273: Cathedral thinking

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We made a silly mistake.

A few months ago, in an attempt to make room for more content, we upped the frequency of our emails from once to twice a week. We should have known better. Urban planners are notorious for making this class of error—trying to solve road congestion by adding more lanes. It never eases the flow, though; it just adds more traffic.

That's exactly what happened to us. Two editions per week didn't make it easier to digest all our news—it made it harder, and too much like a chore. A lot of you wrote to tell us, and to be honest, we'd been feeling the same. For years, the raison d'être of this newsletter has been to prove that there's enough good news out there to counteract the bad news, but lately we feel like we've tipped over to the point where it's too much for anyone to take in.

So we're moving back to one edition per week, and we're making some other changes, too. There's going to be more of an emphasis on curation and less on comprehensive coverage. We're going to be leaving a lot more on the cutting floor. At the same time, we don't want to lose the powerful, visceral sense that progress is happening all over, constantly, and that any of us can be part of it. 

To square that circle, each week we'll choose 10-12 top stories across the full range of social, environmental, energy, and scientific progress. Those stories will be accessible for everyone. Paid subscribers will then get extra content under each of those categories—plus we're bringing back the final section where one of us will be sharing our favourite things from the internet.

To atone for our sins, we're making this week's paid edition available to everyone. Thanks for being patient as we try things out. We hope you like the new format.

Can we please recommend the latest edition of our podcast?

Before we get into the news, if you've never listened to our podcast, Hope is a Verb, how about starting now? Amy took a microphone with her to the Clinton Global Initiative and recorded interviews with the people she met there, including Jane Goodall. This is a great behind the scenes glimpse into what happens at these things, and really sums up what we're trying to achieve with Fix The News. We're a little bit proud of it.

This week's top stories

Pakistan eliminates trachoma as a public health problem
In 1997, Pakistan became the first country to be certified free of dracunculiasis (Guinea-worm disease). Now it has also eliminated trachoma as a public health problem, just seven years since launching its first mass drug campaign. Pakistan is the 19th country globally to reach this historic milestone. WHO

Brazil eliminates elephantiasis as a public health problem
The WHO said that 'Brazil’s extensive and unified health system, coupled with solid specialized laboratory expertise and robust surveillance were essential to interrupt the chain of transmission.' It becomes the 20th country to eliminate one of the most horrible diseases in existence. WHO

IEA boosts forecast for renewables by another 16%
Just nine months ago, the IEA forecast that 3,200 GW of wind and solar would be built between 2024 and 2028. Their latest report has increased that forecast to 3,700 GW—and a massive 5,500 GW by 2030. That's almost three times the increase seen between 2017 and 2023, and it would be equivalent to the entire power capacity of major economies today. IEA

Australia quadruples the size of marine reserve near Antarctica
The Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve, located 1,700 km from Antarctica, is home to penguins, seals, whales, and the country's only two active volcanos. There's still work to do to stop overfishing and bottom trawling—but this expansion does mean 52% of the nation's seas will be protected. Phys.org

The United States may have passed peak obesity
According to new data, the obesity rate in American adults fell by 2% between 2020 and 2023. Although no direct link has been established, it is likely that drugs like Ozempic have contributed to the decline. 'The obesity crisis might have plateaued or begun to ease, and that would be good news for millions.' WaPo

How local heroes reforested Rio’s green heart #notjustparis
A restoration programme has made Rio a much more liveable place. The Refloresta Rio project was set up by the city government in 1986. By 2019, it had transformed the city’s landscape, having trained 15,000 local workers who have planted 10 million seedlings across an area ten times the size of New York’s Central Park. Guardian

A whole lot of good climate news from Latin America
In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, has pledged to boost renewable energy production to make up 45% of power generation by 2030; Colombia has a $40-billion plan to replace oil revenue with tourism and clean energy; and in Chile, polluted 'sacrifice zones' may soon be a thing of the past.

Jordan becomes latest country to join School Meals Coalition
The School Meals Coalition aims to ensure that every child can receive a healthy, nutritious meal in school by 2030. In Jordan, 520,000 students are now served daily through its national school meals programme, reaching over 60% of public primary school students nationwide. X

The hidden world of electrostatic ecology
For years, biologists have wondered whether bees, spiders, ticks, and other bugs have a mysterious sense that we lack. Well, it's official now. They do. Scientists have confirmed the existence of 'aerial electroreception', an evolutionary trait that allows animals to sense and take advantage of electrostatic forces. This is an amazing story—if you read one thing this week... Quanta

Social progress

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
- Lu Xun

Two lives saved every minute by Gavi-supported vaccines in 2023
In 2023, Gavi's efforts helped prevent over 1.3 million future deaths by immunising 69 million children, including vaccinating 14 million girls against HPV—surpassing the total HPV vaccinations from the previous ten years combined. Since Gavi was founded in 2000, over 1.1 billion children have been vaccinated. Gavi

'Game-changing' HIV drug to be made affordable in 120 countries 
Pharma giant Gilead has signed agreements with six manufacturers to make and sell cheaper versions of its HIV prevention drug lenacapavir in 120 'high-incidence, resource-limited' countries. Lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection, has been shown to offer near-complete protection from HIV in recent trials. Guardian

Bangladesh’s social safety net drives remarkable progress
Bangladesh, one of the world's most impoverished countries in the 1970s, is on track to be crossed off the UN's Least Developed Countries list in 2026. The speed of this success is largely attributed to its social spending policies, which now cover 30% of households and have improved a wide range of poverty indicators. Borgen

USAID and UNICEF launch Partnership for a Lead-Free Future
Vox has a great explainer on this amazing initiative, which we first reported two weeks ago. Lead poisoning has long remained on the sidelines of global health despite killing 1.5 million people every year. The new $150-million partnership—which doubles previous global spending—is a gamechanger.

No cervical cancer cases among HPV-vaccinated women in Scotland
A groundbreaking study, the first to track a national group of women over a lengthy period, has found no cases of cervical cancer among women born between 1988 and 1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV at ages 12 and 13. STAT

More dads taking paid parental leave in the Netherlands
Since August 2022, the Netherlands has offered paid parental leave on top of existing maternal and parental leave policies. It's working. Between August 2023 and August 2024, more than 170,000 parental-leave applications were received, of which 40% came from fathers—up from 33% the previous year. I Am Expat

A milestone for transgender rights in the EU
The EU's Court of Justice has ruled that member states must recognise legal changes to gender identity processed elsewhere within the bloc, siding with Arian Mirzarafie-Ahi, a transgender man who sued his home country of Romania for refusing to accept the gender identity changes he initiated in pre-Brexit Britain. 'Gender, like a first name, is a fundamental element of personal identity.' WaPo

Nigeria lights up
Back in July, we reported a $500-million loan from the AfDB for electrification in Nigeria, and next month, the government will launch a $750-million rural electrification project to provide electricity to 17.5 million Nigerians via mini-grids, integrated grid systems, and stand-alone solar setups. iAfrica

Environmental victories

India’s state of Assam creates massive 180-km-long wildlife corridor
Assam has extended Orang National Park’s area to flow into neighbouring protected lands and create an uninterrupted corridor for wildlife. The new corridor will connect Orang to the neighbouring Kazaringa National Park, creating a safe passageway for tigers, elephants, and numerous other species. Guwahati Plus

The Munduruku People of the Amazon win historic victory
The Sawré Muybu territory of the Munduruku People, covering 1781 km²—an area almost the size of 250,000 soccer fields—has been officially signed into decree. While the Brazilian government still needs to mark the territory’s boundaries and start removing illegal occupants, it's a significant victory for Indigenous peoples across Brazil. Greenpeace

The Navajo build thriving farms in parched landscapes
Using traditional rock and stick structures like the ones built by Indigenous peoples to capture water before the arrival of Europeans, Navajo communities in Arizona are defying changing conditions to create productive farms. Scientists confirm that these structures mitigate erosion and increase downstream water availability. Yale Environment 360

Good news for the Atlantic sturgeon, northern bald ibis, and baobabs
In Sweden the Atlantic sturgeon, a long-lost keystone species, is being reintroduced to the Göta River; the northern bald ibis has bounced back in Morocco and is being reintroduced to Europe for the first time since the 1600s; and in southern Africa, the magnificent baobab trees previously thought to be imperilled by climate change look to be thriving.

The EPA to require replacement of all lead pipes within next decade
Forty years after Congress banned new construction from installing lead pipes, water utilities will now be expected to replace lead pipes, a move estimated to benefit around nine million homes. A top priority of the Biden administration, over 367,000 pipes have already been removed nationwide, impacting nearly a million people. WaPo

Wildlife crossings nearly eliminate wildlife-vehicle crashes
Colorado has built more than 40 wildlife underpasses and 3 overpasses, resulting in a 90% reduction in wildlife-involved crashes, and Washington State recorded the 25,716th safe wildlife crossing at the end of 2023 in the Snoqualmie Pass East Project, which includes one bridge and 11 underpasses, with 16 more passes to come.

Seoul's Han River is being restored #notjustparis
Ongoing efforts to restore the Han River ecosystem in South Korea are working. The number of trees along the river now stands at 3.65 million, and the number of species in the area has surged from 1,602 in 2007 to 2,062 in 2022. The project aims to restore nearly 86% of designated areas to their natural state. Korea Times

The clean energy transition

Solar for realists
Jenny Chase is arguably the best solar analyst in the world, and she has been putting out an annual thread on social media since 2017. Her 2024 edition is excellent, clearly articulating both the successes and remaining challenges. Essential reading for anyone interested in energy.

Solar will not solve every problem. But the biggest problem is that our civilisation relies on digging up fossil carbon and burning it, which is destabilising the climate, which multiplies a lot of very unpleasant threats. Solar is part of stopping us needing to do that. Ordinary people have no idea how much progress we’ve made.

Solar for optimists
Yes, we need to build more transmission, and we are behind on wind, but can we also just appreciate how far we've come with solar? This is what exponential growth looks like. The world will install 5 times as much solar in 2024 as it did in 2019, about 3.3 times more than in 2021, and about 2.4 times more than in 2022.

Coal production collapses in Russia
Western sanctions plus weak demand from Asia are hurting the world's sixth-biggest coal producer. Supplies to China in the first half of 2024 fell by 8%, India by 55%, and Türkiye by 47%. Total exports fell by 11.4% between January and July this year. This. Is. Good. News. Moscow Times

Europe is falling back in love with trains
Thanks to a combination of climate awareness, investments into cross-border connections, and both high-speed and night trains, rail travel is increasing in popularity. The trend is particularly pronounced in Spain, where on many routes between large Spanish cities, planes have become almost marginal. El País

A big leap forward for transmission in America
Last week the Department of Energy announced an additional $1.5 billion in funding for four huge new power transmission lines. The projects will enable nearly 1,600 km of new transmission development and 7,100 MW of new capacity in Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas.

EVs start rolling off the line in the US state of Georgia
Hyundai has begun producing electric vehicles less than two years after breaking ground on its $7.6-billion manufacturing plant in Georgia, the largest economic development project in the state's history. The automaker, which makes America’s second-best-selling EV that's not a Tesla, says it will produce up to 300,000 EVs per year in Georgia, as well as the batteries that power them. AP

Chinese EV makers set monthly sales records in September
BYD, Li Auto, Xpeng, Zeekr, and Leapmotor posted new monthly delivery records in September. BYD, the world’s largest electric car assembler, shipped a record 419,426 EVs in September, charting 12.4% month-on-month growth and a 45.9% improvement compared with a year ago. SCMP

But the lithium ruins landscapes and poisons ecosystems wake up sheeple all your shiny phones and electric cars are powered by environmental devastation and exploited labour we are just substituting one thing for the other typical humans we are going to leave behind a wasteland of scarred earth and shattered communities and irreversible damage, and...

Scientific progress

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
- Carl Sagan

NASA sets new record for deep space laser signal
Over the summer, their Deep Space Optical Communications division broke yet another record by sending a laser signal from Earth to NASA’s Psyche spacecraft about 460 million km away, confirming that 'optical communications can be a robust and transformative way to explore the solar system.' JPL

Physicists capture images of ultracold atoms flowing freely
MIT physicists have directly observed edge states in a cloud of ultracold atoms, capturing, for the first time, images of atoms flowing along a boundary without resistance, even as obstacles are placed in their path. The team worked with a cloud of about 1 million sodium atoms, which they corralled in a laser-controlled trap and cooled to nanokelvin temperatures. Because of course, right? MIT

Mathematicians discover new class of shape seen throughout nature
The shape, found in everything from the chambers in the spiral shell of the nautilus to the way in which seeds pack into plants, was deduced via a quantitative measure of the degree of ‘softness’ of space-filling tiles. Researchers found that the 'softest' are not compact shapes but instead have flange-like wings at their edges. Nature

Turning seawater into fresh water through solar power
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an evaporation-based desalination device inspired by the way a tree draws water from its roots to its leaves that's solar powered, five times more efficient than current desalination systems, and creates 20 litres of water per square metre.

New sensors will detect wildfires everywhere on the planet
Next year, Google, Muon Space, and the Earth Fire Alliance will launch FireSat, a constellation of satellites that will monitor Earth’s surface for wildfires, updating imagery every 20 minutes. It will be capable of detecting fires as small as five square meters, catching them before they turn into forest-devouring conflagrations. Google

World-first donor cell therapy for autoimmune diseases
One woman and two men in China with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells. It's the first time autoimmune disorders have been treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells rather than ones collected from their own bodies. Nature

Fly brain breakthrough may be a 'huge leap' to unlock human mind
Scientists have created the most detailed map of a fly brain to date, detailing the position, shape, and connections of all 139,000 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. The complexity of this is staggering, and may lead to significant discoveries in neuroscience, paving the way for future mapping of larger brains, including humans. Nature

The best bits of the internet (Gus)

T. Scott Plutchak's 'Gutenberg In The Whirlwind' is a strong contender for my favourite essay on technology in 2024. It's a surprisingly original exploration of the digital revolution, drawing parallels with the printing revolution of the 15th century, and a must-read for anyone interested in how technology shapes culture and vice versa. A timely reminder that while technological shifts can be disorienting, they also open up new possibilities. As he puts it, quoting Mark Twain on Gutenberg's invention, 'the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored.' Hey Scott

How pour-over coffee got so good. Warning: only for serious obsessives. Works in Progress

I think there are about ten Moleskine notebooks of various colours and sizes lying around my office or buried in the side pockets of my backpacks. Most of them are aspirational, but that doesn't mean I don't love them—so I was delighted to discover this story about their history, and how they were revived by a single, passionate Italian designer named Maria Sebregondi in the 90s. The Walrus

Did you know there's such a thing as Moon Time now? More accurately, physicists have created Coordinated Lunar Time, which means moon time is now possible.

Rebecca Solnit offers a masterclass in rethinking how we view progress. Real change is often slow and incremental, and a whole lot messier than we're usually prepared to accept. Forget simple frames; we should be building acceptance 'like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.' (Solnit's metaphors are so good). She also introduces a concept that's new to me: Cathedral thinking, the key to tackling big issues like climate change. Start building the foundation now, even if you don't know exactly how the ceiling will look. Lit Hub

OK, I didn't know this. Apparently almost everything I thought I knew about the Library at Alexandria—its size, importance, destruction—turns out to have been wrong. The Library is more of a metaphor, a synecdoche for all the knowledge that was lost in Europe’s Dark Ages, and the ur-story for almost all libraries that have come ever since. How Stuff Works