Happy Monday. 👋

I know I said I’d take a week off, but I ended up taking two. My bad. In my defence, the good news kept coming while I was gone, so this week you get a two-week backlog squeezed into one email.

For a little bit of catching up, I had a fantastic time completing my first Ironman 70.3 Austria a few weeks ago. You can see my write-up and my tri-suit that is a tad too small here. It was a lot of fun and has motivated me to get faster and carry on enjoying my training.

I’ve also used it as a great excuse to get better at baking bread to carb-load and yesterday resulted in some quite brilliant bagels, if I do say so myself. If that doesn’t give you reason to have a great Monday I don’t know what will.

It would be really nice if you shared this with a friend so they too can get positive news.

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👀 News to make you feel good this week

🇨🇳 China’s clean power met all of its electricity demand growth in 2025. Ember’s annual China review is out and the numbers show China is making great progress. Clean electricity covered every unit of last year’s 5% demand growth, pushing fossil generation down 0.7%, its first fall in a decade. China also installed around 60% of the world’s new battery storage, electric trucks reached 26% of new truck sales, and cleantech exports passed $220 billion, approaching the scale of China’s garment exports.

💭 My thoughts? While half the West still debates whether the energy transition is real, China has turned it into a $220 billion export business. YES, they are producing a lot of emissions, but boy are they dominating the clean energy space.

🔌 Plug-in solar panels are now legal in Great Britain. Since late August you can buy an 800W solar kit from Argos, B&Q or Amazon, plug it into a normal socket, and knock around £110 a year off your bill. Germany has had balcony solar for years, so this is the UK catching up rather than leading, but it finally gives renters and flat-dwellers a way in. I for one love it.

🏭 The world’s largest green hydrogen, ammonia and methanol plant is up and running in China. The Songyuan complex in Jilin pairs 800MW of wind and solar with electrolysers making 45,000 tonnes of green hydrogen a year, which feeds 200,000 tonnes of green ammonia and methanol. It came online in December, holds ISCC EU certification, and signed the world’s first sales contract for green ammonia as an ocean shipping fuel. Shipping and fertiliser have no easy route to zero, so a plant like this running at commercial scale is a big step.

🍺 Wildfarmed and Hawkstone have brewed a lager with regeneratively grown barley. Andy Cato’s Wildfarmed teamed up with Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone to launch Wildthing, a 4.6% lager made with barley grown to rebuild soil health. It’s stocked in 300 Tescos and pouring in over 600 pubs. Regenerative farming only scales if it finds mainstream routes to market, and few routes are more mainstream than the pub.

Why I love this. Clarkson is a bit of a Marmite character, and I don't like Marmite. But he has one of the biggest voices in farming, and this is climate action that doesn't look like climate action. I love what Wildfarmed do and I'd happily buy a beer like this. Most people drinking it will see it as helping Jeremy run a better farm and won't give the climate a second thought. Fine by me!

🦆 An Oregon farmer turned 70 acres of his barley farm into a wetland, and it now hosts 140 bird species. Karl Wenner took 70 of his 400 acres in the Klamath Basin out of production and let the water back in. The wetland now filters fertiliser runoff before it reaches Upper Klamath Lake, fills with waterfowl on every migration, and is rearing thousands of juvenile C’waam and Koptu suckers, two endangered fish the basin nearly lost.

🚰 Faith Kuya’s solar-powered water utility is serving over 6,000 people a month in Tanzania. Her company SafeSip builds WaterBank, an off-grid kiosk that treats borehole or river water through four filtration stages and dispenses it around the clock via prepaid cards, at roughly 4 cents per 20 litres. Communities using it report a 43% drop in diarrhoea cases. She’s part of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Africa Prize 2026 cohort, and the rest of the cohort is a good rabbit hole.

💨 The UN says every $1 spent on clean air and climate action returns $15. A new UNEP report, the first global economic assessment of combined climate and clean-air action, counts 6.4 million premature deaths from outdoor air pollution in 2025. The fixes are familiar: cut methane, black carbon and HFCs, electrify transport, clean up cooking and waste. Climate action keeps being framed as a cost. On these numbers it’s the best investment going.

A new format for busy people? Introducing the grid of news (working title)

I saw something like this from the Observer and I was like whoa, that’s cool, I should do the same. So here I am, doing the same. I’d love to know what you think, what should my axes be?

🎵 And finally

This week’s tune has to be Superstylin’ by Groove Armada. Before Andy Cato was rebuilding British soil, he was making this. Right, normal service resumes. See you next Monday.

George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚

🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #177