India has famously doubled its wild tiger population in just over a decade, rising from an estimated 1,706 wild tigers in 2010 to an estimated 3,682 in 2022 (around 75% of all wild tigers on Earth). An epic achievement, particularly impressive given their simultaneous human development surge of rapid population and economic growth! Now, India is also fast becoming a world leader in building wildlife crossings to ensure that human infrastructure doesn't block habitat connectivity, with deployments on an unprecedented landscape-wide scale! India is now home to the world's 10 largest wildlife overpasses and underpasses, all built since 2017. A corridors and connectivity strategy is working to stitch tiger reserves into larger-scale landscapes ensuring diffusion and genetic diversity, from the spreading Terai Arc in the north to the Western Ghats in the south.
And the new Delhi-Dehradun Expressway has an epic twelve-kilometer wildlife underpass (the whole road is on stilts for miles!) that has already been used by leopards and elephants since it opened in April 2026 and may yet open up a whole new forest to tiger recolonization if (when!) tigers choose to cross. India is prioritizing and investing in wildlife coexistence at an unprecedentedly early stage in its development history — when the people of Europe, America, or China were in comparable economic growth stages, their megafauna were vanishing, not reviving. Awesome work, India!
Just two years after its launch, India’s nationwide PM Surya Ghar program has now helped fund rooftop and çommunity small-scale solar installation for over 5 million households (fifty lakh in India’s traditional numbering). That’s a cumulative 14.6 GW (14,600 MW) of distributed clean capacity! Over 232,000 people have received related training, and the pace of adoption is accelerating fast, with July 2026 hitting a record-high 506,000 new household installations, or about 16,328 per day. That’s more than triple the pace just nine months ago, meaning that Surya Ghar is now bringing rooftop solar to about 100,000 new households every six days! And there’s lots of room to grow, as India has over 1.4 billion people and around 300 million households. Excellent news!
Chinese eVTOL startup AutoFlight has successfully demonstrated one of their all-electric flying cars in Astana, capital city of Kazakhstan. It remained on display for the recent “Games of the Future” event in the country, and efforts are underway to systemically roll out electric urban air mobility in Kazakhstan. eVTOLs are spreading!
The Xokleng indigenous people of southern coastal Brazil (so the Atlantic Forest bioregion, not the Amazon) are restoring the critically endangered Brazilian pine tree (Araucaria angustifolia) on their territory! The community has now planted almost 100,000 seedlings across 1,000 hectares, restoring a species that produces pine nuts eaten by 22 local animals. Awesome work!
An experimental project in Minas Gerais state, recently equipped with a $3 billion investment and over 200 researchers, is working to commercialize a more sustainable jet fuel made from the oil-rich fruit of the macauba palm tree. Macauba plantations are growing, with a first harvest set for 2030, and biorefineries are under construction. Critically, it grows on degraded pasture land unsuitable for grain production (and it’s highly drought-resistant), thus avoiding the harmful competition for land with vital food production that has long bedeviled our civilization’s so-far-disappointing biofuel efforts (like the majorly harmful 2000s-era ethanol craze). As with all biofuels, burning macauba jet fuel would still releases carbon dioxide, but it’s carbon recently cycled in from the air via photosynthesis as opposed to unlocking more ancient fossil carbon. A potentially very promising new initiative!
The Hydra solar/battery project has opened in the Northern Cape province of South Africa! With 216 MW of solar plus 500 MWh of battery storage, it’s the largest-yet single-site solar-plus-battery project in all of Africa (for now!) and will supply 200,000 households. Awesome!
Over the last 15 years, 196 individual Sumatran orangutans have been rewilded in the formerly orangutan-less Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve in the Aceh region of Sumatra, Indonesia. All 196 were either rescued from the illegal wildlife trade or relocated from an area where they had come into conflict with human farmers or loggers. This second-chance rewilding project is thriving, with at least 10 baby orangutans (possibly more!) already born to the Jantho ape colonists. Superb work!
The government of Indonesia has officially launched its world-historically ambitious “100 gigawatts of new solar” program! The official goal is to build 80 GW (80,000 MW) of distributed small-scale solar plus 320 GWh of battery storage across 80,000 rural villages, plus 20 GW of larger grid-scale solar farms. For context, Indonesia had about 1.49 GW (1,490 MW) of solar nationwide in 2025. If even a fraction of the new 100 GW can get built, it’ll be a world-leading electrification victory! Superb news.
Four African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus, aka painted wolves) were recently spotted in Kasungu National Park, Malawi, the first of their species in the park for over ten years. They seem to have travelled 300 kilometers from their last known location in Zambia, perhaps attracted by the renewed populations of prey species after the reintroduction of impala and warthog to Kasungu in 2022. A win for connectivity, rewilding, and natural return!
A research team at the Technical University of Munich in Germany have invented a new solar-powered modular system that turns carbon dioxide and hydrogen into amino acids, the molecular building blocks of proteins. The electricity is used to convert hydrogen plus CO₂ into methanol (CH₃OH), a common chemical precursor, after which a cocktail of enzymes can convert the methanol to a growing list of amino acids (now seven). It’s at low-volume lab experiment scale right now, but this may someday become another new “alternative to photosynthesis” ultra-resilient sustainable food production tactic, joining Solar Foods’ cellular agriculture. Fascinating work!
Chinese electrotech giant Gotion is now finalizing a new lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) EV and grid battery factory in Kenitra, Morocco. It’s set to start production by the end of the summer and scale up to making 10 gigawatt-hours of battery capacity per year, meaning that it’s the largest-yet battery factory (and first-ever gigawatt-scale “gigafactory”) on the entire continent of Africa! Electrotech-making keeps spreading.
Within the extremely remote and staggeringly biodiversity-rich Torricelli Mountains region of Papua New Guinea, 266 clan leaders from 41 villages have just signed a new legally binding conservation deed agreement. Renewable every five years, it covers 125,000 hectares of land (bigger than New York City!) and completely bans commercial logging, mining, and hunting of certain unique and threatened endemic local animals like the critically endangered tenkile and weimang species of tree kangaroo! The conservation groups coordinating this new deed have also introduced water tanks, metal roofs, and solar-powered street and household lighting to the area.
As I’ve previously reported, this is a very special place and we’re only just learning how important it really is. A recent study calculated that the Torricelli Mountains are among the 1% of land on the planet able to prevent the most extinctions in the next 100 years if they become a protected area. Furthermore, informal early calculations suggest that the Torricellis might be home to as much as 4% of Earth’s biodiversity on 0.003% of its land area! This conservation deed is absolutely spectacular progress!
Despite the grotesque gaggle of grifting gangsters in the White House, ordinary people across America keep fighting every day to build a better, brighter future!
Throughout the month of May 2026, the great state of California got a record-breaking 51% of all its electricity generation, including both on-grid and off-grid, from solar power! It's America's and the world's largest economy yet to cross the 50% solar threshold. This has been made possible thanks to the epic Californian battery build-out: battery storage in the Golden State grew by a whopping 26,129% (not a typo!) from 2016 to 2026. A majority electrotech-powered society is here NOW in America, advancing every day! This is a real “we won” moment. SPECTACULAR news!
In October 2026, Tampa General Hospital in Florida will launch America’s first pre-hospital drone blood delivery program, sending whole blood transfusions to emergency responders on the scene of severe blood loss incidents. It will deliver anywhere in Hillsborough County with an average of three minutes flight time!
Check out my reporting from a blood-delivering medical drone base in Rwanda!
Construction has begun on the Big Rooster solar farm on historic coal mining land in central Texas! When complete in 2029, it will include 1.2 gigawatts of solar power, 1.6 gigawatt-hours (1,600 megawatt-hours) of battery storage, and 20 miles of new transmission lines - among the largest renewables projects in America, and the largest yet on a former fossil fuel “brownfield” site! Superb.
Construction has been completed on the 500 megawatt-hour Old 300 Storage grid-scale battery project in Needville, also in central Texas! It’s colocated with a pre-existing 430 MW solar farm. Electrotech just keeps quietly taking over America’s grid!
Popular New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has implemented a sweeping new permitting reform package to make life easier for small businesses, including 50 measures eliminating or reducing a wide range of onerous licensing and paperwork requirements for everything from florists to ice cream vendors. A great example of the emerging “socialist Abundance” or “progressive deregulation” policy philosophy that this writer strongly advocates for in the field of clean energy!
Updated statistics confirm that the fast-growing all-electric driverless taxi fleet of Waymo remains substantially safer than human drivers. A new Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study found that per vehicle mile traveled, Waymo's current deployments across Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin are involved in a whopping 68% fewer crashes than human drivers! I’ve long advocated for allowing Waymo expansion: here's an action to send to your city!
Friend of the newsletter Amanda Royal has launched Hopescroll.earth, a new website aggregating positive environmental news!
The New York Bight between Long Island and New Jersey is fast becoming a major feeding ground for rebounding populations of humpback, fin, and minke whales, as well as common dolphins. All four species are feeding on newly abundant schools of small fish after years of water cleanup efforts and fishery regulation reforms, and the bubble-feeding humpbacks often arrive here alongside new baby calves. The seas off the Big Apple are increasingly a showcase of human/cetacean coexistence. Great news!
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