Today (2017 C.E. - 2025 C.E.)

This archive spans the years 2017 through 2025, a period marked by rapid advances in clean energy, medicine, technology, and social equity. It collects documented breakthroughs, policy wins, and scientific achievements from the present era. If you want evidence that progress is real and ongoing, this is where to look.

Aerial view of Shanghai traffic, for article on global EV sales

10% of global car sales were electric in 2022 for first time ever

Electric vehicles crossed a quiet but enormous threshold in 2022, making up one in every ten new cars sold worldwide for the first time. Roughly 7.8 million fully electric vehicles found buyers that year, even as overall car sales slipped. China led the charge, with EVs accounting for nearly a fifth of new cars sold there, while Europe wasn’t far behind at 11%. Behind the numbers is a deeper shift: battery prices have fallen dramatically over the past decade, and major automakers are doubling their EV output even as their broader sales decline. Ten percent is the moment a technology stops being niche and starts reshaping an industry — a hopeful signal for the global push toward cleaner transport.

Aerial view of Tongass National Forest, for article on Tongass National Forest roadless rule

Biden restores protections to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest

Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is once again off-limits to logging and new road construction, after the USDA restored protections across the 17-million-acre rainforest — a landscape slightly larger than West Virginia that holds nearly half of all carbon stored in U.S. national forests. Tribal Nations in Southeast Alaska, including the Organized Village of Kake, led the years-long push to bring the safeguards back. For communities who have hunted, fished, and lived among the 800-year-old cedars and wild salmon streams for thousands of years, it’s a hard-won recognition. The victory also points to something bigger: protecting old-growth forests at scale is one of the most affordable, ready-now climate tools we have — no new technology required, just the will to leave ancient places standing.

Vials of blood, for article on cancer diagnostics Africa, for article on Parkinson's blood test

Morocco becomes first African nation to produce its own cancer diagnosis tests

Morocco’s research foundation has developed cancer diagnostic tests made entirely in Africa—a breakthrough that promises to slash waiting times from weeks or months down to hours, and potentially cut costs in half. The leukemia test, already used on 400 patients, sidesteps the costly delays of importing kits from Europe or North America. Because results no longer need to travel abroad for interpretation, patients can receive treatment sooner when it matters most. This success builds on Morocco’s earlier COVID-19 test and positions African nations to control their own medical futures rather than depend on distant supply chains.\n\n**Word count: 95**

Wind turbines in a field, for article on clean energy investment

Global investment in clean energy matches that in fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2022

Clean energy investment hit $1.1 trillion globally in 2022, matching every dollar spent on fossil fuels for the first time ever. Electric vehicles led the charge, with spending jumping 54 percent in a single year to $466 billion. Wind, solar, batteries, and heat pumps all set records too — this wasn’t a fluke driven by one hot sector, but money moving across the whole clean economy. China poured in nearly half the total, sparking a kind of race that tends to push costs down for everyone. Parity isn’t the finish line — the world still needs to roughly quadruple this pace to hit net zero by 2050 — but it’s the moment the global energy story quietly flipped.