The last week was London Climate Action Week and it was a very busy one. The irony that it was also set in the midst of a raging heatwave. So hot that a Reform council couldn’t hold a meeting about scrapping net zero, and an event about extreme heat was also cancelled, because of…extreme heat. What I am taking from this week is that people are starting to realise how bad our summers will be over the coming years. It’s not quite optimistic but it is something.

As part of LCAW I also hosted a great event with Zevero. You can read more about that here. Anyway, let’s bring some positivity into your week folks!

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🏔️ First major hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead. Ofgem has provisionally greenlit 16 long-duration storage projects, including three pumped-hydro schemes in the Scottish Highlands that will use lochs as giant natural batteries. The last one of these was Dinorwig in Wales back in 1984, so this has been a long time coming. Pumped hydro is unglamorous and brilliant, you pump water uphill when power is cheap, let it fall through turbines when demand peaks.

💭 My thoughts? The bottleneck for renewables was never really generation, it was storage and the willingness to build. Forty years of nothing, then 16 projects at once. These things feel impossible right up until the politics shifts and suddenly everyone’s “getting Britain building again.”

🔌 Renewables just hit 30% of US electricity generation. New data shows renewables supplied a full 30% of US power in the first four months of 2026, up from 27.8% a year earlier, with coal output falling nearly 12%. In April, utility-scale solar capacity overtook wind for the first time, and battery storage capacity jumped 58%. All of this during an administration actively trying to prop up coal.

🛢️ ‘It’s now a no-brainer’: Fortescue says Trump has done more for renewables than anyone in 100 years. The mining giant’s CEO reckons the oil-price chaos triggered by Trump’s war on Iran has made the economics of ditching diesel unanswerable. When filling a pick-up truck goes between $200 to $400 and back in a fortnight, planning around fossil fuels becomes impossible. Fortescue is targeting “real zero” within four years and has 1.1GW of solar under construction in the Pilbara.

💭 My thoughts? I love that the strongest case for renewables now isn’t morality, it’s that fossil fuels are a geopolitical liability you can’t forecast around. When the iron-ore guys are this evangelical about solar, the argument is over.

🏭 US court rejects EPA bid to ease regulations for coal-fired power plants. A federal appeals court knocked back the Trump EPA’s attempt to scrap Biden-era soot pollution limits. The standard the agency wanted to kill was projected to prevent roughly 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 asthma cases a year. The court left it standing.

🚗 UK sales of electric vehicles just overtook petrol cars for the first time. Over the past 12 months, more new EVs were sold in the UK than petrol cars.

🌡️ Reform UK climate debate delayed over extreme heat. A Reform councillor in West Norfolk wanted to scrap the council’s 2021 climate emergency declaration. The debate was postponed because the chamber, which has no air conditioning, was too hot to sit in under an amber heat warning. As one independent councillor put it, the weather had “submitted its own amendment to the motion.”

🐟 Mombasa: key outcomes from the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya. The first Our Ocean Conference held on African soil produced 320 voluntary commitments and a reported $6.4bn in mobilised finance, plus the Mombasa Declaration on fisheries transparency signed by 16 governments, half of them African. More than a third of the world’s marine protected areas trace back to announcements made at this conference over the years.

🐋 Billionaire to invest in ocean protection as UK and US scale back funding. In similar news, Michael Bloomberg has pledged $260m to ocean conservation, much of it aimed at enforcing the High Seas Treaty. We’ve pledged to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030 and we’re currently at 10%, so the gap is enormous.

This week’s episode was written after a very sweaty bike ride and a good few days of exercise. On that note, there will be no The Grumpy Optimists next week as I will be cycling around the hills Girona and plan on switching off for the entire week. A much much needed break.

My music recommendation for the week is Khal!l MY FEET. I think this guy could be a big thing.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Last week I spent 22 hours in Paris to celebrate Forbes 30U30 Europe edition with some incredible people. I’m not normally one for celebrating my wins (contrary to my LinkedIn posting) but last night was an opportunity to recognise the hard work of the last five years at Zevero.

Better yet, I got to do it with Emma Askew, an incredible woman I interviewed for my dissertation back in 2019. Seven years later and we both made the social impact list and see each other in Paris.

So here’s to sweating through two t-shirts in 30°C Paris, buying a new one so I’d have something to wear, and drinking champagne at the event before swapping to €4 beers with an inspiring group of people.

Topping it all off with a great run around Paris this morning to take it all in (and sweat out the alcohol). Here’s to being proud of doing cool sh*t!

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🦫 Eight beavers solved a Tube flooding problem engineers spent decades on. Greenford had flooded since the 1970s, and the council’s previous answer was to straighten and concrete the river. Instead, five beavers (now at least eight) were released into Paradise Fields in 2023, built a network of dams, and turned the site into a giant sponge. 2024 was the first year the area didn’t flood, and the Central line station stayed dry through record rainfall.

💭 My thoughts? We spent 400 years hunting these animals to extinction and a fortune trying to engineer our way out of the consequences. Turns out the cheapest, best flood consultant in West London works for free and lives in a pond.

🐟 São Tomé and Príncipe is getting eight new Marine Protected Areas. The island nation’s first formal marine protection network, covering 93 square kilometres across both islands, with the remaining sites being designated through 2026 and full operations expected by early 2027. Some zones ban fishing entirely, others stay open to artisanal fishers using legal gear. Fishing can still be done if it’s sustainable!

🔌 UK retailers are in talks to sell plug-in ‘balcony’ solar panels. These plug straight into a normal three-prong socket, cost a few hundred pounds rather than thousands, and can shave up to 30% off a household’s bill. Germany already has around 1.5 million of them. Imagine being able to power an AC unit during the heatwave we’re about to have in Europe from solar PV? That’s what I’m thinking dreaming about.

⚡ A wartime jolt is pushing buttons on renewable power. The head of one of the world’s biggest renewables groups makes the case that a second energy shock in five years is the best advert renewables could ask for: security, sovereignty and a competitive price. There is no do it for the right reasons argument needed. The IEA is now advising countries like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines on using clean energy as emergency insurance, and rooftop solar is surging from India to the US.

☀️ Spain’s renewables boom is quietly shielding households from the energy crisis. New Ember analysis found Spanish homes have saved about €10 a month since gas prices spiked in March. Gas now sets the power price in just 9% of hours, down from 52% in 2021, after wind and solar grew 37% in four years. Spain didn’t burn any coal at all in August 2025, having got a quarter of its power from it a decade ago. This is pretty cool progress.

🛰️ The Trump administration tried to scrap a vital ocean monitoring network, then backed off. The plan was to pull more than 900 deep-sea instruments that make up the $368m Ocean Observatories Initiative, a decade of continuous Atlantic and Pacific climate data. Then a bipartisan group of senators wrote to the NSF, and on 19 June the agency confirmed it would halt all removals and keep the network running.

⚖️ Clean energy advocates keep beating the Trump administration in court. The Justice Department voluntarily dropped its appeal defending Trump’s executive order banning new wind projects, after a judge ruled the ban “arbitrary and capricious” and beyond presidential authority. A coalition of 17 states and DC led the challenge.

My thoughts? Two stories in a row that allow me to say screw the orange man. prick.

🌏 The world’s largest solar-hydrogen-storage project just came online in China. CHN Energy’s Rudong project pairs a 400 MW coastal solar plant with battery storage and a green hydrogen facility, all built on a reclaimed tidal flat. The solar alone should power nearly 200,000 homes a year, and a dedicated cable lets surplus power run the electrolysers directly, bypassing the grid. The kind of integrated, generation-to-fuel system everyone sketches on whiteboards and rarely builds at scale.

This week is also a very big week here in London with London Climate Action Week.

I’ll be at Reset Connect doing a talk Tuesday 11.30-12 as well as hosting a fantastic panel on Thursday morning near Shoreditch. If you want to come along, sign up here. Do let me know events I should be attending too!

My song for the week is Riley Green and Ella Langley, Don’t Mind If I Do. No joke, I have listened to this song 100+ times on repeat in the last two weeks. 🙃

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another week of positive climate news. I’d ask that you forgive this one for being short, I had a bit of a nightmare train situation this Sunday which turned my 100km cycle into a nearly 160km cycle. I have the very questionable tan lines to show for it too, so that’s fun.

Without further ado (mainly because I am a broken man), let’s get into this week’s edition.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🐠 The world just gained a marine protected area the size of France. French Polynesia just put 520,000 sq km of ocean around the Austral and Marquesas Islands off-limits to mining, trawling and industrial fishing. That’s the biggest single national contribution so far to the 30-by-30 goal. And it came with $15m to actually fund it for the next 15 to 20 years, which is usually where these announcements quietly fall apart.

💭 My thoughts? The countries doing the most for the ocean are rarely the ones that broke it. A scattering of Pacific islands are now setting the global standard while some of the bigger countries do nothing. I also love the way this is funded - we need all the support we can get.

🌳 Amazon deforestation alerts fall to their lowest 12-month level since 2014. 370 sq km of rainforest was cleared in May, down 61% on last year. Over twelve months it’s 3,182 sq km, the lowest since the records began.

🐢 Green sea turtles are officially off the endangered list. The IUCN has bumped them from Endangered straight to Least Concern, skipping two whole categories, after numbers climbed about 28% since the 1970s. Decades of unglamorous work did it: beach patrols, turtle-friendly nets, trade bans. Not every population is in the clear, but as comebacks go, this is a good one.

☀️ Solar is crushing gas growth worldwide. New Ember numbers show that solar added 17 times more power than gas last year, and covered roughly three quarters of the world’s new electricity demand. Gas has now lost share five years running. 61 of 124 gas-burning economies are past peak gas, the UK among them.

💭 My thoughts? Once renewables are cheaper and don’t leave you exposed to the next price spike, gas is just the pricier option with extra geopolitics attached.

🔌 UK power prices turned negative as renewables flooded the grid. A windy Scotland and a sunny England sent wind and solar near record output, and prices dropped below zero for nine hours, bottoming out at minus £25/MWh. These episodes are set to more than double this year. A good problem to have, but the problem that exists is that we’re making clean power faster than the grid can move it or batteries can soak it up. So much so that the UK government is being asked to focus less on new wind turbines and more on grid capacity and increasing energy usage.

🚗 China’s EV boom has prevented an estimated 260,000 early deaths. Across 150 cities, researchers found carbon monoxide down over 30% and fine particulates down over 23% versus a petrol-only world, now that more than half of new cars sold there are electric. California showed the same pattern on a smaller scale.

💭 My thoughts? We talk about EVs as a climate story, but this is the bit that lands fastest and closest to home. Cleaner air is not a 2050 promise, it is fewer strokes, fewer cancers and a quarter of a million people still alive who otherwise would not be.

🎵 This week I’ve been listening to a lot of country music but after an incredible evening at Olivia Dean on Friday, I think you should all go into your week with the banger that is, Man I Need.

And before you go, I feel like this picture sums up this blog incredibly well.

Whatever you have happening this week, whether it’s a holiday, a busy week at work or even a new job, you’re going to kill it.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another week. Last week I had the pleasure of attending an event all about why protecting our oceans matters. It’s not often I find myself feeling inspired to make changes after a climate event these days, but this time I really did. James Blunt was there too, and he wasn’t even the highlight, can you believe it?

While the message was pretty blunt that our oceans and seas are in trouble and we’re not doing enough currently, there was a room full of people filled with hope. From the Blue Marine Foundation (the same crew behind the Waitrose mackerel campaign I featured a while back) and their fight against bottom trawling with Stephen Fry and Theo James, to the people coaxing battered coral reefs back to life (fun fact: a coral polyp is basically an upside-down jellyfish).

The event was hosted by the wonderful 10 Percent for the Ocean (the same people who funded Attenborough’s latest film, Ocean) are running events all through London Climate Action Week, so go and see the work if you care about this stuff.

I left wanting to do something about how I consume fish, how I communicate the challenges we face and how as a society, we should care about the state of our oceans. On that note, there’s a few good wins for the oceans this week.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🌳 Mangrove forests are healing after decades of human destruction. A new study finds the world’s coastal mangroves have been quietly staging a comeback since 2010, driven by stronger legal protection, greater public awareness after disasters like the 2004 tsunami, and the remarkable ability of these forests to regrow on their own once we stop chopping them down.

💭 My thoughts? Mangroves store up to five times more carbon than land forests and protect entire coastlines from storms, and yet we’ve been ripping them out for decades. A particular highlight of this story is the sliders in the BBC news story showing you the sheer impact of the growth.

🥚 Sainsbury’s ditches brown eggs in net zero drive. Sainsbury’s is switching its own-brand range to white eggs after a life-cycle assessment found they carry a roughly 13% smaller carbon footprint, mostly because white-feathered hens are smaller, eat less feed and lay for longer.

💭 My thoughts? A supermarket swapping egg colours is not going to save the planet. But the fact that they ran a full life-cycle assessment on the shell of your breakfast tells you how seriously big retailers are now taking supply-chain emissions. There appear to be some welfare standard increases too. For me, the main thing is we’re getting to the point big decisions for decarbonisation are happening.

⚖️ Seven US states sue Trump administration over deal to kill windfarm project. New York is leading a coalition of seven states challenging a deal in which the federal government agreed to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1bn to cancel an offshore wind lease and pledge the money toward oil and gas instead. The states argue it’s an unlawful abuse of taxpayer money and a breach of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Courts have already struck down several of the administration’s earlier anti-wind orders.

💭 My thoughts? It’s not a prediction it’s more of a ‘here’s what’s actually possible if we stop treating climate, poverty and inequality as separate problems’ document.

🌍 Radical change can lead to a fairer and greener world. The World Inequality Lab launched its Global Justice Report, modelling how the world could raise living standards for most people, cut extreme inequality, and keep warming below 2C by 2100. It’s not a forecast but a deliberately ambitious blueprint, arguing wellbeing, equality and climate stability are one project rather than three competing ones.

🪏 How the ‘Picasso of ponds’ went from shaping golf courses to making freshwater homes for wildlife. Shaun Hancox spent years building golf courses with his family’s groundworks firm. Now he uses the same excavator skills to sculpt wildlife ponds for rewilding projects across Britain. Britain has lost at least 400,000 ponds over the past century, so his work is quietly rebuilding a whole lost habitat. Plus, I bet the people are a lot nicer…

🏞️ New record for dam removal in Europe, with over 600 barriers dismantled. A record 603 river barriers came down across 21 European countries in 2025, reconnecting over 3,740km of rivers. It’s the fifth consecutive record year, and removals are now six times higher than the first count in 2020. Iceland and North Macedonia removed their first-ever barriers. Most of what comes down isn’t grand hydropower dams but obsolete culverts and weirs nobody remembers the purpose of.

🐋 Deep South’s mega marine life gets historic new protections. New Zealand has finalised five new marine reserves along the Otago coast, protecting 308 sq km and increasing the total marine reserve area around mainland NZ by almost 50%. The network, co-managed with Kāi Tahu, took more than 13 years of negotiation between iwi, fishers, scientists and community groups. It comes into effect on 1 July.

🌷 Garden angels: the green-fingered communities turning neglected spaces into urban oases. A lovely piece on Londoners transforming bomb sites, disused estate corners and forgotten scraps of land into thriving community gardens. I love the community element of this too.

🚆 European Sleeper adds Breda and Eindhoven to Milan night train. From December, you’ll be able to get a train directly from the Netherlands to Italy for the first time in years. Budget seats start at €29.99, beds from €49.99, bargain!

👁️ One to watch

🐠 Vela: Palmyra Atoll. While we’re on the topic of oceans, I saw this video a few years ago and I loved it. It’s a short film about a remote Pacific island that has gone from war-torn scar to one of the healthiest reef-and-seabird ecosystems on the planet, now home to a research station studying climate resilience. If you want a reminder of what nature can do when we simply give it room to recover, this is it.

This week’s edition was written after a weekend of lots of cycling, running and good vibes.

🎧 My music recommendation for the week unfortunately comes in the form of another Ella Langley song, Loving Life Again.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another edition of The Grumpy Optimists.

This week I posted something relatively personal on my LinkedIn that I wanted to share here too. The short version: as a northerner, I always assumed working with a coach was for people with too much time on their hands. I was wrong. Five and a half years of building Zevero, plus some therapy and sertraline along the way, taught me that growing and improving yourself isn’t cringey, it’s powerful. Big shout-out to Caspar Chittenden, who’s been helping me figure out what my thirties should actually look like.

The good news is that things like this blog bring me a lot of purpose, so I’m very grateful for you all reading this.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🌍 For the first time ever, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas worldwide. In April, wind and solar produced 22% of the world’s electricity against gas’s 20%, a record 531 TWh versus 477 TWh. Five years ago gas generation was almost identical to today’s, but wind and solar produced less than half what they do now. New demand is being met by renewables which is great.

🔋 Australian power bills are set to fall by up to 10%, and renewables get the credit. The regulator’s final Default Market Offer means households across NSW, South Australia and southeast Queensland will pay less from July, with small businesses seeing drops of up to 20%. Energy Minister Chris Bowen put it down to a grid that’s now half renewable and more than 400,000 home batteries installed since last July. How can we get these benefits for the rest of the world?

🇵🇰 Pakistan’s solar capacity now nearly matches its entire national grid. Distributed solar hit roughly 38 GW last financial year, about 93% of the country’s utility-scale capacity, generating an estimated 51 TWh, nearly half of all grid electricity sales. Most of it is households, farms and factories who got fed up with sky-high prices and unreliable supply and simply went and bought panels.

💭 My thoughts? What’s cool about this is that it’s less about regulation and policy and more about people doing their own maths and creating change from the bottom up.

🌬️ China installs the world’s largest single-unit floating wind turbine. The 16-megawatt “Three Gorges Pilot” now sits in deep water off Guangdong, built to ride out Category 5 winds and waves over 20 metres. Once fully operational it’s expected to power around 24,000 homes a year (some outlets quote a much lower 4,200 figure, but that’s based on far higher US household consumption). Floating turbines matter because they unlock the deep water where the strongest, steadiest winds actually are.

📋 The SBTi has rewritten its entire 2026-2030 strategy, shifting from “ambition-setter” to “transformation partner”. I wrote about this on LinkedIn during the week. The short version, the standard-setter that’s spent a decade getting 13,000+ companies to set targets is now pivoting to help them actually deliver on them, with sector-specific approaches and a real change to how firms are treated when they miss. Setting the goal was always the easy part. This is the harder, more interesting chapter.

🌲 Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to its lowest level since 2019. Brazil lost 20.6% less native vegetation last year, with Amazon deforestation down 23.5%, which MapBiomas credits to a real increase in enforcement and sanctions. It’s not a clean win, though: five trees a second are still being felled, and the Cerrado savanna alone accounted for more than half the total loss. Progress and a long way to go, in the same sentence.

🐦 Forever chemicals in seabird eggs have plummeted by up to 74%, and it’s because regulation worked. A 55-year study of northern gannet eggs in Canada tracked PFAS rising to a peak around 2000, then falling sharply once phaseouts and bans kicked in. The researchers’ own words: “The regulations are having a good effect.”

💭 My thoughts? We’re so used to the forever-chemicals story being relentlessly bleak that it’s easy to miss the actual headline here, which is that we banned something nasty and the planet responded. The persistence of PFAS is real and the industry has already moved to newer compounds we can’t track as easily. But the principle holds, policy works, and you can watch it work its way up the food chain.

And one to keep us honest

🌾 Experts warn Britain is “sleepwalking into a food crisis”. Nine food experts, led by Tim Lang, wrote to ministers warning that extreme weather, inflation and global instability add up to a national security risk the government isn’t taking seriously. Food prices are on track to be 50% higher this November than five years ago, and the current heatwave is hammering yields after a dry spring. For those of you not in the UK, my visit to the supermarket last week was stopped by the fridges and freezers breaking from the heatwave we experienced. Wild.

🗺️ Erin Brockovich has built a crowdsourced map of every major AI data centre in America. Yes, that Erin Brockovich who fought for protecting water in California. Her site tracks AI data centres that are operational, under construction or merely proposed, then overlays them with concerns emailed in by residents living next to them: the energy draw, the water for cooling, the e-waste, the constant hum.

💭 My thoughts? The AI boom is real and largely unstoppable, but where it gets built, how much water it drinks and who carries the cost are still very much up for grabs. I’m very pro AI, but I do believe we have to build infrastructure with purpose so this is a really great piece of work. The slight irony is that the website was clearly built using AI.

This week’s edition was written after a slightly hungover Sunday but a great weekend of exercise and good times. This week I’ve been listening to a BUNT remix of Temper Trap, Sweet Disposition.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

It was a scorcher in the UK. A reminder that climate change isn’t just in the future, but it’s happening now. Not only do we need to cut emissions dramatically, but we also need to adapt to ensure we can create a liveable society. I’m lucky I have a cold bedroom and a fan, but for millions around the world, global warming presents a real and current issue.

Anyway, some good news shall we?

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👀 News to make you feel good this week

🌿 Charity buys meadow in Meon Valley to protect rare river wildlife. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust has bought Court House Meadows, a 21-acre water meadow on the River Meon, after more than 1,000 donations. Chalk streams are properly rare globally, around 200 worldwide and 80% of them in southern England.

💧 The English community that brought its river back from the brink. The River Mease has just won the 2026 UK River Prize after 13 years of restoration work by Trent Rivers Trust, the Environment Agency, and 40 local farmers. Over 250 interventions across 17km of river. The headline, “If we can get it right here, we can do it everywhere”, is the bit worth holding onto.

🌳 Could nature itself hold the solution to climate change? A great essay from Professor Thomas Crowther, drawn from his new book Nature’s Echo. His argument: most climate solutions come with painful trade-offs, but restoring nature is the exception, because it taps the same feedback loops that built the habitable planet in the first place. Not a substitute for cutting emissions, but could deliver about 30% of carbon removal we need.

🔌 British power prices are increasingly independent from gas. New analysis from Ember shows that 15% of Britain’s power generation is now priced independently of gas thanks to Contracts for Difference, heading to 36% by 2030. In hours where gas was below 20% of the mix last year, wholesale prices averaged £60/MWh, versus £130/MWh when gas was above 50%. For those of you who aren’t aware, the reason the UK has such expensive energy prices is because often gas, the highest cost per MWh form of electricity, sets the price for renewables. Rachel Reeves is trying to change this though.

🌍 BloombergNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2026. This year’s BloombergNEF’s NEO report is built around energy security rather than climate, which is telling. BNEF has dropped 1.5C as no longer feasible and now models a 1.81C pathway as their stretch case. The good news is that China, the world’s biggest polluter is underpromising and overdelivering when it comes to cutting emissions.

💭 My thoughts? The framing shift matters more than the numbers. For most of the last decade the case for clean power was “we have to do this for the climate.” It is now also “we have to do this because gas prices are politically and economically unmanageable.”

🦶 Footwear production is broken, so are our feet. Can 3D print fix both? I had the pleasure of attending a Vivobarefoot launch night for their 3D printed fully custom shoes last week. The shoes are made from a single recyclable material and made to order based on a foot scan. The shoe industry makes around 24 billion pairs a year and a similar number ends up in landfill, partly because the standard model overproduces by 20 to 30% to hit sales targets.

💭 My thoughts? I’m not sure how I feel about the shoes themselves, but boy do I love a business model changing things up and setting a trend. What a powerful model and a great company.

🎯 SBTi broadens focus from climate target setting to implementation. Over 10,000 companies now have validated targets. The new 2026-2030 strategy pivots from validation to implementation, with more tailored sector and regional pathways. This has long been a criticism of the climate reporting economy (one I agree with) that we spend more time thinking about targets than meeting them. But now, organisations will be rewarded for their reductions and that’s a great thing.

Just because it’s fun

🚪 The Fish Doorbell. Last week I recorded a podcast (it will be out next week) and the wonderful Niki showed me this fun underwater camera at a 17th-century lock in Utrecht. When you spot a fish waiting to migrate upstream, you ring the doorbell, the lock operator gets alerted, and eventually the lock opens. Nine million visitors last year. I love it.

This week’s edition was written after spending a lot of time in the sun, on my bike and generally just appreciating the world around us. I’m a lucky man.

My music recommendation for the week is the absolute banger that is Choosin’ Texas by Ella Langley. If this doesn’t get in my Spotify wrapped this year, I’m calling fraud.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another edition of the Grumpy Optimists. This week there’s no event to recap or insights from fellow Grumpy Optimists, but there is plenty of great news from around the world.

Let’s dig into it!

👀 News to make you feel good

🐟 Dutch court rules bottom trawling in the Dogger Bank is unlawful. The District Court of The Hague has ruled that Dutch bottom trawlers can no longer fish the country’s largest marine protected area without a permit and a full environmental assessment. It is the first known European ruling to confirm that governments have a legal duty to regulate trawling’s impact on offshore Marine Protected Areas. The case was brought by Doggerland Foundation, ARK Rewilding Nederland, ClientEarth and Blue Marine Foundation, and they’re already pushing the EU and UK to apply the same logic.

💭 My thoughts? The phrase that keeps coming up in the coverage is “protected means protected”. For two decades, MPA has been more of a polite label than a legal constraint. This ruling makes it a constraint. It’s pretty mental we’ve got to this point, surely?

☀️ India’s top solar state blocks a 3.2 GW coal project for a second time. Rajasthan’s electricity regulator has refused, again, to approve a 25-year coal contract sought by the state utility. The reasoning is simple: the state’s own resource plan only needs 1,905 MW of additional coal capacity by 2035-36, far less than the 3,200 MW sought, and a plant that size would have burned 40,000 tonnes of coal a day. While other Indian states are locking in long coal contracts, Rajasthan is betting that solar, batteries and a bit of nuclear will get there first.

🔋 The world is installing grid batteries at a blistering pace. 112 gigawatts of grid battery storage went in worldwide in 2025, up 48% on 2024 and ten times the level installed in 2021. BNEF forecasts another 158 GW in 2026. To borrow Canary’s framing: first came the solar, now the batteries have arrived.

💭 My thoughts? For years the stock objection to renewables was “fine, but what about when the sun doesn’t shine”. The infrastructure to answer that question is now being built faster than almost anyone forecast five years ago. The interesting bottleneck has moved from generation to dispatch, and even that is closing fast.

🧱 Basalt could be the key to greener and cheaper cement. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Brimstone Energy have shown that swapping limestone for basalt could cut cement emissions by 25% on average grid electricity, and up to 80% in theory. Cement is around 4.4% of global emissions, and most of those come from the chemistry of heating limestone, not the energy used to do it. Basalt has no embedded carbon, and there’s enough of it near the surface to supply global cement production for hundreds of thousands of years. The output is still standard Portland cement, so it drops into the existing supply chain.

🚛 Electric trucks are taking off in China. Electric trucks now make up 20% of new commercial vehicle sales in China after sales tripled in 2025, with monthly sales hitting 24,000 in March. Diesel is up 35% and LNG up 53% since the Iran war began, Bloomberg reports payback on the higher upfront cost is now as little as a year. The math now makes sense.

🌫️ Coal pollution is cutting solar power output worldwide. New research from Oxford and UCL, published in Nature Sustainability, mapped 140,000 solar PV installations and found that aerosols from coal-fired power plants reduced global solar output by 5.8% in 2023. That’s 111 terawatt-hours of lost generation, equivalent to the annual output of 18 medium-sized coal plants. The losses run at about 74 TWh a year, roughly a third of the annual gains from new solar capacity. Not so happy, but it shows the knock on impact.

🏝️ Australian solar company signs deal to help “entire country” quit diesel. Sydney’s Smart Commercial Energy has signed an MOU with the small Pacific island state of Nauru for 18 MW of solar and 40 MWh of battery storage. Nauru currently burns around 8 million litres of imported diesel a year to power 13,000 people, with all the cost and emissions that implies. The Pacific islands most exposed to sea level rise are also the places paying the highest premium for fossil power. I love this story.

⛏️ A former Scottish colliery is being turned into a solar and battery hub. The National Mining Museum Scotland, on a site that closed in 1981 and is now one of the best preserved Victorian-era collieries in Europe, is installing around 100 kW of solar and a lithium-ion battery the size of a small shipping container. Excess generation will be exported to the grid as a revenue stream to help secure the museum’s future. They’re crowdfunding £450,000 to make it happen.

This episode was written after the joy of Leeds United winning in the 95th minute on Sunday. What a day. Today’s song choice is White Flag by Dido. See you next week!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Grumpy Optimists. This time, not only are we looking at some positive news, but we’re also recapping the event I hosted last week.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dig in.

🗺️ The Grumpy Optimists Event Recap

Last Thursday I hosted a Grumpy Optimists event at the Lucky Saint pub. While there were drinks flowing and great conversations, I also made everyone participate in a bit of organised fun, writing about the future.

The premise was simple: forget 2026 for two hours and time travel to 2035 as an optimist. We looked at the world through 4 lenses: a 15-year-old, a CEO, a regulator, and nature itself. The conversations were fantastic, the energy delightful and the ideas inspiring. I thought it would be a shame to not share them with you.

Let’s look at what the scribbles, words and drawings made.

🛹 The 15-year-old

The 15-year-old in 2035 is outside. Phones are out, third spaces are in. Youth clubs are back and somehow cool again. Allotments are normal. Classrooms have “nature + climate” written on the door, outdoor teaching is the default, and the kids are less stressed and learning better for it.

Fast fashion is gone. Seasonal eating is normal. Sustainable clothes are just clothes.

The phrase that stuck with me was “no eco-anxiety”. A generation that grew up with climate as fact, not threat. That’s a different kind of childhood from the one I’d imagined a few years ago.

Best line on this page: “Nothing is cooler than nature.”

🏢 The CEO

The 2035 boardroom looks nothing like the one I sit in today. Sustainability metrics carry the same weight as financial ones in performance reviews. Nature has a seat at the table. Board meetings happen outside. Carbon and nature literacy is a baseline CEO requirement, not an optional add-on.

“Profit and loss is the same conversation as cost of inaction.” Patagonia-style 1% of profits to charity is normal. Customers expect supply chain transparency, and companies provide it. Solar and ground-source heat pumps stopped being sustainability stories and became how you keep energy costs down.

One person wrote “Paul Polman Junior x 100,000”. For those of you who don’t know, he was the CEO of Unilever who really pushed for the climate agenda in the 2010s. A hero.

I loved this one as it’s all I try to do with my work at Zevero.

🏛️ The regulator

This was the most detailed page of the night.

I loved the ideas of citizens’ assemblies operating at the local level by default. Indigenous voices and ancestral knowledge are built into regulation, not bolted on as a consultation step. Farmers are given a seat at the regulatory table to help change how we grow food. A just transition that comes from the shop floor up, not the boardroom down.

The new laws went deep. A processed food and meat tax. Mandatory food waste reporting, an end to deforestation and palm oil. Mental health and nature days as standard for every business. Every green claim third-party validated with data and tax that scales with emissions.

None of this is really that wild, it’s just about whether we actually care enough to put it into action.

🌳 The forest

If a forest could write a postcard back to 2026, this is what it said: “Thank god they did something.”

The forest of 2035 is in the city, it’s microforests in towns, no-mow in parks. We create a less manicured, more diverse and more alive interaction between humans and nature. More birdsong, more pollinators and more seaweed farming came up too. Fewer cows where they shouldn’t be, often destroying grassland.

One drawing had the Gulf Stream still functioning, with “ICE STILL HERE” written underneath.

🧵 Cross-cutting themes

Five things came up on more than one page, which feels significant.

1. Nature gets a literal seat at the table. Boardroom, council, regulator. This was the single most repeated image of the night. This is already happening with brands like Faith in Nature.

2. Decentralisation. Power flows down to councils, communities, streets, allotments, classrooms to make change.

3. Education as infrastructure. Carbon and nature literacy mandatory at every level, from the CEO to the 15-year-old knowing about climate.

4. The end of greenwashing. Third-party validation, supply chain transparency, mandatory reporting.

5. Letting go. Fast fashion, palm oil, processed food defaults, eco-anxiety. This is the shift from assuming humans are extractors rather than stewards of the world.

Overall, the event was incredible. I’m grateful for those who came and I look forward to hosting the next one…you’re all invited.

👀 News to make you feel good

🌍 New signs the Iran war is boosting clean energy. Axios pulled together early signals from China, South Korea and the EU showing the war is accelerating the energy transition globally. South Korean EV sales more than doubled in March year on year, solar panel imports were up 137%, and EU leaders say they will get more aggressive on electrification because the war made it expensive not to.

🇪🇺 European rooftop solar demand has doubled since the war began. Octopus Energy reports UK heat pump sales up 51% and solar up 54% in three weeks of March. OVO Energy’s April sales in solar and heating were ten times higher than a year earlier. Enpal’s CEO Mario Kohle summed it up: “This is about European resilience.”

🇳🇱 Amsterdam becomes the first capital city to ban meat and fossil fuel adverts. Since 1 May, billboards, tram shelters and metro stations have been stripped of ads for petrol cars, airlines, cruises, beef, chicken, pork and fish. The BBC describes one busy tram stop where the chicken nuggets and SUVs have been replaced with a poster for the Rijksmuseum and a piano concert. Edinburgh, Sheffield, Stockholm and Florence are moving the same way, and France has it nationwide.

💭 My thoughts? Lawyer Hannah Prins calls this a deliberate “tobacco moment” for high-carbon food. The smoking ban felt impossible until it didn’t. The norm is shifting.

🛢️ Can we loosen the grip fossil fuels have on our lives? According to the IEA, chemicals derived from oil and gas make up 90% of all raw materials, with petrochemicals accounting for 14% of oil demand. The Guardian walks through realistic alternatives across the big three of fertilisers, plastics and textiles: green ammonia, seaweed-based bioplastics, natural fibres. As Cip Hamilton at the Australian Marine Conservation Society puts it: “We cannot recycle our way out of a crisis driven by overproduction.”

🐟 Ghana declares its first ever Marine Protected Area. 703 square kilometres off the Greater Cape Three Points coast, covering critical fish breeding grounds and coastal wetlands, after 15 years of advocacy led by Ghanaian NGO Hen Mpoano. A community-led MPA pulling Ghana closer to the global 30x30 goal, despite USAID funding cuts last year that nearly derailed the project.

This episode was written after a soul-charging weekend in Lewes, lots of time in nature and an appreciation for life. My music recommendation for this week is Better (Solace) by Mantra, a real pick me up song.

See you next week!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

I took the day off yesterday for the bank holiday here in the UK so apologies for this episode being a day late!

It has been a busy one and somehow the Lucky Saint event on Thursday has crept up faster than I expected. Looking forward to actually being in a room with some of you. If you have been on the fence, there are still a handful of spots left. You can still sign up here. If you can’t make it, do make sure to change your RSVP!

👀 News to make you feel good

📊 Renewable energy just broke a 100-year-old streak. According to Ember’s 2026 Global Electricity Review, renewables produced 33.8% of the world’s electricity last year, edging out coal at 33%. That is the first time those lines have crossed since 1919, when most of the world’s power still came from hydro. Solar alone covered 75% of the rise in global demand, fossil fuel generation fell for the first time outside the pandemic, and battery deployment grew 46% in a year. A century of coal dominance ended quietly last year, and the line on the chart is not going back up.

💭 My thoughts? This is a phenomenal piece of analysis from Ember and as ever, records are being broken when it comes to renewable energy. It’s pretty clear, this is the way to the tide is going.

🇮🇷 Investors pile into clean power as Iran war drives push for energy security. Similar to the story above, more than $3 billion poured into renewable energy ETFs globally in April, the biggest monthly net inflows in five years. With Brent crude up to $126 a barrel, the case for solar, wind and grid investment is being made on sovereignty grounds rather than climate ones. Ørsted up 37% YTD, Nordex 67%, GE Vernova 65%, Siemens Energy 50%.

🇨🇴 Countries end Colombia fossil fuel summit with focus on next steps and financing. 56 countries gathered in Santa Marta for the first international summit dedicated solely to phasing out fossil fuel production, after a similar push was blocked at COP30 in November. No binding outcome, but as one delegate put it, this was the first time in 30 years of climate negotiations where countries gathered specifically to talk about how to end fossil fuel supply rather than just cut emissions.

🇫🇷 France unveils plan to ditch all fossil fuels by 2050. France are leading the charge on the phasing out of fossil fuels. Their 14-page roadmap sets specific deadlines: coal out by 2030, oil by 2045, gas by 2050. Two-thirds of new cars electric by 2030, gas boilers banned in new buildings by the end of this year, solar capacity tripled by 2035. Analysts say no other country has put a comprehensive end-date on fossil fuel use, which forces every other government to argue against a clear plan rather than for the absence of one.

🔋 Renewables and batteries drive down fossil fuel use in Australia despite record electricity demand. Australia’s grid sailed through a record-hot summer with rooftop solar covering most of the demand surge. Gas generation hit its lowest level since 1999, battery capacity doubled year-on-year, and renewables are now 46.5% of the National Electricity Market, up from 42.5%. Batteries are starting to do the evening peak job that gas plants used to, at lower cost.

🚗 Labor extends EV tax break to encourage cheaper vehicles amid soaring fuel prices. With petrol above $2.50 a litre in Australia and EVs now 15% of new car sales (double last year) since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the Albanese government is keeping its full FBT exemption for EVs until March 2027 before winding it back to a 25% discount on cheaper models. The scheme was projected to cost $605m over seven years and is now tracking at $10.1bn. Cheaper EVs sell themselves when petrol is expensive.

🌼 From neat lawns to wild havens: how No Mow May is transforming England’s gardens. Plantlife’s campaign has gone from niche to mainstream, with councils, schools, parishes and a growing share of the UK’s 23 million gardens going unmown for the month. Their citizen science shows that leaving lawns alone produces a tenfold rise in the nectar available to pollinators. I loooove this.

🐋 Rescuers release humpback whale that was stranded off German coast. Timmy, a young male humpback who had been stuck in the shallow Baltic near Wismar since early March, was finally released into the North Sea on Saturday. Two German entrepreneurs funded a private rescue, used a barge to move him out to deeper water, and slathered him in zinc ointment for his Baltic-induced skin condition. Authorities had given up. He should now be heading north toward the Arctic.

🥝 Kiwis released near New Zealand’s parliament as project hits 250th bird. On Tuesday night, the Capital Kiwi Project quietly released its 250th bird into the hills above Wellington, a place kiwi had been absent from for over a century. Earlier in the day they were carried into Parliament’s banquet hall for a celebration before being driven out to the bush. The project covers 24,000 hectares, runs more than 5,000 stoat traps, and Wellington’s wild kiwi now have a 90% chick survival rate.

💭 My thoughts? Stories like this are why I keep writing the newsletter. We are so used to species disappearing from our landscapes that the idea of one quietly walking back in still feels almost transgressive. The birds did not get the memo about extinction.

🦆 Wildlife arriving at new Great Fen wetland in Cambridgeshire. 25 hectares of arable farmland (about 60 football pitches) have been transformed into mere, channels and reedbeds at the Great Fen, near Ramsey. Lapwings have already turned up to scope out the new feeding ground, and the muddy edges should be a feast for waders like redshank and snipe. The broader Peatland Progress project will eventually link Woodwalton Fen and Holme Fen, two of the last fragments of ancient fen, into a single restored landscape.

👀 One to watch

🛰️ NASA’s “your name from space” tool. NASA has built a slightly ridiculous, very lovely tool that spells your name using overhead satellite shots of natural features that happen to look like letters. We have used overhead nature shots at Zevero since our first brand guidelines, so this one scratched a particular itch. Worth a click for the visual alone.

My music recommendation for the week is Porcelain by Moby. I hope you all have a great week.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to the 162nd edition of The Grumpy Optimists. This week I have two updates before we get into it. One cool, one an update for the event I’m hosting on 7th May.

🎆 One, I got on the Forbes 30 under 30 list for social impact!!

This is not something I was expecting or aiming for, but it’s cool to see the hard work paying off over the last 5 years.

🎫 Two, I’ve made some updates to The Grumpy Optimists event.

I’ve had a lot of people saying they’d love to go but can’t get the time off. So the lovely people at the Lucky Saint have given us the room until close.

The event will now be from 5.30pm onwards with a 6pm start time. You can find more info and request a spot here. Be quick, there aren’t many left!

Sign up to the Grumpy Optimists event!

⚡ Cheap is the new clean

⚡ Why cheap power could matter more than clean power in the push for net zero. A decade ago the argument for renewables was moral. Now it’s economic. The BBC lays out how falling costs, rather than climate policy, are doing most of the heavy lifting on emissions. Not the most romantic framing, but arguably the one that sticks.

💭 My thoughts? Years of climate comms tried to make people care about the right thing. Turns out the best decarbonisation strategy is to make clean power the cheapest option and let human self-interest do the rest.

🇬🇧 Reeves looking to break link between gas cost and electricity prices. The UK’s marginal pricing model means gas sets the electricity price even when renewables dominate the grid, which is why bills stay punchy on sunny, windy days. The Chancellor is reportedly eyeing reform to decouple the two. If she pulls it off, it would be one of the most consequential electricity market changes in a generation. You can read a deep dive from Carbon Brief here.

🧺 Households could get free electricity for doing washing on sunny weekends. Britain’s grid operator is expanding the Demand Flexibility Scheme so that when renewables flood the system, providers can pay households to use more electricity, not less. British Gas, Octopus and Equiwatt are all in. Smart-meter households could get free electricity, cheaper rates, or gift-card points on sunny, windy weekends when the grid has more clean power than it knows what to do with.

⚛️ Rolls-Royce signs deal with UK to deliver fleet of small modular nuclear reactors. Rolls-Royce SMR has signed a firm contract with Great British Energy – Nuclear to deliver the UK’s first three small modular reactors at Wylfa in North Wales. It follows the company’s selection as preferred technology partner in June 2025 and sits inside the government’s “Clean Energy Superpower” plan, backed by £2.5 billion of public money plus a £599 million facility from the National Wealth Fund. Wylfa has been on every UK nuclear wish-list for nearly two decades. This is the first time there’s a contract, a technology, and a supply chain attached to it.

🦪 More than 15 million oysters to be released in the North Sea for UK rewilding project. Native oysters were once so abundant you could walk sections of the British foreshore on their shells. Then we ate them. This reintroduction is one of the more ambitious marine rewilding efforts this country has tried, and the knock-on effects go well beyond the oysters themselves. A single oyster filters up to 200 litres of seawater a day. Do the maths on 15 million.

🌲 Defensive rewilding: wetlands and forests as border infrastructure. New research from the University of East London introduces the concept of “defensive rewilding”: deliberately restoring peatlands, forests and wetlands along contested borders to shape terrain in ways that slow or redirect military advances, while also storing carbon and rebuilding biodiversity. The authors frame it as a response to the growing “guns versus climate” trade-off, pitching restored ecosystems as a genuine force multiplier rather than a nice-to-have. Peatlands come out as the standout example. Their soft, low-bearing ground is notoriously hard for even light armoured vehicles to cross, and they happen to be one of the most effective long-term carbon stores we’ve got. The study draws on First World War flooding and, more recently, Ukrainian floodplains slowing armoured advances.

💭 My thoughts? For decades we drained wetlands, felled forests, and straightened rivers to make land productive. Now we’re restoring them because they stop tanks. The climate case didn’t win on its own. The security case came to the rescue. I’ll take the outcome and skip the philosophy lecture.

🎵 Music recommendation for the week is Bleachers, you and forever.

Have a great one!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another edition of The Grumpy Optimists. I took the week off last week to enjoy the Easter longer weekend and refresh my mind and body. I feel great for doing so, there might be something in this four day work week hey?

Before we get into positive news for the week, I’d love to remind you all I’m hosting a free event on the 7th of May in central London at the fantastic Lucky Saint pub. The event will be based on bringing people who care about the planet together to talk about how we can imagine a better future.

There’s only 40 places available and the last poll I did had a great response, so please request a ticket below. I’d love to meet some of you in person!

Sign up to my event here!

There’s a lot about energy and nature this week so I’ve separated them out. I’ve also got an incredible read for you as you head into the week.

⚡ The numbers are moving

🌍 Record 692 GW of renewables added globally in 2025. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) yearly report shows a 15.5% increase in renewable energy in 2025, adding 692 gigawatts (GW) of capacity and 85.6% of the total global power added in 2025. That puts global renewable capacity at 5,149 GW, accounting for nearly half of all global power capacity at the end of 2025.

🇬🇧 UK wind and solar saved Britain £1bn in gas imports in a single month. Carbon Brief analysis shows March 2026 was a record month for combined wind and solar on the British grid, up 28% year-on-year. Wind generation alone rose 38%, pushing gas output to its lowest March level ever recorded. At Iran-war-inflated prices, that avoided generation equated to roughly 18 fully loaded LNG tankers.

💭 My thoughts? The framing of renewables as an energy security play rather than a climate one is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now. Politicians who spent years blocking wind farms are suddenly very interested in domestic generation. Cynical? Maybe. But if it gets turbines in the ground, I’ll take it.

🇮🇳 India’s CO2 emissions grew at their slowest rate in two decades in 2025. Just 0.7% growth, down from 4-11% in the preceding four years. Power sector emissions actually fell 3.8%, the first drop outside Covid since 1973, driven by a year in which India added 47 GW of solar and 6.3 GW of wind. The contradictions remain: the country is also planning massive coal, steel and cement expansion. But the direction of travel in power is striking.

🇪🇺 IMF says France and Spain are structurally well-positioned for the energy transition. A March 2026 IMF working paper highlights Spain as a case study in what early bets on renewables deliver: 56% renewable electricity share, with Spain’s central bank crediting the grid shift for a 40% reduction in electricity prices. France’s low-carbon nuclear base provides a different but complementary structural advantage. The IMF estimates the transition requires sustained investment of 2-3% of EU GDP annually.

⚡ 97% of business leaders now support the shift to renewables. The We Mean Business Coalition’s latest survey finds near-unanimous corporate backing for the energy transition, driven overwhelmingly by energy security, risk reduction, and financial returns rather than climate commitments. Worth noting: this isn’t the usual suspects. It’s a broad cross-sector coalition. When the economics start doing the talking, the conversation changes pretty fast.

☀️ Government approves UK’s largest ever solar farm. The 800MW Springwell Solar Farm in Lincolnshire got the green light on April 8, covering an area equivalent to 1,700 football pitches and expected to power over 180,000 homes a year. It’s the 25th nationally significant clean energy project approved since July 2024. We need to say no to NIMBYs more in this country.

🐦 Nature doing its thing

🌱 Nature loss is now a business and security risk, not just an environmental one. The UK government’s latest Nature Markets Framework makes this shift explicit: private investment, biodiversity net gain, and land use planning are now being treated as economic infrastructure, not green afterthoughts. The framing has changed. Nature is no longer just something to protect at the margins of a planning document. It’s a systemic risk that finance and business are being asked to price in.

🦒 40 migratory species gain new global protections, as giraffe numbers quietly rise 20%. The UN’s migratory species conference wrapped in Campo Grande, Brazil on March 29, adding cheetahs, snowy owls, giant otters and thresher sharks to protected lists, alongside new action plans for jaguars and Amazon catfish. Buried in the proceedings: combined giraffe populations rose from 113,000 to 140,000 between 2020 and 2025, attributed directly to previous coordinated actions under the same convention. BirdLife called the bird outcomes a “major breakthrough.”

🌊 10% of the world’s ocean is now officially protected. IUCN announced this week that 10.01% of the ocean is now within designated protected and conserved areas, a milestone six years late under the old Aichi targets but a milestone nonetheless. Over the past two years, an area larger than the European Union has been brought under protection. The honest caveat from IUCN themselves: coverage still needs to triple by 2030, and most existing MPAs are not actively managed.

🦅 Golden eagles set to return to England for the first time in 150 years. A Forestry England feasibility study published today identifies eight potential recovery zones in northern England capable of sustaining golden eagle populations. The government has backed it with £1m in funding, and juvenile birds could be released as early as next year. The species was wiped out in England during the Victorian era, with the last individual dying in the Lake District in 2016. In southern Scotland, conservation work has already boosted numbers to record levels, and satellite tracking shows young birds are already exploring northern England on their own.

🎧 This week's recommendations

I have two recommendations for you this week.

🎵 I really want my music recommendation to be Justin Bieber at Coachella, but instead I’ll give a banger from 2012, I Need by Maverick Sabre.

📚 My reading recommendation for the week is a beautiful, beautiful article about how everything is a win when the goal is to experience. I’ve sent this to about 10 people this week and it’s beautiful.

Have a great one, George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to this week’s episode. Last week was a big one for me and the company I help run, Zevero. We announced that we raised another $7 million to help scale our mission and I was shortlisted for Green Business’ Entrepreneur of the Year. How cool?

‼️I also have other interesting news for you I am hosting a The Grumpy Optimists event on the 7th May in London! I’d love to meet you all.

Register for The Grumpy Optimist Event!

News to make you feel good this week

💨 Great Britain breaks its wind generation record, again. On March 25, wind hit 23,880 MW, accounting for 53.5% of the electricity mix at peak. Gas was squeezed to just 2.3%, the lowest since April 2024. Clean energy now provides around 60% of UK electricity, up from 3% in 2000. I feel like I’m constantly finding articles like this and long may it continue.

📈 IEA signals the clean tech market could more than double to $3 trillion by 2035. Currently worth $1.25 trillion, the market size of technology like solar panels, batteries, EVs and heat pumps is approaching the size of the global crude oil market.

💭 My thoughts? I wonder how collective voices can help amplify the value of the clean tech market. We all know the value that the oil lobby has, how can we do the same for clean tech?

⚖️ Policy corner

🏠 Heat pumps for all new homes and plug-in solar in green tech drive. The UK’s Future Homes Standard will require heat pumps in all new homes from 2026, and Ed Miliband simultaneously announced plug-in solar panels, already common in Germany, will be made available in the UK for the first time. This alongside the next renewables auction has also being pulled forward to July shows that the the Middle East energy crisis is doing what years of climate advocacy could not. It’s creating genuine political urgency around domestic clean energy.

🇮🇳 India updates its climate targets: 60% non-fossil power by 2035. While some critics are arguing this is weak, I think we need to see the positives in this. Shock. Buried in the detail is the fact that India has already hit its previous target of 50% non-fossil power capacity five years ahead of schedule. Analysts think the new 60% goal will be met by 2028. While the ambition is soft it appears to be a classic case of underpromise and overdeliver.

🚌 Australia’s fuel crisis is accelerating the electric bus transition. With diesel hitting record prices as the Middle East conflict disrupts supply, Australian state governments are fast-tracking EV bus orders. In Australia, just 1% of buses are electric, compared with 80% of the urban fleet in China, a quarter in the Netherlands and 12% in the UK. The argument for electrifying public transport used to be climate. Now it is also fuel security and basic economics.

🌿 Nature doing its thing

🐋 Scientists film sperm whales working together to help one of their own give birth. In July 2023, researchers from Project CETI were tracking a sperm whale off Dominica when eleven whales bunched together near the surface. They launched drones. A calf was born and the group, including non-relatives from two separate family lines, worked together to lift the newborn to the surface so it could breathe. Published this week in Science and Scientific Reports, it is the first quantitative evidence of cooperative birth assistance outside humans and primates. Scientists say the behaviour may predate the last common ancestor of toothed whales more than 36 million years ago.

🦋 Monarch butterfly population up 64%, the largest recovery since 2018. The butterflies occupied 7.24 acres of Mexican forest this winter, up from 4.42 the year before. Scientists put the minimum safe threshold at 15 acres, so the risk of extinction hasn't gone away. But this is the second consecutive year of growth after a near-catastrophic low in 2023/24, driven by conservation work on the ground, better weather and a sharp reduction in illegal logging in the reserve.

🦅 Rewilding in Scotland delivers dramatic gains for birds and pollinators. New research from the Northwoods Rewilding Network, more than 100 landholdings across Scotland, found that bird species are up 261% and breeding territories up 546% on rewilded land compared to neighbouring conventionally managed sites. Bumblebees and butterflies are up more than tenfold. Spotted flycatcher, cuckoo and woodcock, all in national decline, are relatively common on rewilded sites. The researcher who analysed the data described the results as “astonishingly clear.” Several sites combine nature recovery with active farming and tourism. It does not have to be either-or.

My music recommendation for the week is Spanish Sahara by Foals, a great, great tune to start the week with. Speaking of, have a great one!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

As oil prices climb past $100 a barrel and gas prices in Europe have risen 60%, now is a better time than ever to think about clean energy as energy independence. The 2022 energy crisis helped accelerate the shift towards renewables, and while the context isn’t ideal, it will go down in history as an important period for renewables.

There’s still a lot of great news to leave you feeling optimistic for the week, but before we get into it, I’m organising a couple of fun events to try and bring The Grumpy Optimists together in London. I’d love to hear if you might be interested to learn more…

⚡ The numbers keep moving

🌍 The world added a record 814 GW of wind and solar in 2025. Global wind and solar capacity crossed the 4 terawatt mark for the first time, with solar installations up 17% on 2024 and wind up a whopping 47%! Solar alone accounted for 647 GW of that.

💭 My thoughts? This shows that renewables really are taking over and growing exponentially.

⚡ Wind and solar generated a record 17% of US electricity in 2025. Utility-scale solar was up 34% year on year, according to new EIA data. This is happening under a president who keeps insisting renewables don’t work.

☀️ Cuba set a solar power record, then broke it the next day. The country generated 800 MW of solar one afternoon, then hit 900 MW the following day. However, this is against a backdrop of ongoing blackouts. Let’s hope that solar can be a solution here.

⚖️ Policy corner

⚖️ 24 US states sue Trump over the repeal of the Endangerment Finding. The 2009 Endangerment Finding is the legal foundation for virtually all US greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act. The Trump administration repealed it in February. Shock. California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and 20 other states filed suit on Thursday calling it unlawful and scientifically indefensible. Every single legal challenge to the Finding since 2009 has failed.

💭 My thoughts? Half the country is now in open legal resistance to federal climate rollback. The undisputed champion of fossil fuels moved to erase the legal basis for climate regulation entirely, and 24 attorneys general said no the same week.

🇪🇺 Von der Leyen announces a €30 billion ETS Investment Booster for clean tech. With Middle East conflict pushing European energy prices through the floor of what anyone expected, the Commission President responded with a new €30 billion fund for industrial decarbonisation, financed by ETS allowances, first-come first-served. The ETS itself is also under review. The crisis is, perversely, doing what years of policy advocacy could not.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales signs a renewable energy sector deal targeting 100% clean electricity by 2035. The Welsh government has committed to 78 specific measures to accelerate wind, solar, marine and hydro, including streamlined planning and workforce training. The announcement was made on Anglesey (very near where my family live). The cabinet secretary cited the Middle East conflict directly, framing energy independence as the rationale.

🏭 Industry moving

🚗 The Middle East conflict is making the economic case for EVs. With oil past $100 a barrel, Transport and Environment published analysis showing petrol drivers are five times more exposed to energy price shocks than EV drivers. Europe’s 7.7 million electric cars are already cutting oil imports by 126,000 barrels a day. The case for EVs as an energy security play has always been there. Suddenly it’s the argument that’s actually cutting through.

🌳 SBTi tightens its deforestation rules for corporate climate targets. The Science Based Targets initiative updated its Forest, Land and Agriculture guidance this week, closing loopholes and tightening no-deforestation commitments for any company submitting targets from 2026 onward. The land sector represents 22% of global emissions so this is big.

🧱 Lego is installing 40,000 solar panels at its first US factory. Over 30,700 ground-mounted panels across 80 acres, plus 10,000 on the roof, targeting 100% renewable electricity on site. The factory building is partly constructed from mass timber, which stores rather than emits carbon, and is aiming for LEED Platinum certification. LEGO are driving forward a lot of climate ambition, but, they still produce plastic blocks. This is important, especially given today’s film recommendation.

This week I have 3 things to note.

1. My music recommendation is a delightful remix of Sweet Disposition.

2. My TV recommendation, albeit not so optimistic, is The Plastic Detox on Netflix. It’s f*cked.

3. I spoke at an event last week about the future of sustainability. If you’d like to get the slides, send me a message and I’ll get them to you.

That’s all folks - have a great week!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Spring is doing its thing at the moment and the sunshine is great for the soul and very very much needed.

The good news is there are plenty of optimistic stories from around the world to bring to you, so let’s dig in.

📊 Reaching net zero by 2050 ‘cheaper for UK than one fossil fuel crisis’. The Climate Change Committee found this week that the total net cost of reaching net zero by 2050 is roughly £100bn. That’s approximately what the UK paid during a single fossil fuel price shock after Russia invaded Ukraine. They also modelled a future equivalent crisis in 2040. What this shows is that if we stay dependent on gas, household bills rise 59%. With policies to support net zero, they rise 4%.

💭 My thoughts? We’re living through another fossil fuel spike, this one driven by conflict in the Middle East, and the CCC just handed politicians the clearest possible argument for going faster. It’s a win-win for the planet and for energy security.

Perhaps a similar argument that gets levelled is that we should be drilling in the North Sea. This report from Carbon Brief showcases why that’s not really the solution. You can read more here.

💨 Construction finishes on a major offshore wind farm, the first during Trump’s tenure. Vineyard Wind completed construction off Massachusetts this weekend, becoming the first major US offshore wind project to finish during Trump’s second term. This is the same project the administration tried to halt in December on national security grounds. Federal judges said no. A second halted project, Revolution Wind, started sending power to the New England grid for the first time on Friday.

🏭 Construction on Milford Haven hydrogen production plant to begin. A £50m green hydrogen plant has been given the green light in Milford Haven, built on the site of a former oil refinery. It’s one of the first projects from the UK’s Hydrogen Allocation Round to reach this stage, with commissioning targeted for early 2028. Turning a refinery site into a hydrogen hub is not nothing.

📋 90% of companies no longer in CSRD scope plan to maintain, expand sustainability reporting. The EU scaled back its CSRD requirements last year, removing thousands of companies from scope. A survey this week found 90% of those companies are keeping or expanding their sustainability reporting anyway. The infrastructure is built, the teams are in place, and walking it back is harder than it looks.

🏦 Japan lenders see rising demand for ESG finance as decarbonisation investment grows. Japanese banks are reporting rising demand for ESG-linked financing as corporate investment in decarbonisation picks up. Not a flashy story, but Japan’s financial sector moving in this direction at scale matters.

🇸🇬 Singapore sets climate risk management expectations for banks, investors, insurers. Singapore’s financial regulator has set formal climate risk management expectations across its banking, insurance and investment sectors. Part of a steady drumbeat of financial regulators embedding climate into the plumbing, regardless of what’s happening at the political level elsewhere.

♻️ Romania’s recycling revolution lifts off. Romania’s deposit return scheme launched in November 2023 with a recycling rate of around 11%. It now sits at 94%, with over 8 billion containers returned. The CEO of RetuRO said “You go to Romania now, you don’t see a bottle anywhere.” The UK launches its own version in October 2027 but it’s proving to be very problematic.

🌲 ’It has changed my life’: how a dose of nature is treating mental illness. A London charity called Dose of Nature is prescribing time outdoors as a direct treatment for mental illness, and an LSE randomised controlled trial backs it up. 64% recovery rate versus 50% for standard NHS talking therapies, with social welfare benefits estimated at eight times the cost. GPs are going as far as referring patients directly. I don’t know about you, but I am a huge believer in spending time in nature, it’s actually something I don’t feel like I do enough living in central London. Take this as a reminder to get outside today!

🦋 ’Extinct’ large tortoiseshell butterfly spotted across southern England. The large tortoiseshell, classed as regionally extinct in Britain since the 1980s, has been photographed across Kent, Hampshire, Sussex, Dorset, Cornwall and the Isle of Wight. Caterpillars have been found feeding on trees in the wild since 2020, which means these aren’t just tourists blown over from the Netherlands.

That’s all for this week folks. My music recommendation to take you into the week is Walking Through The Water by John Vincent III. Have a great week all.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome to this week’s The Grumpy Optimists. The brief moment of sunshine here in the UK last week has helped lift my mood so it’s a good day to have a good day.

This week two big numbers landed that I think belong together: UK emissions hit their lowest point in over 150 years, and clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025. I’ll come back to both. But first, let’s get into the stories.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🇬🇧 UK emissions fall 2.4% in 2025 as coal hits a 400-year low. UK greenhouse gas emissions are now at their lowest level since 1872. Coal use has dropped to levels not seen since 1600, when Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Most of this is structural: the last coal power station closed in 2024, the steel industry has been contracting, and gas use is at a 34-year low. The UK’s emissions are now 54% below 1990 levels while GDP has grown 84% over the same period. That statistic deserves to be repeated more often.

🇨🇳 Clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025. China’s clean energy sectors contributed $2.1 trillion to the economy last year, equivalent to roughly 11% of GDP. If those sectors were a country, they would be the 8th largest economy in the world. Without them, China would have missed its 5% growth target entirely. EVs, batteries and solar are no longer a climate story in China. They are the economy.

💭 My thoughts? The story of the energy transition is increasingly an economic one. The countries and companies moving fastest on clean energy are not sacrificing growth. In many cases they are driving it. The argument that we can’t afford to act is running out of runway.

🌍 Nature and people

🌊 Brazil’s hiking trails are becoming a tool for conservation. New long-distance trails through Brazil’s biomes are connecting communities to wild landscapes and giving local economies a reason to protect them. Tourism and conservation are not always natural allies, but when they are, it tends to stick.

📸 Underwater Photographer of the Year 2026. Sharing just because it’s cool and worth seeing.

👩 Twelve women carrying the flame for climate action despite the headwinds. Yesterday was international women’s day so I thought it was a great time to share this story from Reuters about twelve women leading climate action globally right now. Worth reading this week in particular.

🏭 Industry moving

🧴 L’Oréal signs deal to turn captured CO₂ into packaging. A startup called Dioxycle uses carbon electrolysis to convert captured industrial emissions into ethylene, the building block of polyethylene plastic. L’Oréal has signed a multi-year deal to use the output in its packaging. This is the kind of thing that sounds niche but matters: packaging plastics are a huge Scope 3 emissions source for consumer goods companies. Replacing fossil-derived plastic with captured-carbon plastic is not a silver bullet, but it is a real piece of the puzzle.

🌞 Nigeria launches $750 million mini-grid solar initiative. A World Bank-funded programme aiming to provide electricity access to 17.5 million Nigerians through 1,350 solar mini-grids. About half of Nigeria’s 230 million people have no reliable grid access. This programme aims to replace 280,000 diesel and petrol generators with clean alternatives. The scale is significant and the model, private sector-led with public subsidy, is increasingly the template for energy access across Africa.

🇰🇷 Korea plans mandatory sustainability reporting from 2028. Another major economy moving towards mandatory climate disclosure. The direction of travel globally is clear, even if the pace varies.

🎬 One to watch

And finally, the LinkedIn post your algorithm probably surfaced but you might have scrolled past: this one is worth a look.

It’s about a Dutch campaign called NK Tegelwippen that encourages people to rip up paving tiles and replace them with plants. Sounds small, but it adds up: since launching, citizens and cities have removed more than 50 million tiles.

Why it matters? Around half of gardens in the Netherlands are paved, which increases flood risk, raises temperatures by up to 10°C and wipes out space for birds, bees and plants.

The clever bit: cities compete to remove the most tiles. Current leader Venlo, with more than 270,000 tiles removed. My favourite fact is that “Green residents” go 20-25% less often to the general doctor, with things like depression and migraines. Wild!

That’s it for this week. Music recommendation for the week is Without Your Love by The Paper Kites and Julia Stone, it’s been a real sing in the shower number this week.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Welcome back to another edition of The Grumpy Optimists. The end of February has become a milestone for me. Two years ago, on 29 February, I sold Zevero so it could grow into what it is today. We have grown from 5 people wanting to make climate action easier to a team of over 50 around the world with clients as big as Tokyo Government.

I started this blog nearly six years ago as a way to write and show that I can do hard things. I wanted to work in climate and thought that if I wrote about it consistently enough, it might open a door. The irony is that it did, just not in the way I expected. Instead of helping me get a job, it helped me start a company with my co-founder.

I think a lot about how easily that might not have happened. If I had overthought it. If I had worried too much about whether anyone was reading. If I had not asked myself, what is the worst that can happen?

I am very aware that optimism is easier when you have the privilege to absorb failure. But optimism, especially about climate, is not naivety. It is not ignoring reality. It is choosing to believe that progress is possible, and then behaving as if that belief matters.

So thank you, reader, for being a grumpy optimist, for thinking about the world we can create rather than the world we currently have.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🌍 Nature fighting back

🐟 Waitrose to suspend mackerel sales due to overfishing concerns. Waitrose has paused sales of mackerel over concerns that current fishing levels are unsustainable. Retailers rarely take voluntary steps like this unless the science is clear and the reputational risk is rising. It signals how biodiversity and ocean health are starting to shape mainstream commercial decisions, not just NGO campaigns.

What I love about this is that Waitrose are making a bold decision. They don’t need to stop selling mackerel, but by doing so, they also raise attention to wider issues of overfishing.

🦅 No trees, no food, shot for fun, yet Serbia’s imperial eagles are making an improbable return. Once close to extinction due to habitat destruction and hunting, Serbia’s eastern imperial eagles are coming back. Years of habitat restoration, nest protection and conservation enforcement are bearing fruit. Wildlife recovery is rarely instant. It is the result of persistent, often unglamorous work over decades.

💭 My thoughts? Stories like this are the reason I started this newsletter. Extinction feels inevitable right up until it isn’t. The birds didn’t get the memo.

🌊 ‘The river won’: campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon stopped the privatisation of a waterway. A coalition of indigenous communities and environmental groups successfully blocked the sale of a major Amazon river to private interests. The case shows how local activism can defend critical natural assets against commercial pressure. The kind of win that rarely makes front pages, but absolutely should.

🐦 Berry boom brings hope for New Zealand’s once-doomed kākā. A strong berry season combined with long-term conservation programmes is supporting the recovery of New Zealand’s native kākā.

⚡ Energy shifting beneath the surface

🌋 ‘Magic beneath the surface’: pioneering geothermal plant launches in Cornwall. A new geothermal plant in Cornwall is tapping heat from deep underground to generate electricity for homes, a UK clean energy first. Unlike wind and solar, geothermal provides constant baseload power regardless of what the weather is doing. It has been a long time coming, and Cornwall is a genuinely exciting place to prove the model.

⛏️ Trump has overseen more coal retirements than any other US president. New analysis shows coal plant retirements have accelerated during Trump’s presidency, driven largely by economics rather than any policy ambition. Cheap renewables continue to outcompete coal. The structural shift in the US power mix is market-led, not politically led.

💭 My thoughts? The undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal Donald Trump can’t even stop the decline of coal and the rise of renewables.

🏎️ Toyota to build circular factory in Poland to recycle end-of-life vehicles. Toyota plans to build a facility focused on recovering materials from end-of-life vehicles. Circularity is shifting from pilot projects to industrial scale, which is the only scale that actually matters.

👟 Nike sources 100% clean electricity for Japan operations. Nike has transitioned its Japan operations to 100% clean electricity. For context, Japan’s grid emits roughly 0.45 to 0.50 kg of CO₂ per kWh, compared to around 0.20 kg in the UK and closer to 0.05 kg in France. In other words, decarbonising in Japan avoids more than double the emissions per unit of electricity compared to much of Western Europe. I’m lucky enough to spend a lot of time in Japan, so this one hit home!

🥛 Minor Figures launches powdered milk to cut emissions. Minor Figures have developed a powdered version of their product, dramatically reducing the emissions associated with shipping liquid (which is mostly water). It is the kind of unglamorous supply chain innovation that does not get much attention but makes a real dent. Less liquid, less weight, fewer lorries, lower footprint.

📋 UK Sustainability Reporting Standards: what you need to know. The UK has launched its latest standards in climate reporting. This is big news for corporations in the UK and one I’ll be hosting a webinar about soon. 👀

🎬 Dirty Business — Channel 4. There’s a reason the working title for this show was “Isle of Shite.” A three-part drama about Britain’s sewage scandal, built around real victims and campaigners who spent decades trying to make people care. The facts were always there. Surfers Against Sewage has been campaigning since 1990. The harm was documented. Nothing moved at scale until the emotional reality landed somewhere people couldn’t look away from.

That’s what good storytelling does that data never quite can.

💭 My thoughts? Most of the issues covered in this newsletter suffer from the same problem: the evidence is overwhelming and nothing moves fast enough. Storytelling is one of the most underrated tools we have for closing the gap between knowing and actually caring.

That’s all from me this week. This week’s music recommendation is Look At That Woman by ROLE MODEL.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Last week it felt like good climate news was everywhere. This week I had to look a little harder.

That said, the stories I did find shared something interesting. A recurring theme kept appearing: resilience.

If you strip away the political noise at the moment you find something more structural is happening. Countries you might not expect are investing in renewable energy. Cities are redesigning streets to cope with heat and pollution. Car batteries are being used to power homes. We are even restoring species that have been absent for nearly two centuries.

Climate action is increasingly being integrated into society, into the everyday. That’s a reason to be optimistic.

Although, if I have missed any great resilience stories, I would love to see them in the comments.

👀 News to make you feel good this week - resilience edition

🇨🇺 US sanctions, power cuts and climate crisis: why Cuba is betting on renewables. Facing repeated blackouts, ageing grid infrastructure and fuel shortages, Cuba is accelerating investment in decentralised solar installations. Rather than relying solely on large central power stations, the country is deploying smaller, distributed systems that reduce strain on the grid and improve energy reliability.

What began as a response to crisis is becoming a structural shift in how power is generated and consumed. In this context, renewables are not just about emissions reduction. They are about stability and independence.

🇫🇷 Paris announces Europe’s largest urban detoxification project. Paris plans to remove cars from historic avenues, plant hundreds of trees and expand traffic free school streets. Beyond emissions reduction, the initiative directly addresses urban heat, air pollution and public health risks that are intensifying with climate change. More shade, fewer vehicles and safer streets increase a city’s ability to cope with heatwaves and extreme weather while improving everyday quality of life.

💭 My thoughts? Climate resilience in cities is not abstract. It is cooler streets, cleaner air and infrastructure designed to withstand hotter summers.

🚗 GM announces lease programme for powering your home with your EV. General Motors is launching a programme that allows EV owners to use their vehicles to power their homes. Vehicle to home technology effectively turns cars into mobile battery units. During outages or peak demand periods, stored energy in cars can be redirected into households. This shifts EVs from being purely transport assets to distributed energy infrastructure.

💭 My thoughts? Once storage is embedded in everyday assets, grid resilience becomes decentralised. I listened to this podcast from Tortoise media and found it incredibly useful to understand how we can run an entire grid on renewables.

🔋 China’s water battery breakthrough can last 120,000+ cycles. Researchers in China have developed a water based battery that could last more than 120,000 charge cycles, dramatically extending operational life compared to conventional lithium ion systems. If scalable, it could reduce long term storage costs and ease material constraints. More durable storage strengthens grids as renewable penetration rises.

🌬️ UK backs biggest English onshore windfarm in a decade. After years of political hesitation, the UK has approved major onshore wind projects, marking the strongest push in a decade. Expanding domestic renewable generation reduces reliance on imported gas and buffers the economy from international fuel price shocks. Onshore wind remains one of the cheapest forms of electricity generation available.

🐢 Floreana giant tortoise reintroduced to Galápagos island after almost 200 years. Conservationists have reintroduced giant tortoises to Floreana Island nearly two centuries after they were wiped out. As keystone species, tortoises help regulate vegetation and restore ecological balance. Their return strengthens long term ecosystem stability.

💭 My thoughts? Climate action is not only about cutting emissions. It is also about rebuilding natural systems that can endure.

📚 Also worth your time

🇨🇳 China is becoming a green superpower as Trump retreats from climate leadership. Industrial scale clean tech investment is reshaping global economic power.

⚡ Chris Stark: The economics of clean energy ‘just get better and better’. The cost curves continue to move in one direction.

🇬🇧 River Thames site gains bathing water status after community pressure. Citizen campaigning pushes water quality standards higher.

🤝 UK and California deepen ties on clean energy. Subnational alliances are shaping climate momentum beyond national politics.

Today’s song recommendation is Tems, Burning. An absolutely brilliant tune for a kitchen playlist. Well, hopefully not what’s actually happening in the kitchen.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

There are weeks where finding six genuinely good climate stories feels like hard work. Right now, the challenge is the opposite. I am cutting stories rather than searching for them. That does not mean everything is fixed. Far from it. But it does suggest that beneath the political noise, structural progress is quietly building.

Speaking of positive stories, last week I spent 20 minutes talking about the future of packaging emissions. Riveting, I know. But to me, it genuinely was. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, email me at george@zevero.earth and I will send you the slides.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🇨🇳 Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 21 months. New Carbon Brief analysis shows China’s carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or declining for nearly two years. Record solar and wind deployment is now growing faster than electricity demand, limiting coal growth and signalling structural change. For the world’s largest emitter, this is not a marginal development. If sustained, it marks a genuine inflection point in global emissions trajectories.

💭 My thoughts? If China decisively bends the curve, global carbon maths changes quickly. The only thing that matters now is durability.

🇮🇳 India says it remains committed to its climate goals. India has reiterated its commitment to delivering on its climate targets, highlighting rapid renewable deployment and continued investment in clean infrastructure. A fast-growing economy increasing clean capacity at scale is a major signal for the global transition. This is growth and decarbonisation running in parallel.

🌍 Global economy must move past GDP to avoid planetary disaster. UN chief António Guterres has called for moving beyond GDP as the primary measure of economic success. GDP ignores environmental degradation, resource depletion and inequality. As climate impacts intensify, alternative metrics that embed planetary boundaries are gaining credibility.

💭 My thoughts? We optimise what we measure. GDP has optimised extraction. A different scoreboard changes behaviour.

🇺🇸 The US story is more complicated than the headlines

🇺🇸 Trump EPA moves to roll back key climate rule. The Trump administration’s EPA has moved to repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding”, a cornerstone of US federal climate regulation. The decision signals a clear shift in federal posture and introduces legal uncertainty. However, analysis suggests the immediate emissions impact may be more limited than headlines imply, given existing market dynamics and state-level policies already in motion.

🧪 Scientists and states push forward on US climate action. At the same time, coalitions of states, cities and scientific institutions are mobilising to safeguard climate progress. Much of US decarbonisation is now driven by state mandates, corporate procurement and falling clean energy costs rather than federal directives alone.

💭 My thoughts? The US story is no longer just Washington. It is governors, grids and gigawatts. Structural change is harder to unwind than political rhetoric. So while you may think that we’re in a position where the US is screwed, it perhaps isn’t as bad as it could be.

⚡ Economics are shifting

⚡ Australia’s renewables boom delivers power price payoff. Australia’s rapid buildout of wind and solar is pushing down wholesale electricity prices. Greater renewable penetration is reducing fossil fuel exposure and softening volatility. Clean energy at scale is beginning to show up in consumer bills.

🌞 Google expands its solar power portfolio. Google continues investing heavily in solar to power growing data centre demand. Long term power purchase agreements are accelerating renewable deployment and reshaping energy markets. Corporate procurement remains one of the strongest transition levers globally.

🏪 The practical transition

🥯 Brooklyn bagel shop cuts costs and emissions with plug in batteries. A New York bakery installed battery storage to avoid peak demand charges, storing cheaper off peak electricity and using it during busy periods. The result is lower bills and lower emissions.

💧 Spain turns an engineering headache into a turbine free hydropower source. Spanish engineers have developed hydropower solutions that avoid conventional turbines by rethinking existing infrastructure. Incremental innovation across existing systems can unlock meaningful clean energy gains.

🌳 China’s tree planting turns desert edge into a carbon sink. Extensive afforestation around the Taklamakan Desert is restoring degraded land and absorbing carbon. Long term policy coordination has reshaped entire landscapes.

Lastly, today’s music hit of the week is Marlon Funaki’s ‘when sunday comes around’. A nice song to bring you into the week.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Here’s the news to make you feel a bit better about the state of the world this week.

Welcome to another edition of The Grumpy Optimists. If you’re feeling like the climate news cycle is relentless, here’s your reminder that progress is happening. From Africa’s solar boom to China’s clean energy revolution, from snails making a comeback to soil holding the key to flood prevention.

This week’s roundup is packed with stories that show what’s possible when we invest in solutions, support regenerative practices, and give nature a chance to recover.

Let’s dive in.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🎉 Zevero acquires Inhabit. The company I co-founded, Zevero, has officially acquired sustainability service provider Inhabit, bringing expert climate advisors and a strong portfolio of European clients onto the platform. Sam and the team are incredible humans and have some great customers and I’m excited to get this one over the line and see how we can grow together.

Quick note, we’re looking for more deals to help us grow…so if you know somebody I’m all ears.

☀️ Africa records its fastest year of solar growth as installations rise 54% year-on-year. Africa installed approximately 4.5 GW of new solar PV capacity in 2025, representing a 54% year-on-year increase and marking a sharp acceleration across regions. The number of countries installing 100MW or above essentially doubled from 4 to 8, showing that solar deployment is spreading beyond early leaders. South Africa led with 1.6 GW, followed by Nigeria (803 MW), Egypt (500 MW), and Algeria (400 MW).

💭 My thoughts? What’s remarkable here is the diversification. This isn’t just about a few big markets anymore, it’s about solar becoming accessible and economically viable across the continent. The fact that distributed capacity (rooftop and commercial) now represents 44% of installations shows this is being driven by real demand from households and businesses, not just government-led projects.

🇬🇧 UK renewable energy just had its best January ever. January 2026 marked a record-breaking month for UK renewable energy, with wind, solar and hydro providing 64% of Britain’s electricity generation. Wind power alone generated 11.9 TWh, smashing the previous January record by over 20%. Gas-fired generation fell to just 19.5% of the total mix, while coal generation remained at zero for the entire month. Progress is happening.

🇨🇳 Clean energy drove more than a third of China’s GDP growth in 2025. Solar power, electric vehicles, and other clean-energy technologies contributed a record 15.4 trillion yuan ($2.1 trillion) in 2025 – some 11.4% of China’s GDP. That’s comparable to the entire economy of Brazil or Canada. Clean-energy sectors contributed more than 90% of the rise in investment. EVs and batteries were the largest growth drivers, delivering 44% of the economic impact.

💭 My thoughts? This is massive. Without clean-energy sectors, China would have expanded by 3.5% instead of 5.0%, missing its growth target entirely. The scale of investment here – $1 trillion in clean energy versus $260 billion in fossil fuels – shows where the smart money is going.

🌊 Trump-halted offshore wind project to proceed. Despite earlier political headwinds, a major offshore wind project that was previously halted is moving forward, demonstrating the resilience of the renewable energy transition even in challenging political environments.

🌾 Why soil coverage matters for flood prevention. A simple demonstration from Climate Farmers shows how soil health affects flooding. Bare soil sheds water and erodes, dead cover absorbs some, and living cover allows water to infiltrate and drain. Supporting farmers to build soil cover could significantly reduce flood damage while improving resilience.

💭 My thoughts? This is a solution hiding in plain sight. We talk a lot about flood impacts, far less about degraded soils that make them worse.

🐌 Bermuda snail thought to be extinct now thrives after a decade’s effort. Once reduced to fewer than 200 individuals, the greater Bermuda snail has been brought back from the brink. After a decade of coordinated conservation work, more than 100,000 snails have now been bred and released, with stable populations established across six protected sites.

🐑 China’s desert solar farms are creating unexpected oases through “solar grazing”. In China’s Gobi Desert, massive solar installations are doing double duty, generating clean energy while reversing desertification. The shade from solar panels creates cooler microclimates and reduces water evaporation, allowing vegetation to flourish beneath them.

🌊 Norway bans deep-sea mining until 2029 in major policy reversal. Norway has halted all deep-sea mining exploration and development in Arctic waters until at least 2029, marking a dramatic U-turn for one of the industry’s strongest proponents. The decision came after sustained pressure from environmental groups, scientists, and green opposition parties. The government will also end public funding for mapping deep-sea minerals, effectively stopping the world’s first attempt at commercial seabed mining before it could begin.

♻️ Modern Milkman to collect unwanted electronics and toys with deliveries. Modern Milkman is expanding its doorstep delivery model to collect unwanted electronics and toys at the same time. By using existing delivery routes, the scheme makes reuse and recycling easier for households while reducing the need for separate collection services. A small operational change, but one that removes friction from circular behaviour.

🏗️ EPDs now searchable in one place, helping the built environment decarbonise. Emidat has made it possible to search and compare Environmental Product Declarations from around the world in one place. By the way, EPDs are basically emission footprints. This makes it easier for sustainability teams to access comparable, third-party verified data to make better decisions on what materials are the lowest carbon.

This week’s music recommendation is a beautiful track by Sienna Rose called ‘Into the Blue’. For many (mainly those in the Northern Hemisphere), January and February can feel pretty blue, which is understandable. I have been thinking a lot about finding comfort in winter, and Wintering by Katherine May is a great introduction to that mindset. That said, I am still very much dreaming of lighter mornings and longer evenings.

Have a great week!

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

Last week I was joking that I’m supposed to be the grumpy one here, but UK newspapers are really giving me a run for my money. New analysis finds that, for the first time, editorial opposition to climate action now outweighs support – a pretty wild place to be after the hottest year on record.

It’s also exactly why this newsletter exists. The more our media leans into culture‑war framing, the more important it is to keep pointing at the boring, tangible, quietly optimistic stuff that’s actually happening.

With that in mind, let’s dig in to the latest episode.

👀 News to make you feel good this week

🗞️ UK newspaper opposition to climate action overtakes support. As I mentioned in the intro, UK newspaper editorials are now more likely to oppose climate action than support it, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. The shift is driven by a handful of high-circulation titles (guess who), despite continued public concern about climate impacts.

💭 My thoughts? What is striking here is the widening gap between media narratives and material reality. Emissions trajectories, investment flows, and deployment numbers continue to move, even as coverage becomes more adversarial.

☀️ UK solar deployment continues to rise. New UK government data shows solar capacity continuing to grow, with deployment spread across both rooftop installations and larger projects. The pace is not dramatic, but it is consistent, and it persists despite planning friction and grid constraints. This is also a common critique of NIMBYs who say we should not put solar on fields but on rooftops. The simple answer is we need both.

🚆 I took a 12-hour train home from France. I shared a post about choosing the train over flying and the response was unusually thoughtful. Lots of people reflected honestly on their own travel choices, flight counts, and where they draw the line between ideal behaviour and practical reality.

🧱 Swift bricks to be installed in every new Scottish home. All new homes in Scotland will include swift bricks, supporting urban biodiversity and helping reverse declining bird populations. I love small regulatory tweaks that quietly lock nature into buildings by default.

🚗 EV sales in Europe surpass petrol for the first time. Electric vehicle sales have overtaken petrol car sales across Europe, marking a major milestone in transport electrification.

🌬️ UK joins major European wind farm project. The UK has joined eight other European countries in a large offshore wind initiative aimed at expanding capacity and improving energy security. Projects like this matter less for their symbolism and more for their scale and coordination. They reflect a growing recognition that energy security and climate goals are now tightly aligned.

🐦 National Trust creates new island for birds. The National Trust has sunk three decommissioned barges in the Blackwater Estuary to create a new artificial island for birds. The structures will be filled with dredged mud and topped with gravel to form a safe habitat above the highest tides. The project will add 0.55 hectares of new habitat for species including curlew, avocet and little tern. It is also designed to protect nearby saltmarsh, an important natural carbon store, from erosion.

⚡ Australia’s grid now relies on renewables as much as coal. Renewables now match coal’s contribution to Australia’s electricity grid, a shift that would have seemed unlikely not long ago given the country’s fossil fuel profile and its politics three or four years ago.

🥕 Amsterdam becomes the first capital to ban meat advertising. Amsterdam will ban meat advertising in public spaces as part of its climate and public health strategy. The policy mirrors earlier restrictions on tobacco and fossil fuel promotion.

💭 My thoughts? Treating meat more like other public‑health risks in ad policy is a big cultural signal about where food and climate are heading.

That’s all from me this week folks. Two things to shout out for the week. One, I had a great gym session with the team at Rally on Tuesday, some very sweaty pictures you shall not see. Two, my music choice for the week is an indie banger.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚