Fighting Environmental Despair

As long as there are people living on this earth, as long as there is a single patch of forest or a single coral reef, this fight will be worth fighting. No matter the odds, hope is the only way forward.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Welcome to Hope for the Planet!

Other places you can follow Hope for the Planet: •Bluesky ([email protected]) •Substack (in progress)

Ask Information, FAQs, and Resources Below the Cut!

A Couple Notes About Asks…

•I get A Lot of asks—in order to not burn out on this blog, I have to accept that I can’t answer all of them or always answer in a timely manner

•If you send me a kind message or a thank you, please know that I deeply treasure each and every one of these messages, even if I don’t post it <3

•Submissions of good environmental news are always welcome!

I Will Not Answer or Post the Following Asks...

•Anything with an explicit, specific call to action (ex. a link asking to donate, sign a petition, support something specific, etc.)—that is outside the scope of this blog and I don’t have the bandwidth to vet these kind of requests or evaluate which ones are most important to post

•Usually asks that are not about environmental-related issues (I very occasionally make exceptions). There are limits to what I can speak knowledgeably about and I feel I can make a bigger difference by focusing on issues related to my field and knowledge-base.

•Doomerism asks or asks that seem to want me to argue against their claims that everything is actually hopeless and we are all doomed. This whole blog is my evidence against that. (This does not apply to folks asking for hopeful news about a specific issue or expressing fears! But if you come here demanding me to refute your argument or a list of negative claims I am not here for that!)

FAQs

Do you think saying optimistic things about climate change will make people less likely to take action?

No, I think hope usually makes people more likely to take action. People have a limit on how much mental distress they can tolerate before they start to tune something out through denial or distraction or just shutting down. If you believe the odds are hopeless and no one else cares, why would you believe you have the agency to take action or make a difference?

I get lots of asks from people telling me that reading this blog motivated them to actually get involved with an environmental cause or in some cases even pivot their future career goals. Or that this blog was the tether that helped them pull out of a mental health spiral. Dr. Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data has said that doomerism almost drove her to leave the climate change field when she was first starting her career, which would have removed all her massive contributions.

Hope is not the same as blind optimism. Pessimism says nothing we do will make anything better, optimism says things will get better no matter what we do. Hope says that there is a path to making things better if we choose to walk it--hope demands action. It is also a much more accurate way to view the world.

Do you truly believe that there is hope?

Yes, I really really do. I don't post these things because I want to make people feel better. I post them to counteract the negativity bias both in the news and in human nature. If you only hear about or focus on the bad things, you are not getting the full accurate picture of the world you're living in or what we are up against.

Is someone paying you to say these things?

Ha! No. I get this one very occasionally and it's always both funny and sad that someone thinks I must have an ulterior motive for sharing news that accurately reflects the state of the world as flawed but not hopeless.

I've noticed that the rise of despair and doomerism has coincided with hope being seen as suspicious. That if you're not always talking about how unjust and horrible things are all the time you are somehow complicit or letting people off the hook. That celebrating partial victories or slow but significant progress is not ideologically pure because it does not fix all the suffering and societal injustice in one fell swoop.

You can't hate or torment yourself into becoming a better person, and you can't hate and misery the world into becoming better either.

Resources and more FAQs Coming Soon!

[hope-for-the-planet]

New Solar Tech Makes Desalinating Seawater Cheaper Than Producing Bottled Water

Engineering teams around the world have been attempting to develop new methods of seawater desalination.

Scientists in China have developed a more efficient form of solar desalination that uses 47.4% less energy than alternatives. After the first year of testing, the scientists believe that at scale it would be able to desalinate water more cheaply than producing bottled water.

The goal is now to scale the technology for use in coastal areas and islands experiencing water insecurity.

[hope-for-the-planet]

California is investing a half-billion dollars to decarbonize homes for low-income households

California is installing zero-emission electric appliances and energy-saving upgrades at no cost to low-income households across the state u

Under the Equitable Building Decarbonization Program, California is providing no-cost, zero-emissions appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps to low-income households. The program covers single family, multifamily, and mobile homes and also include other efficiency upgrades like smart thermostats, LED lighting, and better duct sealing and insulation.

Worth noting, is that these appliances improve not only energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions, but are also cheaper to operate and significantly improve indoor air quality.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Green Economy Hits $10 Trillion in Market Value - Inside Climate News

If the green economy—defined as the group of companies heavily involved in environmental business—were its own industry, it would be the thi

If it was considered its own industry, the green economy would be the third largest in the world.

Companies are considered part of the green economy if at least 1/5th of their income comes from environmentally focused activities. Over the last ten years, green economy companies have regularly performed about 12% better than the rest of the market.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Most Efficient Solar Module in the World — New Record - CleanTechnica

Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) is no str

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems recently broke their own previously held solar panel efficiency record with a new solar panel design with 34.4% solar module efficiency.

This won't be going to mass market anytime soon, but considering the previous record was set less than a year ago it is heartening to see how quickly solar energy tech is continuing to advance.

[hope-for-the-planet]

2026 becomes record year for leatherback sea turtle nesting at Cape Hatteras National Seashore | Island Free Press

Four leatherback sea turtle nests have been identified within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore (CHNS) during the 2026 nesting season, mar

While four leatherback sea turtle nests might not sound like a lot, it's the same number in a single year as were found in total during the ten year span between 2015-2025. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore is also on the north edge of the species' range, so leatherback sea turtle nests are already not very common in the area.

Scientists also found two green sea turtle nests and 130 loggerhead sea turtle nests during this nesting season.

[headspace-hotel]

I am learning to imagine the future:

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I am learning to imagine the future. There is a crack in the wall of this prison, of this machine, of this darkness, and through it, I see a tree.

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

today

[hope-for-the-planet]

Analysis: UK sales of electric vehicles just overtook petrol cars for the first time - Carbon Brief

For the first time in the UK, more new electric vehicles (EVs) have been sold over a 12-month period than petrol cars, according to Carbon B

For the first time ever, more electric vehicles were sold over a 12 month period in the UK than gas cars.

The takeoff in EVs is not limited to the UK, with EV sales rising this May by 39% in Germany, 83% in Italy, and 93% in France--which has weakened the position of those striving to overturn the EU's impending gas car ban.

[hope-for-the-planet]

We look at how conservation efforts in India have been pivotal to the survival of these birds.

In the early 2000s, vulture populations in Asia began to crash for no apparent reason. It was eventually discovered that a drug veterinarians used to treat cattle was highly toxic to vultures and poisoning them when they fed on cattle carcasses. The governments of India, Pakistan, and Nepal all worked to ban the toxic drug and support vulture conservation programs.

Twenty years later this is a huge conservation success story. Several Asian vulture populations that had decreased by over 99% before the ban have made huge recoveries thanks to conservation breeding centers, the creation of vulture safe zones, and stricter drug regulations.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Rooftop Solar Gave Power to Pakistan When Fossil Fuels Failed– it’s Now Called a Boom

"Pakistan serves as a great case study as to how renewables can provide a hedge against dependence on fossil fuels.”

Rooftop solar on private homes has taken off in Pakistan at an unprecedented rate. Huge swings in energy prices and an unreliable grid, combined with plunging solar panel prices, made the investment of rooftop solar an easy choice.

There are now so many rooftop solar panels in Pakistan that they make up 1/5th of the country's total energy supply--all just from regular families installing them on their own homes.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Ugandan Coffee Growers Shrug Off Drought Thanks to Regenerative Agriculture

Uganda's oldest and largest licensed coffee exporter contributed their in-country expertise to the coalition to establish "model farms."

Due to where it is typically grown, coffee farms are particularly vulnerable to damage from erosion when rain comes either too intensely or too sparsely. A coalition assembled by the Global Environment Facility set up test farms to help provide local coffee farmers in Uganda with the resources to apply regenerative agricultural techniques to their local farming conditions.

The results have led to better yields, healthier soil that is less prone to erosion, and more stable income for farmers.

“But since we applied mulches and planted drought resistant seedlings, the coffee farms are reliably resilient. My coffee is stronger and more promising, and so is my family.”

[hope-for-the-planet]

Colombia passes landmark cattle traceability law to combat illegal deforestation

Colombia passed a landmark law June 4 aimed at improving traceability of its cattle supply chain to ensure beef isn’t sourced from deforeste

This June, Colombia passed a law to enhance its ability to trace cattle that have been grazing on illegally deforested land. Officials will be able to implement stricter registration and monitoring in deforestation hot spots and within the next two years all parts of the cattle and meat-packing industries will be required to implement due diligence measures.

"Conservation groups said if the law works as intended, the country could make unprecedented progress in the fight against illegal deforestation."

[hope-for-the-planet]

hey hope!

something i struggle with these days, as a millenial who has lived through greenwashing and carbon credits- is hope an op? are we getting peddled idealism and hope to cover for us being well and truly screwed?

i love this blog so much and i want to have optimism but i’m also so, so scared that this is a dupe, another shell (not u but like in general)

how do you combat that? how do you push past that?

Hi Anon,

This is a great question and definitely a not-uncommon feeling. I do sometimes get the not-so-nice version of this sentiment expressed at me in angry asks accusing me of lying or being paid to say the things I say.

I think that a confluence of factors, including the manufactured climate denial that got us where we are now, has understandably made a lot of people suspicious of hope in general. That if someone disagrees that everything is irredeemably broken beyond the point of trying to fix it, that if they say good things can happen sometimes, they are complicit in letting everything that is problematic and awful and unfair in our world off the hook.

Comic by Tom Gauld

While there is certainly old-fashioned climate denialism still out there, many entities with a vested interest in stalling climate action have switched their narrative to “it’s too late to be worth doing anything”. They’ve changed from blind, passive optimism to blind, passive pessimism, but it has the same impact of suppressing action. Dr. Simon Clark has a great in-depth video about this.

One quick test for possible manipulation is to think about what tangible action a message is likely to encourage and who that would benefit. Hope, or at least the kind of hope I try to promote on this blog, is not “things will get better no matter what we do”—that is blind optimism. Hope is “we can make things better through our actions”.

I’ve gotten many asks from folks telling me this blog inspired them to start environmental careers or volunteering that they previously felt too hopeless to pursue—and from people who felt the good news helped them pull out of a mental health spiral and get back to their lives. Dr. Hannah Ritchie, a climate change sustainability researcher at Oxford and Our World in Data, nearly did not go into the environmental field because she felt so overwhelmed by doomerism. I do not think hope prompts the kind of actions that the people who would dupe us and stall climate action are going for.

That being said, I do very much understand that knee-jerk, wary feeling. A dear family member recently got me the book How to Fall in Love With the Future by climate activist Rob Hopkins, which imagines various hopeful futures that could exist when we take positive environmental action and discusses how doing so can help us commit to fighting for those futures. Some of these radically hopeful futures made me so uncomfortable that I had to take a break from reading. Something about imagining things going really well felt unsafe or irresponsible, like it was too painful to open myself up to hoping for something so good.

Engaging with hope and the imperfect, complicated work of trying to make things better comes with uncertainty and uncertainty is scary. Sometimes certainty feels safer and more in-control even if it’s a negative certainty. I don't have any easy tips for getting over that hump, but I do think it helps to acknowledge that the hump is there and that it comes from a place of understandable fear and pain. Give yourself space and patience in letting those emotions run their course. It's a process for me as well.

Something I can say with complete certainty is that the future will be better than it otherwise would have been if we believe we have the power to make it better.

I hope this helps you trust the hope at least a little more, Anon. <3

[hope-for-the-planet]

Pioneering grid battery nudges California closer to 24/7 clean energy

The Tumbleweed installation just went online in Kern County. It can store clean energy and discharge it for eight hours straight, a harbinge

A new large scale battery project in California is now the first in the country that can discharge stored, clean energy for up to eight hours at a time. The longer discharge time is a crucial next step in meeting 24 hour energy needs with clean power.

Battery storage is now being built at a higher rate than any other kind of on-demand (i.e. not intermittent power sources like renewables) power.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Solar cold storage helps African farmers cut losses and reach global markets

Kenyan smallholder farmers are reducing post-harvest losses and accessing global export markets through a pay-per-use solar cold storage mod

While the focus is often on transportation and energy generation, about one third to one fourth of global carbon emissions come from our food systems. This means that making these systems more efficient, such as by reducing wasting energy on food that never makes it to market, is a big deal--as well as an important economic factors for farmers.

In regions where grid electricity is unreliable or inaccessibly expensive, the lack of access to reliable refrigeration greatly increases the risk that harvested food will spoil before it can reach market. Farmers also have less agency in when and where to sell their food when they have to rush to sell it before it spoils.

With the plummeting cost of solar, innovative companies are now providing farmers in these regions with rentable solar-powered cold rooms that are not dependent on grid electricity. One company in Nigeria estimates that their services have reduced food spoilage from 50% to around 2% while helping farmers earn more for their produce.

[hope-for-the-planet]

Global mangrove forests rebound, offering hopeful sign for climate and coastal resilience

A new study from Tulane University researchers has found that after decades of loss from deforestation and coastal development, mangroves ar

Mangrove forests used to be considered one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. However, recent analysis of satellite data shows that mangrove forests are no longer in decline and in fact the global coverage of mangrove forests has been increasing over the last 16 years due to restoration and natural habitat expansion.

The health of mangrove ecosystems is particularly relevant in the era of climate change, since they place a crucial role in protecting coastlines from storms and erosion in addition to storing carbon.

[hope-for-the-planet]

How trade bans and local conservation helped save a dazzling blue gecko

Beauty is a curse — at least for the turquoise dwarf gecko of central Tanzania. Between December 2004 and July 2009, demand for this gecko f

When the turquoise dwarf gecko became a focus of the illegal pet trade, it's estimated that over 15% of the wild population was removed in just five years.

Scientists worked to get the species designated as critically endangered and then to get it CITES protection to ban international trade. During that same time, captive breeding helped to stem the demand for wild-caught geckos and their price dropped from over $1,000 a gecko to less than $50.

These legal protections worked, and the turquoise dwarf gecko was able to return to pre-collection numbers. Their habitat is still threatened by invasive cedars and resulting wildfires, but efforts by the local community to remove invasive trees have reduced wildfires in the area by 80% in the last ten years.