Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another edition of The Grumpy Optimists. This week’s episode is a nice one, so let’s get into it.
👀 News to make you feel good this week
🔌 We are entering the Age of Power. Ember’s big new report argues that the energy transition and the computing boom are the same story: both run on electrons, both ride the same supply chains, and the countries that master both together will set the pace for this century. 97% of the world’s population lives in countries where solar and wind potential is more than ten times current electricity demand.
If you are to do one thing today to make you feel more optimistic it’s read the slides at the bottom of this site. It’s kind of crazy to see such progress.
☀️ Solar is now “offensively cheap”. Chinese-made panels are down to around $0.12 per watt. In 2000 it was $6. In 1975 it was $100. No energy technology has ever fallen in price like this, and with the latest turmoil in the Middle East pushing oil and gas prices up again, countries keep setting installation records.
🚌 Latin America’s electric bus fleet passes 10,000. With costs falling and charging infrastructure catching up, electric buses are now powering millions across South America.
🐋 Iceland to submit bill that could ban whaling in its waters. The government plans to introduce legislation in February that would end commercial whaling for good, and it has the majority to pass it. If the bill passes, only Norway and Japan are left commercially whaling.
🐈 A new species of wild cat has been confirmed in Bolivia. The Tilcaya cat is about the size of a domestic moggy and went unnoticed for so long because it looks nearly identical to the other spotted tiger cats of South America. DNA work on living animals and museum specimens confirmed it as its own species, and suggests there are five tiger cat species rather than three, taking the world’s cat family from 41 species to 44 or more.
🐧 A puffin has fledged in Dorset for the first time in 30 years. The colony at Dancing Ledge is the last on England’s south coast, and it has not raised a chick since the 1990s. This summer the National Trust’s monitoring cameras caught a puffling (great word btw) taking flight.
📢 Bristol bans ads for high-carbon industries and fast fashion. Bristol has joined nearly two dozen UK councils restricting ads for high-carbon industries on council-owned property, and it is the first to add fast fashion to the list. The ban covers petrol, diesel and hybrid cars (including electric SUVs), flights and cruise holidays, fossil fuel brands, and campaigns pushing excessive fashion consumption. The textile industry accounts for 2 to 10% of global carbon emissions and nearly 10% of ocean microplastic pollution, according to UNEP.
💭 My thoughts? Why should a council take money to promote the things it is building policies against? This will not change the world on its own, but it is an important precedent. It is also so incredibly Bristol.
🌳 Lewes adopts a charter recognising the rights of trees. The town council voted unanimously to become the first in the country to formally recognise the rights of its trees, after a campaign by local groups and the University of Sussex’s environmental law clinic. Legal rights for nature sounds eccentric until you remember that rivers in New Zealand and ecosystems in Ecuador already have them. Somebody has to go first, and this time it was a market town in Sussex.
The grid of Grumpy Optimism news
This week’s edition comes to you after a wonderful weekend of being outside, seeing family and loved ones and recharging my body. This week’s song is High by the Lighthouse Family.
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚