good news
Reimagining energy: The rise of free solar power
A solar revolution is underway, with experts predicting that by 2030, solar power could be effectively free during daylight hours in many regions.
In short:
- Solar energy capacity saw an 80% increase in 2023, now providing nearly 6% of global electricity, with expectations to become the dominant source by the 2030s.
- The cost of solar panels has dropped dramatically, making solar the cheapest new electricity source for 95% of the world.
- The future may bring industries that adjust operations based on solar availability, with a growing focus on energy storage and transmission.
Key quote:
“The next tenfold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.”
— The Economist
Why this matters:
With fewer fossil fuels being burned, we could see a dramatic drop in pollution-related illnesses, cleaner air, and a significant cut in carbon emissions. The challenge now is to figure out how to harness this potential. Read more: Solving the climate crisis requires more than switching to renewables—everyone needs equal access.
Harris could redefine climate leadership in 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris' entry into the presidential race has ignited hope among environmentalists that her administration could push climate action further than President Biden’s, particularly by holding Big Oil accountable and addressing historic injustices.
In short:
- Harris has a history of challenging the oil industry and supporting environmental justice, making her a strong contender for advancing climate policies.
- Her choice of running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, strengthens her climate credentials, especially given his success in making Minnesota carbon-free by 2040.
- Despite skepticism from the Trump campaign, Harris’ focus on real-world benefits and her ability to communicate climate issues resonate with many voters.
Key quote:
She has a record of "making sure that Black and brown and low-income communities aren’t disproportionately impacted by corporate pollution."
— Kaniela Ing, national director of The Green New Deal Network
Why this matters:
While she’s likely to continue Biden's pragmatic approach, Kamala Harris's history as a prosecutor and a champion for justice could bring a fresh perspective to the fight against climate change. Read more: Robbie Parks on climate justice and mental health.
A Michigan court ruling may reshape how animal waste is regulated
A recent Michigan Supreme Court decision could drastically change how the state — and possibly others — regulates pollution from industrial animal farms.
Keith Schneider reports for Circle of Blue and The New Lede.
In short:
- Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) now has the authority to enforce stricter manure management practices for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
- The ruling is seen as a significant win for environmental advocates, who hope it will set a precedent for stronger regulations nationwide.
- CAFO waste, which contains harmful chemicals and bacteria, has been a major source of water pollution in Michigan and other states.
Key quote:
"This is a rare win for water protection."
— Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council
Why this matters:
With this ruling, there’s hope that we might finally see a shift toward more sustainable and responsible farming practices that protect both our environment and our health. It's a win for clean water, and a wake-up call for an industry that’s been polluting unchecked for far too long.
Read more: Peak Pig: Our series on the fight for the soul of rural America
Sweden shows how to slash emissions while boosting the economy
Sweden has managed to cut 80% of its emissions since 1990 while doubling its economy, proving that economic growth and climate protection can go hand in hand.
In short:
- Sweden's success comes from early investments in renewable energy, utilizing its natural resources like forests and hydropower.
- The country transitioned away from fossil fuels for heating and electricity, with biofuels now powering 97% of heating.
- Strong government policies, including a high carbon tax, incentivized businesses and citizens to adopt greener practices.
Key quote:
"The biggest lesson is that you need close cooperation between government, private sector, and the local government as well to really develop these system solutions together and take risks, make these big long-term investments."
— Asa Persson, advisor to the Swedish government on climate policy.
Why this matters:
By investing in green tech, enforcing strict environmental regulations and pushing for a circular economy where waste becomes a resource, Sweden is showing the world that you don’t have to choose between a healthy planet and a thriving economy. Read more: Steps to re-invigorate the economy must free us from polluting fossil fuels.
Care for endangered seabirds continues amid a 51-year legacy of optimism
“There is this idea of healing the Earth ... perhaps there’s something about this project that captured that."
Steve Kress’s smile lit up the dusk as research assistants at least 50 years younger than him regaled him with tales of their vigilance to save tern chicks on Stratton Island, Maine.
For an hour, all talk centered around a mortal enemy of tern chicks: the black-crowned night heron. The latter is a beautiful, stocky wetland bird with glowing red eyes and two delicate white plumes shooting out the back of its head. A nocturnal hunter, lucky photographers can catch it at dusk or dawn along rivers and ponds snapping fish out of the water in a split second.
The black-crowned night heron, which hunts tern chicks as well as fish, keeps Audubon Seabird Institute researchers on edge on Stratton Island, Maine.
Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson
Stratton Island is three miles out to sea from Orchard Beach, Maine. The Audubon Seabird Institute, formerly known as Project Puffin, began restoring terns here in the 1980s. Kress founded the project in 1973.
On this island, in the dead of the night, the heron has other prey on the menu. It includes a precious colony of least terns, the smallest tern in the world, with a striking black cap and bright yellow bill. The tern was nearly wiped out on the East Coast in the late 19th century for hat feathers.
Despite their recovery from that slaughter —a recovery aided by the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty—least terns are listed today as an endangered bird in Maine. It nests on sandy beaches, which often puts it in competition with human development and recreation. That fragility makes it critical to keep herons out of tern colonies as one heron can kill many chicks in hours. In 2022, just 14 chicks fledged out of 91 nests on Stratton. Last year, maybe four chicks survived to fledge off Stratton.
The team of Ben Becker, Kay Garlick-Ott, Tiffany Christian, Ellie Bretscher, Katelyn Shelton, and Joe Sweeney told Kress they are always “on edge” for the heron attacks and do everything possible to scare off herons. They use lights and lasers and make every kind of noise possible with bangers, screamers, and pot banging.
Kress chimed in that crews have also tried (in vain) to use a mannequin to startle the herons. There was one researcher years ago who dressed up as the action film character Rambo to hunt a heron that was terrorizing chicks. Another attempt to use lights to see herons resulted in federal authorities roaring out to Stratton in a boat, on a tip that it was a landing strip for drug runners.
Sadly, right after this visit, a heron evaded the crew and unleashed another lethal attack, reducing the number of least tern chicks from more than 60 to less than 20. The moment was symbolic of how Kress’s original vision for Project Puffin evolved dramatically over the years.
Protecting tern chicks from predators and other threats
A least tern and its chick on Stratton Island, Maine.
Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson
All Kress had wanted to do a half-century ago was restore just one species, the Atlantic puffin, to Eastern Egg Rock, one small island off the coast of Maine. Puffins were hunted off nearly every island in Maine in the 1880s. Kress hoped that once he re-established the bird, with chicks translocated from Canada, it could maintain itself and that would be the end of the project.
He came to realize that breeding puffins and eventually other birds, such as terns, requires people to guard them for the entire 3 to 4 months of their breeding season. Whatever the ecosystem was centuries ago that allowed puffins and terns to thrive in Maine, now there are just too many threats. Some threats are other birds that thrive thanks to major conservation victories. For example, herring gulls, which also were slaughtered for hat feathers, recovered with the 1918 treaty. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are flourishing again after the 1972 banning of the pesticide DDT. Other threats are tied to human sloppiness: Gulls went beyond recovery to crowding out other birds on Maine islands, boosted by banquets of coastal landfills and fishing waste.
It may all be part of a larger struggle of birds competing for dwindling habitat in the face of development, climate change, pesticides, industrial agriculture, and pollution. A 2019 study in the journal Science found that North America has lost more than a quarter of its bird population since 1970; there are nearly 3 billion birds less than there used to be.
“I had no idea we would face this complexity of the ongoing need for management,” Kress said. “It’s a myth that islands are separate from everything else. We can’t walk away from [the restorations], or they would eventually unravel.”
Passing on the torch at Project Puffin
A murre, restored to Maine by Project Puffin, joins a group of puffins off the coast of Maine.
Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson
They have not unraveled. The project has had at least 700 research assistants. At 28 years old, Becker, Garlick-Ott, and Christian are the same age that Kress (now 78) and his colleagues were when they started Project Puffin 51 years ago. The half-century age gap punctuates the success of Kress effectively sharing his vision with young researchers and entrusting them to carry out the mission. (That is exceedingly elusive in other spheres. For example, a 2008 Harvard Business School paper estimated that 4 of every 5 founders or co-founders are eventually forced out as CEOs. The long list includes founders or co-founders of Apple, JetBlue, Tesla, Zipcar, Twitter, Uber, PayPal, OpenAI, and Yahoo!.)
“It’s a myth that islands are separate from everything else. We can’t walk away from [the restorations], or they would eventually unravel.” - Steve Kress
As Kress’s co-author and photographer on two books about Project Puffin, this aspect, the passing on of the founder’s torch, has enthralled me as much as the birds. Garlick-Ott, a former island supervisor who studies tern aggression on Stratton for her doctorate at the University of California Davis, said, “You get a quick sense that the torch is constantly being passed. It’s empowering and humbling at the same time. I feel like I have a purpose and a place in this project. When I became a supervisor, I wanted so badly to do what my supervisor did. I really wanted to be like her.”
Keenan Yakola, 31, is in his 11th summer with Project Puffin and the Seabird Institute. A former island supervisor and now a doctoral student at Oregon State University, he leads the GPS tagging of puffins, terns, and storm petrels to study where they feed. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming seas on Earth. He hopes the tracking will indicate how seabirds adapt to ocean heatwaves and help offshore wind developers site facilities to avoid conflict with birds.
Yakola said he learned early on that Project Puffin patiently welcomed innovation by college-age assistants. Perhaps that was because Kress himself almost did not get the chance to restore puffins. At first, a top Canadian official balked at the idea that Newfoundland puffin chicks would return to Maine as adults. Even after getting permission, it took eight years until Kress, then an Audubon camp bird instructor, reestablished puffin breeding on Eastern Egg Rock. His first artificial burrows for chicks were too hot or they flooded. The puffin chicks he raised in 1973 and 1974 disappeared into the Atlantic, never to be seen again.
“My first summer on the project, I didn’t feel I had a particular contribution to make other than to be a good intern and collect data,” Yakola said. “I just thought it was cool being with birds. But when I asked about analyzing diet data for my undergraduate thesis [at the University of Massachusetts Amherst], Paula [Shannon, the institute’s seabird sanctuary manager)] simply said, ‘Yeah, sure. Just ask Steve.’”
Shannon, 48, a former island supervisor who first began working with the project in 2002 and co-authored a 2016 paper with Kress showing how puffin diet was changing with the warming Gulf of Maine, seconded Yakola. She talked about how crews kept repositioning common murre decoys on Matinicus Rock until the first egg in more than a century was laid on that island in 2009. A cousin of the puffin, common murres, were also hunted in the 1800s until there were no breeding pairs left in Maine. Last year, a dozen murre chicks fledged off Matinicus Rock.
Kress once asked Shannon and others a question about an extinct bird.
“What would you do if a Great Auk showed up with the puffins?” he said.
She laughed and replied to him, “We’d probably take a picture and send the bird on its way because no one would believe us.” The question was both in jest and a suggestion that trying new things can have unforeseen victories in science.
The Great Auk indeed will never come back, but Kress’s restoration of puffins and murre have helped conservationists all over the world bring back seabirds from the brink of extinction. One or more of the methods used by Project Puffin, such as the translocation of chicks, decoys, taped bird calls, and mirrors, have now been used in more than 850 projects in 36 countries to restore (or relocate from danger or competition with other animals), 138 seabird species. Some restored species were thought to be extinct, such as the Chinese crested tern.
Sue Schubel, 62, has been associated with the project for most of the last 40 years. In 1996, she advised the placing of murre decoys, mirrors, and recorded calls atop a northern California sea stack. A colony of 2,900 breeding murre had been wiped out by an oil spill a decade earlier. The day after decoys were installed, murres returned and began breeding again.
Affectionately known as Seabird Sue, current research assistants say they are inspired by her ceaseless energy. She is an assistant sanctuary manager, decoy project manager, a logistics expert for all the boats that get crews, provisions and gear on and off the islands, public educator, and artist. When she first joined the project, she herself fed off the sense that “everybody was willing to do everything for the birds.”
A culture of caring for the birds, for each other
Kress and Schubel came out to Eastern Egg Rock this summer to see what has become of his original project island. The crew of supervisor Theresa Rizza, 28, and assistants Arden Kelly, 25, Coco Deng, 19, Camryn Zoeller, 20, and Anson Tse, 27, said they know they are in a special world.
“This is an island and project of hope,” Zoeller said. “The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.”
Rizza added, “The puffins are proof that as long as someone wants to try, good things can happen.”
Arden said, “You really see the can see the passion that is still in their eyes. You want to be your own Steve Kress.”
(Left to right, top row) Stratton Island supervisor Ben Becker, Project Puffin founder Steve Kress, former Eastern Egg Rock supervisor Kay Garlick-Ott, and research assistant Joe Sweeney. (Left to right, bottom row) Research assistants Katelyn Shelton, Tiffany Christian and Ellie Bretscher.
Credit: Derrick Z. Jackson
The sentiments were echoed 32 miles away in the Gulf of Maine out on Seal Island, another island where puffins were restored after a century’s absence. The crew there consisted of supervisor Coco Faber, 30, and assistants Amiel Hopkins, 19, Liv Ridley, 26, Reed Robinson, 19, and Nacho Gutierrez, 24.
“This is an island and project of hope. The fact that this project is a success is a reason to not get distraught about all the destruction all around us.” — Camryn Zoeller
Faber, in her ninth summer with the project, has seen some of the most volatile years of boom and bust for seabirds with the warming Gulf of Maine. “With climate change, the threats feel so amorphous and big, it’s hard to know where to go,” she said. “There are no more normal years. I now wonder every summer, what am I going to witness. When I [feel] down, I think of Steve and all his optimism, and how he threw spaghetti at the wall to bring these birds back.”
Ridley added, “They say one person can only do so much,” Ridley said, “But here, with [Kress’s] legacy you know you’re carrying on. You’re inspired to say I’m going to give my life to seabirds.”
Kress retired from the project in 2019, handing it over to Don Lyons, a tern researcher from Oregon State. Lyons said Kress left behind “community and continuity” that he could not find a comparison to.
“Steve is very focused on thanking people for their contributions,” Lyons, 59, said. “That includes a new researcher who lugged a boat up onto rocks or other seemingly menial tasks like data entry. It makes people feel valuable.”
So valuable that back on Stratton Island, Tiffany Christian, who lives the rest of the year in the Chicago area and is in her first summer on a Maine research island, said the magic of being surrounded by seabirds on an island was like being in “an ornate castle built in the sky.” She said the project’s legacy and the camaraderie “gives me a new awareness of what I want to do in the future.”
Kress himself said he did not intentionally set out to pass on a culture of such caring, but as it turns out, he looks at that culture as the “greatest hope” for seabirds. “Wherever I go, China, Ecuador, I see the same type of person,” he said. “There is this idea of healing the Earth. I sure didn’t create that, but perhaps there’s something about this project that captured that.
“It helps that this project is such a conspicuous success that people are today surrounded by come-back birds, baby birds, all this life. I hope that future generations of seabird stewards continue this amazing story. You can’t avoid the feel-good part of it. I don’t need to say anything. The birds constantly remind the researchers that they are part of a miracle.”
Read more about Puffin Island and the efforts to save seabirds in Maine here and here.
This post originally ran on The Union of Concerned Scientists blog and is republished here with permission.
How to save money and fight food waste
A new generation of apps is rescuing perfectly good food from landfills, making it available at a fraction of the retail price at restaurants and grocery stores.
In short:
- Food waste apps like Flashfood and Too Good To Go connect users to surplus food from grocery stores and restaurants.
- These apps help reduce the 2.5 million tons of food waste retailers discard annually, benefiting both the environment and consumers.
- By purchasing discounted surplus food, users can save money and access healthier food options.
Key quote:
“It feels like they are spreading like wildfire. I love the model because at least some of the food would literally have been thrown out a day later. It really is saving it from the garbage.”
— Dana Gunders, ReFED
Why this matters:
These digital do-gooders save money and so much more. Reducing food waste can cut global CO2 emissions and provide affordable, nutritious food options, particularly benefiting low-income families struggling with the high cost of healthy eating. Read more: New White House strategy backs food rescue efforts but more is needed to fight hunger and waste.
Harris taps Minnesota Governor Walz as her vice-presidential pick
Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, highlighting his strong climate change record and appeal to working-class voters.
In short:
- Governor Walz is known for his environmental initiatives, such as Minnesota’s push for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 and stricter vehicle emissions standards.
- Climate advocates, including the Sunrise Movement and Sierra Club, praised Walz for his leadership on clean energy and efforts to create safer communities.
- Walz’s folksy style and commitment to progressive causes like climate change make him a strategic choice to unify and energize Democratic voters.
Key quote:
“He gets that climate action isn’t about politics, it’s about protecting our small towns and cities. It’s about creating safer and healthier communities for our kids and grandkids.”
— Gina McCarthy, former EPA Administrator
Why this matters:
Walz stands out as a candidate who can bring a much-needed focus on environmental issues to the national stage. His blend of environmental advocacy and practical policymaking could provide a strong foundation for the administration's climate initiatives, making him a natural ally for Harris and a hopeful choice for climate advocates nationwide. Read more: Minnesota enacts nation’s broadest ban of “forever chemicals.”