Climate crisis

The climate crisis demands action — and action is happening. This archive tracks real progress: policy wins, clean-energy milestones, community resilience, and scientific advances that show meaningful change is possible. Stories here come from every corner of the world.

Wind turbines, for article on offshore wind farm

Offshore wind sites are delivering power to the grid for the first time in U.S. history

By / / Good news links

In December 2023, Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource announced that their first turbine was sending electricity from what will be a 12-turbine wind farm, South Fork Wind, 35 miles east of Montauk Point, New York. Now, the joint owners of the Vineyard Wind project have announced the first electricity from one turbine at what will be a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts.

Aerial view of London and the Thames, for article on U.K. renewable energy record

U.K. use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957

By / / Good News For Humankind

The UK’s electricity grid just hit a milestone unseen since 1957: gas and coal together produced less power than in any year of the last seven decades. Renewables — wind, solar, hydro, and biomass — supplied a record 42% of electricity in 2023, while coal alone has fallen 97% since 2008 and is set to disappear from the grid entirely when Britain’s last coal plant shuts in September 2024. Add nuclear, and more than half of the country’s electricity now comes from sources that emit no carbon. The deeper significance is simple: a major industrialized economy can run mostly on clean power not as a forecast, but as a lived, ordinary year — proof other countries can point to.

american public power association eIBTh DXW w unsplash, for article on global wind power capacity, for article on renewable energy record

In Scotland, renewable power has outstripped demand

By / / Good news links

For the first time, in 2022, Scottish renewables generated more power than the country used, new government figures show. The growth of wind power, coupled with a small drop in electricity consumption, meant that the volume of electricity produced by renewables in Scotland was equal to 113 percent of demand.

Biogas plant in agricultural landscape.

South Korea to require producers of organic waste resources to make biogas

By / / Good news links

According to the East Asian nation’s Environment Ministry’s new biogas law, public and private industries that generate organic waste such as livestock manure and food waste will now be required to produce them in the form of biogas. Biogas is a gaseous renewable energy source produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, plant material and manure and can be used in vehicles that operate on natural gas.

JAC Motors sodium-ion battery EV, for article on sodium-ion EV

China’s JAC Motors rolls out world’s first commercial lithium-free EV

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sodium-ion EVs just hit the road for the first time, with Chinese automaker JAC delivering its Yiwei hatchback to customers in January 2024 — the world’s first mass-produced electric car running on a battery made from one of Earth’s most abundant elements. The little urban hatchback offers about 157 miles per charge, plenty for daily commutes, and holds up better than lithium in cold weather. Because sodium is found in ordinary salt and spread across nearly every country, it sidesteps the supply bottlenecks and high costs that have kept EVs out of reach for many buyers. If the chemistry scales, it could open the door to affordable electric driving in places lithium has struggled to reach.

Industrial pipes and infrastructure at a coastal energy facility for an article about carbon capture and storage, for article on fusion plasma record, for article on fusion plasma record, for article on fusion endurance record, for article on nuclear fusion ignition

American scientists repeatedly produce nuclear fusion ignition for the first time in history

By / / Good News For Humankind

Nuclear fusion just cleared a crucial bar: scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have now achieved ignition four separate times, with the best shot producing 89 percent more energy than the lasers delivered to the target. That repetition is what transforms a single 2022 breakthrough into real, replicable science — proof that the Sun-like reaction can be coaxed out of a frozen hydrogen pellet on Earth, again and again. Momentum is building beyond the lab, too, with more than $6 billion now invested in fusion worldwide and governments at COP28 agreeing to speed things along. The road from a boiled kettle’s worth of energy to a clean-powered grid is still long, but the hardest physics is finally behind us.

Uruguayan flag, for article on Uruguay renewable electricity

Uruguay now generates more than 90% of its electricity from renewables

By / / Good News For Humankind

Uruguay now generates between 90% and 98% of its electricity from renewables, a shift it pulled off in roughly 15 years after starting out almost entirely dependent on imported oil. The turning point came in 2008, when an oil price spike pushed the government to take a chance on a nuclear physicist with an unconventional pitch: skip the nuclear plant, go all in on wind. About 50 wind farms later, paired with existing hydropower, the country had one of the cleanest grids on Earth — and around 50,000 new jobs in a nation of just 3.4 million. Uruguay’s quiet experiment offers something the global energy transition badly needs: proof that a small country, starting from scratch, can actually do this.

Air pollution from industrial faciliity

MIT scientists discover how to convert CO2 into powder that can be stored for decades

By / / Good news links

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exposed CO2 to catalysts and then electrolysis that turns the gas into a powder called sodium formate, which can be safely stored for decades. The breakthrough follows an almost century-long effort to turn CO2 into a cheap, clean fuel. Researchers have previously turned CO2 into fuels that required too much energy to make or were difficult to store long-term.

Car exhaust|Traffic on a bridge

Canada to end sales of gas-powered cars by 2035

By / / Good news links

Under the new rules, electric or hydrogen-powered cars will account for 20% of new sales by 2026, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2035. The rules mirror similar 2035 phase-out mandates in China, South Korea, the U.K. and several U.S. states, including California, New York, and Massachusetts.