“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

This came to mind reviewing the latest batch of climate news as I read through stories to seek the unifying thread. Something is happening to the planet’s climate system, yes (and this is extensively covered elsewhere.) But something is also happening to the fossil fuel industry: The two broad, sometimes overlapping groups of factors are combining to create tipping points. Tipping points where gradual changes amplify one another to become rapid change. What are these factors? They are the ‘carrot and the sick’ both pushing the world towards change and pulling the world into a new post-carbon future. Where they amalgamate, tipping points emerge that accelerate the change from gradual to sudden.

Let’s break it down!

(Image - Wind turbines at sea on a calm sea with a ship sailing past. Photo by sha_ma/Reddit)

Push Factors towards Decarbonization

Let us look at ‘push’ factors first. These are things that force action whether someone wants change or not, kind of like the ‘stick’:

• Energy Security - This is a big one. Many of the countries that supply oil and gas are not very stable. Many of the routes by which we get oil and gas are also not stable. The on-going geo-political disaster that is the Trump-Iran War is underlining the case on both the supply and transport side as to why relying on fossil fuels is a bad idea. (Manwhile, the rise in prices from this conflict has been less than expected thanks to the shift to renewables.) Thus, fossil fuel dependence is a bad idea because the price is so volatile and a bad idea because many of the countries that supply it often end up as kleptocratic, corrupt and fragile states. Far better to develop your own energy supply so you are less at the whim of these countries and their conflicts. Governments that simply don’t care about climate change are still picking renewables because they are more secure than fossil fuels. As well as the acceleration from the Iran conflict, we see this shift happening in Cuba as the US enforces an oil embargo, in the Philippines as the government seeks to avoid energy emergencies. This can also, of course, be seen in Ukraine:

Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

• The falling cost of renewables - So when you need to build or replace an energy supply, above all else, cost is going to be the main factor. This is where renewables, whose cost is going down and down (and which are faster to deploy) are winning out. Governments that simply don’t care about climate change are picking renewables anyway because they are cheaper than fossil fuels. In Australia the boom in renewables has meant that gas has peaked and is now, “in structural decline.” However, nowhere can this be seen better than in the pro-Oil, Trump-loving state of Texas where renewables are on a dramatic rise, because they are cheap for consumers and Texans like making money.

• Divestment movements - Folks who don’t want to invest in fossil fuels, either personally or via institutions such as pension funds are pulling investment money away from the carbon-industries so depriving them of some sources of capital, giving them less to spend to defend their industry from the winds of change. This is partly why clean energy investment is about double that of fossil fuels.

• Protest - One of the most fundamental human rights is that of protest. Fossil fuel industries are damaging and polluting and people often don’t want them next door. People can, and do, protest the companies, governments and politicians that are propping up the carbon economy. This creates pressure for change. (Sure there has been opposition to renewable projects but far less than expected and much of what there has been is based on disinformation and astroturfing.)

• Legal cases - There is a suite of cases globally with wins and losses, most around the right to a habitable biosphere. As a bonus, these cases suck up the resources of fossil fuel companies as they defend themselves. Resources the fossil fuel lobby is going to have less and less of in the coming years.

• The changing climate - I write this in the midst of a heat wave in the UK. It’s getting harder and harder to deny the change we are seeing with our own eyes. From insurance costs to record breaking weather events year after year - the costs of inaction continue to outstrip the costs of action - and people are realising this.

(Image - A rainbow over wind turbines at sea on a calm sea. Photo by sha_ma/Reddit)

Pull Factors towards positive change

On the other hand ‘pull’ factors are more positive ones that want change to happen and so encourage it. Kind of like the ‘carrot’.

• Advances in renewable technology (including batteries) - Batteries have been a game-changer for renewables. The ability to store energy when it is abundant and release it when needed removes many of the objections to the use of renewables. Not only that, big advances over all these technological areas pour in month after month giving more benefits in security and cost. I used to document them, but there are so many it is hard to keep up. But this is why solar power has beaten the IEA forecast for 2025 by a whopping 1800%!! Each advancement pulls people into the orbit of renewables. Take Spain for example - in the year 2000 the energy mix was 2% renewables and today it is 44% and growing (and it is now one of the cheapest power markets in Europe!). Or Poland which was 94% coal-powered in 2000 and now is just 50% and dropping. The same has happened in Pakistan too. Even oil-rich Saudi Arabia is building solar farms. The tipping point is here.

• Political Change - Climate is often, wrongly, seen as a lesser issue by some political strategists. Yet anyone following this issue knows it is a ‘meta-issue’ amplifying many other problems that countries face. Even after decades of fossil-fuel propaganda, sizable majorities of voters want change and governments who promise action are regularly voted in; for example 53 nations recently got together to make that change. Here’s a great positive story from Phoenix, Arizona where a group of grassroots activists defeated powerful fossil fuel interests. (Sure sadly regressive ones are also voted back in, but because of the factors here they are finding it increasingly hard to hold back the tide of change. For example, even in the US under Trump, solar generates more power than coal.)

• Consumer Pressure - Significant percentages of the population are about the environment and make day to day choices that reward companies doing the right thing. While individual action creates the space for wider change, it does help create the culture for bigger political change.

• Cultural shifts - Over many years the culture has shifted to view environmental care as a positive thing that matters. This moves people into industries, movements and organisations that move us all forward. Even OnlyFans models are pushing for decarbonization! This is why we’re seeing exciting movements like community-owned power projects. Next? Plug-in solar is going to be lit. (Sure there are also backlashes that pop-up, but the fact that so much rich donor money has to go into defending polluting industries is a sign they are on the losing side of history.)

• Legislation - Once serious governments get into power who want to enact change they can make the business environment positive for renewables/electrification, encourage green jobs and innovation and then remove subsidies from the carbon-lobby while keeping fossil fuels in the ground.

(Image - Solar panels on a park building in Brighton, England. Photo by author.)

Tipping points

• EVs & Electrification - As bikes, trucks, cars, ships and more, move from fossil fuels to being electrically powered, they use less energy overall. But this is not only in transport, the rise in heat pumps is also contributing to this tipping point. Each day millions of cars are no longer stopping at a gas station and put money in the pockets of big oil. This means less demand and so more unused supply and so dropping prices and profit. Yes this is not universal and the Iran War mixed this all up more on the security side, but the trend is clear; we are using less fossil fuels month after month. China is now going through a major tipping point which means that it may reach 90% EV adoption around 2030. Globally we have passed the tipping point of the combustion engine, which peaked in 2017 - 9 years ago.

• Shipping & Overcapacity - A whopping 40% of the fossil fuels we use, is to refine and transport the raw substance into usable products in a places where demand exists. Thus less demand at the pump means an amplified reduction of demand overall. Bringing online new sources of fossil fuels is a costly endeavour and it takes time - many years. But in the meantime, as documented, demand is dropping which means by the time the resources are online they market they sell into is likely to be already seeing falling demand, which their added capacity simply makes worse as they drop the market price and profit. The change is happening fast and renewables take around half as long to build. Not only that, but currently the refinement of petrol subsidises the cost of all the other products the process creates - jet fuels, bitumen and so on. So what happens when the profit driver of this process - petrol - starts to drop in demand and so subsidy the whole process? A tipping point where many refineries become uneconomical:

The closures have started. Grangemouth, Scotland’s only refinery and Britain’s oldest, stopped processing crude in the second quarter of 2025. It had been losing around $500,000 a day on 13% of the country’s refining capacity, and it is now an import terminal. Shell closed Wesseling. BP is shutting a third of Gelsenkirchen. Lindsey followed its owner into insolvency. Eni converted Livorno. That is 573 kb/d gone in two years, about 4% of Europe’s capacity, on top of roughly thirty closures since 2000.

• Decentralization - This is a big one. Most existing energy systems - especially fossil fuels - are part of vast interconnected networks of extraction, refinement and use. By contrast the cheaper renewable option also had the benefit of being easy to install by comparison and able to be used without needed to be connected to that grid. Thus global energy use patterns are changing and yet not showing up on the dashboards of major organisations - until it is too late to do anything to change it. Here’s a great quote on the subject:

The best global dataset, Global Energy Monitor’s tracker, catalogues solar plants comprehensively only down to 1 megawatt, and its coverage between 1 and 20 MW depends on whatever government databases happen to exist. Below that — the rooftop, the balcony, the solar pump in a field — it mostly leans on national totals that, across Asia, are thin. The IEA reckons distributed systems are already about 42% of all solar capacity on the planet. Our instruments can barely see half of what’s happening.

• Fossil Fuel industries having less resources to fight - As documented here, the fossil fuels lobby has had to spend decades casting doubt on climate science, funding pro-oil politicians, propping up pro-extraction governments and pushing for tax breaks and subsidies. None of this is cheap and they have spent billions over the decades on this. But as demand for their product drops, so too does the money they have to spend here. So they move from attacking to defending to finally a readguard action. We are seeing this play out, for example, in the race for Texas Attorney General where the solar industry finally decided to fight back - and won - defeating the anti-renewables candidate Chip Roy in the primary.

(Image - Sunset over wind turbines at sea on a calm sea. Photo by sha_ma/Reddit)

Other Links of Interest

• New Nvidia chips will remove the need for water coolant.

• ‘Pressure’ shows why Eisenhower trusted scientists over blowhards —and why we should too

• Debunking climate ‘sceptic’ talking points works. Here’s how to do that.

• A Fighting Change - new films on making a climate difference.

• “Colombia makes history by declaring its entire Amazon region free of hydrocarbons and mega-mining”

Thanks for reading!

PS. Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

“Over the past five days in Santa Marta, Colombia and The Netherlands convened 57 countries in support of the commitments made under the Paris Agreement. … Their aim was not to develop new targets, but how to advance and accelerate the implementation of agreed goals. Conversations centered on three key themes: reducing economic dependence on fossil fuels, transforming supply and demand, advancing international cooperation.”

I’d recommend reading through the full document. Yes it’s long (15 pages) but it is really interesting to see how deep, interconnected and wide the thinking is!

(Image - Scientific Advisory Panel for the Global Energy Transition - Santa Marta Theatre. Source - transitionawayconference.com)

Here is what Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister and chair of the talks, said about the event:

“We decided not to resign ourselves to an economy built on the destruction of life. We decided that the transition away from fossil fuels could no longer remain a slogan but must become a concrete, political and collective endeavour. … When people look back on us from the future, they will not remember only this conference. They will remember whether or not we rose to the challenge of our time.”

Inspiring stuff - and they are not done there - as they plan to follow on in 2027. See here for more info.

So while these 53 nations were busy planning for the post-fossil fuel age, the current and ongoing conflict in the middle east was again busy underscoring why reliance on fossil fuels is a terrible idea. The Financial Times had a report on the market movements:

“More than $3bn flowed into global renewable energy ETFs in April — the largest monthly inflow since January 2021 — bringing total net assets to $43bn, according to Morningstar data. Analysts say the driver is not climate policy but energy security, as the US-Israel attack on Iran in February pushed Brent crude to $126 a barrel, a four-year high.

The S&P Global Clean Energy Transition index has outperformed its S&P Global Oil counterpart over the same period. Major beneficiaries include Ørsted (+37%), Nordex (+67%), Acciona (+33%), Siemens Energy (+50%), GE Vernova (+65%), and NextEra Energy (+22%).

Strategists at Société Générale argue the rally is fundamentally an energy security trade, with investors pricing in the cost of dependence on imported fuels in an era of persistent geopolitical instability. Paradoxically, US policy uncertainty under Trump — including opposition to renewables — has acted as a tailwind rather than a deterrent, by amplifying concerns about fossil fuel supply risk.”

I can’t emphasise how important this push factor is! In the past there were two big arguments that the fossil fuel lobby and their flunkeys relied on; 1) that they were needed for economic growth and 2) they can be relied on unlike renewable energy as when it is not sunny or windy, the power ends. Well point 1 died some time ago, as I’ve covered here as renewables are cheaper and earlier to use. Point 2 was also not accurate as with batteries and renewables combined, there’s no need for fossil fuels. But now the Iran war has conclusively proved from the other end that you can’t rely on oil and gas as a both stably priced or stably supplied energy source. So point 2 is dead now too.

It is interesting to me that that discourse is now happening in places far removed from a discussion of climate change.Here’s two historians, noting that fossil fuels are basically, “long term poison”:

Decentralized Energy Systems

Mentioned in the conference official press release was a push toward more decentralized energy use. This is another area I feel has fallen under the radar and is both positive and growing! In the past the technology of power-generation needed large-scale buildings for generation and infrastructure to get the fuel to them. However with renewables like solar and wind plus batteries - the generation can happen in any location and at any scale... and happening it is! Globally, especially in developing nations, individuals and communities are bypassing the grid all together to make a decentralized grid. Where are we seeing this? I’ve reported before on this happening in Africa, Ukraine & Australia, “Solar power numbers from Australia are just mind blowing. Every 2/5 homes have rooftop solar. Rooftop solar in Australia now generate about 40% of all daily electricity demand.” But also in the US, e.g. “Colorado House passes legislation to legalize plug-in solar for renters”, and in the UK - but this image from formally war-torn Aleppo in Syria, where the roofs are bursting with solar, is so inspiring!

(Image - Solar panels of the roofs of buildings in Aleppo, Syria. Source - Reddit.)

Other News

• Clean energy pushes fossil-fuel power into reverse for ‘first time ever’

• France unveils plan to ditch all fossil fuels by 2050

• The EU has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% since 1990

• Arizona, USA - Clean energy candidates have beaten fossil fuel backed ones.

• New tech; Carbon Storage: 60% of injected CO2 gets turned into rock in only two years

• Solar panels are creating an unexpected effect by forming rainfall clouds and thriving oases in the middle of the desert

• Solar is good for nature: Rare plants thrive in solar fields. & attract birdlife.

• China’s tree-planting has created a huge ‘carbon sink’

• Norway has gone from near zero to 100% EV vehicles in around 13 years!!

• The world’s biggest EV container ship is operational.

• India hits 150 GW solar milestone.

• More news from India: “Gurdeep Singh, the Chairman and Managing Director of NTPC Limited, said coal-based power plants in India are struggling to stay running. It is not because of fuel shortages but because surplus renewable energy generation is squeezing coal-based power plants out of the dispatch merit order, he added. Gas-based power plants are barely operating at double-digit capacity utilisation, he said.”

Other Interesting Links

• How much energy does AI use? A good deep-drive.

• These people are making a Minecraft mod that simulates climate change

• Getting solar in the UK? Read this guide.

• “The man who killed offshore wind in America” > Depressing to read but then strangely empowering when you realise what one person can achieve!

• Great quote from climate scientist Michael Mann on Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for hope!

• Interesting looking book on restoring nature.

Thanks for reading!

PS. Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

[Renewables] are now entering markets as a result of RD&D investments by IEA member countries since the 1980s. The initial investment was prompted by energy security concerns linked to the oil price crises of that period but the enduring appeal of renewables is due, at least in part, to environmental benefits.

Which begs the question; what will be the long term impact of this conflict? Could we see a mostly net-zero world in the decades to come? Hopefully, yes and the first wave of change is already upon us. This for example from the UK;

Greg Jackson, head of Octopus Energy, described a “huge jolt” in sales of solar panels and heat pumps, as well as enquiries about electric vehicles and chargers, so far this month compared to February.

(Image - A field of solar panels in England with a rainbow to the right of them. Photo by author.)

Change is abound, so while the info we have at this stage, is mostly smaller scale stories given how fast the war hit us. So as time passes we will see more. But for now here are some of the other impacts I’ve spotted:

• Also in the UK, EV sales surged in March to a quarter of the market.

• New Zealand a +278% Year-on-Year rise in EV sales.

• An EV dealership in Manila saw a month’s worth of orders in just 2 weeks.

• Across the rest of Asia, a general rise in EV sales.

The conflict and the brittle system of oil supply we rely on, frames the potency and urgency of a meeting of 85 nations intending to move away from fossil fuels;

At the UN Cop30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in vetoing calls to develop a “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at Cop30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables. Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on 28-29 April for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petrostates did at Cop30.

Not only has this pushed folks to renewables but it has also broken Trump’s own energy policy. Heatmap has a great write-up on how this self-made War by Trump has resulted in this own-goal;

But Trump’s ambitious plans to remake the country’s energy system — and the bargain that he made with the American people and the world — have been defeated by reality.

A key point to note is how much of the fossil fuel industry is based around the shipping of the energy from A to B - this is as much as 40% of the sea-borne traffic - which shows why narrow choke points leave an energy system vulnerable.

You can’t blockade the sun or choke the supply of wind.

This is all explained in more detail, including the historical route to this current oil crisis by David Toke who expertly summarises the changes we are seeing;

So what technological leaps will this latest oil crisis generate? Certainly, the crisis will make wind power, solar PV, batteries, heat pumps and Electric Vehicles essential means to help mitigate the effects of the coming economic cataclysm. Without solar and wind power the European gas crisis of 2022-3 would have been all the worse. This oil and gas crisis would be all the worse without the amount of solar PV, wind power, batteries and also heat pumps that are in operation.

According to the European Heat Pump Association, there were 25.5 million heat pumps operating in its 19 member states in 2025. This saves around 5 per cent of European gas supply. In the UK renewable energy generates getting on for half of UK electricity. If this were all produced from natural gas, then UK natural gas consumption would be around a third higher than it is.

That last point is key - countries that have already invested in renewables and batteries are seeing the impact of the energy crisis blunted. Investment bank Goldman Sachs remarked on the world’s largest builder of renewables: “China looks better placed than most in this oil shock … alternative/renewable energy notably nuclear, wind, solar and hydro now represents 40% of China’s energy generation, up from 26% a decade ago …”

(Image - A post on Threads showing a group of sea-borne wind-turbines and the words, ‘For the next 6 hours or so, electricity in Danish households is free because our wind turbines are producing a surplus in the national grid. This happens regularly.’ Source lellgaard on Threads, here)

Pakistan is another example, which had started to switch a few years back from where this interesting anecdote illustrates the change ongoing;

Amid the US-Israel war on Iran, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – through which 20 percent of oil and gas passes during peacetime – energy prices have soared around the world. But [farmer Karim] Baksh isn’t worried. Under the scorching sun of Dasht, where temperatures rise as high as 51 degrees Celsius (124 degrees Fahrenheit) in peak summer, his pump runs without diesel, and Baksh can irrigate his watermelons uninterrupted. “Now, I don’t care if the prices of diesel increase,” he says, proudly pointing to the sun above. “As long as there is this sun, I can grow my watermelons.”

This transition can’t come soon enough. Not only will it help us to avoid climate chaos and have less polluted air, but it de-fangs some of the worst people on the planet, as historian Timothy Snyder says:

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

One country that already knows the impact of war on an electrical system is Ukraine, which is rushing to create a resilient and decentralised grid powered by renewables - because that is the best way to get energy security;

Ukraine is revamping its power sector as rapidly as it can, not for climate protection but for energy security. “Ukraine’s energy transition is not a slogan,” says Ievgeniia Kopytsia, a Ukrainian energy analyst at the Institute for Climate Protection, Energy and Mobility. “Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has added over 3 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity. It’s a security-driven transformation, unfolding under extreme constraints, that prioritizes decentralization, flexibility, and speed of recovery.”

This is the way.

Hope powers the way. Don’t let doom win;

All of this is to say that it’s not game over, despite what many apocalyptic predictions would have you believe. What we do matters, and what we ask of others — governments, companies, investors — does too. It’s never “too late” to protect what remains and build a better future that future generations deserve.

(Image - from the Mandalorian TV series)

Updates

Plus some updates on earlier posts;

• I’d reported last year on China’s flat-lining CO2 emissions, all the while the energy demand of the country grew; well the trend of ‘flat or falling’ has been going on for 21 months now!

• - How is Trump’s ‘war on renewables’ going? Not how he planned. Globally new wind, solar and battery storage will ‘swamp’ fossil fuels in 2026. As it did in 2025.

• Battery power - allowing the rise of EVs - has thus far helped the world avoid 2.3 million barrels of oil per day in 2025. More to come too! For example the EU and UK plan a massive ‘clean energy reservoir’

• The Future is Solar - But what about night time? Well, China is building hot-salt powered solar plans that run even when the sun sets. Meanwhile in California the batteries now bridge the nighttime energy supply ready for sunrise the next day giving 24/7 supply.

• Trump’s ongoing failure to stop renewables - even MAGA folks want solar because it works better and is cheaper.

• Fusion Energy - France now holds the world record for nuclear fusion! It sustained the reaction for 22 minutes!

Thanks for reading!

PS. Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

(Source)

There was never a moral case for ‘oil wars’ but one could, wrongly imho, argue there was a ‘realpolitik’ case for them. That is no longer the case. In January this year we saw a bit of old ‘Neocon policy’ at play with a classic ‘Oil War’ with Venezuela as Trump mounted a ‘decapitation strike’ to arrest the Venezuela dictator and take ‘control’ of the country’s oil supply. Less than two months on, and the US is back at it again, this time beside Israel and against Iran, igniting war all over the Middle East. Sadly this is something we’ve seen play out before (I’m looking at you, Iraq War!) with few positives. This time, however there are differences and I wanted to take a moment to show how radically different a position we are in now from the ‘Oil Wars’ of the past;

These price shocks will have global impacts. When such spikes occurred in the last century, there was little choice for import-dependent countries but to pay a premium or burn less fuel. This century, however, falling prices of solar and batteries offer another option.

But Trump is a backward-looking politician. So old Neocon thinking is that the US takes control, produces the oil and boom - profit! So after this ‘decapitation’ action he invited a bunch of oil executives to chat about the ‘bright’ future for oil production there. Except that Venezuela has huge oil reserves and of a type the US does not produce, plus it actually produces very little oil given the reserves. As such, much like the debacle of the Iraq war, reality has a nasty habit bringing the carbon party crashing down:

“But getting foreign companies to flock back to Venezuela will be a massive challenge. Chevron is the only major U.S. oil company there and is the country’s largest foreign investor. Other oil executives will be forced to gauge the stability on the ground in a country where the industry has fallen into disarray after more than two decades of mismanagement and corruption. … The other obstacle facing Trump’s effort to put more of Venezuela’s viscous crude into the global market is that the world doesn’t have much of an appetite for more oil.”

So not only is it going to cost a lot to get at those reserves, the market for oil globally is actually dropping. (Which is why a recent auction of US government land for oil exploration got zero bids.) This is because renewables are cheaper to install and produce more energy.

“It’s simple: the cost of oil just goes up over time, while the cost of solar just goes down over time.” (Source)

Then about 2 months later, Trump launches another ‘special military operation’ [lol] this time on Iran. This not only disrupts Iran as an oil producing nation but also impacts the critical juncture point known as the Strait of Hormuz. This is a narrow bit of sea that is the only point where sea-borne shipping can exit the Persian Gulf, which borders Iran, Oman and the UAE. About one fifth of all global oil/LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) passes this choke-point.

(Image - An older image but from the same region of a tanker on fire in the Gulf of Oman. It illustrates that we see the same crisis over and over. Source.)

So this conflict has spiked oil prices which will impact on the global economy. (Though it won’t help oil in the long term, as the price hike won’t last and it could flood the market, dropping prices further). How can we stop this forever cycle? One way to reduce the strategic impact of this region by stopping the use of fossil fuels:

The sun shines equally on all parts of the Earth, and since oil and methane (and coal) are nothing more than stored sunshine accumulated over millions of years, why not simply use the energy of the sun that shines on our planet every day? Why go through this constant exercise of maintaining a trillion dollar a year military just to protect land and sea routes for fossil fuels? Why rely on methane from Russia when you can make all the energy you need locally without all this foreign intrigue and drama?

Plus let us not forget that Trump himself is incredibly mercurial and changes his mind easily. Given fossil fuel exploitation requires vast amounts to be spent to get the returners, it is a lot of money to stake on a diminishing-value resource (Source):

A U.S. oil executive told the Financial Times concerning Venezuela: “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country”

These factors are why, despite the Trump administration’s assault on renewable energy and climate science, despite the vast resources of the only global super-power being poured into stopping progress; it is not really succeeding. Because, reality:

But the economic case for renewable companies and projects “are better today than they were 72 hours ago,” [Pavel Molchanov, a managing director at the investment bank Raymond James] said. “So that also feeds into investor appetite for clean energy stocks.”

Others have done research around this topic, with this from Kings College London, being very interesting indeed:

In the alternative scenario, what changes?

The immediate macroeconomic shock would be weaker. A disruption at the strait would still matter. Oil would still be traded in some sectors, but it wouldn’t be as central to everyday energy use. Prices would be lower because demand was falling. The automatic link between Gulf instability and global inflation would loosen.

Electricity generation would continue, largely insulated from disruption of gas supply. People with electric cars would be less directly affected by a petrol price spike. Household bills would remain unchanged as energy price rates stay stable. Governments would be less exposed to sudden demands to subsidise fuels and an inflationary shock.

These clear market advantages are one of the reasons why renewables are still growing in the US, despite Trump’s ‘total’ opposition to them. In addition the courts have blunted some of his attacks on wind energy (an ongoing battle!). But overall renewables are still winning because they are more efficient, cleaner, cheaper and faster. This is why Africa is jumping the expansive fossil fuel stage of development and going right to renewables. Cheap Chinese solar panels are driving down costs of energy and replacing the legacy systems;

“No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That’s forcing the nation’s already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate.”

(Interesting point - the vast array of small local installs of solar and wind are meaning the ‘centralised’ stats used to show energy supply are undercounting renewables. So any stat you see about energy mix is almost certainly wrong and that renewables are almost certainly doing better!)

It is not just energy generation that is starting to move CO2 emissions in a better direction, the electrification of transport is too. Cars going EV is helping, but more than that, eBikes are going further:

“But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day—about 1 percent of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.”

This is all the while that technological developments for alternatives to oil grow and grow!

• Donut Labs have created a new super-efficient battery

• Ming Yang claims world’s first 100% recyclable carbon fiber wind turbine blade

• France’s WEST tokamak held a hot plasma for 1,337 seconds, a little over 22 minutes

• And so on!

As the rising oil and gas prices roil the world economy, do you know where this impact will be felt the least? Places like Uruguay because they use almost zero oil and gas. This is why the demand and installation of renewables grows and grows:

• Egypt signs renewable energy deals worth $1.8 billion.

• California’s Westlands Water District is going big on solar

• Spain is ramping up energy storage, with €818M in EU funding awarded to 126 projects totalling 2.2 GW of power and 9.4 GWh of capacity.

• And so on!

(Image - Wind power generation from Scotland, photo by author)

The evidence is clear - globally the majority want to see climate action and are willing to personally put income towards it. What stops this trickle of support from becoming a wave is we don’t understand that we’re the majority. See this landmark study reported in Nature:

“In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action. … individuals around the globe systematically underestimate the willingness of their fellow citizens to act.”

Key that we drive the message home - decarbonizing is an investment that saves, not costs money. (Indeed this is why proponents of fossil fuels have to resort to dishonest tactics to make half-baked arguments against) When combined with other key climate works like better standards and insulation for buildings, it’s a winning message.

Other Links Of Note

• I’m only one person, what can I do? Quite a lot!

• If climate change is not real, what has stopped the snow from coming, leading to a wave of abandoned ski resorts?

• Greenwashing, illegality and false claims: 13 climate litigation wins in 2025

Thanks for reading!

PS. Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

(Image - A wind turbine in the UK, photo my me. The UK continues to make progress on climate and energy, as covered in the last newsletter)

So the top three posts on the newsletter are currently:

1. It’s not ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ but ‘Mill, Baby Mill’ (and ‘Shine, Baby, Shine’)

2. Renewable energy was winning so much that Big Oil needed Trump to use the full power of the government to try and stop it. Which they won’t.

3. What have we learned about climate progress in 2025? Quite a lot and some surprising victories and good news

I was pleased to see all of these top three were within the 12 months. This mirrors the steady rise in subscribers to the newsletter. It means overall the reach of Climate Hopium is steadily growing and a bit thanks to all who have shared, liked, commented or recommended my writing to others - it means a lot to me and is good to know that things can spread by being positive and not just from hate-engagement.

Topics

How I tend to write posts is, as I read news and events and various other sources (such as Substack, Reddit, BlueSky, Threads, not X-Twitter) I note items of interest and then sit down and review the links and a shape for the month.

In the 2025 review I noted I wanted to look at these Future Topics and notes in italics on what I did manage to cover.

• The rise of EVs and electrification (thanks to those who noted it!) > So batteries and so some of eletrification was covered here, I have more to do here.

• More on Fusion (as was covered here) > Still on the list! I’m reading a book on the topic first so wanted to finish that first.

• Climate and democracy (the inter-relationship here, I’m a keen advocate of the democratic process so both interest me, so how to stop climate chaos and strengthen our democratic institutions) > Still on the list!

• The psychology of climate change (as in how us human perceive threats and respond to them and what we can learn to help our advocacy of the issues at hand) > Still on the list!

• The disconnection of economic activity and fossil fuels (as had been argued for decades that you could not have one without the other and that’s clearly not true any more!) > Done! Here.

• Testing an audio format for posts > I decided against this. Feedback didn’t show it was a format people were interested in and so my time stays on text for now.

• New for 2026 - I want to get a couple of interests with people doing interesting things in the climate space. Feel free to suggest people!

• New for 2026 - AI and where is really is regarding climate. This would be more of an exploration than anything else as I see a lot of competing views re climate/energy.

How you can help!

So I get lovely messages of suppoort and thanks for each newsletter I publish and huge thanks for tht means a lot to me! So a comment, a like or a share on whatever platform you saw my work is is always welcomed.

• Suggestions/feedback on the proposed topics.Also ideas for interviewees. (Please post a comment here to do so or into the chat, thanks!)

• Climate related photos you have taken I can use to illustrate issues of the newsletter. (Post a link to them in the comments or you can post them directly into the newsletter chat. please only post pics you have taken and are giving me permission to use.)

• Suggestions and comments on the Points of Action page (and sharing this page)

• Subscribe and share of course!

  Subscribe to Climate Hopium and support this work1

  Share the hope of Climate Hopium with your friends and family!

  Share

Thanks for reading!

PS. Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

(Image - wind turbines in action in the South West of England. Photo by me.)

Emissions are finally flatlining - downwards is next!

Ember Energy produced a report that showed that there was no meaningful growth in fossil fuel energy because renewables met all of the planets demands in 2025. We are headed for warming, yes, but we have now avoided the 4°C+ hell-scape that we were heading towards if we’ve taken no action. This is how it looks right now:

(Image - A graph showing the past path, the current path and where we could go on CO2 emissions. Via Axios.)

Plus there is still plenty to play for; remember every fraction of a degree of warming that we stop matters in terms of less climate chaos! As Hannah Ritchie reports:

The reality is that we will not cut emissions fast enough to avoid 1.5°C. But 2°C is still very much to play for. It will require a big step up in the world’s efforts (we’re currently headed for 2.5°C to 3°C under current policies), but if we get going, there is still some chance that we can limit warming to those levels. And as I always emphasise, even if we marginally fail, those efforts will in no way be wasted. 2.1°C means fewer impacts than 2.3°C, which means fewer impacts than 2.5°C.

Places where we are seeing the flatlining of fossil fuels include an oversupply of oil, which may mean that in 2026 the world could end up with 4M barrels per-day it does not need! Not only that but moving to renewables allows countries to decouple thier energy from the global suppliers, who are often far from paragons of virtue! (Here’s Moldova consciously decoupling from Russian energy control.) Plus there is a cascade effect; “If the world is supplied with 100% renewable energy, 50% of the global shipping traffic will be eliminated, coal oil and gas no longer needs to be transported”

We have the path to Net Zero

Yes indeed, the technology is here and growing; we just need to political will to accelerate the change that is already happening. That past link between economic growth and fossil fuels use is well and truly gone as these 35 countries’ economies are growing while the amount of CO2 they emit is dropping! This is why António Guterres, UN Secretary-General stated, “Thanks to the renewables revolution, the clean-energy economy is no longer tomorrow’s promise. It’s today’s engine of progress.”

(Image - Graphis showing 35 nations whos’ CO2 is dropping despite rises in GDP. Via here, via Global Carbon Project)

Zooming in a couple of countries in this list to update on news:

• Australia records biggest annual drop in emissions outside pandemic, keeping 2030 climate targets on track

• Denmark’s renewable revolution: A model for global sustainability

• Norway says ‘mission accomplished’ on going 100% EV, proposes incentive changes

• South Korea has announced it will not build any new coal plants and will shut down 40 existing plants by 2040 to address the climate crisis

European Union

The EU continues to show why it has a huge global value in the fight against climate chaos - following on from its €100 billion investment into climate and clean energy announcement back in April, and despite political push-back it is still managing to make progress:

The European Commission proposed its target to reduce the EU’s net emissions by 90 percent by 2040, a waypoint between the goal of reducing net emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and achieving climate neutrality by 2050. However, pushback by member state governments is set to water down the target by including flexibilities, like international carbon credits.

America

Trump has only managed to slow, not stop renewables in the US, so despite a slew of cancelled policies, executive orders and a failing attempt to revive coal, solar installations for the year are still set to beat previous year, as Heatmap AM (Nov 5th) reported. This trend will continue into 2026 too because of the 668 energy projects under construction in the US, over 88% are related to renewable power. As Christiana Figueres, noted diplomat and climate diplomacy expert, remarked “Honestly, the decarbonization of the global economy is irreversible… Momentum is building into the point where it is simply unstoppable, with or without the United States.” Helping ensure the drive continues in the US, comes via California which is becoming a clean-energy super-power! This from Heatmap AM 25th Nov:

Over the last three years, California generated steadily more electricity from utility-scale solar farms while generation from natural gas-fired plants dropped. Gas still dominates the state’s power generation, but industrial solar generation more than doubled in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2020, new analysis from the federal Energy Information Administration found. Between January and August of this year, natural gas supplied 18% less power than during the same months five years ago.

The Democratic party, now clearly the party of climate realism in the US, has made some impressive wins in the handful of US elections that happened in November, as Heatmap reported:

Democratic candidates swept to victory in key races with implications for climate change on Tuesday night. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — who vowed to push forward with offshore wind, new nuclear reactors, and fusion energy — seized the governor’s mansion in the first major race to be called after polls closed. In New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on building new nuclear plants and pressing the state’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to cut electricity prices, trounced her Republican opponent. In New York City, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, who said little about energy during his campaign but came out in the last debate in favor of nuclear power, easily beat back his two rivals for Gracie Mansion.

Australia

More great news as Australia is going all in on solar, which is no surprise given the local climate. But it is going so well down there that the government is making the power companies give away the excess energy to consumers for free! Also via Heatmap:

Australia launched a new plan to force energy companies to offer free electricity to households during the day to use excess solar power and push the grid away from coal and gas. The policy, called the “Solar Sharer” plan, aims to take advantage of the country’s vast rooftop solar panels. More than 4 million of Australia’s 10.9 million households have panels, and the capacity has overtaken the nation’s remaining coal-fired power stations.

United Kingdom

My home and there are still good things happening here. Firstly electric vehicles out-sold petrol vehicles for the first time in November this year. The Dogger Bank wind farm, under construction in the North Sea and due to complete in 2027 is estimated to bring in an economic benefit of £6.1 billion as well as generating 3.6GW of power - which is more than enough for around six million homes. While every islander in Orkney will gain as a new £62M project to build 18 turbines will become the world’s largest publicly owned windfarm! While another first from another windfarm; “[The] Sofia Offshore Wind Farm in the North Sea – it’s finished installing all of its recyclable wind turbine blades, the first time that’s ever been done at scale in the UK.” However UK energy bills continue to be high - this would be much worse without renewables, as David Toke reports, and is at its root a structural-market issue that needs fixing. If you are from the UK and reading this - go sign up for the community energy project, Up The Energy.

China

We can’t write about climate and energy in 2025 without looking at China. China now dominates global renewables in both production of the means of power generation and in the generation of power itself. (It didn’t have to be this way, but thanks to fossil fuel companies, it mostly is.) As The Economist reports, “The scale of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. By the end of last year, the country had installed 887 gigawatts of solar-power capacity—close to double Europe’s and America’s combined total.” As I reported previously, what this means is that it looks like China’s CO2 emissions have actually dropped. It seems trend is continuing:

China’s electricity emissions are down 2% YoY, oil consumption down 5%, and overall emissions from all sources — electricity, transport, heating, industry — flat or falling, despite increasing demand and new coal plants. Clean energy and electrification did it.

(Image - A MW molten-salt power tower in Hami, China. Source: Csp.guru via Wikipedia)

Not only that but they are innovating in other areas of energy too; both fusion and now fission too, having built the worlds first thorium reactor, which will be using the far more abundant and less dangerous fuel than uranium.

New Technology News

Other new tech news for climate and energy includes:

• There is a wave of M&A activity coming in the climate tech sector

• This sounds like a very potent carbon capture tech!

• Solar power at home-scale level you can just plug in and go? Yes please!

• ‘Green concrete’ and 9 more interesting new techs

• This tool helps connect your country’s industrial base with new climate tech outputs

Other Climate Links of Interest:

• Murdoch helped fund climate denial which his media empire then reports the output of as ‘news’. An important read.

• The cost of living rising is more often than not linked to the ongoing costs of not dealing with climate chaos. Link then in elections!

  • Same for rising home insurance costs!

• Another story in the ‘not stopping climate chaos is costing us a fortune’ bucket.

• Solar punk is happening in Africa right now!

• The Japanese government is supporting clean tech investment.

• Oh and this is worth a listen:

Remember - there is a points of action page - turn hope into action!

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. Where text is in italics, I am quoting it!

And while we still do both of these as a species, the former is down a couple of nations and in stark opposition to most of the world and the latter, with its vast subsidies still powers large swathes of the planet. Yet, starting small a few decades ago but growing on an exponential-like curve, these new technologies - led by solar and wind - are allowing us to generate energy from the wind and the light falling from the sky itself.

(Image - the sun shines down on solar panels in the Somerset region of the UK. Photo by author.)

This is nothing short of a technological revolution and it is reshaping our world in many ways, “The shift to renewables represents an agricultural revolution for energy, moving from searching and extracting scarce fuels to harvesting abundant sunlight in place.” Key amongst these changes is that is that it is finally allowing us to reduce emissions of CO2 and curb climate change, even while demand for energy rises;

“Electricity demand is growing around the world but the growth in solar and wind was so strong it met 100% of the extra electricity demand, even helping drive a slight decline in coal and gas use.” (Source)

This has resulted in over 100 countries cutting fossil-fuel imports according to the IEA. New Scientist also weighed in on this point;

“The first six months of 2025 saw wind and solar together pass a historic milestone, generating more power than coal for the first time and making renewables the world’s leading source of electricity.” (Source)

And…it’s working, this from Simon Stiell, UN Climate chief;

It is easy to look at the UN’s annual Cops and say nothing happens – in the words of Greta Thunberg, “blah blah blah”. But before the 2015 Paris agreement, the world was headed for more than 5C of heating – a level that would leave the world unrecognisable. Ten years later, the projection – if all current commitments are fulfilled – is for 2.7C of heating. That is still far too high, and this year’s [nationally determined contributions] must at least “bend the curve” towards 1.5C, Stiell said, even if they still fall short of meeting it.

The benefits don’t stop there. It is allowing for the democratising and devolving of power production as we move from having only a centralized electricity supply to one where countries, regions, communities, businesses and even households can install to meet their own needs. This is also revolutionizing access to power in some of the most remote and vulnerable parts of the world. All the while as less fossil fuels are being combusted and so less of the other pollutants they produce are being emitted, many of which are linked to a whole host of damaging effects on people and ecosystems.

So the change to renewables is not just about helping fight climate chaos but actually makes life better for us all;

“climate action isn’t a sacrifice, it’s an upgrade. cleaner air, better jobs, healthier communities, a liveable planet. we’ve been sold the idea that caring costs too much when actually not caring costs everything” (Source)

This classic cartoon, of course springs to mind:

(Image - “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” cartoon by Joel Pett)

For those trying to wrongly argue that this will increase energy costs - nope! “There’s basically no correlation between renewable penetration and electricity prices.” (Source) The fact is that if we stopped subsidizing all energy sources - including fossil fuels - oil, coal and gas would tank, hard.

Because the economics and the practicalities align, investment continues to pour into the renewable sector as Simon Stiell, UN Climate chief noted;

“He pointed to global private sector investments last year of more than $2tn in green energy and low-carbon industry, dwarfing the $1tn poured into fossil fuels. “I see promise, I see action,” he said. “I see tangible output. But not enough.”

More Renewables News

So let us take a moment to dip into some more news from this front. First we celebrate that solar becomes main source of electricity in the EU for first time in history; More than half of the EU’s electricity in the second quarter of 2025 came from renewable energy. Not only that but in Central Europe, solar power has grown at twice the EU average since 2019. This matters as it was once the area of the EU associated with coal, yet now it is growing into Europe’s solar powerhouse and is quickly becoming the continent’s battery hub too. (Source)

The change is global; Heatmap AM from 1st October reported that Nigeria heard the news from the EU and seemed to say, “Hold my beer (my Lion Stout)” and then did this:

Africa’s biggest petrostate is having a solar boom. Nigeria became Africa’s second-largest importer of solar panels over the past year by overtaking Egypt. The imports total 1.7 gigawatts. “It is a response to a problem … You can’t rely on a 24/7 grid in most parts of Nigeria at the moment,” Ashvin Dayal, senior vice-president of power at Rockefeller Foundation, which backed the mini-grid project, told the Financial Times. “Demand is booming for reliable, affordable electricity both for inside the home, but also to run small businesses, to run agricultural appliances, to increase productivity and incomes.”

While Iraq, responding to both the EU and Nigeria and responded, “Hold my very sugary but yummy mint tea” and turned towards the abundant Sun: 1,000 MW Al-Haidariya Solar Plant Marks Nation’s Largest Step Toward Renewables

While over in the UK where I live, in early October 91.4% of the country’s energy needs came without needing to burn carbon! (Source)

(Image - Models of wind turbines in the Future of Technology Institute, Berlin. Photo by author.)

Trump Resistance

So with just over 167 weeks left in the Trump presidency my past point that his sad and deluded ‘war on wind’ won’t amount to much on the global scale is still proving correct as worldwide investment into renewable energy is still around 10% on 2024 despite Trump’s policies. All he is doing is ceding any US leadership of the issue away while causing energy prices to rise. Anyhow, here’s a few more wins for the resistance:

• Removed website has been brought back online!

• In a blow to Trump, judge clears Ørsted’s Revolution Wind to resume (More detail on how the Trump case fell apart)

• Newsom strikes climate deal with Brazil after Trump calls climate change a con job

• Trump’s ‘Drill Baby Drill’ Plan Just Backfired—Oil Stocks Haven’t Been This Cheap In Years

And finally - most companies are still sticking to the sustainability plans they had regardless of what Trump and his cronies say:

“Despite headlines declaring the collapse of corporate ESG, a new study of 75 firms across the world found that only 13% have retreated from sustainability, while 85% have held steady or accelerated efforts—often under the radar.” (Source)

Technology Developments

A look at the last month on interesting developments around technology;

• China turns dead wind turbine blades into durable defenses against desert spread

• Nuclear fusion, the ‘holy grail’ of power, was always 30 years away—now it’s a matter of when, not if, fusion comes online… (Source)

• Apple to develop 650MW solar and wind farms in Europe. The company’s investment in these initiatives is expected to unlock over $600m in financing. (Source)

And finally in this section;

“Solar farms are stepping up their game, and it’s not just about producing clean energy. These sun-soaking powerhouses are now doubling as havens for wildlife, offering a ray of hope in the fight against biodiversity loss…”

What we can do?

Remember the Points of Action page!

With so much bs, disinformation, misinformation and propaganda around, I really like this simple advice: “We can’t control a lot of things in this world, but we can choose where we focus our attention.”

So here’s a simple one that seems very cool; you can spend $25 on some renewable energy for the global south! I just put in a $100 to start with.

(Image - Screenshot from my first investment in Renewables.org)

More advice for keeping your mind grounded while all around you, people lose theirs; “Don’t vent; channel. Turn frustration into reps…research…writing…reform, revenue. That’s how you convert emotion into motion and keep dignity intact.” (from -THE SURVIVOR BLUEPRINT: 20 Laws for Staying Unbreakable in an Unraveling America)

More links/reads:

• Good reading on the importance of the oceans as a solution

• How to prepare for a climate disaster

• Great resource - How We Came to Know Earth: The achievement of climate science

• Why the lifespan of solar is still better overall than oil and gas

• Make your money work for the climate! “How banks affect the environment and the role your money plays in it”

Remember the Points of Action page!

Thanks all - let us keep moving forwards!

PS. Please note that this project now has an action page. Do check it out for things you can do.

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

PPPS. Where text is in italics, I am quoting it directly, so it’s not my words!

(Image - The inside cover and opening title page of the 1876 edition of Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. Photo by Sailko, via Wikipedia)

If we start our journey by staying in the Americas, but go south from the US, we arrive in Mexico. A country that is undergoing a major reworking of its energy policy away from gas towards renewables.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s announcement in October 2024 of the 45% renewable electricity generation target marks a significant policy shift towards clean energy.

Travelling further south, we soon hit the large nation of Brazil, target of the ire of the Trump Administration over the prosecution of its former president for a coup attempt. Once more bucking the US’s trend, it too is undergoing a major shift in energy generation:

Wind and solar power generated more than a third of Brazil’s electricity in August, the first month on record the two renewable sources have crossed that threshold, according to government data made public on Thursday and analyzed by energy think tank Ember.

Investment is pouring into the country to open up new sources of renewables as the country's energy needs are still growing, but as noted before, growing energy needs no longer mean growing fossil fuels needs.

(Image - more growing renewable power, this time a wind turbine next to a motorway in the UK. Photo by author.)

Going further south, we end up in Uruguay, a nation that has made huge moves towards renewables and is one of the poster children for a new green economy. Today it gets just 9% of its energy needs from imported oil!

Today, the small South American nation is a global clean energy leader, deriving approximately one-third of its electricity from wind power, two-fifths from hydropower, and cutting its reliance on imported oil for electricity from 50% in 2008 to only 9% today.

From here we if we were to fly across the Atlantic ocean we’d soon arrive in Africa. Today, as often, an amazing continent of many complex changes, one of which is a rapid move to renewables energy where, in some cases the development areas are by-passing the fossil fuel era most industrialised nations passed though.

The first signs of a takeoff of Africa’s green economy are raising hopes that a transformation of the continent’s fortunes may be under way, driven by solar power and an increase in low-carbon investment. … Green energy is booming in Africa, with 20 countries breaking records for imports of solar panels in the 12 months to June. According to the thinktank Ember, imports of photovoltaic equipment from China rose by 60% over the past year, from 9GW in 2024 to 15GW of capacity, with a tripling of imports to countries outside South Africa.

Africa has huge potential, yet it needs investment to really follow though. The technology is here, the need is here - policy makers need to connect the dots. However the economics of why this change is happening are clear:

But the economics for solar look good. As Ember writes: “A solar panel can pay back imported diesel within months. In Nigeria, a 420 Watt solar panel retails for around $60 USD ($0.14 USD/watt), and would produce 550 KWh in a year. At the current diesel price of $0.66 USD per litre, $60 USD of diesel would make only 275 KWh of electricity, implying a payback time of just six months.”

(Image - a public charging port in Sweden powered by renewable energy. Photo by author.)

Going north from Africa, we travel over the Mediterranean sea and arrive in Europe. Europe is seeing record investment in clean energy as the money and projects that would have gone to the US, are now happening in Europe. For example in the UK (where I live) just gave the greenlight to a 96 turbine windfarm (snubbing Trump’s call to halt such developments), Norway is at 91% of new cars being EVs, a ground breaking new project is putting a huge energy transfer cable between the UK and Germany (which will revolutionize energy management) - oh and researchers are looking to generate electricity in space!

Solar panels in space could cut Europe’s terrestrial renewable energy needs by 80% by 2050, a study has found. Using a detailed computer model of the continent’s future power grid, the researchers found that a system of space-based panels designed by Nasa could reduce the cost of the whole European power system by as much as 15%. It could also cut battery use by more than two-thirds.

Travelling a bit south then east from Europe, we come to the Middle East, which while awash with oil, is also seeing the impacts of the shift to renewables. In Lebanon, which is not sitting on a wealth of oil, the electricity grid is haphazard and mostly powered by a myriad private of small diesel generators. Not only does this cost people a lot, but it produces vast amounts of pollution. Here’s how solar is moving in:

(Image - Solar importation in Lebanon by year. UN Comtrade Data, created by Net Zero Notes.)

Moving further east, we arrive in India. A nation also in energy transition:

Clean electricity production in India has surged by 20% to new highs so far this year, giving utilities a rare chance to cut fossil fuel-fired generation and reduce reliance on energy imports for power production.

Is we go directly south from India, we’d soon be in the Indian Ocean and if we were to sail along a bit south and round much further east, then slightly northwards in a kind of looping arc, we’d skirt the edge of Antarctica and arrive at Australia. Another nation being transformed by solar:

South Australia locks in federal funds to become first grid in world to reach 100 per cent net wind and solar … South Australia already leads Australia – and the world – with a wind and solar share of around 70 per cent over the last 12 months. The addition of the new capacity, along with the new Project Energy Connect transmission link from NSW, will enable it to become the first in the world to reach 1`00 per cent net renewables based around wind and solar.

Now the reason we went to Australia next and not, as one might expect in this journey - to China - is because I wanted the contrast of the two nations to jump out at you. Let us start with this quote:

In April this year, China installed more solar power than Australia has in all its history. In one month. This isn’t a story about Australia’s poor track record on solar; Australia is a global leader. Rather, this shows the astonishing rate at which China is embracing renewable technologies across every aspect of its society.

Like it or not, China is leading the way on electrification and renewable energy. The numbers are staggering and show what can be done when a government zeros in on serious action. This all means that China’s CO2 emissions are peaking (something we’ve covered before) - for as China’s CO2 peaks, so too will the world’s CO2 soon peak. This commentary from Fix The News really frames what is going on:

Since the beginning of 2021, its wind and solar capacity has soared from 635 GW to almost 1,700 GW, close to a threefold increase. In the first half of this year, China added more solar than the United States has in its entire history, forcing fossil generation down by 2%.

This is THE tipping point. A country that was adding “two Great Britains worth of electricity demand every year” is now more than satisfying that growing demand with panels, turbines and batteries, instead of black rocks and dinosaur juice.

And it doesn’t stop at China’s borders. Four out of five solar panels, two-thirds of electric cars, almost all the world’s batteries - made in China. That scale has crashed global prices and pulled entire regions into the slipstream.

In sub-Saharan Africa, a solar kit now costs less than a smartphone. In Latin America, BYD is selling electric cars for under US$20,000. In Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya and Brazil, grids are being rewired in real time by a tidal wave of manufactured sunlight.

This is the structural change we’ve all been waiting for. Emissions are plateauing.

(Image - China’s CO2 emissions data showing plateauing. Source - Ember via Heatmap.)

Indeed, China’s CO2 emissions fell 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, continuing the trend of 2024. It is not just renewables - China is also making strides on fusion too.

If we flew back to the US we’d also find that the momentum of renewables, while blunted, has not stopped. The Trump Administration's ideological obsession with picking older and more expensive technologies over newer, cheaper ones is going to cost people money too. Oh and the fight-back against the ruinous policies is underway.

So I hope you can see in our brief round-the-world trip that the momentum has not stopped globally.

Here’s a few more links of interest for this newsletter:

• U.S. Banks Slash Fossil Fuel Financing As Market Forces Outweigh Politics

• Trump Couldn’t Kill Biden’s EV Charging Program

• Clean energy is getting its own national day of action. It’s about time.

• We’re on a mission to power the planet with clean energy from ocean waves.

• Blue sky thinking: why we need positive climate novels

Thanks all & happy Sun Day!

PS. Please note that this project now has an action page. Do check it out for things you can do.

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

(Image - A top down view of fields in Prignitz, Germany showing 40.5 MW Jännersdorf Solar Park. Source; Parabel GmbH, via Wikipedia)

Noted climate advocate Bill McKibben noted (on Heated, a great climate news source) how solar is transforming energy generation around the world - this is happening via large scale utility installation but also, excitingly, by small-scale individual home installation. We've seen this is Australia, but now it is also happening in Pakistan;

"Pakistan's been hit harder by climate change than any country on earth. And people had lousy, expensive, unreliable electricity. But they're also right next door to China. So people just started buying these solar panels, looking up videos on TikTok about how to install them, and putting them up on their roofs. Pakistanis put up the equivalent of half the national electric grid last year in just in solar. So the possibility for doing this is astonishing." (Source)

Wait, there’s more - replacing fossil fuels with solar (and wind) may create more carbon reduction than previously thought! In this interesting post from David Toke, he argues that the data used to measure energy sources is based 'primary energy' (the total energy a given source creates on conversation into energy, so for coal, oil and gas; on combustion) However what matters is the 'useful energy' generated (as in the energy that we as consumers get to use to do things with). As fossil fuels (and nuclear) are inefficient sources, vast amounts of the energy is lost as heat before it can do much helpful work. As such David estimates that switching to greener technologies for both power and use (electrification) results in more carbon emissions losses than we might expect because the new technologies use less to be produced and are more efficient during use.

What is exciting is that we are seeing this change all over the world and at every scale, from siting solar panels on the roof of supermarkets to grid-wide adoptions where, as I've noted before, Australia is really, really moving ahead with solar; "South Australia that is balancing a grid with 73% solar & wind and investing in solutions to stabilise frequency. High renewable energy grids are now fact, not fiction." (Source)

Here's an individual country example of the transformative power of solar; Holland.

"For the first time, in 2024, more than half of the electricity produced in the Netherlands came from renewable sources, and almost all of it (45%) from solar and wind. As the chart shows, this has been a sharp and recent shift. Even as recently as 2018, over 80% of Dutch electricity was generated by fossil fuels." (Source)

All this (combined with wind and other renewables) means that the UN now think we are reaching a 'positive tipping point' on energy as the AP reports, "The United Nations reports a global shift toward renewable energy, calling it a “positive tipping point.” Tuesday’s U.N. reports reveal that 92.5% of new electricity capacity in 2022 came from renewables, with wind and solar leading the way." (Source)

(Image - Three solar towers, under load, glinting in the sun at Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, California. Source; Sbharris via Wikipedia)

AI & Climate News

AI advances fusion state prediction - I've mentioned AI before and its a complex and rapidly changing field and I do plan to dig into parts of it for further commentary. (What I'll be interested in, is to try to tease apart the various conflicting views I read online about its projected power usage, the claimed use cases that may benefit and/or damage it may do in the fight for a livable climate). Here's an interesting use case for a neural network (a form of AI technology) that accurately predicts where a fusion reaction becaumes unstable (so giving operators time to react to it) and also modeling opperational modes for the reactor's state that allow it to move into energy generation modes. (Source)

In an interesting side-effect of the AI boom, is the bevvy of green/climate tech start-ups suddenly find there are customers and cash for green energy and energy efficiency technologies;

"Their founders wanted to make transmission lines, powertrains, and electrical switches more efficient. Or maybe they wanted to unlock the potential of geothermal energy or low-carbon cement. Wherever they began, a bevy of deep tech climate startups, clean energy producers, and sustainable materials companies have found their way to the same destination: Building and powering data centers in the most energy efficient way possible." (Source)

So while the AI boom may or may not be financially sustainable, there is a good chance that much of the positive energy infrastructure it has funded, will.

Legal & Climate news

In a landmark ruling by the International Court of Justice, the requirement of states to prevent harm to the climate has been affirmed:

States must tackle fossil fuels, the world’s top court has ruled, and failing to prevent harm to the climate could result in them being ordered to pay reparations. ... In a landmark advisory opinion published on Wednesday, the international court of justice (ICJ) said countries must prevent harm to the climate system and that failing to do so could result in their having to pay compensation and make other forms of restitution. (Source)

So while this might not, immediately, lead to changes, this ruling will be helpful to those seeking legal routes for climate justice in individual countries.

EU and China Step up to global climate leadership roles

In a sane world, the US should working with the EU for this, but in the world we live this, some leadership better than none;

"China and Europe pledge to go green together as U.S. abandons climate - As the U.S. seeks to dismantle its climate regulations, China and the European Union signed a pledge Thursday to work together on cutting emissions. The document, dubbed “the way forward” following the 10-year anniversary of the Paris climate accords, called the 2015 pact brokered in the French capital “the cornerstone of international climate cooperation” that “all parties” should implement “in a comprehensive, good-faith and effective manner.” ..."
(Source - Heatmap newsletter 25th July, also China is still going for it with renewables, "China installed twice as much renewables in H1 2025 as a year earlier" Source)

(Image - Not forgetting wind! Wind turbines in Scotland. Photo by me.)

Other Climate News

Jobs and Climate Tech go hand-in-hand - Here in the UK the government has secured 5000 jobs via a grant for the production of 'green steel'. This is a continuation of the decoupling form of carbon use from economic activity. (Source)

Microsoft signs 2nd biggest carbon removal deal yet - "Microsoft has inked a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep, a waste management startup, for an undisclosed amount. The companies boasted that the deal, which runs through 2038, represents “the second-largest carbon removal deal to date.” (Source, Heatmap AM newsletter 18th July)

Fusion reactor hits 22 minutes long plasma reaction - So I missed this earlier in the year, but Fusion energy continues to make steady progress as the French CEA WEST Tokamak reactor managed an impressive 22 minutes long plasma reaction, "WEST has achieved a new key technological milestone by maintaining hydrogen plasma for more than twenty minutes through the injection of 2 MW of heating power," said Anne-Isabelle Etienvre, Director of Fundamental Research at the CEA (Source)

Oil major commits to go renewable - So globally its well reported the retreat from any form of renewable energy that the big oil companies have been undertaking - while also cutting back on exploration and research and increasing spending on stock-buybacks (a signal that they don't see a long term future in the oil business?) but not all of them; An oil giant bucks the majors by betting on green energy ... But at least one oil titan is doubling down on clean energy. On Monday, the Italian oil giant Eni said it expects its green business to rival revenues from oil and gas within a decade. (Source Heatmap newsletter 29th July)

(Image - The growth of renewables is a global story. It continues despite the actions of Trump. Renewable energy via wind power in Wales, UK. Photo by author.)

They won’t win

It made me think of the famous quote, often misattributed to Gandhi;

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” We are at the ‘fight you’ stage. Once we win this fight, we’re at the ‘we win’ stage.

Taking a step back, our understanding of the existence of climate change is not new. The first time that an increase in global temperatures is predicted from the emission of CO2 was back in 1896. This begins the ‘ignore’ period as the science advances - accelerating from the 1960s onwards to no great political impact beyond that. Then around the 2000s we enter the ‘they laugh at you’ phase when the science of climate change becomes settled; in that it is real, it is happening, it is serious and we are causing it. Then began a deluge of Big Oil funded disinformation that aims to belittle, confuse and distract. Sadly it is quite an effective campaign that turns climate change into a culture war issue. They create a media landscape in which we don’t debate the solutions, but one where we have to debate its very existence. Over and over and over. Common tropes of this period include the lies that renewables can’t possibly work at scale, that scientists used to think there would be global cooling now its global warming - can’t they just make their mind up, that its a scam to get the research funding and that is a hoax for [insert favorite conspiracy theory here].

Yet physics does not care about our culture war battles and the impacts of climate change and the deluge of science backing the theory, just grew and grew. Thus we moved into the ‘fight phase’. What I would hope we can take away from this is that we do have a huge amount of power here. Which is why the fossil fuel lobby goes to such extraordinary lengths to shut us down. Most people want action and are even willing to pay for it to be fixed. (Yet it is clear that taxing the mega-rich is a much more equitable way to fund the transition). What is also clear is that the idea that dealing with climate change is just a ‘cost’ is a lie. The costs of climate chaos are, and will continue to be, much more expensive in both lives and money, than pretending it is not happening. Not only that, renewables are not only a better technology that promotes energy independence, but they outcompete fossil fuels when on a level playing field. Hence the actions of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill - which not just removes any financial incentives but actively hinders the development of renewables.

Climate change always was all of our problem, except that for a while some politicians and Big Oil could pretend it was not happening. Sadly, as the impacts of a warming world continue to grow (Texas flooding, European heatwaves, California wildfires and so on) such that what we will see is the ongoing costs of climate change on all our doorstep. Our job now is:

1. So point to the evidence linking such disasters and human-caused climate change.

2. Point to the huge benefits (cost, energy independence, reduction of CO2 emissions) of renewables and energy efficiency projects.

3. Point to the escalating costs of failing to deal with climate change.

Climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel has a new book out that also covers a lot of this. She posted a great summary of where we are:

might help:

1 calling your reps

2 organizing your community

3 joining a local direct-action group

4 attending protests

5 volunteering

6 canvassing

won't help:

7 yelling that we're doomed

8 bragging about how cynical you've always been

9 sneering at people doing 1-6

I’m 100% behind this sentiment and it echoes a lot of what we cover here. Digging into points 1,5 and 6 - political action - and the recent actions (and inactions) of the Trump presidency, it shows really clearly that all political parties are not the same. That anyone arguing that the Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same coin - is either woefully mistaken or trying to misinform you. (Or is indulging in point 8, above.) To underline; the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill is deliberately restricting renewable energy while actively promoting fossil fuels. Even a milquetoast centrist party both acknowledges the reality of climate change and mostly lets the market decide on energy (which, when they do, we’ll win).

(Image - Renewable energy of the south coast of the UK, via a line of wind turbines in the sea. Image by author.)

As such we need to ‘run into the fight’. The facts are on our side, the majority of the population is on our side, young people really care about the issue, and victory conditions mean that every fraction of a degree of warming we stop, matters. (On this point, Wired has a great guide to winning a fight) We have to persuade people of the fact that the economics are now on the side of climate action.

This is a great laying-out of that call to action by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson - So, what now? Harness your rage and heartbreak …

Sadly millions of US voters sat out the 2024 election. Many of whom care about the climate. We need to get them back into the fight. We need where you live, to be in the fight!

News Updates

• US Focus - California - a major state on the global stage is posting impressive wins on renewable energy despite the Tump administrations actions

  

• UK Focus - We have a left-of-center government and while not perfect, is doing some great things. My worry is the ‘mini-Trump’ of Farage takes power next because of the same apathy that hit the Biden-Harris campaign. All political parties are not the same.

• EU Focus - Denmark’s renewables are ‘off the chart’! While Ireland has moved to be the 5th nation to stop using coal.

• China Focus - China hits 1TW renewable capacity milestone and interestingly, in Fusion research, “China isn’t just a supplier in the fusion race, but also an ambitious tech actor.” Something to watch.

• Australia is showing how to do a household energy revolution via solar!

  • It is not just Australia, but Germany too is seeing a home-revolution in renewable energy.

Cutting Edge News

• Yet another fusion breakthrough - this time around the modelling of plasma. On that topic, this is a great summary of the state of fusion.

• AI might help in the fight against climate chaos? Like any technology, the issues are in how we actually use it. This is some interesting research saying that if we regulate AI and take care how it is powered, then focusing it right, means it, “could cut global climate pollution by up to 5.4 billion metric tons a year over the next decade if it’s harnessed in ways that would improve transportation, energy and food production.”

• Another AI story on a start-up aiming to use AI to more efficiently power the grid and so save vast amounts of energy.

• Pretty mind-blowing - Trees that make CO2 into stone. Very early stage but this has huge potential.

Doom-watch (where we focus on tackling Doomerism)

• As note again that Dr. Kate Marvel has a new book out that also covers how to have hope in the face of waves of bad climate news.

• Check out ‘From Doom to Hope with special guest Katharine Hayhoe’

Thanks all!

PS. Please note that this project now has an action page. Do check it out for things you can do.

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

The new analysis for Carbon Brief shows that China’s emissions were down 1.6% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2025 and by 1% in the latest 12 months. Electricity supply from new wind, solar and nuclear capacity was enough to cut coal-power output even as demand surged, whereas previous falls were due to weak growth.

Humanity is now at the point where we so clearly have the technology and its implementation that our need for power, no longer needs to power the destruction of a livable climate for all.

(Image - wind power in Belgium. Belgium is ranked sixth worldwide in offshore wind capacity!)

Does this mean the battle is won? Far from it. There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of work yet to be done. This drop in emissions may not hold in China. We're seeing in the US how a change in government can still progress. But, make no mistake, this is a turning point. Here’s how the graph looks:

(Image China’s CO2 from 2016 to 2025. Source, Carbon Brief)

Why does this matter so much?

1. That drop in CO2 was powered by clean power. This, anyone making the argument that we have to use fossil fuels else the economy tanks, is talking rubbish. Our economies can grow while power demand falls even in the very largest of economics. There is no reason but our own political limitations, why this can’t happen everywhere. It just now needs the political will. (And yes, we can also imagine and explore other ways of being - the point is it is now just down to us!)

2. It is China doing this. This matters for a couple of reasons. As a climate advocate, for a couple of decades now, one of the arguments people in the West deployed against taking action at home was that it didn't matter because 'China'. In essence, the argument went, why should we be bothered to act when the largest manufacturing base in the world would wipe out any gains we made? That becomes an impossible argument to make when CO2 emissions are dropping in China. It is also of note that up until around 2012, China tended to view climate change as a ‘Western-created hoax’ designed to hold back its economic growth. Then it saw reality and went for it.

3. It could be so much more! The CO2 reductions were impressive, but could have even more so by looking to drop emissions in other areas. If you check this graph, you'll see how much the drop in energy CO2 was - and how the potency of this drop was lost a bit from other areas. Now think what that would be like if all areas focused on dropping CO2?

(Image - First quarter 2025 CO2 use by section in China. Source, Carbon Brief)

That 15.4 million tonnes of CO2 for the metallurgy industry, for example; What might that have com down to with a focus on low CO2 production? Same question for the chemicals industry and the heating systems industry. We can also be asking the question of what kinds of economics we might want and what values they should reward? The point is that there are much more gains in the system. That’s exciting!

4. It was clean energy doing this. I’ve argued here before how the potency of clear energy is an underreported story. The growth of this technology in China is an interesting story. But it is one that is mirrored in country after country. It is happening where the government is supporting it much more than where it is not, but make no mistake - it is happening all around the world because the economics are so good. Take the UK as an example; “Increasing numbers of solar farms are going ahead without any contractual support from the Government and some of them are based on cooperative or community support.” As well as solar, there is huge potential for more wind in the UK too! But we could also be discussing geothermal in Kenya or solar manufacturing in the middle east and North Africa. There is so much going on globally here!

(Image - a barn with solar panels on the roof)

5. This change is the harbinger of the end of the age of oil. In fact we’ve already passed the peak of oil production - around seven years ago, “In fact, world peak oil output has already happened in November 2018, clocking in at 85.5 million barrels pumped daily.” This is also why (in pert) 90% of the new energy capacity being added globally in 2024 was via renewables, these trends are impossible to stop, only slow. When you chart these two trends on a graph, this is what you get:

(Image - Global energy % by energy type. Source is here.)

A Note on Action & Hope

So what is needed, as ever, is action. Here I endorse Arnie’s words;

“I know that the people are sick and tired of the whining and the complaining and the doom and gloom,” Schwarzenegger said. “The only way we win the people’s hearts and minds is by showing them action that makes their lives better.”

We don’t win by giving up. We don’t win by spending our limited energy complaining. We don’t win by focusing on the ‘purest’ yet unachievable solutions. To paraphrase Michael Podhorzer - who notes that ‘democracy is not a spectator sport’; neither is the battle against climate chaos. We win by actions that work. We have tons and tons of examples, technologies and ideas for this. We need concerted work over multiple fronts to get the change we want and need. On this I wanted to share a couple of things:

If you are in the US, there are two major points of positive action; one is to halt the damaging mega-bill working its way through the legislative process. Distilled has been covering this from the climate angle:

All of that’s to say there’s hope. Any of these Senators can demand revisions to the bill. They can vote to block it outright. Just a few holdouts could tank the legislation. For anyone that wants to protect our climate future, that’s an opportunity.

Simon Rosenberg takes this on from the political action end of things (scroll to the bottom of the post for this quote and action)

Job One for us this summer is fighting Trump’s ruinous economic agenda. We need to keep calling every day and demand our leaders vote down the reconciliation bill and roll back Trump’s terrible tariffs. This is the big, definitional battle of the summer and we need keep working it every day.

And another climate author here, Ayana Elizathen Johnson, issued this call to action:

Hey Everyone. I just wrote to you yesterday, but this is very important:

This Saturday, June 14th.

This weekend we protest against the Trump administration and for democracy and decency (and good climate policy!). Massive turnout is critical.

If you are in the UK, we have our own political work to do. There is an insurgent Trumpist party, Reform, that is playing all the classic authoritarian dog-whistle politics and also wants to roll back any progress on climate. Helpfully here we get to make the moral and economic argument. We have to persuade people of the fact that the economics are now on the side of climate action;

To take just one example, the net zero industry (that Farage wants to dismantle) is growing at three times the rate of the rest of the economy. Our fossil fuel reserves are dwindling, and being exposed to energy imports that can be switched-off by mad dictators is never a good idea – as the last few years have demonstrated.

So to action as it is rather for us to be, here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, the slowing then halting of climate chaos.

Let’s do it.

PS. Please note that this project now has an action page. Do check it out for things you can do.

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

So yes, I’ve also seen the scary and depressing news headlines from the Trump administration, but one of the things that characterise such far-right governments is they live in a fantasy world that eventually meets reality. Trump recently wrote an executive order to ‘bring back coal’ - but the TR;DR is it is not going to happen because its expensive, dirty and the market has turned away from it;

The deeper pattern here stretches beyond coal into how energy transitions actually work. From wood to coal, coal to oil, and now fossil fuels to alternatives, these shifts are driven primarily by cost advantages, not policy preferences. The coal industry wants to frame its decline as regulatory overreach because that suggests a political solution. But the uncomfortable reality is that market forces, which Republicans typically celebrate, delivered the knockout punch. By 2015, natural gas had already surpassed coal in electricity generation through simple economic competition.

(Image: Wind power in action in Greece, 2025.)

This is a global phenomena as even China - a major user of coal - is importing less. Plus, it is not just coal that is retreating from the energy stage. Oil is too as it drops into the global energy mix, we can see that over 50% of the operating cashflow of major oil companies is not going to new oil capacity but is instead going to dividends and buybacks. In 2015 this was around 20%;

In 2024 fossil fuels dropped below 80% of global primary energy for the first time in modern history, and oil’s share dropped below 30% for the first time too. Oil and gas companies have reacted rationally by exiting the battlefield of energy growth, whether renewables or fossil fuels, and giving cash to shareholders instead. The future of energy is clearly being left to others: for oil and gas investors, caveat emptor.

That future is being taken by renewables. As Heatmap reported on 7th April noted that in 2024, 41% of the world’s power came from low-carbon sources;

Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year.

Wherever you look, renewables are on the rise - India (almost tripled solar cell manufacturing capacity in last year), China (coal drops as renewables grow), Namibia, Uruguay and Kenya and so on. It is happening all over! The fact is that, over time, the stubborn refusal to accept reality from the leaders of a handful of world leaders, is going to amount to little more than a bump in the road on the way to the renewable energy future.

The Battery - The Workhorse of the Renewable Transition

A while back I’d written of the powerful momentum of renewables energy and a couple of people noted in comments and feedback (thanks for those!) that the missing link in the commentary I’d written was batteries. They are correct as the rise and rise of batteries has powered not just the huge growth of renewable energy but also that of electric vehicles (EVs) and that in turn may lead to, just from China, a billion tons of less CO2 emissions by 2040. Batteries are the work-horse of the renewable energy revolution allowing us to capture energy when nature gives it out;

"While solar continues to dominate clean energy headlines (and rightfully so), battery storage has quietly transformed from a niche technology into a mainstream grid resource. The numbers we uncovered in our analysis paint a picture of an industry hitting its stride at precisely the moment when the grid needs it most. What makes the battery storage story particularly compelling is how quickly the technology has matured. Just five years ago, utility-scale batteries were still considered experimental by many grid operators and utilities. Today, they're being deployed at gigawatt scale and playing crucial roles in maintaining grid reliability during extreme weather events, reducing electricity costs, and enabling higher penetrations of renewable energy."

I want to note the point above of how fast this has happened - in 5 years we’ve gone from grid-scale batteries being just a cool idea to them being everywhere as more and more capacity is being installed. It is a staggering technological and societal change. Why so much, so fast? Because it works. Around the globe, people are turning to battery power, for example in the US in 2024 60% more capacity was installed than in 2023 (which accounts for 1250 megawatts) - an almost exponential growth rate (Source, Heatmap AM 20th March). Thus far 2025 has seen the same kind of activity, where, in California for example battery use is up by 78%. This growth is mirrored around the world including in Australia and Brazil. (Note also as you read this - currently there is 10 times the battery capacity in EVs than in grid-scale. The numbers when combined we are off the charts!)

(Home energy for hot water and electricty, in Athens, 2025.)

This fascinating account from The Guardian about how a student (Roxana Borda Mamani) who had to return home to her remote Amazon village during the COVID crisis, turned to renewables and batteries to power her work and now, 5 years later, the whole village is running on solar and it is displacing fossil fuels;

Borda began researching the components of an off-grid solar energy system: photovoltaic (PV) panels, a battery, an inverter and a charge controller. Five years later, her community has a 400W solar system powering a 24-hour satellite internet connection and charging points for phones and torches next to a small school that was set up thanks to the new energy source. A second phase, due to be implemented this year, will equip households with PV panels, providing the community’s 50 families with regular electricity access and ending their reliance on expensive and polluting diesel generators.

This small change is being played out all over the globe - and its reducing demand for fossil fuels. Batteries are powering both a grid-scale and home-scale revolution, for example in Australia there was a 30% rise of home battery installation in 2024 and given how many homes have solar there (around 55%) there is a huge opportunity to expand that number!

Why has battery growth and use become so huge? For the same reasons it has with solar and wind - the technology has improved and the cost has come down. In 2021 the price had reduced a staggering 91% from what it was in 2018. (This, of course, opens up questions around how we get the materials to make them, the manufacture and recycling of grid-scale batteries - but progress there is happening too.)

In Conclusion

Yes, folks, the news in the US can be worrying (and I’d recommend this as a good source of news+action) but human ingenuity is a more powerful force than any single government. We are seeing it applied at a global scale to the issue of energy and its storage. We are also seeing the results of this potency writ large and the headlines are that we’re not going back, as reported form a recent energy summit:

But the gathered ministers were largely looking beyond fossil fuels. European politicians, especially, spent the summit saying their future did not involve swapping Russian gas for American imports, but was led primarily by clean energy.

Amen to that.

PS. Please note that this project now has an action page. Do check it out for things you can do.

PPS. Also this newsletter is both a personal project and represents my personal views and not that of any organisation or company. Comments and feedback are always welcomed!

The EU announced its goal of climate neutrality by 2050 back in 2020, but now it’s putting its money where its mouth is, with new legislative direction and several financial commitments. It’s in part a response to the US’ Inflation Reduction Act, and takes a page out of that playbook by streamlining major reporting and carbon trade regulations, adding in new incentives, and encouraging private investment. (Source, CTVC)

(Image - The European Investment Bank headquarters in Luxembourg. Pic: Flickr/Steintec, Source)

While in Europe (but sadly not the EU, the United Kingdom announced that its 2024 carbon emissions fell by 4% relative to 2023. Plus the government numbers noted this means emissions are now 54% less than where they were back in 1990. This is because of a range of factors including lots of new clean power projects (for example here) and a lot of great grass-roots projects, for example in the community energy sector;

Thrive has formed a strategic joint venture with the UK’s leading social impact investor, Better Society Capital, bringing together £40 million for community-owned wind and solar projects across the UK. (Source)

(Image, a wind turbine generates clean energy for people in the South West of the UK. Author's own image.)

This kind of change is being repeated from project to project, nation to nation and when added up globally, the worldwide rise in renewables and the shift to EVs means that we’re now seeing the peak of oil use as a percentage of the total energy mix, a trend that will only increase on to the actual peak of use soon too:

EV sales surged by over 25% in 2024, now making up 1 in every 5 cars sold globally, and this had a notable impact on oil demand, which grew modestly, at just 0.8%. Oil notably fell below 30% of total energy demand for the first time ever, 50 years after it peaked at 46%.

It is not just that the rest of the world is getting on with tackling climate change, it's that they are taking commercial advantage of the US retreat. Here’s a glimpse into the European Union’s thinking:

Notably, it is also stepping up to fill the vacuum left by the US' pullback on climate under President Trump. Trump’s early moves — exiting the Paris Agreement, halting IRA funding, and drafting tariffs — are countered by the Commission’s new Clean Trade and Investment Partnerships — free-trade agreements that support the EU’s strategy with better access to global raw materials, clean energy, and climate tech. (Source, CTVC)

As noted, the EU’s plans are modeled on the successful US law, the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Biden. This was the largest climate law in the world and so successful has it been, that even some Republican politicians see its value:

"Twenty-one House Republicans have signed a letter urging the GOP to uphold the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits in their budget bill, warning that gutting the credits would “risk sparking an energy crisis in our country, resulting in drastically higher power bills for American families.” That’s three more than signed a similar letter during the last Congress." (Source, Heatmap AM, 10th March 2025)

An AI Shift?

I’ve written before about the (understandable) worry about AI and its power consumption going forwards. Now, one of the key ways you can know where people think the demand for power is going, is via where they actually put their cash. There was a recent IPO for a power company, CoreWeave, which aimed to capitalise on the expected rush for energy to power the upcoming AI world and, well, that’s not quite how it happened:

Last week, the CoreWeave IPO faltered: The company raised only $1.5bn at $40/share — well below its $47–$55 target range — giving it a $20bn valuation. Even then, shares struggled to open, with investor appetite cooling fast.

Added to that, I’m seeing more stories about AI being used to develop new technology (such as this for example, helping with fusion development) makes clear it a development we need to understand more about. On this theme, commentator Leigh Phillips argues the progressive left should be seeking to develop this thread, not retreat from it;

The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of bad fantasy art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.

I’ll continue to report on events here going forwards.

On Making Connections

Finally there is an excellent post about 20 lessons on how to navigate a world moving towards tyranny. I don’t intend for this this newsletter to cover this area, as others do it better than I can, worthy topic though it is. However I will note that a couple of the points echo the points in our own Points of Action page.

The one below echos my point 7 - Support an independent media outlet!

11. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

Also the next point quoted echoes my point 1 - “Politics, politics and more politics! If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people? Yes, you can!” (also kinda echos Points 5 and 6 too)

13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Worth a listen/read!

Things are inevitable, inviolable and unstoppable - right up until the point when they’re not.

Let me give some small examples. Many years ago I picked up an anthology of short SF stories about the future of war. Written mostly in the 80s, the authors explored what they thought conflict might be in the near future. As you might imagine there were all the themes of Science Fiction conflict - fights in space, a battle on the moon, lasers and more. Most of the stories pitted the future USSR vs the future USA. Yet none of the authors envisioned the fall of the USSR because at that point in the 80s it seemed strong and inviolable. Yet inside it was rotten and brittle and a few short years later it had fractured and fallen.

Let us take a more recent example - the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Despite almost being toppled by a popular uprising in the early 2010s it had clung on and then, with the backing of Russia and Iran, brutally pushed back the opposition and rebel forces into ever smaller enclaves. Global acceptance of this reversal in power seemed to follow years later as in 2023 Assad was welcomed at the Arab League summit inSaudi Arabia and embraced by a number of leaders there. A few months later he signed a China–Syria strategic partnership. The Assad regime was back and seemingly now unstoppable. Yet 10 months after signing that deal with China, the ‘inevitable’ Assad regime would collapse because inside it was rotten and its power was ephemeral.

Today as I write this it is easy to get into the mindset that our fossil fuel powered civilization is inevitable and inviolable and will power onwards until it bakes the planet dry. We have seen the election of Trump and globally there are a bunch of countries - gulf states, Russia, Venezuela to name a few - that want to keep us drowning in oil. What hope do those of us wanting change have? Yet the fossil fuel edifice they have built is brittle and rotten inside. The best encapsulate of the brittleness of the current system was written almost a decade ago and yet resonates still today:

Here’s something critical it took me a long time (and the patience of a few smart friends) to understand: the Carbon Bubble will pop not when high-carbon practices become impossible, but when their profits cease to be seen as reliable.

As it becomes clear that these assets will not produce profit in the future, their valuations will drop — even if the businesses that own them continue to function for years. The value of oil companies will collapse long before the last barrel of oil is burned; the value of beachfront hotels will collapse long before rising tides flood their lobbies.

For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.

So the huge amount of resources and cash that the oil industry spends to fight a PR/legal/political war that climate change is both/either inevitable/not happening/a natural process is huge. (This is why climate denial narratives are so contradictory, because they care only about slowing the transition to a clean energy future, nothing else) If the oil industry didn’t need to maintain the future profits illusion then it would not need to do any of this. Yet, year after year, the impacts and reality of climate change pile up, so it needs to do more and to protect the illusion. As I’d written before:

The reason is because despite all the bad news, they know the writing is on the wall and they can see the end of the age of carbon. They engage with it because all they have left is delay. This is not hyperbole, actions speak louder than words; Heatmap.news, a new energy news start-up, noted that the spending patterns of the oil industry shows not an industry investing in the future, but one cashing cashing out.

(Image - Micro-grid using small wind turbines, solar PV, energy storage by Munro89)

Point no. 2 - Doomerism protects the status quo

So what the barrage of activity that the decades-long big oil strategy of delay and denial wants is for people (at best) to either join it in the illusion we can ignore reality but if not that, then check out. And believe me, they are fine with doomerism as an outcome:

One of the most telling examples of how fossil fuel interests leverage hopelessness to prevent climate action comes from a leaked 2018 PR firm document. The PR strategy document recommends that a comprehensive coalition of industry, civil society, and political leaders challenge Canada’s proposed federal clean fuel standards by arguing that “fighting climate change is a losing battle.” Strikingly, polling evidence suggests that for people who do not think the government should act on climate, a key factor driving their attitude is they feel there is nothing the government can actually do to stop it. Climate apathy and doomism protect continued fossil fuel extraction.

So even if there was no hope (which there is) I’d keep hope alive to not let big oil win.

But I don’t need hope for hope’s sake; the reality is that climate change is real and we know how to stop it. We just need the political will to follow through and to take action.

Victory in this battle is not all or nothing. We can lose battles yet win overall. Because every single fraction of a degree of warming that we stop matters.

Point no.3 - Action makes hope

One of the best ways to get hope is to act. Inaction is the antithesis of hope. This is a great summary of the point from the article entitled ‘I was in despair about the environmental crisis. Then I volunteered to clean up my local park’

“It was the counsellor I was seeing who switched me on to the idea of volunteering. As I sobbed in front of my computer screen during one of our online sessions… He gave me three rules: make it simple, immediate and collaborative. That’s how, a week later, I found myself in Victoria Park in Ashford, Kent, fishing old carrier bags out of the river. In subsequent sessions, our band of volunteers put up bat-boxes, created new paths, renovated the dried-out pond and surveyed for amphibians. Psychologists call the mental boost from volunteering the “helper’s high”. And boy, did I get high.”

So the science backs the point up - that action makes us feel better. What is even better is collective action. Why collective? Because climate change is not a personal issue and thinking of it solely in those terms is another way to hand a win to big oil. ( See ‘Net zero hero’ myth unfairly shifts burden of solving climate crisis on to individuals, study finds)

Because of the state of the world, there is no shortage of places to put your energy. I’ve recommended a few here. Feel free to suggest others to me too.

Key here though, as well as to take action., is to not run down something that another is doing to fight climate chaos. If you think your strategy is better, the best way to convert people to it is to show your strategy in action and get results.

(Note - given I’ve said a focus on personal changes does not really help, am I contradicting myself here? No, so while taking personal steps to reduce climate change won’t resolve the issue, it does create an environment that makes it easier for larger political change to happen. So it is all good - provided you don’t spend your energy attacking others for not doing it the way you’d do it).

Point no.4 The climate movement is about building the future

What we are building here is the future of humanity. To see the future needs a hope that we will both get there and can make it better than the projected worst cases. We’ve already escaped the very worst - but we need to go further! As will all human enterprises, the future (and building it) will be messy, fractious, imperfect and noisy, for sure. But what it wants at heart is a better future for all. It is not seeking to push one group of people down to advance another. It is not seeking to burn the world to ash to be the last man standing. It wants to move us forwards to a better place than we’re in now.

This movement, within the current world, is best exemplified by this classic cartoon:

(Image - by U.S. cartoonist Joel Pett for USA Today)

This is in contrast to the movement that opposes us that is, at best, about the status quo, but is increasingly about destruction.

"Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain well below their levels at the turn of the century."

This is why collective action is so key - building is best done as a group activity. Ideas are here.

Some final thoughts

I want to shout out to some other newsletters that are also covering a similar ‘beat’ to mine. I’m enjoying their writings:

• What if we get it right?

• Good Climate News

• The Climate Optimist

Let me end with this quote:

The world is burning whether you watch it, read about it, spiral over it - or not.

But in your circle of control, you can build something that matters.

Something real.

Something that helps.

(Image - Lens flare on the plasma vessel of the Joint European Torus (JET) Tokamak in Culham. Fusion is a technology now interecting with that of AI. Source.)

Going back into history to frame this topic we find plenty of great examples. One relevant here is that of Thomas Malthus. In 1798 he looked at the growing population, looked at the amount of food being produced and concluded that doom lay ahead and that, bluntly, we should let people starve. Because feeding poor people led to them having babies and so even more poor people to feed. He was looking at the data, as it stood, fairly accurately. He saw the rising population, knew the amount of food being made and projected both forwards as-is and prducted a point of crisis.

(Image: Graph sowing the principle of Malthus’ theory of population. Graph by Jan Oosthoek, source)

However what he wasn’t able to project was that in the future, things would be different to how they are now. What he got wrong was that the population growth would level out and that - key for our discussion here - the rate of innovation in food production would accelerate and allow far more production than he thought possible. There was no doom as he predicted it.

But we didn’t really learn from Malthus’ misunderstandings. The same argument was made in the late 1960s, the most well known version being the book ‘The Population Bomb’ which argued (with data) that the human population was growing too fast and we could not feed all these new people and that, “...hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” Except that didn’t happen. There was no doom as they predicted it. Yes there were famines and yes there was hunger but the technological innovations of the Green Revolution, the 1960s-1980s series of farming and agricultural initiatives that saw a huge increase in food production, meant that overall more humans had more calories then before.( Again at note; this post is not an analysis of these events, good and the bad, but is here to show the same point; the vast underestimation of the pace and impact of technological change.)

Which brings us back to AI and energy where the assumptions were that growing energy demands from AI and growing use of AI would lead to doom. Here’s a New York Times headline example from July 2024; “The soaring electricity demands of data”. Yet some outlets urged caution on this news trend, back in April 2024 Heatmap News was a rare voice urging caution in those assumptions;

In a 1999 Forbes article, a pair of conservative lawyers, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, warned that personal computers and the internet were about to overwhelm the fragile U.S. grid. Information technology already devoured 8% to 13% of total U.S. power demand, Huber and Mills claimed, and that share would only rise over time. “It’s now reasonable to project,” they wrote, “that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” They could not have been more wrong. In fact, Huber and Mills had drastically mismeasured the amount of electricity used by PCs and the internet. Computing ate up perhaps 3% of total U.S. electricity in 1999, not the roughly 10% they had claimed. And instead of staring down a period of explosive growth, the U.S. electric grid was in reality facing a long stagnation. (Bold emphasis mine.)

After story after story about the steady increase in the cost and power demands of AI, in January this year a small Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, smashed all those assumptions by producing a model that works with comparable ability to others yet was trained needing a fraction of the computing power of past models. Shares in energy companies fell on the news as the markets reacted to the upheaval. We need to be skeptical of projections:

But there’s an important caveat that is almost never mentioned, let alone emphasized, in all the discourse about AI and the explosion in electricity demand: These are all just forecasts, predictions, informed guesses about the future…. But the confidence most people make their predictions with is what I’m most skeptical about—mainly because humans are so bad at predicting the future.

After all, as well as being wrong about food production, our projections were also wrong about other technologies including lithium-ion batteries, LED lights and solar power. On solar power projections, by 2019 actual power generated by solar outstripped what had been projected back in 2010 by the IEA. We achieved a rate of production that is 16 years ahead of projections. 2024’s actual solar output was 3x what was projected back then.

Let's also look at LED lights:

“In 2010, LED lights were installed in less than 1% of sockets. They cost $40 per bulb. Then the cost fell to as little as $2 per bulb and they became one of the most quickly adopted new technologies in history.”

(Image - Blue LED strip light by Maksym Kozlenko, source.)

Now this does not mean that there are no longer any worries about the energy cost of AI; that is still a worry because of the aforementioned uncertainty. This article does a good job of explaining the various routes that AI, climate and energy may go. The TL;DR is that it’s complex and we just don’t know.

You’ll hear people mention the ‘Jevons Paradox’ for example. This is where a new breakthrough means a reduced resource use of something, which you’d expect would lead to less resources now needed for it. Yet it has the opposite effect as it then gets used in more places and more people, because of that reduced resource cost. Resulting in a net effect can mean the higher overall resources being used.

But the Jevons Paradox didn’t work well for LEDs which decreased lighting power consumption even as more people used LEDs. The Jevons Paradox may, or may not, apply to AI? We just don’t know.

Then, as I’m doing research for this article - to underscore this uncertainty - someone then claimed they have recreated the core functions of DeepSeek for just $30. Not $30 million, $30.

To those who are bullish on what AI might be able to do, cite the argument that its power can help solve some of the technological challenges we need to overcome to make the next generation of power technology, like fusion. They may be wrong, but they may also be very right. I’ve covered fusion before here, but what is key to note is that there have been a huge range of technological and scientific innovations over the last decade or two that have gradually chipped away at the wall of difficulty we need to overcome to make this technology usable. Things are changing fast and here is an example of AI helping to chip away at that wall;

Nuclear fusion reactors, often referred to as artificial sun, rely on maintaining a high-temperature plasma environment similar to that of the sun. … Accurately predicting the collisions between these particles is crucial for sustaining a stable fusion reaction. … "By utilizing deep learning on GPUs, we have reduced computation time [of these projections] by a factor of 1,000 compared to traditional CPU-based codes," the joint research team stated.

The key takeaways here are that we get the prediction of technology wrong time and time again. One of the constants of humanity is innovation and it has been increasing in pace and breadth over time. These innovations are, yes technological, but also intellectual and cultural too. So we’re creating new things, new ideas and new ways they mesh and get used. That is not to say that all innovation is good - it is clearly a mixed bag. But it is happening and while we’re not helpless in the face of change, we’re not good at predicting it and any second-order effects and onwards. Indeed, as well as innovating technologies, we innovate ideas that help us to shape them. Democracy for example allows (in theory anyway!) the ability for people to shape rules for how technology is developed and deployed by the people.

Three technologies connected to climate change that are debated (rightly) are AI, fusion and carbon capture. We’ve already been wrong on renewables - we will be wrong on other technologies also - the question is in what way will be wrong; in a good way or in a bad way?

I think there is more of the good way to come.

PS. Don’t forget the new ‘Points of Action’ section of this project with ideas for things you can do to help the fight against climate chaos.

(Image -Rows of solar panels on a building in Somerset, UK. Author’s image.)

While the new US administration is going all in on fossil fuel and is spouting phrases such as ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ the problem they have is that the reality on the ground fails to match the rhetoric. The issue is that fossil fuels are falling behind renewables in cost, flexibility and acceptability. That does not mean fossil fuels are done, sadly waaay still too much is still being used. But there is a human revolution of technology going on where electrification and clean energy are rising and the CO2 burning fuels are becoming the fuel of yesteryear. Evidence of the decline? This from early January: "A recent oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge got zero bids, the Interior Department announced yesterday."

Yet as Trump dampens the market for renewables in the US, other countries are seeing that as an opportunity to grab that investment cash!

Duncan Paterson, director of investor practice at the Investor Group on Climate Change, which represents Australian and New Zealand investors concerned with the financial effects of the climate crisis, agrees. “Most global investors are sticking to their climate targets because they understand the science hasn’t changed, so if the US pulls back on renewable energy, Australia looks like a better option,” Paterson says. . … “It’s a major opportunity,” [The chief executive of the Clean Energy Investor Group, Richie Merzian] says.

Want more? Check the progress of the granddaddy of fossil fuels, coal, in the US. Its use has dropped to levels last seen in the early 1960s. Coal is not coming back.

(Image: Coal us in the US over time - source)

One of the key things about the growth of renewables and the fall of fuels like coal; the connection between fossil fuel use and economic growth is now broken. One does not need the other. Take the US in 2024 for example; "That’s good news in the sense that emissions didn’t rise, even as the economy grew by an estimated 2.7%." (Source) While some may make the case for a change in our economic systems that reflect values other than growth, what this does mean is that another argument for not taking action on climate, is gone. Economic growth does not need fossil fuels.

The new US president is aiming to reverse progress, yet economic reality is going to crash into that warped aim; “But the overall trend in cost reductions is so strong that nobody, not even President Trump, will be able to halt it.” (Matthias Kimmel, head of Energy Economics at BloombergNEF, Source). This is a helluva trend to try and reverse! “The U.S. added 47% more clean energy capacity in 2024 than in 2023. 95% of capacity added in 2024 was carbon-free; solar and batteries made up 83% of new capacity.” (Source)

On this topic, the advance and growth of batteries is one of the unsung success stories of renewable technologies, which themselves are already one of the unsung success stories of technology development. Our ability to store energy, and store it at scale has allowed renewables to become more flexible and also unlocked electric vehicles (EVs) as a viable technology; both of which are shaking things up. So much so that BloombergNEF expects the cumulative doubling of energy storage in 2025!

Mill, Baby, Mill

So I got this headline from this newsletter, (and thanks to them for that!) and I like it as globally wind-power is having an amazing time. From the very big (‘China firm to build world’s most powerful ultra-large onshore wind turbine’) to the very small (‘Compact wind turbine can generate 1,500 kWh of energy per year’). The innovation in this space is exciting!

This story, of an ordinary person, a Ukrainian, making his own wind-power to deal with the energy shortages caused by war, is pretty inspiring;

“Long before renewable energy became a wartime topic, Oleksandr Klymenko embraced it as a necessity. Thus, on the outskirts of Dnipro, just over 100 kilometers from the front line, stands a wind generator of his design, its silhouette reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower.”

Here in the UK, the power regulator, Ofgem, are going to make it easier to get renewables such as wind power onto the grid;

Years of gridlock holding renewable energy projects back could be brought to an end by plans to connect new wind and solar farms to the power grid faster. Regulator Ofgem estimates the changes will roughly treble the amount of power generation added to the grid per year.

As if all that news was not cool enough; Now they are making wind turbine blades from wood.

(Image - Solar panels and wind generator in Oleksandr Klymenko's yard. Source, The Counteroffensive, recomended reading on the subject of Ukraine!)

Shine, Bay, Shine

Lets not forget solar in our discussion of renewables. In the US solar is booming in the Lone Star State, famous for oil, "Solar power is the cheapest form of energy now, even with zero subsidies. One state that realizes this is Texas, which is building more solar than any other state."

It is not just Texas, the biggest areas of growth already are Republican states in the South of America. Here’s another quote (from Heatmap’s AM newsletter);

“Xcel Energy, the largest utility in Minnesota, says it will deliver 100% carbon-free electricity to customers in the state five years ahead of the state’s 2040 deadline.”

While over in Turkey solar is also booming;

“Türkiye’s solar energy capacity doubled in 2.5 years, exceeding the 2025 target. Installations primarily for self-consumption have driven 94% of the growth since July 2022, raising capacity from 9.7 GW to over 19 GW by the end of 2024.”

Law, Baby, Law

I’ve written before about how legal cases are an interesting front of climate action. The super-simple summary of them is that some countries have enshrined rights in law (or even a requirement to stop climate chaos) and the cases argue those rights are curtailed by a lack of climate action. So in the UK recently campaigns overturned a government decision to allow a huge oil project, called Rosebank’ to continue:

“Rosebank has been ruled unlawful and the oil field’s approval has been overturned. This is a monumental victory in the fight for a liveable future for all. Thank you to all who have supported us, especially the 100,000 people who added their names in support of the court case. The government now has the chance to remake the decision after their oil & gas consultation concludes in spring. The key is to make as much noise as possible to make sure that they make the right decision to reject Rosebank.”

So first off, well done those campaigners and second it shows that this route can have victories. It all helps. Over in the US there was another recent victory:

“The supreme court has shot down the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to kill a Hawaii lawsuit, which is seeking to hold the sector accountable for an alleged decades-long misinformation campaign.The Monday decision will allow the closely watched litigation, filed by officials from Honolulu, to proceed toward a trial. It is a procedural victory for the wave of climate accountability lawsuits filed against oil and gas companies in recent years.In March 2020, the city and county of Honolulu and the Honolulu board of water supply sued oil companies for violations of state law, including for creating a public nuisance and failing to warn the public of the risks posed by their products.”

Also in the US, environmental groups have turned to the law to halt Trump’s actions (Via Heatmap AM newsletter):

“Environmental groups filed their first lawsuit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, challenging Trump’s moves to open up public lands and waters to oil and gas drilling. Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Oceana, among others, are contesting the president’s executive order revoking Joe Biden’s protections of parts of the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans from oil and gas leasing. The groups claim that the president has the authority to create these protections but not to withdraw them — a right reserved for Congress — and notes that a federal court confirmed this after Trump attempted to undo similar Obama-era protections during his first term.”

Back here in Europe; Swiss farmers are also taking their government to court over the issue of climate change:

“Farmers suing their government for failing to act on climate change might sound surprising — we’re more used to seeing convoys of tractors in the streets with farmers protesting the imposition of climate and sustainability policies. But that’s just what’s happening in Switzerland — a country where average temperature increases have already hit 2.8 °C compared with preindustrial times. In March last year, a group of farmers turned to the Swiss courts to force the government to do more to act on climate change before their farms become unviable.”

Thanks for reading and more incoming soon!

Remember - here are some points of action you can take.

We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming. … Yes, read that again. Let it sink in. This is what the science now says. We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming. The pace of technology, of innovation, of prices, of feasibility, of discovery, of organizing, of grassroots movements, of movements in other countries around the world, have all picked up the pace so fast in the last five years.

Renewable technology and capacity are both increasing at an exponential rate. It's all S-curves, ones that look like this:

(Image from here)

That graph is quite something! This is why I’ve written a number of times about the staggering growth of renewable energy. It is quite mind-blowing when you let it sink in, and, AND (yes 2 x ‘AND’) we’re far from done yet.

One of the biggest under-reported stories in climate news, indeed in any news category, is the rise and rise of renewable energy. As someone who has been campaigning on climate issues for decades, I’ve seen the question of renewables go from an argument that we should subsidize renewables because it's the morally right thing to do, to now where it's cheaper to use renewables than anything else.

In fact, building on this point, from Reddit; Scientists call for updated IPCC AR7 scenarios to better reflect optimistic reality.

Recent research suggests that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs to revise its scenarios for its upcoming seventh assessment report (AR7) to better reflect encouraging real-world trends in population growth, economic development, and renewable energy adoption.

So while there’s a lot of worrying Trump news around. I project that the Trump administration will be a bump in the road on the global growth of renewables.

Why do I say this? For a few reasons:

• Trump wants to ‘drill, baby, drill’ - but the US was already producing more oil than any other nation - yes including Saudi Arabia or Russia. So if somehow it manages to go higher, all it will do is tank prices and so tank new production. The end of the age of oil is nigh and there’s not much that can be done to stop it.

• So while Trump hammered Wind power (because he has this weird obsession with wind turbines) thus far solar was hit the least. But elsewhere in the world Wind continues to grow. For example there’s a new silent home turbine taking off and I’m very much here for microgeneration of power. Also China continues to dominate renewables globally and is building the world's most powerful onshore turbine.

• Trump made a lot of noise about coal when he came into power in 2016 yet nothing changed in its fortunes. Nor will it now, it's simply too expensive and dirty compared to alternatives.

• The US is just one country amongst many and only represented only 11% of global capacity in 2021 and in 2023 was at almost the same level as Brazil. So even if Trump impacted, say for example 20% of US capacity, it’s still only around 1% of global capacity. Elsewhere we power onwards! In the UK for example (where I’m from) the UK had the best year ever in 2024 in terms of energy coming from clean sources.

Say it with me now; The Trump administration will be a bump in the road on the global growth of renewables.

OK, so let's briefly look back at 2024 because amongst all the bad news (and yes, I know there was a lot of it!) There were a couple of things I’d like to note. One was this on the US economy in 2024; that economic growth is now so clearly decoupled from carbon emissions. This matters because one of the big arguments that climate deniers and fossil fuel companies have deployed over the last couple of decades is that for growth to happen, you need gas, oil and coal. But that is no longer true, "That’s good news in the sense that emissions [in the US] didn’t rise, even as the economy grew by an estimated 2.7%." Before anyone comments (and please do!) that they think we need to rework our world so that economic growth is not the imperative, which I very much get, pragmatically another zombie argument against tackling the climate crisis is dead. Oh, and in that same article was this gem, "A recent oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge got zero bids, the Interior Department announced yesterday." Intrigued to know why that was?

A few other news items that caught my eye:

• As the IEA Calls it the "Next Chapter of the Energy Revolution," BloombergNEF Expects Cumulative Battery Energy Storage Systems to Double in 2025

• Direct CO2 capture from the atmosphere will scale up massively in 2025

• New York to fine fossil fuel companies $75 billion under new climate law

• US supreme court allows Hawaii lawsuit against fossil fuel firms’ misinformation

• China's 'artificial sun' shatters nuclear fusion record by generating steady loop of plasma for 1,000 seconds

Oh and I wanted to mention something about individual responsibility. While anything someone does to move us in the right direction is to be applauded, I’m not in favour of hammering people for personal choices. No major environmental change has ever been won by personal consumer choices. We didn’t close the ozone hole by buying non-CFC products alone. So good to read a study backing this view;

[Assoc Prof Tom van Laer, a co-author of the study] said individual climate warriors could be motivational and had helped drive a number of grassroots movements.

But when individuals are put on a pedestal in the absence of tangible corporate and government policies to decarbonise, these narratives can breed feelings of helplessness and disengagement rather than empowerment.

On that motivational point; There’s also a point to be added to this around how many of the fully fossil fuel nations are deeply troubling authoritarian places. Russia, for example. So this story about a Ukrainian man making his own renewable power combines both points!

Long before renewable energy became a wartime topic, Oleksandr Klymenko embraced it as a necessity. Thus, on the outskirts of Dnipro, just over 100 kilometers from the front line, stands a wind generator of his design, its silhouette reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower.

(Image - Solar panels and wind generator in Oleksandr Klymenko's yard. From ‘The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak’)

So, what can you do? Here’s my updated list:

• Politics, politics and more politics! If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people? Yes, you can!

• Make sure your own supplier of energy is getting it from renewable sources. (UK link)

• If you have influence at work, ask about if your work place can also switch energy suppliers.

• If you have investments/pensions and can control where they invest, seek to move from any fossil fuel ones to renewable energy. Here’s how to start.

• If there is a renewable energy project seeking planning permission in your area, write in support of it. Help make it happen!

• Join a climate action group. There’s loads around and this does not have to mean protest - any group always needs a core of people to help from admin, funding, logistics and more. Being part of something is one of the best ways to stave off despair.

• Support an independent media outlet. One of the issues why we hit headwinds in climate progress despite a majority of people wanting to see action is that we face a huge, well-funded climate denial media network. However there are individuals and outlets doing good reporting, investigations and more. These always need support, so find one you like and subscribe!

Thanks for visiting Climate Hopium - together, let’s make change happen!

PS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

PPS. Some housekeeping, requests for info etc from Climate Hopium!

In the mid-1980s, nearly four million people were infected by Guinea Worm each year. Caused by the parasitic roundworm Dracunculus medinensis, it’s certainly a disease you wouldn’t want to experience. The infections come from stagnant water, in which the worms lay their larvae, but the worms mature inside the human body. Over the course of a year, an infected person eventually plays host to a worm that grows to become one meter (3.3 feet) long.

Once fully grown, the worm creates a lesion on the skin and then escapes from the body, usually producing agonizing pain in the process. … Fully removing the worm can take days or weeks. It’s extremely painful, and often leads to secondary infections. …

Jimmy Carter decided to do something about it.

There was no glory in it. This wasn’t like cutting a ribbon or raising funds for a high-profile cause. In the United States and other rich countries, few people had ever heard of guinea worm, so Carter wasn’t exactly about to generate front page publicity for taking the parasite on, but he nonetheless decided to make it a core of his post-presidency public health agenda.

And it’s hard to overstate just how successful he was. Take a look at this chart (from NPR), showing the estimated number of cases in 1986 versus today, due to the Carter Center’s investments to eradicate the disease.

Before Carter got involved, Guinea Worm was prevalent in 21 countries, infecting at least 3.5 million people per year. Today, that figure is down to just 13 cases per year. It’s a reduction of 99.99% in just a few decades, making it one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Experts estimate that, without the efforts of the Carter Center, roughly 80 million more people would have been infected by Guinea Worm. Instead, they were saved from excruciating pain and crippling disease by a former president who gave a damn about a disease that nobody else seemed to care about.

Imagine if your legacy was that you helped to stop around 80 million people from an agonising, debilitating and possibly fatal parasite? Quite something. Not all progress get headlines and Time covers.

Back to the climate; Thank you to those who've commented, messaged me etc on posts - always helps to know your thoughts. Since the November 2024 post here about structuring the newsletter and content (and big thanks to those who completed the survey!) I've moved forward with the updated format and I'm happy to say that the two posts since (here and here) have been some of my best performing posts in terms of views, ever! So I'm assuming most like the updated approach. (I should note I do this out of both interest and commitment to a better climate future, so ultimately while stats help to understand you as readers, I'm going to cover topics that grab me or matter, popular or not!)

Future Topics

Some of the topics I'm looking to cover in future articles include:

• The rise of EVs and electrification (thanks to those who noted it!)

• More on Fusion (as was covered here)

• Climate and democracy (the inter-relationship here, I’m a keen advocate of the democratic process so both interest me, so how to stop climate chaos and strengthen our democratic institutions)

• The psychology of climate change (as in how us human perceive threats and respond to them and what we can learn to help our advocacy of the issues at hand)

• The disconnection of economic activity and fossil fuels (as had been argued for decades that you could not have one without the other and that’s clearly not true any more!)

• Testing an audio format for posts.

So if you have any interesting links, connections etc on any of the above or thoughts on topics to cover, please do let me know in comments, DMs etc (as you have been!)

Resources

I’m also going to put up a resource post that I will update as I process with both links and other media (books, films etc) suggested. These will be focused on areas of interest that I cover and not intended to be a ‘catch-all’ list. These include:

• Your energy provider - Make sure your own supplier of energy is getting it from renewable sources. (UK link) Also, if you have influence at work, ask about if your work place can also switch energy suppliers.

• Investments/pensions - If you have investments/pensions and can control where they invest (or where they don’t!) seek to move from any fossil fuel ones to renewable energy.

• Support new renewable capacity - If there is a renewable energy project seeking planning permission in your area, write in support of it (as for sure, there are campaigns to stop such projects getting built!)

• Politics - Contact your poltical representative and talk to them about climate action - even if you don’t think they care - let them know you both care and vote! If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people?

• Join a climate action group. There’s loads around and this does not have to mean protest - any group always needs a core of people to help from admin, funding, logistics and more. Being part of something is one of the best ways to stave of despair.

• Support an independent media outlet. One of the issues why we hit headwinds in climate progress despite a majority of people wanting to see action is that we face a huge, well-funded climate denial media network. However there are individuals and outlets doing good reporting, investigations and more. These always need support, so find one you like and subscribe!

• Better media use - Stopping doom scrolling (an interesting read here)

So if you’ve got suggestions to add to these or books you recommend, please do let me know and I’ll take a look.

Climate Images

Finally I like to add images in posts, again related to the way I cover climate change. Some are ones I’ve taken and some come from Creative Commons images I find online. If you’ve got images of yours and you are happy for me to use them, please do post them comments, DMs etc and I can look to use some in future posts (and please do give me the credit line for the post! Note only images of your please, not ones you’ve found online)

(Image - Solar farm near Blagdon, Noth Somerset - one of mine!)

Thanks and my next post is coming soon!

PS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics or block quotes then I’m quoting directly from the source. With images, below each picture (in brackets) is the source for that image. Anything wrongly attributed or missing a link, let me know and I’ll update! Thanks.

Fusion

Fusion is the way stars produce energy, so we’re kinda benefiting from it via solar already. However if we’re able to use similar physics here on earth, it's going to be a game changer. It will not only upend energy policy, it will upend global politics too as the oil-producing nations of the Earth will quickly lose a lot of relevance. So how close are we? The joke within the scientific community has always been that we’re always 20 years away from the technology working, and we have been for almost 70 years now. However in recent years we have seen a steady beat of breakthroughs in the science and engineering of fusion that gives real hope for this technology. Indeed, we’ve had the announcement that the first ever commercial fusion power plant is now going to be built (in the US) and will come online sometime ‘in the early 2030s’ (so kinda-less than 20 years?!) This project is mostly funded by private investment, so somewhat clear of the changes in political winds. But fusion advances are not limited to the US; it is happening all over. Where I am in the UK there’s an exciting joint project by the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Hartree Centre, IT company IBM and the UKAEA (United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, the national body tasked with R&D and delivering fusion energy) to design and simulate a experimental fusion plant. Other major backers of the technology include the EU and China plus there’s over $7 billion in private cash already going into the sector. As the CEO of the Fusion Industry Association says;

Over the last decades, fusion scientists have made significant increases in their understanding of plasma physics and design of fusion and then bringing in these other advances in other technology fields, whether it’s high-speed computing or artificial intelligence or new materials such as high-temperature super-conducting wires or new advance optics. All these things allow you to take this scientific understanding and put it into a context that is more commercially relevant. So, we’re now at the point where fusion scientists almost universally around the world agree that the next machine they build will be a break-even machine, which gets to that break-even point of making more energy out than goes in.

(Image, maintainance of a fusion vesssel by Rswilcox)

Steps Towards Peak Carbon
At some point soon, if trends continue, we’re going to hit peak carbon usage. From there the usage will go down and down. Is this fast enough? No. Should we move faster? Yes. However the trend is there and has momentum. There’s a few indicators of where this is happening that we can see now:

• This trend is a global phenomena - in Africa, Kenya is now the leading renewable champion going from 60% of its energy coming from fossil fuels in 2000 to just 6% today! But we’re seeing amazing developments all over the globe: so yeah, China and the US but also Spain, Brazil and India - plus a few other places you might not expect to see!

• 2024 was the first year that the UK generated more energy from renewables than from fossil fuels. Plus the UK switched off its last coal-fired power plant in 2024 and has plans to eliminate all carbon from the energy mix by 2030.

• The rapid switch from petrol cars to EVs in China has seen a demand drop which we expect to manifest in the stats in 2025.

Renewables continue to grow in potency while dropping in cost meaning it is increasingly the best option to either add power capacity or replace aging fossil fuel infrastructure.

(Image source)

The Continued Investments in Climate

Is it as good as it could be? No. But there is more than a meaningful wedge of cash going into the sector. Climate investment newsletter, CTCV, noted that since 2021 there are $164 billion in assets under-management in the climate sector. Plus there is $86 billion in ‘dry power’ as in funds ready to find the right project. Climate and renewables is increasingly not only a positive use for funds but a profitable one too. As we see continued innovation in a range of climate areas, we’ll hopefully see these funds pouring into them to drive them forwards.

Climate Legal Cases

Over the last decade or so there have been a number of legal cases ongoing that focus (in one way or another) on the government's failure to address climate change and/or the fossil fuel industry's culpability in the global situation. In 2024 this litigation was on the rise (as well as a smaller but notable legal backlash the other way) so that there are 55 nations in 2024 with ongoing climate litigation. A recent report on this concluded, among other things, “Some types of cases, such as government framework cases, have already had lasting impacts on domestic climate governance.”

Ok so what can you (or I) do in 2025 to help? In a previous post I noted, for renewables:

• Make sure your own supplier of energy is getting it from renewable sources. (UK link)

• If you have influence at work, ask about if your work place can also switch energy suppliers.

• If you have investments/pensions and can control where they invest, seek to move from any fossil fuel ones to renewable energy.

• If there is a renewable energy project seeking planning permission in your area, write in support of it.

• If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people?

Plus I’d add:

• Join a climate action group. There’s loads around and this does not have to mean protest - any group always needs a core of people to help from admin, funding, logistics and more. Being part of something is one of the best ways to stave of despair.

• Support an independent media outlet. One of the issues why we hit headwinds in climate progress despite a majority of people wanting to see action is that we face a huge, well-funded climate denial media network. However there are individuals and outlets doing good reporting, investigations and more. These always need support, so find one you like and subscribe!

All in all, I’m going to be watching these areas in 2025 and hoping to see the continued steady progress.

Thanks, have a great Christmas break and see you in 2025!

(Image source)

Other Positive News

• Permian Basin methane emissions drop

• Biden approves 11th large-scale offshore wind project

• Tokamak Energy’s fusion facility to get game-changer upgrade as US, UK join hands

• Seven quiet breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2024 you might have missed
  

  
  PS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics, I’m quoting directly from the source. Below each image (in brackets) is the source for that image. Thanks.

(Image - Andasol Solar Power Station, Spain. Image by kallerna)

One of the biggest under-reported stories in climate news, indeed in any news category, is the rise and rise of renewable energy. As someone who has been campaigning on climate issues for decades, I’ve seen the question of renewables go from an argument that we should subsidize renewables because it's the morally right thing to do, to now where it's cheaper to use renewables than anything else. The argument against renewables has gone from saying they are expensive and unreliable to now, that because the reality is that they are reliable and cheap, that we should not use them for well, reasons.

Not only are renewables cheaper and better for the climate, but their adoption means we’re less reliant on buying fossil fuels from a whole bunch of countries that frankly, have terrible records on security, democracy, care for the environment or human rights.

Here’s the comparative costs of the various sources of energy over time:

(Source - cleantechnica.com/RMI via Canary Media)

Don’t take my word for it, ask an economist

But green technology really works, and is in the process of transforming the world. Solar and batteries gotten so cheap that they now promise a future of cheap abundant energy that will accelerate rather than retard economic growth. The problems of intermittency and long-term storage are not a big deal. New research from economists at Brookings shows how saving the climate and accelerating growth are no longer at odds.

Basically by any measure - ethical, financial, security, reliability, technological - renewables are the way to go, and the world is responding to this change by slowing the use of fossil fuels and moving to renewables. Yes, this momentum is slower than we need and it is still against a backdrop of growing global demand for energy, but make no mistake this is a remarkable and ongoing transformation.

(Source - Our World in Data)

Let's give a few zoomed-in examples that underline this transition, from November 2024 alone!

• Texas now makes more energy from renewables than from coal.

• UK - Plans for biggest onshore windfarm in England to be submitted this week

• Did you know that Pakistan was the sixth-largest installer of solar panels in 2024?

• The world’s largest solar farm in the open sea is now connected to the Chinese power grid, set to power 2+ million homes (CHN Energy)

• India adds 12.8 GW of solar in H1

However, we have just seen the election of Trump in the US, will this not impact the momentum? Yes, but probably only slows it somewhat because; 1) this is a global change and not limited to the US and 2) it's hard to fight the economics of renewables without spending vast sums. 3) The technology just keeps getting better and better.

To give an example, when Trump took office back in 2016, his then VP was handed a note by then CEO of major coal corporation, Murray Energy, Robert E.Murray of desired policy changes. Murray reportedly wanted a bunch of things; the rolling back of regulations and the subsidizing of the coal industry and so on. However despite Trump campaigning to ‘end the war on coal’ and his denial of climate reality, it was not enough to save Murray Energy from the changes in the energy market as the company went bankrupt in 2019. It came out of bankruptcy in 2020 yet from the data I can see, it now produces 30 million tons of coal per year, which is about half that it was producing at its peak back in 2013.

My point here is not that Trump won’t try to roll back the tide of reality, but it's going to be harder because 1) the economics are against him and 2) he’s going to pick people for jobs on the basis of loyalty and not competence and 3) The rest of the world (and some US states) will keep moving anyway.

The TL;DR is that renewables have an enormous momentum behind them and the best opponents of green technology can do, is slow this momentment.

Change is coming, the only question is how fast.

(Image, wind turbines in Spain. Image by jesus martinez.)

However this change has not happened in a vacuum. It is happening because lots of people are making it happen. So ask yourself; What you can do to help build the momentum:

• Make sure your own supplier of energy is getting it from renewable sources. (UK link)

• If you have influence at work, ask about if your work place can also switch energy suppliers.

• If you have investments/pensions and can control where they invest, seek to move from any fossil fuel ones to renewable energy.

• If there is a renewable energy project seeking planning permission in your area, write in support of it.

• If there is any election - local or national - can you help elect better people?

Other Positive News

• Looks like Geothermal is the one green energy that all people like

• Belgium is making an artificial island to help its renewables capacity

• Japanese company ‘Gitai’ has developed a robot that is capable of assembling solar panels autonomously

• Startup shakes up industry with revolutionary wind turbine design backed by Bill Gates

• Maine sues oil companies over impact of fossil fuels on climate

PS. A note on format here, where you see text in italics, I’m quoting directly from the source. Below each image (in brackets) is the source for that image. Thanks.