🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #169
Happy Monday. 👋
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 💚