, especially on the sort of information communities we’re part of, like Substack, that everyone hates it. One of the interesting things there is that, almost by definition, people who find writing fun, like us, probably don’t like AI because it’s trying to take away the thing that they like doing for fun. But a lot of people do not like writing for fun, and may find automating, say, a good enough cover letter to be a genuinely helpful thing.

I can respect people who are using AI to do things that they find to be chores. But then don’t present yourself as an expert! The AI is the expert. You still haven’t internalized that skill. You’re just relying on another service to do it for you.

But it’s all very complicated, and as soon as you start talking about AI stuff, people get very heated.

There was an interesting survey of a thousand young people, between the ages of 18 and 35. It found that the heads of all the AI companies are overwhelmingly unpopular. Absolutely loathed.

I feel like I can understand that. Because if I was in that age range, and I was listening to some of the stuff coming from these directors, they’ll drop a line that essentially says, “oh yeah, all these jobs will just disappear” in front of young people. And I’m thinking, have you workshopped that line? Because that’s infuriating. You’re essentially saying, oh yes, and that part of the economy will be gone overnight, will be destroyed. Isn’t that lovely?

To hear that kind of stuff, it would infuriate me if I was entering the job market. Or if I was in the job market and I was looking to work my way up the ladder over the next decade or so. So I wonder about this. I wonder about the anger.

I mean, I’m the lucky one and I’m also angry at them. I’ve basically won the lottery in that I actually have a job writing full-time at my age in 2026.

You are consistently really good at a thing which I really try to do myself in my own newsletter, which is bringing a sense of wonder to learning about the world. What else would you like to share that we haven’t covered yet?

Well, I’m always having my mind blown about all the really fundamental things in the world that I know nothing about.

I always want to kind of stop and say, yeah, but how does this work?

It’s like, I used to be able to understand the very basics of how a car works. But now we look at a car, it’s all computerized, there’s all sorts of things going on in there. And I’m just looking at it like it’s a spaceship.

This is a wonderful thing and also a slightly bewildering thing. People of my generation, I guess, are feeling this future shock more and more as the world is filled with these devices and ways of thinking that we don’t understand in the way that we used to understand their predecessors. And I love that process as much as I’m a bit discombobulated by it. So it’s kind of fun.

That also unlocks a lot of my wonders. I’m always trying to look at the way things have changed. I was just struck the other day by just checking the time of a ferry. It’s two seconds to just go on your phone, check the ferry times and everything, and just book your ticket there and then. I remember, like, 30 years ago, getting a ferry was like, “Oh, well, I’m going to have to go down to the dock in the morning to the office and hope that there’s still a place.” I remember watching when Michael Palin went around the world in the 1980s, and he was having to do that.

I kind of feel like this is a wonderful thing to teach generations who never had to think about this stuff. There’s so much wonder that can be unlocked now with just explaining how the world used to work. So I’m finding that fun.

Fascinating.

One thing I’m particularly looking at the moment is modern history mega-floods. My newsletter blew up because I wrote about the Zanclean mega-flood in the Mediterranean.

Everything Is Amazing

In Search Of A Flood Like No Other

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a weird newsletter about strange science stuff…

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5 years ago · 83 likes · 26 comments · Mike Sowden

Which happened six million years ago. Nobody around to see it, not even distant Homo sapiens ancestors. The earliest arrival of hominids into Europe has been pushed back, but it certainly hasn’t been pushed back that far. But what would it look like if there was anyone to see these things?

I’ve been looking at mega-floods in more recent history. There was the St. Mary Magdalene’s flood, in 1342.

There’s all sorts of stories that I can dig up here. It’s really bringing home that sense of, wow. If I can find reports of these things, of the way that people at the time were affected, I can write a story that tries to convey what it must be like to see something like that and be in awe of nature in all its awesome fury.

There’s been all sorts of things happening in the climate that have profoundly affected human history. It’s just that we’ve kind of forgotten them.

Like the French Revolution. The backdrop to that was, in 1783, there was a volcanic eruption in Laki, Iceland. Crop failure. You know, “let them eat cake”? That is a direct result of all these crop failures across Europe. And that agitated into this wild social convulsion that became storming the Bastille. French politics was changed forever.

This is a great example, the 1783 eruption! I also wrote a whole article about the climate crisis of 536, about another volcanic eruption that changed history.

These were one-off climate events, at a smaller scale than what we have now, but even those had huge, huge historical impacts.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much to learn by looking at these things. And there’s so much to project forward and to teach politicians.

Environmental scientist, Jonathan Tonkin wrote a piece recently about how ecological grants work in three-year cycles, and how that was just such a problem for getting work done.

Predirections

The four-year planet

I applied for a grant recently. Grant writing is something us academics have to do to keep our research programme running. I treat grants like writing a Nature paper. Every word is scrutinised to ensure it’s the best use of space. You have to convince a diverse panel of experts as well as very specific reviewers that it’s worth funding…

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2 months ago · 57 likes · 15 comments · Jonathan Tonkin

Because that means you have to get everything done within three years, and that’s a ludicrous thing to say about an ecological project that could last centuries.

I was looking at a piece in Scientific American, a study of decomposition of wood in forests. It’s this wonderful project in Oregon that’s been going on now for 40 years, and it’s actually projected to go on for well over another century. It doesn’t need a lot of funding, because it is essentially just wood rotting in a forest, so that they can just come back in and they can continue the work of studying it as wood decomposes. It’s looking into what wood actually puts up into the atmosphere over long periods of time as it decomposes.

Instead of making assumptions, we can study this example of wood over a century, and say, here’s what actually happened. Here’s the carbon that actually went into the atmosphere. And that’s a long, long, long-term project. A project that spans many human lifetimes.

It’s been a long-running environmental talking point, thinking long-term, but it’s increasingly important now. We face issues like “Maybe we need to start planning now to stop the West Antarctic ice sheet from sliding into the ocean in the 2100s.”

That kind of thinking really makes the future safer. And yet here we are in four year political cycles. There’s this terrible disconnect at the moment.

Positive change seems to always happen slower than we want it to, and then also somehow faster than we expect.

Like what you said earlier about the California milestone. California went from 1% solar power in 2012 to 51% in 2026! Just 14 years, and a complete change of the basis of the grid.

Also in 2026, a Chinese EV actually became the single most sold model of car in Britain.

Yeah, the rise of EVs has been spectacular. I’ve heard it! I don’t hear electric cars in the way I used to hear cars. “Oh, that car is moving. Is there something wrong with my ears?” I love to hear it.

Also, that should be something that should be taught to people who are setting targets within the government. Like, look, these things can change this quickly. You can’t just say this is going to take 30 or 40 years to implement. It just happened in five years in this place. We could do it here.

Those are the kinds of examples, case studies, that I would love to see really filtering in into government. We shall see if they do with Andy Burnham’s government.

That is one of the things I really try to do with my newsletters, to say, “Okay, this is a thing that really happened.” To share what currently defines the leading edge, out somewhere in the world.

The world’s largest ever electric aircraft took off on August 12th. Electric aircraft! That was described as impossible just a few years ago.

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope

Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope, August 19, 2026

Electric aircraft are starting to really take off…

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13 days ago · 37 likes · 4 comments

I remember, yeah. Isn’t it wonderful to see? It’s very hard to argue with the possible existence of something that already exists.

That is the whole thing about the renewable revolution now. Renewables can’t be the basis of a grid? Well, they are, in South Australia and Spain and California and many other places. The things that they argue can’t happen have already happened.

That is the value of really spreading the news of everything that you write about. Every time I take something from it and I put it onto the social media platform, I can see people lighting up because it’s like, we don’t have to believe. We don’t have to believe. It’s happening! That’s such a great thing.

And in the age of AI-generated slop nonsense and everything, it’s often hard to know who to believe. But when you say, “Okay, this thing right here exists. Are you going to tell me it doesn’t? Because I can prove that it does.” That’s something that is hard to argue with.

Yeah, and that’s the value of prototypes. It’s such a powerful thing for storytelling purposes. A team in Cambridge built a solar oven that converts waste plastic into clean hydrogen! And it worked! It’s incredible. I mean, that is a plot point in a Neal Stephenson novel. That was science fiction until recently.

All the things that are happening in the world, they have their own momentum. And that momentum, in the long run, outpaces whatever is going on in the U.S. I very much hope that it will correct things and it will move the U.S. back into the direction that it deserves to go in.

Me too, very much. We have options to at least begin to course-correct coming up in the November midterms.

And in the meantime, there’s a lot of hope that can be taken from seeing all the things that are going on.

I genuinely feel like one of the luckiest people alive. In these crazy, maddening times, I get engage with ideas to make things better, and try my best to help nudge the world into a better place, as my job! I’m very, very fortunate.

I love that enthusiasm. And yeah, it’s desperately needed, this sense of wonder, Everything going on with the climate is creating so much anxiety and people need to be woken up to that, you know, with uncertainty, there’s possibility.

And they need to be woken up to all the things that are happening which are taking advantage of what that possibility can be. These things, this is why people get activated rather than hearing news where they’re just curling up in a ball in despair.

Exactly!

Yeah. Nothing happens to the world that is good when that happens.

And I really feel like that’s a thing now in climate change storytelling that scientists are learning. That in order to get people to do something, you can’t shut them down with dread.

People criticize that as being, you know, a Dr. Pangloss, a Pollyanna, a naive optimist in the face of horror. But just horrifying people doesn’t motivate people. You’ve got to show people that there’s stuff to fight for. That we’re putting points on the board. I sometimes compare the “doom” communication strategy as trying to motivate a sports team by only showing them the points their opponents scored.

And sometimes human beings work harder in adversity. They work harder when the points are down, and they need to be aware of that.

They need to feel like that they are being treated like somebody who can make that responsible decision to kind of step up and do something. Instead of just saying, oh, you know, all is lost.

There’s all sorts of challenges in science communication that I feel like are going to be very interesting over the next few years.

I see my role as a kind of a mixture of a clown and a tidal barrage.

I have never heard that sentence before. That is a fascinating sentence. I can’t quite picture that in my mind. But please, I want to hear what that is!

So a clown, in that I’m really writing a newsletter that’s trying to entertain people. I’m always leaning into the laugh. I’m always trying to find stuff that makes them go, wow! I’m trying to engage their emotions. It’s a piece of entertainment as much as it is trying to teach people what’s actually going on.

Everything Is Amazing

Where We're Going, We Still Need Idiots

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8 months ago · 132 likes · 25 comments · Mike Sowden

And a tidal barrage, because it’s my job as a slightly clueless idiot to step into the middle of the current and kind of take all this energy of all this stuff going on and then divert it to the people that I really want to see getting the attention, which are the scientists and the engineers and the professional science educators.

For some reason, I am now in this position where I do get a certain amount of attention. So I feel like I am here to collect that energy, and my role is to just divert it to all the causes that I really believe in. So that’s why I’m a tidal barrage.

That’s a great metaphor.

We do both things. To do science storytelling, you have to also be aware of what storytelling, what good storytelling is. And good storytelling is really engaging people.

Everything that’s within nonfiction storytelling that works, that’s been rediscovered, essentially, or been adopted over from fiction storytelling. Structure, foreshadowing, sense of character, sensual detail that make you really feel like you’re in the moment, immediacy, it’s all these things.

Within science, you’ve got to give people that hope as well. You’ve got to make them aware that science is not absolutely terrifying. Because these topics are, sometimes I can write about a topic that is on an inhuman scale, and I’ve got to try and find the thread that makes it human within all that vastness. Deep geological time, or the size of the universe or whatever.

You see good science storytellers who are very good at that. They’ll say something like, “oh, yeah, within you are a scatter of atoms that started in a star and then they worked their way through the world, including at some point Julius Caesar.” They’ll bring that alive. They’ll make it kind of a real, personal story that you can really feel.

I really feel that is part of it. Science communicators discovering this kind of storytelling that makes their readers light up and really feel, “Wow, this is such a great story.”

That’s a beautiful expression of the job that we’re both trying to do.

We’ve come to the top of the hour. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

One of the things I’m doing at the moment is I’m working my way through a series that’s called SF Masterworks. It’s collected together the best of science fiction over the last century. I’m working my way through all the titles, and that’s fascinating because it’s seeing all the ways that science fiction authors have told these science stories and how that’s changed. One of the things that I really noticed has changed is these vast future histories, like Olaf Stapledon’s books Star Maker and Last and First Men. They’re essentially a future history of humanity that goes off hundreds of thousands of years into the future, I think millions of years at one point. You don’t see those kinds of stories as much anymore, and I wonder if that reflects something about the age that he was writing in.

So this has got me really curious about the kinds of stories that science fiction storytellers are telling now. They’re clearly different. There’s Hopepunk, Solarpunk, Thrutopian fiction. It’s not that new, but its popularity is new.

You could see that at some points, not too long ago, it was dystopian fiction that was really popular. I’m very interested in the way that the world is affecting science fiction writers and the stories they tell.

I love Kim Stanley Robinson’s work because I always feel like I am glimpsing a future. It may not be the future we end up with, but it feels very real. What’s the word? Verisimilitude. A real sense of: this is tangible. This is real. In a way, this exists. This is worth fighting for. This is a thing we should have. Why do we not have it yet?

Absolutely.

Thank you for what you do, Sam, as always.

Thank you for what you do, Mike! Live long and prosper.

Cheers, Sam.

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Our Sunday feature shares good news on climate action & resilience!

Clean Energy

Bloomberg has an excellent new visualization of the astounding global progression of solar power. We’ve just passed the 3-terawatt (3,000 GW, three million megawatt) milestone of installed solar capacity globally as of early 2026! While China leads the way, solar deployments are accelerating around the world in both rich and poor countries. Most importantly, the pace of solar deployment just keeps speeding up! Bloomberg now forecasts that the world will have 9 terawatts of deployed solar by 2036, and the concurrent spread of batteries is rapidly making that into 24/7 power!

India continues its fast-track mass electrification, advancing the human development of 1.4 billion people with abundant clean energy! In the first half of 2026, India installed a record-high 27 GW (27,000 MW) of new solar capacity, making up 76% of all new capacity built in that period. More than 150 GW of new renewables capacity is currently under construction as of mid-2026. Awesome work!

The largest-yet grid-scale battery in all of Europe, Coalburn 1, has come online near Glasgow in Scotland! Located on a former coal mining site, it has 1 GWh of storage.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a massive new suite of hydro and wind projects to be built in the ultra-remote Labrador region of Canada, describing the CAN$70 billion plans as the largest-ever single-area investment in clean energy in North America. By the mid-2030s, it would add up to 2,500 megawatts of additional capacity to the existing Churchill Falls dam, build a new 2,700 MW (2.7 GW) Gull Island dam, and build 2,000 MW of new onshore wind in the general area, all sending clean electrons out via two new transmission lines.

That would add enough new non-fossil energy to power and heat every building in Canada’s three largest cities, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, combined.

The plan includes local community benefits, with provisions including electricity bill rebates for all Newfoundland and Labrador households plus an opportunity for the local Innu Nation to become part-owners of wind and transmission projects. Up to 720 MW could also be sold to United States grids via recently built power lines linking Quebec to New York and Massachusetts. Canada is going all-in on electrification!

Wildlife

Red-footed falcons (Falco vespertinus) are found across much of Eurasia for most of the year, and migrate every winter to southern Africa. Now, Hungarian ornithologist Péter Palatitz has discovered that every February and March, hundreds of thousands of this falcons — possibly up to one million — pass through the same tiny patch of land in central Angola where they form a mass roosting site, dubbed “Falcopolis.” They gorge on the winged termites that erupt from the ground en masse each March, increasing their weight by 20 to 30 percent before flying north. Now, research is ongoing, the Angolan government is showing interest, and community conservation efforts have already reduced falcon-hunting in this critical area. Spectacular news!

India is home to the world’s last remaining wild Asiatic lion population, living only within and around the Gir Forest landscape of Gujarat. Dedicated conservation work is paying off: the government recently announced that the Asiatic lion population reached 891 lions in 2025, up from just 523 in 2015! Prey species have rebounded, community engagement has increased, and the lions’ range has expanded. Great work!

2026 so far has been a record-high year for loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) nests on the beaches of Florida! As of mid-August, 13,770 nests have been reported on the Atlantic coast plus 922 more on the Gulf-facing Sanibel Island. After decades of over-hunting, conservation efforts have led the species to rebound since the 1970s. Superb!

Researchers have discovered a new species of mountain horned dragon lizard in the high-elevation evergreen forests of Mae Wong National Park in western Thailand. It’s named Acanthosaura syrax, after the fictional dragon Syrax from the House of the Dragon TV show, and they’re only up to 10 centimeters long. A new fellow Earthling!

The ancient and unique species of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) is reportedly experiencing an epic population rebound on the beaches of Massachusetts! After decades of conservation work, recent state surveys have found record abundance in several areas, particularly towns on the south side of Cape Cod. Awesome work!

Innovation

The UK government and Google have begun Operation Blue Skies, a world-first trial using atmospheric analysis to redirect commercial plane flights towards areas of temperature, moisture, and pressure where they’ll be much less likely to form contrails, high-altitude clouds that worsen global warming by trapping additional heat. Google will analyze satellite and flight data to find likely contrail-producing regions, focusing for now on the Shanwick Oceanic region of North Atlantic airspace, and UK air traffic controllers will redirect planes to avoid them during trial periods set for the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28. Vital, innovative harm reduction work!

In cities across India, from Jaipur to Alwar to Jodhpur to New Delhi, communities have recently restored dozens of ancient yet abandoned millennia-old stepwells, providing pedestrian-accessible clean water that’s highly valuable during heatwaves. In another old-school climate resilience tactic, the national Amrit Samovar program has built over 68,000 new village ponds since 2022. Spectacular work!

Here’s my article reporting from Delhi in 2024 — I visited the Ugrasen ki Baoli stepwell!

The first regular commercial shipping route through the Arctic Ocean has begun operations. The “Ice Silk Road” starts at the major port of Ningbo (near Shanghai) in China, goes up through the Bering Strait, through melting sea ice north of Siberia, and ends at Felixstowe (near London), the largest port in the United Kingdom. This route takes only 18 days, compared to 40 days via the Suez Canal. Ironically, many of the major exports China will be sending to Europe on this route opened by climate change will be electrotech: Chinese EVs, batteries, and solar panels! Fascinating news.

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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.

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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are a fast-emerging housing and climate solution.

Tell your state leaders to support accessory dwelling units (ADUs)!

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Reasons For Hope

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs, aka “backyard homes,” often a method for grandparents to live near their family) are increasingly emerging as a win-win housing and climate solution! Smaller, more compact houses inherently use less energy to start with, and modern fully electrified models are becoming widely available. These compact, energy-efficient, modular homes can now be made at scale in factories, drastically reducing housing build costs! Efforts to scale up the ADU sector just got a vital boost with the recent passage (without the president’s signature) of the bipartisan federal 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act1, which removed some key regulatory barriers like the nonsensical “chassis rule.”

Lower-level red tape is now the key barrier stopping people from building ADUs in their backyard, and some states are stepping up on permitting reform for electric housing abundance. Massachusetts has lately made permitting for ADUs easier, with Governor Healey signing a law that prevents municipalities from banning families from building small homes in their own backyard. (Though another round of permitting reform would be welcome, as there are still varying town-level standards). The state’s ADU Resource Center includes an ADU Wizard online tool that lets homeowners virtually map and cost out potential projects. And Bay State home manufacturing startup Reframe Systems is using robots to assemble ultra-efficient ADUs in their novel “microfactory” model.

State leaders should accelerate affordable housing abundance by passing an ADU permitting reform bill that establishes one clear set of rules statewide and preempts nonsensical municipal bans on these homes.

Tell your state leaders to support accessory dwelling units (ADUs)!

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Wild pronghorns chose to move through a solar farm in New Mexico.

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Reasons For Hope

At San Juan Solar in New Mexico, early results from a multi-year research project used tracking collars to discover that wild pronghorns (Antilocapra americana) will sometimes choose to move through an active grid-scale solar farm. National electric codes currently require fences around grid-scale solar arrays, but San Juan (which replaced a coal plant) chose to put multiple smaller fences around nine individual arrays instead of one big one around the whole site. Early data now shows that pronghorns have chosen to move through all of the existing “passageways” between solar arrays to varying degrees.

This is just one of many recent examples of solar/wildlife coexistence!

The Gemini Solar Project in Nevada has become a haven for the endangered threecorner milkvetch plant! Scientists found 12 individual plants of the unique species on the site before development, but 93 in 2024 after the solar panels were added. Furthermore, the milkvetch growing at the Gemini solar farm grew wider and taller than the milkvetch growing on nearby land plots outside the solar farm.

Another recent study from Argonne National Laboratory found more grassland birds on ecovoltaic solar arrays than nearby farming fields across the U.S. Midwest.

A Cambridge/RSPB study from England also found more birds on solar farms than neighboring farmers’ fields.

In Germany, the Weesow-Willmersdorf solar farm has become a high-density breeding area for the Eurasian skylark.

And a solar farm in Colorado appears to have directly helped the wild grassland ecosystem beneath survive a drought by boosting soil moisture retention, increasing plant growth by about 20% or more compared to open fields with no solar panels.

The United States is currently in an entirely politician-driven electricity shortage as gigawatts of solar, wind, and transmission line projects are being intentionally blocked by the White House. And with an increasingly chaotic global climate, we need as much support for biodiversity as we can get. In addition to farming-plus-solar “agrivoltaics,” wildlands-plus-solar “ecovoltaics” is looking like a scalable win-win for a warming world.

By supporting the build-out of solar farms, U.S. state leaders can help provide abundant and affordable clean electricity while supporting healthy ecosystems! The clearest win-win in policy today is to prioritize and accelerate solar power progress with maximally supportive pro-buildout legal, regulatory, and permitting structures.

Tell your state leaders that solar farms can and do coexist with wildlife!

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Agrivoltaics is stepping up during the 2026 European heatwaves!

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During the 2026 heatwave, early European adopters of agrivoltaics have seen the moisture-retaining shade effect of solar panels save their harvest! For example, the Wimmer traditional hop farm in Bavaria, Germany has protected this year’s yield (and taste) with solar canopies, and now plans to expand to 20 hectares and add a small battery.

A recent study from the University of Hohenheim found that barley, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and maize all adapt well to agrivoltaics, changing their use of photosynthesis to use CO₂ more efficiently in the partially shaded conditions.

And recent research with fig and olive crops in Puglia, Italy found during the heatwave that elevated solar panel canopies can lower soil temperatures by as much as 20 degrees Celsius compared to directly sun-exposed soils! It’s a resilience multi-tool.

These are just a few of the latest case studies in the growing mountain of evidence about agrivoltaic benefits pouring in from around the world!

Early agrivoltaics adopter China had over 500 agrivoltaics projects two years ago in 2024, and many more have been built since. Solar panels have been installed over sites ranging from livestock grazing areas in Inner Mongolia to tea plantations in Yunnan to leafy vegetable-growing greenhouses on the island of Hainan to underwater sea cucumber farms in Shandong.

Humanity is starting to realize that we can now set up an array of solar panels above almost any form of food production. Solar panels provide shade during hot days, which both directly shields what’s below from UV radiation and improves water retention in the soil. That benefits everything from sheep to strawberries to sugarcane!

State leaders should actively encourage and incentivize all forms of agrivoltaics, from solar grazing to row crops to greenhouses to aquaculture. Policymakers can accelerate this epic win-win by spreading the word and ensuring fast-acting and supportive legal, regulatory, and permitting structures!

Illinois has become an agrivoltaics hotspot lately thanks to recently passed laws both forbidding nonsensical local-level solar bans and fast-tracking permitting for community solar and agrivoltaics. And Virginia recently passed a bill creating a formal legal definition for “agrivoltaics” as a prelude to supporting more farmers’ adoption. These are great models to follow!

Tell your state leaders to actively incentivize agrivoltaics progress!

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Solar stepped up to stabilize grids during the 2026 European heatwaves!

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Reasons For Hope

Solar has been a savior during the scorching 2026 European heatwaves. Coal plants in Poland, fossil gas plants in Italy, and nuclear reactors in France, Hungary, and Romania were all shut down due to rivers running low and causing dire shortages of water for cooling, while power generation from hydroelectric dams declined pretty much everywhere. “Baseload” power proved to be deeply vulnerable to climate shocks, cutting electricity supply just as demand skyrocketed with more people staying cool indoors.

But solar power stepped up, keeping the lights, fans, and fridges running across the continent! The long, hot, cloudless stretches that shut down coal and gas plants due to water shortages also benefited solar farms’ electricity production. Overall, the heatwaves increased daily power demand in Europe by up to 25%, but the hot, sunny weather simultaneously increased solar generation by up to 17%, directly stabilizing national grids across the European Union!

Clean energy doesn’t just help avoid worst-case future climate change — it actively builds resilience against present-day climate change! Renewables are traditionally attacked as “intermittent” because solar farms don’t generate power at night. But in the real world, the one with batteries to store solar power into the night and structural fossil fuel vulnerabilities to geopolitical and climate shocks, renewables are increasingly the least intermittent power source. America’s starting to see that as well, with solar providing over 51% of California’s electricity in May 2026.

This is vital context for policymaking as the current U.S. presidential administration continues its unprecedented campaign of sabotage and corruption to slow down renewable energy and prop up the dying fossil fuel industry. Congress must restore its constitutional role to control the power of the purse and rein in executive abuses! Furthermore, Congress should pass a clean permitting reform bill that both explicitly blocks presidential sabotage of clean energy build-outs and generally prioritizes firm, strong renewable electricity generation over weak and intermittent fossil fuels.

Tell Congress that renewables are the least intermittent power source!

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Solar Solves Energy

Solar solves energy because it’s generating electricity by tapping directly into a billions-of-years-old nuclear reactor 93 million miles away that is so utterly immensely gigantic it makes Earth look like a pool ball by comparison. It’s been the cheapest source of electricity on the planet and the overwhelming majority of all new-built electricity-generating capacity worldwide for five years straight now, and it’s just getting started.

I sometimes think that we forget too easily what this technology actually is, and just what an incredible new foundational accomplishment it is for human civilization. Solar panels are simultaneously a humble, friendly, low-impact, zero-pollution power system suitable for your balcony or backyard and a personal conduit to unfathomable cosmic power1. There’s just so much energy produced by our Sun! Even the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of this star’s energy output that reaches the surface of Earth as sunlight adds up every five days to more usable energy than burning the world’s entire known fossil fuel reserves!

And then there’s BATTERIES! Solar’s best friend, the parallel revolution, the electricity silos, arbitraging electrons across time, extending the sun’s rays into the night, bringing solar asymptotically close to becoming its own source of 24/7 baseload power as the tech keeps progressing! This kills the intermittency problem stone dead and solidifies solar’s status as the new foundational power source for human civilization.

More available energy makes pretty much anything we humans want to do substantially easier. And so far at least, it’s been strongly associated with improved outcomes in key human-wildlife statistics like life expectancy, literacy, and women’s rights. More energy availability may sound greedy or wasteful, but in practice it disproportionately benefits the most vulnerable among us, the people most likely to be forced into dirty and dangerous muscle-power tasks from smoky cookstoves to back-breaking water-carrying.

The Electrotech Revolution is the third titanic changing-everything phase-shift of human history, after the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. As Ember2 consistently discusses, human history in the long run may conveniently be periodized in four stages of increasing access to usable energy. Foragers, Farmers, Fossils…and now Photovoltaics.

We are beginning to truly channel the power of our local Star, and it is a momentous step forward in the history of humanity. In my opinion, this is both the best and most important thing happening on Earth right now. It’s bigger than the energy sector, bigger than the much-hyped AI industry, definitely bigger than politics. The Big Good to fight the Big Bad of climate change, potentially in the very long term of more lasting importance than the threat of climate change itself. The Solar/Battery Revolution will touch every aspect of human life, and signs are good that it will solve or at least drastically ameliorate a heck of a lot of our civilization’s biggest problems!

Solar Solves Water

Solar solves water through desalination. (Not even getting into the incremental benefits of improved solar-powered wells and taps, which I’m categorizing under “energy”)! An overwhelming majority of the water on the surface of planet Earth is salt water in the oceans, most of the remainder is frozen in ice caps and glaciers, and only a relative trickle is available as liquid fresh water. Desalination works, but cheap, abundant solar power (plus the new materials science in membranes for osmosis techniques) is making it much, much cheaper. If humanity can tap the water reserves of the oceans, we need never, ever run out of water to drink. Water shortages anywhere in the world become a policy failure, not an external constraint.

And a good thing too, because climate change is threatening the reliability of surface fresh water. In dry areas of the world from Australia to the Middle East to southern California, desalination plants are being built at a rapid pace, slaking the thirsts of entire cities and providing some stability in an age of extreme weather shifts. We’re already seeing examples of rapid desalination progress and fascinating new paradigms from around the world!

Saudi Arabia recently achieved a new world record for ultra-energy-efficient desalination, getting fresh water from seawater with less energy use than ever before. Their new cutting-edge advanced reverse osmosis unit at the Yanbu desalination complex (partially solar powered!) has a capacity of 200,000 cubic meters of water per day, and record-low energy use of 1.55 kwH per cubic meter.

The Middle East already relies heavily on desalination to remain habitable, and this paradigm is likely to accelerate.

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

Desalination is expanding. In 2026, two companies and two county governments in Texas have signed off on a new partnership to build a gigantic new advanced-reverse-osmosis desalination plant on South Padre Island with a capacity of at least 50 million gallons per day. This could potentially “drought-proof” the entire Rio Grande Valley region (currently severely water-stressed to the point of risking draining the river!) by providing a consistent supply of drinkable water from the Gulf of Mexico!

In Australia, 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.

Desalination’s negative environmental impacts are on track to be greatly reduced, if not eliminated entirely. There are a great multitude of pioneers fine-tuning upgraded models of desalination that minimize negative effects on marine life, for example diffusing brine discharge over a harmlessly broad area or using the salt and minerals in industrial applications. And when you look at the global picture, the seas of Earth are getting more full of water and slightly less salty anyway as the Greenland ice cap melts, so removing a little fresh water (at a much, much smaller scale) is just moving the needle very slightly back towards pre-Anthropocene conditions.

Desalination is increasingly a core civilizational competency, slaking cities’ thirsts in a warming world. As desalination is overwhelmingly likely to keep scaling up fast, there’s fascinating potential for substantial knock-on effects to benefit biodiversity by humans reducing consumption of the surface fresh water we share with wild ecosystems – or even, in the future, using desalination to produce more fresh water to keep drying lakes, rivers, and swamps alive on a hotter planet.

Solar Solves Food

Solar solves food through agrivoltaics, soon to be joined by scaled-up cellular agriculture! And that’s not even counting the many second-order factors related to energy electrotech just being better in general, like the emerging worldwide surge of electric farm equipment and irrigation wells reducing dependence on vulnerable diesel imports!

A landmark new study from 2025 has calculated that agrivoltaics, the growing of crops under solar panels, is suitable for a very large chunk of all existing farmland across Earth’s surface. Their headline result is that about 22% to 35% of rain-fed harvested area globally would likely continue their current crop yields if solar panels were added, with the agrivoltaic setup helping to reduce water stress by protecting the crops from heat! And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a conservative estimate by now, because new studies on crops performing well under solar shading just keep pouring in from around the world. I could write an entire weekly newsletter on agrivoltaics alone and never run out of stories.

As with much else, China is ahead of the curve on this. China had over 500 agrivoltaics projects two years ago in 2024, and many more have been built since. Solar panels have been installed over sites ranging from livestock grazing areas in Inner Mongolia to tea plantations in Yunnan to leafy vegetable-growing greenhouses on the island of Hainan.

Shade and a windbreak - it helps keep moisture in the soil! With the rise of agrivoltaics, plus the incredibly fast rise of new precision-bred heat-tolerant higher-yielding climate-resilient crops around the world in recent years, I personally think that the long-feared apocalyptic of climate chaos-driven famines is no longer an inescapable trap, but entirely avoidable and overcome-able.

And that’s just the first wave of how solar directly benefits food production. We already have working prototype factories in Finland doing commercially viable cellular agriculture, growing and fermenting a particular species of microbe (in a setup similar to how beer is brewed) with only renewable electricity and carbon dioxide needed as inputs, to produce human-edible Solein protein powder! It’s now scaling up fast, with the second (much larger) factory being built.

Precision-fermented protein is the most sustainable food in the history of the world. It is to plants what plants are to beef, using much less water and land while causing much lower greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s completely independent of weather or soil conditions, a mass protein production strategy suitable for a Mars base — or a global network of climate disaster-proof backups on Earth, potentially up to the task of ending hunger forever.

This very year, 2026, saw a protein powder enriched with Solein, the first calorie source in human history not sourced directly or indirectly from photosynthesis, go on sale in the United States for the first time. There are dozens more products being developed for sale in markets around the world.

The Solein-making Finnish startup’s name? Solar Foods. It’s only just beginning to scale up, and there are many more in the field. Watch this space!

Solar Solves Health

The first way solar power solves health is by replacing the fossil fuels that are the world’s leading source of deadly air pollution. A Harvard T.H. Chan study has calculated that 8 million people per year die earlier due to air pollution from fossil fuels. That means that burning fossil fuels directly hastens one in five human deaths worldwide! The population of New York City killed by fossil fuels, every year. That’s not even discussing carbon dioxide-related impacts, just all the nasty crap that burning coal, oil, and gas spews into the atmosphere, from sulfur dioxide to particulate matter. Fossil fuel air pollution is a major cause of heart disease and lung cancer (two of the biggest causes of death for modern humans) as well as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a host of other ailments.

All unnecessary. We have a better choice. The change is already happening. When I went to Beijing in January 2026, I saw clear blue skies. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people are alive today who would have been dead if their country hadn’t pushed so hard to cut fossil fuel pollution and deploy renewables. The U.S. and Europe had already made substantial progress on air pollution reduction by the dawn of the solar age, but there’s still lots of opportunity to improve — for example by switching to EVs and shutting down those last coal and gas plants!

The second way solar power solves health is through its fundamentally decentralized and resilient nature, a massive boon for healthcare accessibility that is particularly apparent in the vital cold chain. A lot of life-saving medical products, from vaccines to blood transfusions, need to be kept cold in fridges right up until their use. In underdeveloped tropical parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, communities without a stable 24/7 grid connection (many millions of people) essentially had no chance at getting the basic healthcare the rich world takes for granted, because there was no way that their tiny village clinic (if they even had one!) could consistently keep a fridge running without any blackouts spoiling the supplies.

That’s now changing fast thanks to the solar revolution! And there are entire new paradigms of healthcare now possible due to electrotech, like Rwanda’s amazing medical drone delivery base that I visited in April 2026. That’s possible thanks to batteries, and solar is making it ever cheaper and easier to charge those batteries! The life-saving benefits of modern medicine are rapidly becoming available to the world’s poorest people, thanks to solar power.

But wait, that’s not all! As with cellular agriculture for food, there are also some fascinating early signs of a potential extra additional future solar-powered revolution in the field of health. Scientists have recently found that a very specific wavelength of far-UVC light, around 200 to 235 nanometers, kills lots of bacteria and viruses while having little to no negative impact on human health — not even the sunburn you get from the UVB part of the UV spectrum. If you install a specialized lamp producing far-UVC light, it basically constantly disinfects everything the light touches.

We probably still want to minimize exposure, but even a few walk-through light booths at the entrance to key infection-transmission areas like hospitals, schools, and public transport stations could revolutionize public health, maybe even to the level of preventing the next pandemic or ending transmission of the common cold if it gets widespread enough. That’s the kind of widespread additional beneficial electricity use that would be relatively to easy to implement in a solar-powered civilization!

The Works in Progress Newsletter

Flipping the switch on far-UVC

For all of the progress that humanity has made against water-borne, food-borne, and vector-borne disease, we remain devastatingly vulnerable to germs that spread through the air…

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a year ago · 117 likes · Richard Williamson

Solar Solves Biodiversity Loss

Solar solves biodiversity loss because it is a highly economically productive land use that is eminently compatible with wildlife habitation. A solar panel is, after all, just a thing, sitting there, like a Platonic solid. Photons knocking electrons off silicon. No moving parts, no emissions, no pollution going out to soil, water, or air. Over and over, studies around the world are finding that many wildlife species simply don’t mind solar panels, and if the land under and around them is sown with wildflowers or just left alone it can become prime bird and small mammal habitat, as studies have found recently from the UK to the U.S. Midwest!

Solar farms are immensely better for wildlife than high-intensity industrial cropland pretty much everywhere. Study after study keeps finding more biodiversity on solar farms than on the adjacent farmland! Replacing crop growing with solar farms (which currently take up less space than golf courses and much less space than wasteful ethanol cropland in America today!) is a huge benefit to wildlife. It provides classic grassland habitat in exactly the way that modern high-intensity farming doesn’t. There’s no more plowing or pesticides! It’s a de-facto nature sanctuary that pays for itself.

These benefits aren’t just on land. The fast-growing field of floating solar, in addition to conserving water by reducing evaporation, often becomes a new perching ground for waterbirds!

Furthermore, in deserts and dry grasslands, we’re increasingly learning that adding solar panels actively benefits the wild ecosystem!

An in-depth new study at the giant 1 GW (1,000 MW) Gonghe solar park in Qinghai Province, China, has found that the presence of solar panels had multifaceted positive effects on the local arid desert ecosystem. The solar panels provide shade and a windbreak, allowing more moisture to accumulate in the soil below, and the researchers found that the area under the solar panels had higher plant diversity, plant biomass, and microbial diversity than the surrounding desert!

As solar farms spread, we’re seeing similar findings around the world. A recent study from Arizona State University has found that the cool shade of solar panels can serve as a growth-enhancing “nursery” for small American desert plants and “biocrust” species like mosses, lichen and cyanobacteria.

It’s starting to look like building large-scale solar farms in arid deserts is not, in fact, an ecological tradeoff - it’s a win-win! Shade and a windbreak, again, doing their thing! It’s a way of generating energy that is SIMULTANEOUSLY A FORM OF CLIMATE-RESILIENT ECOSYSTEM CONSERVATION! It’s the freaking apotheosis of the environmental movement, a self-sustaining incentive package to help the drier parts of Earth survive the Anthropocene.

Solar Solves Mining and Waste

Solar solves mining and waste because an electrotech economy lives more lightly on the Earth than a fossil fuel economy. Not only in the metaphorical way, preventing massive global harms like toxic air pollution, in the very literal pounds/kilograms way.

The total weight of the ore needed to electrify the entire world’s current transport system by 2040, all those critical battery minerals you hear about, all the lithium and manganese and rare earth elements, adds up to about 1.410 million tons. That’s a lot. But the weight of the oil extracted each year to support our current fossil-fueled transportation is about 2.150 million tons! This is just transport, but the same relationship holds for all of our civilization. It makes sense when you think about it - fossil fuels get burned, but solar panel and battery minerals stay in use for decades and can then be recycled!

As highlighted in the exciting research of Dr. Hannah Ritchie and the Rocky Mountain Institute, we’re also learning that clean energy technologies hit a waste-reduction trifecta. In comparison to fossil fuels, they require orders of magnitude less mining (because they’re not burning fuel!), produce much less end-of-life waste, and are increasingly hyper-recyclable, to the extent that it might someday be possible to create a “Battery Mineral Loop,” where after a one-time mining investment, critical minerals could just keep getting recycled between ever-improving generations of tech.

The Electrotech Revolution

The Battery Mineral Loop

Today we launched our new report on battery minerals: The Battery Mineral Loop. In it, we lay out a comprehensive strategy to address the rising demand for battery minerals…

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2 years ago · 24 likes · 2 comments · Daan Walter and Kingsmill Bond

By the Numbers

How much waste do solar panels and wind turbines produce?

You might have seen the following image from a recent paper from Heather Mirletz and colleagues, published in Nature Physics. It has been shared a lot in my circles on social media…

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3 years ago · 114 likes · 53 comments · Hannah Ritchie

I get why many people oppose battery mineral mines near them, I really do. And in some places, like Sulawesi in Indonesia, rapid proliferation has caused genuinely bad environmental harm. But in the global scheme of things, each battery mineral mine is also a sort of anti-mine, an investment in a civilizational future with much, much less mining needed.

And much less waste! Total “used solar panel” waste by 2050 is on track to add up to less than one percent as much mass than coal ash waste! End-of-life solar, wind, and battery waste is generally highly recyclable, and even if it wasn’t and was all destined for a landfill (implausible in the extreme), the fact that clean energy minerals stay in use for twenty years straight instead of being burned up for fuel means that their waste would still be positively tiny and harmless in comparison to the vast and constantly growing piles of toxic coal ash already sickening some of America’s and the world’s poorest and vulnerable communities!

But what’s actually happening is even better — as we improve at both recycling and efficiency, building solar panels and batteries with less materials, the rate of improvement is so fast that after a few more decades, we might not even have to extract new minerals for batteries and other electrotech! This is frankly incredible.

Solar Solves Peace and Freedom

As Bill McKibben has consistently written, a solar-powered world seems extremely likely to be a more peaceful and freer one.

What do Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and a multitude of smaller dictatorships from Brunei to Equatorial Guinea have in common? Their economies are propped up by fossil fuel exports, a narrow, capital-intensive, centralized source of money and power that can be easily controlled by autocrats and used to fund brutal regimes. (One might also note at this point the many, many extremist political factions in democracies that have been empowered by raking in fossil fuel industry donations, including the current White House regime). And in addition to being a ready-made recipe for enriching autocracies, the process of exporting and transporting those fossil fuels creates geopolitical risks at chokepoint straits, constantly occupies a substantial chunk of the world’s shipping, and has routinely become a primary cause of bloody wars for control of this precious loot. But sunlight isn’t loot-able or blockade-able! Once you buy electrotech, it keeps working off free fuel for twenty years or more!

It is very difficult to set up a coal plant or oil refinery in your backyard or on your roof. But you can set up solar panels and battery storage anywhere, in any size, in any configuration, and then power your entire life with them, from an electric car to an induction cooktop. Whatever the worst threats to peace and freedom in the future may be - mass AI surveillance and cyberattacks, drone swarm attacks by terrorists or rogue states, climate-supercharged mega-storms, a nuclear exchange, bioengineered pandemics, something we can’t even conceive of yet – having widespread, decentralized solar and battery power will help people survive and resist it.

No matter what scary menace arrives in the future, it’s always going to be relatively easy to stop the operations of a single centralized coal or gas plant, with a single explosive strike or workplace infection or cooling water shortage. It will always be much, much harder to shut down electricity generation across tens of thousands of households with their own self-sufficient clean power plants. Even centralized grid-scale solar farms are much harder to destroy! As recent wars have proven, you can smash some panels, but the rest keep working and more can be installed quickly, unlike the complex, flammable fossil fuel plants where one boom kills the whole thing.

Decentralized solar fundamentally makes human civilization in its entirety a more resilient, less fragile entity, giving ordinary households the benefits of key modern technologies with an unprecedented degree of security and ownership over the power supply that makes those technologies function. We’re already seeing this, over and over, around the world, with solar creating islands of resilience after climate-supercharged mega-storms from Jamaica to Malawi.

Perhaps the most extreme test case so far is in Ukraine, where solar/battery microgrids are increasingly keeping hospitals and schools running despite constant brutal and deadly Russian missile attacks against civilians. A few recent solarization projects include the Odesa Perinatal Center (which saved 62 children’s lives in Jan-Mar 2026 alone!), a heart surgery center in Kropyvnytskyi, an eye surgery center in Mykolaiv, a maternity hospital in Cherkasy City, and the Borodianka Lyceum. Ukraine is at the forefront of building deep societal resilience with electrotech.

War and tyranny have obviously been around since long before humanity started to use fossil fuels at scale. Solar can’t solve the problems of senseless inter-ethnic hatred, bitter religious schisms, greed, stupidity, or sheer lust for power. But it can radically reshape the underlying architecture of civilization in a manner that surgically removes one of the primary enablers of, and incentives for, violence and tyranny today.

Solar Solves Climate Change

Oh, and solar power (plus batteries) also replaces almost all uses of the fossil fuel-burning technology producing the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions that are cooking the planet. Just in case we need another reason.

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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.

Our Sunday feature shares good news on climate action & resilience!

Clean Energy

After eight years of research, a new study chronicles how a floating wind farm off Portugal has become a life-rich artificial reef, home to 270 types of marine animal including 5 marine mammal and 33 bird species! Octopuses and several species of fish were even more abundant around the turbines than in the surrounding ocean. Yet another excellent example of renewables actively benefiting biodiversity! This extraordinary mega-trend might just define an emerging good Anthropocene.

The Obelisk solar-plus-battery storage project in southern Egypt has entered full commercial operation! Built by Norwegian company Scatec and selling its power to Egypt Aluminum, it includes 1.1 gigawatts (1.100 MW) of solar capacity plus 200 MWh of battery storage, Obelisk is now the new largest-ever solar-plus-battery project in all of Africa — though it’ll likely be overtaken quite soon!

Leah Stokes, the climate policy powerhouse who was a major architect of 2022’s epic Inflation Reduction Act, has joined Substack at Notes from the Electric Era! One of her first articles highlights a major recent theme of this newsletter: that the American electrotech industry supercharged under the Biden Administration has been damaged since 2025 but is far from destroyed! Though consumer-support tax credits were eviscerated, parts of many manufacturing-focused tax credits survived in some form, and many solar, EV, and battery factors are still being built across America. (The Qcells solar foundry in Georgia being an excellent case in point). We strive on!

Notes from the Electric Era

No, the Democrats' Big Climate Law is Not Dead.

Rumors of the Inflation Reduction Act’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Headlines declared the Democrats’ big climate law dead soon after Republicans passed their One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. But the truth is, much of the law is still alive…

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a month ago · 68 likes · Leah Stokes

Across the remote Australian Outback, solar/battery microgrids are fast becoming the surest way to provide power. Anna Creek Station in South Australia, the world’s largest cattle ranch (called a “station” locally), just installed rooftop solar plus batteries to cut diesel generator costs. And Australia’s vast mining industry is electrifying fast, with microgrids now consistently providing over 80% of power at several gold and rare earths mines. Fully electric mine trucks are also spreading fast!

Argentina has seen an unprecedented surge in electric vehicle sales in 2026 so far, from less than 1% of sales in Q2 2025 (almost no EV market) to over 6% and climbing in Q2 2026. That’s largely driven by the arrival of world-leading Chinese EV titan BYD in mid-2025, with this one company now accounting for 89% of Argentina’s EV sales. This is one more emerging case in a fast-proliferating trend of “leapfrog” moments in which Global South countries shift to Chinese electrotech incredibly quickly, like the recent solar surges in Pakistan and the Philippines. Fascinating!

Here’s my 2025 in-person reporting visit to a BYD dealership in Mexico!

Wildlife

Australia has begun efforts to vaccinate several rare native bird species, both in captivity and in the wild, against the deadly H5N1 bird flu pandemic, which has ravaged species around the world in recent years and just lately arrived on Australian shores for the first time. An early push is now racing against time to vaccinate 5,000 individual wild little penguins (Eudyptula minor, the world’s smallest penguins) at the Phillip Island and St. Kilda colonies, popular ecotourism destinations in Victoria state. This is now the world’s largest-ever wild bird vaccination program — a milestone in proactive, compassionate Anthropocene conservation! Great work.

Kazakhstan used to be home to wild tigers (known as the Caspian tiger population) but after decades of over-hunting the last confirmed sighting took place in 1948. Now, after years of conservation work building up populations of prey species, the tiger has returned! On July 31, 2026, “Umit,” a wild-caught female Amur-subspecies tiger from Russia, was released from a cage on the back of a pickup track into the vast wilderness of the Ile-Balkhash nature reserve. Three other Amur tigers are now in nearby holding pens and set to be released by next year. Kazakhstan is now the first country ever to reintroduce a wild tiger population after losing all their tigers. Awesome work!

White-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal pandemic, has devastated a multitude of bat species across North America in recent decades, killing over 6.7 million individuals as it spreads fast through close-living cave colonies. Now, there are a few signs of hope, with some little brown bat fungus survivors seemingly evolving a degree of resilience and successful tests of a “probiotic cocktail” that could help protect other species.

Researchers working on coral restoration in the Pacific island nation of Palau have developed a simple, low-cost, and low-tech method to ensure that they’re planting¹ corals better suited to survive warming waters. It’s a heat tolerance “fitness test,” subjecting clipped-off fragments of wild coral to extra-hot waters in an ordinary plastic cooler, seeing which ones survive and don’t “bleach,” and using those as stock for restoration efforts. Even a quick-and-dirty test over just a few days has proved to have some predictive value, raising hopes to scale up this solution across the tropics.

Innovation

A new study has found that controlled (aka “prescribed”) burns, the ancient Indigenous land-management practice now being re-adopted across the American West to reduce climate-supercharged wildfire risk, have directly saved several giant sequoia trees! Giant California wildfires in 2020 and 2021 killed nearly one-fifth of all living giant sequoias, but without controlled burns it would likely have been much worse. Satellite analysis found that sequoias were four times as likely to survive if they had previously been treated with a prescribed burn to clear away flammable underbrush nearby, and estimated that such burns directly saved 1,900 trees!

Following its rediscovery by “bio-prospector” botanist Aaron Davis, a Kew project in Sierra Leone is now working to scale up cultivation of Coffea stenophylla, a “lost” West African species of wild coffee with a critically acclaimed flavor profile and much more heat resilience than the C. arabica and C. robusta species currently dominating our civilization’s massive global coffee markets. (Coffee is the second-most-traded commodity worldwide after crude oil, and may soon rise to first). Fascinating work!

Solar has been a savior during the scorching 2026 European heatwaves. As coal plants in Poland, gas plants in Italy, and nuclear plants in France, Hungary, and Romania were shut down due to rivers running low causing dire shortages of water for cooling, solar power stepped up to keep the lights, fans, and fridges running across the continent. The heatwaves increased daily power demand in Europe by up to 25%, but the hot, sunny days simultaneously increased solar generation by up to 17%, directly stabilizing the EU grid. Clean energy doesn’t just help avoid worst-case future climate change — it actively builds resilience against present-day climate change! Renewables are increasingly the least intermittent power source. Great news!

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November 3, 2026, is the date of the critical U.S. midterm elections!

Check your voter registration status and polling place on Vote.org!

Check out our amazing new CAN Action Carousel activism tool!

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Reasons For Hope

November 3, 2026, will be midterm elections day in the United States of America, with control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and many governorships and state legislatures all decided by the outcome. It’s less than 80 days away now. The vile regime currently occupying the White House has repeatedly threatened and attempted election interference and voter intimidation, including “jokes” about canceling elections altogether.

But as we saw in Hungary earlier this year, even entrenched autocratic regimes can lose power when a motivated opposition wins an election with results “too big to rig.” And the current bunch of wannabe autocrats in power are widely renowned for their flailing incompetence and long history of ignominious failure. If you’re a U.S. voter, your vote will matter more than ever in November 2026.

Vote.org is a renowned non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to helping Americans exercise their right to vote. Their eponymous free website contains online tools to help with checking voter registration status, registering to vote, finding your polling place, requesting and tracking vote by mail ballots, and more.

The details and deadlines on all of these vary by state, so Vote.org’s tools are built to show you the information relevant to where you live. As voter registration has been a longstanding target of partisan attacks on elections, this newsletter recommends that U.S. voters check their voter registration status early and often.

If you’re a U.S. citizen, make sure to vote by November 3!

Check your voter registration status and polling place on Vote.org!

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THIS MONTH ONLY: Plant double the trees forever when you become a Planet-Saving Subscriber.

A new study finds that puma presence prevents deer/car collisions.

Tell your state leaders to support puma restoration for road safety!

Feel free to skip this action for state leaders in Hawaii, where pumas are not native.

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Reasons For Hope

A fascinating new study from Washington state recently discovered that puma presence actively protects human drivers by sharply reducing the incidence of deer/car collisions. Five years of data from 503 camera trap sites and 59 GPS-collared pumas found that puma presence corresponded with a 67% decrease in the likelihood of a deer colliding with a vehicle and a 76% decline in the overall number of car wrecks over a five-year period! When the predators are around, deer change their behavior to avoid exposed areas like roads. Deer collisions are a major cause of U.S. car crashes, and pumas help restore ecological balance and road safety — working for free.

Pumas were historically found in every U.S. state except Hawaii, and after decades of over-hunting they’ve recently begun returning to much of their historic range. The return of the puma directly benefits humans along the way: pumas often specialize in hunting deer, and white-tailed deer have lately become highly overpopulated in much of the United States due to lack of predators. In addition to helping prevent car crashes, there’s also abundant ongoing research strongly suggesting that pumas’ control of deer populations can help reduce the spread of chronic wasting disease (aka “zombie deer disease”) and even tick-borne illnesses like Lyme disease in humans. Tick-borne diseases are a fast-increasing risk across much of the United States, as higher temperatures increase the survival and active periods of many tick species. Almost half a million Americans are treated for Lyme disease each year.

There’s still a lot of room left for pumas to expand, within states where they currently live and beyond! A new 2023 study identified 17 landscapes in the Eastern United States that are ideally suitable as once and future puma habitat, from Maine to Wisconsin!

In March 2026, a trail camera near Voyageurs National Park recorded a female puma with three kittens, marking the first time in over 100 years that the species has bred in Minnesota!

A key factor blocking the return of the puma is un-crossable highways, which both block off new territories and are a major cause of death in established puma populations. In the 21st century, hundreds of individual “pioneer” pumas have dispersed into new territories east of the Rocky Mountains, but most of them have died before establishing new breeding populations, often from being hit by cars or trucks. One young male cougar traveled for 18 months from South Dakota to Connecticut before being hit by a car in 2011.

Now, wildlife crossing overpasses and underpasses are emerging as a solution to restore habitat connectivity and reduce traffic collisions across America. A 2022 study in Washington state calculated that 13 wildlife crossings in the area had a favorable cost-benefit analysis due to preventing medical, car repair, and cleanup costs, with each wildlife crossing saving an estimated $235,000 to $443,000 per year thanks to avoided collisions! And that doesn’t even count the potential “force multiplier” effect of allowing pumas to resettle more parts of their old range. State leaders should support wildlife crossing projects as a win-win for human safety and wildlife population health.

Tell your state leaders to support puma restoration for road safety!

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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by for .

Electric aircraft are starting to really take off!

Tell your state leaders to support electric aircraft progress!

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Reasons For Hope!

America just saw its first-ever use of all-electric aircraft for real-world emergency first responder deployment! In rural Hyde County in coastal North Carolina, a prototype BlackFly model eVTOL from startup Pivotal flew local paramedic Ms. Quinn Reece to respond to two recent 911 calls — arriving 20 minutes faster than an ambulance could, and in one case landing in a backyard!

Amazingly, this is only one of the historic milestones achieved this summer in American electric aviation. On August 12, 2026, human history’s largest-yet 100% battery-electric aircraft1 took to the air at the Plattsburgh airport in upstate New York. The X1 prototype from startup Heart Aerospace has a 106-foot wingspan, can lift a 25,000-pound takeoff weight, and successfully flew for half an hour while using just $5 worth of electricity!

Heart is using this flight as a testing ground to further refine their electric motors ahead of a planned rollout of their ES-30 “hybrid” 30-seat aircraft. The ES-30 will have a 125-mile range of all-electric flight rising to 500 miles with batteries plus jet fuel — suitable for short-haul commercial flights.

Aviation was long one of the “last frontiers” of clean energy, routinely described as very hard or even impossible to decarbonize. As of 2019, air travel accounted for about 2.5% of humanity’s carbon emissions, and 4% of total human-caused global warming due to additional non-carbon factors like plane contrails trapping more heat in the atmosphere — and that share is growing fast, as plane travel keeps expanding and the rest of the economy decarbonizes.

Now, as battery technology keeps advancing, we’re seeing electric aircraft successes arriving years ahead of almost all predictions! And by the 2030s, we’ll have even better batteries than today — a future of chargers at airports may be surprisingly close. State leaders should actively prepare for and work to accelerate the electric aviation future, preparing plans now for electric flight infrastructure and working with the FAA to develop a maximally supportive regulatory and permitting framework!

Tell your state leaders to support electric aircraft progress!

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In May 2026, California got over 50% of its entire statewide electricity from solar power alone — an INCREDIBLE world-first milestone!

Tell your state leaders to accelerate solar-plus-battery progress!

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Reasons For Hope

Throughout the month of May 2026, the entire state of California got a record-breaking 51% of all its electricity generation, including both on-grid and off-grid, from solar power alone! Other zero-carbon sources including nuclear, wind, hydro, and geothermal totaled 33%, while fossil gas provided a record-low 14.9% of power that month. California is America’s largest state and would be the world’s fourth-largest national economy if it was counted as a separate country, making it all of human civilization’s largest economy yet to cross the 50% solar threshold1!

This is an incredible milestone: a majority electrotech-powered grid is here NOW, in America, advancing every day! For decades, the fossil fuel industry said it was impossible — now it’s just the unremarkable status quo. And there’s a lot more room to grow, as in addition to decarbonizing the electric grid (well underway!) it’s now a better deal than ever to electrify transport and heating with EVs and heat pumps.

This solar surge has become a stable, reliable, and non-intermittent source of power thanks to the epic Californian battery build-out. Grid-scale battery storage in the Golden State grew by a whopping 26,129% (not a typo: over twenty-six thousand percent!) from 2016 to 2026. This is a working model that other states can follow!

State leaders must accelerate the buildout of the solar/battery revolution to bring its benefits to their state as fast as possible, and there are tons and tons of policy options available! Kickstart a statewide review to eliminate red-tape permitting bottlenecks like the governors of Oregon and Colorado are doing, pass an Illinois-style battery-boosting Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, exempt solar farms from permitting review like Florida has, encourage municipal-level battery resilience like the EPB town utility is doing in Chattanooga, Tennessee…the list goes on and on. We need maximally supportive legal, regulatory, and permitting structures for solar and batteries to make it as fast and easy as possible to build cheap, clean, reliable electricity for America!

Tell your state leaders to accelerate solar-plus-battery progress!

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Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by for .

The 15th Monthly Dose of Climate Hope event took place on August 12, 2026! Sam Matey-Coste hosted an in-depth conversation with Bill McKibben, the legendary veteran climate activist, founder of Third Act, and writer of The Crucial Years! The YouTube recording is above! Below are a few recent highlights from Bill’s work.

The Crucial Years

Take Five

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25 days ago · 349 likes · 95 comments · Bill McKibben

“I can’t stress enough how quickly it has arrived.

In 2012 California generated about one percent of its electricity from solar power.

Last week we learned from the think tank Ember that in May it became the first large economy to generate more than half its power directly from the sun for an entire month….

This is among the most significant statistics the climate fight has yet produced.

In the fourth largest economy on earth, an extensive buildout of renewable energy has immediately and radically undercut the use of fossil fuels.

No other intervention in the last forty years has come even remotely close to this scale of decarbonization.”

— Bill McKibben.

The Crucial Years

Fun with numbers

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19 days ago · 230 likes · 72 comments · Bill McKibben

“That charge long leveled at sun and wind—that they provide “intermittent power”—is probably truer now of other energy sources (including the natural gas that can get shut down if, say, a war breaks out in the Strait of Hormuz).

See the numbers on batteries above—I think it’s pretty clear that once you connect them to a solar or a wind farm you’ve got some of the world’s firmest power.”

— Bill McKibben.

The Crucial Years

Oil as Achilles Heel

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2 months ago · 305 likes · 154 comments · Bill McKibben

“Sun and wind and batteries are not like oil—they are small, interchangeable pieces of infrastructure, easily subbed in. There aren’t chokepoints like refineries and tankers and terminals; there’s no cascading failure…

Once you can run cars and heat pumps and cooktops off the power those panels and turbines generate, then you’re far more protected against attack. If Vladimir Putin had an electrified Russia he would worry far less about Ukrainian drones. Of course, if the world ran on electricity Russia would never have built up the treasury required to act like a bellicose beast…

The peace dividend from sun and wind could be very real.”

— Bill McKibben

“In a world where many, many, big things have taken a very dark turn this decade, this is the one big thing that is going right.

We have, quite suddenly, the opportunity to build a clean, abundant future if we simply seize it…

So the mantra for this moment is clear.

Energy from heaven, not from hell.”

—Bill McKibben.

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Our Sunday feature shares good news on climate action & resilience!

Wildlife

India has famously doubled its wild tiger population in just over a decade, rising from an estimated 1,706 wild tigers in 2010 to an estimated 3,682 in 2022 (around 75% of all wild tigers on Earth). An epic achievement, particularly impressive given their simultaneous human development surge of rapid population and economic growth! Now, India is also fast becoming a world leader in building wildlife crossings to ensure that human infrastructure doesn’t block habitat connectivity, with deployments on an unprecedented landscape-wide scale! India is now home to the world’s 10 largest wildlife overpasses and underpasses, all built since 2017. A corridors and connectivity strategy is working to stitch tiger reserves into larger-scale landscapes ensuring diffusion and genetic diversity, from the spreading Terai Arc in the north to the Western Ghats in the south.

And the new Delhi-Dehradun Expressway has an epic twelve-kilometer wildlife underpass (the whole road is on stilts for miles!) that has already been used by leopards and elephants since it opened in April 2026 and may yet open up a whole new forest to tiger recolonization if (when!) tigers choose to cross. India is prioritizing and investing in wildlife coexistence at an unprecedentedly early stage in its development history — when the people of Europe, America, or China were in comparable economic growth stages, their megafauna were vanishing, not reviving. Awesome work, India!

Within the extremely remote and staggeringly biodiversity-rich Torricelli Mountains region of Papua New Guinea, 266 clan leaders from 41 villages have just signed a new legally binding conservation deed agreement. Renewable every five years, it covers 125,000 hectares of land (bigger than New York City!) and completely bans commercial logging, mining, and hunting of certain unique and threatened endemic local animals like the critically endangered tenkile and weimang species of tree kangaroo! The conservation groups coordinating this new deed have also introduced water tanks, metal roofs, and solar-powered street and household lighting to the area.

A recent study calculated that the Torricelli Mountains are among the 1% of land on the planet able to prevent the most extinctions in the next 100 years if they become a protected area. Furthermore, informal early calculations suggest that the Torricellis might be home to as much as 4% of Earth’s biodiversity on 0.003% of its land area! This conservation deed is absolutely spectacular progress!

The New York Bight between Long Island and New Jersey is fast becoming a major feeding ground for rebounding populations of humpback, fin, and minke whales, as well as common dolphins. All four species are feeding on newly abundant schools of small fish after years of water cleanup efforts and fishery regulation reforms, and the bubble-feeding humpbacks often arrive here alongside new baby calves. The seas off the Big Apple are increasingly a showcase of human/cetacean coexistence. Great news!

Over the last 15 years, 196 individual Sumatran orangutans have been rewilded in the formerly orangutan-less Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve in the Aceh region of Sumatra, Indonesia. All 196 were either rescued from the illegal wildlife trade or relocated from an area where they had come into conflict with human farmers or loggers. This second-chance rewilding project is thriving, with at least 10 baby orangutans (possibly more!) already born to the Jantho ape colonists. Superb work!

Clean Energy

Throughout the month of May 2026, the great state of California got a record-breaking 51% of all its electricity generation, including both on-grid and off-grid, from solar power! It’s America’s and the world’s largest economy yet to cross the 50% solar threshold. This has been made possible thanks to the epic Californian battery build-out: battery storage in the Golden State grew by a whopping 26,129% (not a typo!) from 2016 to 2026. A majority electrotech-powered society is here NOW in America, advancing every day! This is a real “we won” moment. SPECTACULAR news!

The Hydra solar/battery project has opened in the Northern Cape province of South Africa! With 216 MW of solar plus 500 MWh of battery storage, it’s the largest-yet single-site solar-plus-battery project in all of Africa (for now!) and will supply 200,000 households. Awesome!

Just two years after its launch, India’s nationwide PM Surya Ghar program has now helped fund rooftop and çommunity small-scale solar installation for over 5 million households (fifty lakh in India’s traditional numbering). That’s a cumulative 14.6 GW (14,600 MW) of distributed clean capacity! Over 232,000 people have received related training, and the pace of adoption is accelerating fast, with July 2026 hitting a record-high 506,000 new household installations, or about 16,328 per day. That’s more than triple the pace just nine months ago, meaning that Surya Ghar is now bringing rooftop solar to about 100,000 new households every six days! And there’s lots of room to grow, as India has over 1.4 billion people and around 300 million households. Excellent news!

Innovation

An experimental project in Minas Gerais state in Brazil, recently equipped with a $3 billion investment and over 200 researchers, is working to commercialize a more sustainable jet fuel made from the oil-rich fruit of the macauba palm tree. Macauba plantations are growing, with a first harvest set for 2030, and biorefineries are under construction. Critically, it grows on degraded pasture land unsuitable for grain production (and it’s highly drought-resistant), thus avoiding the harmful competition for land with vital food production that has long bedeviled our civilization’s so-far-disappointing biofuel efforts (like the majorly harmful 2000s-era ethanol craze). As with all biofuels, burning macauba jet fuel would still releases carbon dioxide, but it’s carbon recently cycled in from the air via photosynthesis as opposed to unlocking more ancient fossil carbon. A potentially very promising new initiative!

Popular New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has implemented a sweeping new permitting reform package to make life easier for small businesses, including 50 measures eliminating or reducing a wide range of onerous licensing and paperwork requirements for everything from florists to ice cream vendors. A great example of the emerging “socialist Abundance” or “progressive deregulation” policy philosophy that this writer strongly advocates for in the field of clean energy!

Chinese eVTOL startup AutoFlight has successfully demonstrated one of their all-electric flying cars in Astana, capital city of Kazakhstan. It remained on display for the recent “Games of the Future” event in the country, and efforts are underway to systemically roll out electric urban air mobility in Kazakhstan. eVTOLs are spreading!

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A new cultivated meat effort reported a milestone success in larger volume and lower costs.

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An international collaboration has achieved a new milestone in cruelty-free, ultra-sustainable cellular agriculture! Parima, a cultivated meat startup from France, worked with the Vow company in Australia to grow a record-breaking tonne-scale volume of Parima’s duck meat cell line in Vow’s world-largest 22,000-liter bioreactor located in Sydney. Notably, they managed this massive scale-up by growing duck meat cells not on a scaffolding, but as an undifferentiated biomass in a food-grade nutrient medium, very similar to classic fermentation like how beer is brewed. (Notably, no genetic engineering is involved. These are ordinary duck cells, grown elsewhere).

Critically, the new economy of scale in the giant bioreactor meant that Parima produced this multi-tonne batch of clean duck meat at a per-gram cost 99% cheaper than their previous smaller-scale production runs. It’s a world-first successful example of industrial-scale, reasonably-affordable cultivated meat production! Awesome work.

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

Yet cruelty-free meat is already the target of a relentless attack from the industrialized factory-farmed meat industry (a sector also known for its widespread abuses of workers). Shamefully, seven U.S. state legislatures (Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas) have already passed senseless laws banning the sale of cell-cultivated meats!

The multiple U.S. startups working to sell no-kill clean meat are brand-new, only selling at a few restaurants so far and still working to scale up to supermarket-level production, but politicians are already trying to take them down!

Americans deserve a chance to try cruelty-free sustainable proteins and decide for themselves what they think about clean meat!

State governors and state legislators must keep an open playing field for new meat innovations, and fight ongoing industry attempts to unfairly hobble the growth of America’s brand-new cell-cultivated clean meat industry and restrict consumer freedom for the narrow benefit of a cruel monopoly.

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The Charles River of Massachusetts has experienced an ecological renaissance!

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The Charles River of Massachusetts flows past Boston, and like many other urban rivers worldwide it has experienced an epic ecological renaissance in recent years! Essentially a lifeless open sewer for decades (in which the song “Dirty Water” became a Boston anthem), it sustained a run of 300,000 alewives (“river herring”) in 2025, the highest in memory, feeding an abundance of waterbirds including swans, herons, loons, eiders, cormorants, mergansers, buffleheads, and more.

This transformation is thanks to years of dedicated effort. In the 1980s, conservationists and the U.S. EPA sued the state of Massachusetts over wastewater discharge into the Charles. They won, leading to $4.5 billion in federally overseen mitigation projects in the following years, including overhauling over 100 miles of leaky sewage pipes and storm drains. After decades of this unglamorous yet vital water and sewage management work, the Charles became safely swimmable again and is now home to a growing multitude of birds and fish. By the late 2010s, it was considered one of the cleanest urban waterways in America. And more progress is possible, with campaigns underway to remove defunct dams further upriver.

Restored rivers are a massive win-win-win, offering habitat for wildlife, a heat refuge and quality-of-life boost for humans, and a profound socioeconomic value addition for communities all at once! The Charles River is just one of a great multitude of urban waterway restoration efforts going on across America. State governments should proactively seek out and support river restoration efforts, allocating funds to eliminate sewage outflows into rivers and maintain waste treatment infrastructure!

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