Tag Archives: energy

December 2025 in Review

2025 is in the books! I covered a number of “best of” posts by others in December so I will highlight a few of those below. I still have some “best of” posts queued up so they will continue to roll out in January.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global progress on poverty reduction stalled around 2020. Gains in Asia are offset by losses in Africa. Meanwhile, gains in crop yields may have plateaued and are expected to decline as climate change drives increasingly extreme weather.

Most hopeful story: From Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions in the US and most developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Global internal combustion engine vehicles peaked around 2018, while electric vehicle sales are rising. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially as costs of existing technology fall, and there are some promising advances in materials science that could improve wind turbines and batteries. There is hope for fusion power, although it still seems to be the proverbial two decades away.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: BBC lists 25 most important scientific ideas of the 21st century. Highlights include various genetic technologies (stem cells that don’t come from babies, mRNA vaccines, tissue engineering for human organ transplants), attribution analysis, and of course large language models. Science magazine echoes some of these and adds gene editing, new antibiotics, and progress on heat-resistant rice strains as 2025 breakthroughs.

what’s new with fusion?

One thing that’s new, according to the New York Times, is massive investment in R&D by the government of China. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s more about startups and public-private partnerships. In at least one anecdotal case mentioned in the article, top scientists from China who have been based at top U.S. universities for decades are choosing to go home. The article suggests that American firms are often the first to achieve breakthroughs, but the Chinese system is better at scaling and commercializing them.

It seems like there is an opportunity to cooperate for the greater good here, no? That is not the way the political winds are blowing at the moment, of course. At least in this case, if our countries aren’t actually cooperating, they are not competing to weaponize the technology first. This technology was weaponized more than half a century ago, of course, and the quest ever since has been to learn how to control it for peaceful purposes. Of course, the joke is always that commercial fusion is two decades away, no matter what decade we are currently in. This article declines to give a clear time table for widespread commercialization, but it talks about a “pilot plant in the 2030s and 2040s”, so yep the rolling two decade projection seems to be holding.

Our World in Data 2025 Roundup

There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.

  1. Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
  2. Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
  3. Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
  4. Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
  5. Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
  6. The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
  7. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.

November 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Wait, I actually had trouble coming up with a frightening or depressing story this month! It’s not because I was in a particularly good mood. Okay, I’ll go with all the terrible things identified in Project Censored’s yearly roundup of terrible things. These include PFAS, melting ice sheets, police violence, and the generally sorry state of the Native American community.

Most hopeful story: RENEWABLE ENERGY IS NOW CHEAPER THAN FOSSIL FUELS, AND ANYBODY WHO CLAIMS OTHERWISE IS EITHER MISINFORMED OR LYING. Note I said “misinformed”, because I try to be nice and “ignorant” is not a nice word. But they are synonyms. Despite the propaganda coming from the U.S. fossil fuel industry, government, and press, the renewable energy transition is happening and the fossil fuel stranded assets problem (for that industry) is real. Speaking of propaganda, Noam Chomsky is 96, still writing, and surer than ever that people don’t want war and only acquiesce to it because of the propaganda machine.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Tyranny of Small Decisions posits that many small but well-intentioned decisions made at inappropriately low levels within an organization can cause it to stray from its mission.

October 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!

Most hopeful story: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I mused about what it was like to be a child in the distant past of novels I have read, during my own youth, for my own children today, and for young adults I have interacted recently. We hear children are “anxious” and experiencing various crises, and I am not denying there is hard evidence of this, but with my own eyes I also see kids being somewhat safer, kinder, and gentler to each other than in the past. I hope it is possible to mitigate some of the negative effects of technology and other negative influences on kids today while also building on the positive trends.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It

Charlie Stross continues to rant about renewable energy and fascism

Yes, Charlie Stross continues to rant, enjoyably and correctly, in my view. I’ll share a brief quote and then encourage you to read his long post. And I’m still bothered by the idea that he is 61 and “never expected to get to be this old”. That is not that old, dude! Possibly I feel that way because it is not all that much older than I am! And I am not yet ready to concede that I am old.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

The idea of fossil fuels as “stranded assets” has faded from the US press, but he is surer than ever. And I think he is right, and it is industry and political propaganda (which are, of course, one thing at the moment, or maybe always one thing but different industries get the upper hand depending on the politics) that is hiding this fact from us here in the United States, which is rapidly downshifting to developing country status relative to the world’s most advanced countries.

Spain’s “solar power meltdown”?

This article in (paywalled) Financial Times is called “The Story Behind Spain’s Solar Power Meltdown”. But the “meltdown” turns out to be in the price of solar power following an extraordinarily successful implementation effort. So maybe it’s a meltdown for some corporations and their investors who created too much capacity in the short term, but it has resulted in abundant renewable energy, which has to be good for the long term.

The other issue apparently is that Spain and its electrical industry did not invest enough in their electric grid and storage capacity at the same time they invested in all this supply, and that has also caused issues. Recent blackouts have been blamed on solar power, whether that is really fair or not (this article says mostly no).

Spain may be sunnier than many parts of the US, but certainly not the desert southwest. I think the lesson here is that solar supply probably doesn’t need government subsidies any more to take off. It may need a level playing field, in other words dirtier, less efficient fossil fuels not to be unfairly subsidized with our taxpayer money while propaganda convinces us the opposite is happening. But the grid, vehicle charging, and storage infrastructure seems like it still needs government help to get over the hump. That is not where the political winds are blowing at the moment, but political winds eventually shift in the face of overwhelming economic forces. Just check in with the coal industry on that one.

positive tipping points

This paper identifies a number of “positive tipping points” on climate change that can help counteract the risk of reaching negative tipping points such as glacier melting and methane release. They identify the shift to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, and heat pumps for heating and cooling buildings. These seem very market- and consumer-driven to me. So these are feedback loops that have been gathering some steam, and maybe governments can do relatively small things to reinforce them in the hopes of getting them to a takeoff point where they are self-sustaining and able to counteract the negative feedback loops that are out there. It is somewhat heartening to realize that the renewable energy and electric vehicle revolutions are farther along outside the US than inside, and we are not getting this impression I believe because of effective oil and gas industry propaganda here. Because those companies and their lobbyists understand these positive feedback loops too, and they are evil or at least amoral in the pursuit of short term profit at the long term expense of human civilization on Earth.

From what I understand (outside this article), adoption of heat pumps and building electrification is farther along in the U.S. than elsewhere. This is interesting – how did we manage to move away from heating buildings with coal, oil, and gas directly decades ago if this decreased the profits of the all-powerful fossil fuel industry? Were they just asleep at the switch, or were the economic incentives just that strong? Is it because we made the choice to fund electric infrastructure through a decentralized, regulated electric utility industry? And once we built that infrastructure, the economic incentives became too strong to resist. Whereas we have not built the infrastructure to support the electric vehicle transition, and the fossil fuel/automobile/highway construction industry is successfully fighting that tooth and nail through propaganda and (legalized, by our corrupt Supreme Court) political corruption. (Remember that currently, highway construction has dedicated funding from gas taxes. And auto dealerships make more money from servicing and repairing fossil fuel powered vehicles than they do from selling them.)

Note the oil and gas industry could have been decentralized and regulated too, that is just not the path we went down a century or so ago. It’s too late for this, but economic incentives are going to push in the direction of building the charging infrastructure, because it is just a better, cleaner, and cheaper way to get around overall. So by pushing for this policy, however strongly and effectively the forces of darkness have been pushing against it lately, we are working to reinforce a positive feedback loop that can eventually tip and become irreversible.

I know, a lot of electricity is still generated with fossil fuels at this point. It is still more efficient from what I understand. And slowly but surely, renewables are chipping away. Add modernized nuclear technology to this mix, like the small modular reactors, and keep pushing toward that longer-term dream of fusion power.

electrification in China, US, EU

Here’s an interesting stat from OilPrice.com:

According to a study, China’s electrification rate has hit 30%, significantly ahead of the U.S. and the EU and US where the electrification rate has plateaued at ~22% in recent years.

The study defines the electrification rate as the share of electricity in final energy consumption versus energy coming from fossil fuels. According to the study, the U.S. still leads the world in the electrification of buildings; however, China recently caught up to the U.S. and Europe in industrial electrification, and has overtaken both in the electrification of transport. In 2024, electric vehicles (EVs) made up approximately 47.9% of the total passenger car sales in China, a huge increase from 2020, when plug-in EVs accounted for just 6.3% of total sales. In comparison, electric vehicles accounted for less than 23% of new car sales in Europe over the timeframe.

I’m all in on electrification. For one thing, it reduces air pollution and carbon emissions even with our current energy supply mix, as I understand it. But it also allows us to substitute cleaner fuels for electric generation over time, starting with natural gas for coal and oil, and moving towards nuclear, renewables, and as an aspirational goal, maybe even fusion.

I’m not surprised the US is lagging on electrifying transportation, because the oil, auto, and highway lobbies are politically powerful and have money at stake. The regulated electric utility and nuclear industries don’t have the same political pull. (There is no particular reason oil couldn’t have been a regulated public utility.) It surprises me a little that the US and Europe are at the same level.

January 2025 in Review

Well, January was a doozy. Here goes:

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.

Most hopeful story: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: AI agents – coming soon to a computer near you.