Some Good News To Close Out This Year

I’m a pretty pessimistic guy. Finding the dark cloud behind the silver lining is something of a specialty for me. But maybe at the end of an atrocious year for environmental law and policy in the United States, we should look for the good news, and thanks to the good people at Canary Media, there actually is quite a lot. Here are some highlights, but as they say, read the whole thing.

Relentless Rise of Renewables

This has gotten a lot of press, but we should remember it. For the first time ever, renewables produce more energy worldwide than coal. It’s not a fluke: Science calls it “seemingly unstoppable.”

Renewables Dominate New Power Coming Online

Even with the repeal of much of the Inflation Reduction Act, utilities understand that the most reliable and inexpensive source of energy will be renewables. Solar, wind, and storage accounted for 92% of new power capacity added to the grid this year through November.

Battery Breakthrough

As the old saw: batteries are the future of power, and always will be. But this is particularly big news, for two reasons: 1) as batteries come online, this will make wind and solar even more competitive, because it seriously diminishes the intermittency problem: you can have wind and solar power even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine; and 2) the One Big Bullsh*t Bill did not destroy incentives for batteries, so this will continue.

EVs Are Kicking Gasoline-Powered Automobiles Rear

Investors Are Turning To Renewable Clean Power

It isn’t in Canary Media’s wheelhouse, but three other great developments have also appeared in 2025:

*Species Recovery. Nature reports the recovery of several species, including the endangered green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), which has now been taken off the endangered list, and ampurta (Dasycercus hillieri), a rat-sized Australian marsupial, moved from near-extinction to ‘least concern’ this year. It also notes that 60 nations ratified the United Nations High Seas Treaty, bringing it legally into force. It’s official name is Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction or BBNJ Agreement. It is an environmentally-focused instrument, so this is further good news for species recovery.

Guess who didn’t sign it?

*Ozone Hole Shrinks. We have seen reductions in the ozone hole before, but according to MIT, where the study revealing the shrinkage originated, “the new study is the first to show, with high statistical confidence, that this recovery is due primarily to the reduction of ozone-depleting substances, versus other influences such as natural weather variability or increased greenhouse gas emissions to the stratosphere.”

And why were we able to reduce ozone-depleting substances? Because of an international treaty, the Montreal Protocol – just the sort of thing that the Trump Administration wants to destroy.

*New Malaria Drugs. This isn’t strictly an environmental breakthrough, but I feel obliged to mention it, because the impacts are so huge, and demonstrate what science can do. Malaria is an absolutely devastating disease, and it overwhelmingly affects children in the most vulnerable parts of Africa and Asia: more than 600,000 people die from malaria each year. The presence of malaria is not only a grotesque human tragedy, but a major cause of underdevelopment in the Global South.

According to Nature,

In a phase III clinical trial this year, [a malaria drug called] ganaplacide–lumefantrine (GanLum), successfully treated malaria in 97.4% of participants. GanLum also cleared parasites that have developed resistance to the antimalarial drug artemisinin.

If GanLum receives regulatory approval, it will be the first new class of malaria medicine in more than 25 years.

This is huge huge news.

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I am wary of those who have suggested that the energy transition has already happened, and Trump cannot stop it. Stupidity is more powerful than all the science that has ever been developed, and as Esquire magazine has noted, the Trump Administration favors not Big Business nor Big Tech, but Big Stupid. Now it is frantically trying to pay off dying fossil fuel producers and anti-vax nutcases. We are in a race between the public’s growing rage at this maliciously incompetent continuing criminal enterprise centered in the Oval Office, and its relentless drive backed by a corrupt Supreme Court to consolidate enough power that the public will not matter.

But these signs show reason for some optimism. Nothing is inevitable, but many things are possible. There are 307 days until the midterms. Let’s get to work.

Happy New Year.