294: Peak Booze

Our new charity partner - PRO

We know we’re late with our April charity partner announcement, so we wanted to share some details about where we’re up to. A few weeks ago, we came across an incredible organisation called Project Resource Optimization (PRO) that is urgently trying to fill the gap for USAID-funded programs that have been slashed. Since the freeze, food and medical supplies have been stuck in warehouses and a lot of small, local organisations have been forced to shut down programs that provide life-saving services for communities around the world. 

These guys have a wealth of experience in humanitarian development and include former USAID employees who are determined to keep the work going, even though their own jobs have been terminated. Despite being a team of just five, they've managed to compile a live list of high-impact programs affected by the cuts.

We spoke with Caitlin Tulloch, one of the leads, and she’s helping us to find the right project along with a larger donor who can help shoulder most of the cost. We'll have final details in our next edition - but if you work in philanthropy or an organisation with the resources to help, please check out the list and reach out to the PRO team directly.

Amidst all this chaos, it's been personally meaningful to our team to apply our skills to identify projects that, if funded, will help sustain life-saving services. We're finding that an increasing number of private donors are willing to meet the moment, if we can help make sense of where the opportunities are for them to do the most good with their money.
Caitlin Tulloch

Ever wondered what young people are thinking about?

Last year we connected with one of our subscribers, Will Hone, a teacher at Camberwell Grammar School in Melbourne, who wanted to create a student-led podcast featuring stories from this newsletter.

"Growing up today is a tough gig," he told us. "I want to provide a way to shine a light for them, and solutions journalism is a powerful bulb. Getting the students to share these stories with other students could be a great way to get some positive news in their lives."

Over the past 12 months Will and his team have thrown themselves into learning everything they can about podcasting and are working with other schools to create an audio ‘news network’ to spread solutions-based journalism around different school communities. We love that this project is produced by students, for students – they have full editorial control.

If you want to hear which stories matter to them, you can listen to the pilot episode from Camberwell Grammar School. A big congratulations to Adil and Thomas for hosting, and to the entire student production team. The next episode is in the works and more schools are coming on board. We'll let you know how the project develops!

This week's top stories

Syria's most famous first responders are returning to Damascus. With the fall of Assad, White Helmets founder Raed Saleh has been appointed to Syria's transitional Cabinet as minister of emergencies and disaster management. The force he launched 12 years ago is now expanding nationwide to aid over 20 million Syrians, responding to alerts of fires, missing persons, and the occasional adventurous cat. NPR

It’s possible that the world has already passed peak booze. Consumption of beer peaked in 2016, wine has been falling since 1979, and per-capita drinking fell from 5 litres in 2013 to 3.9 litres in 2023. Even with population growth expected to hit 10.3 billion by the 2080s, the heaviest-drinking regions have already passed their demographic peaks, making it unlikely that global consumption will ever surpass the 25.4 billion litres recorded in 2015. Bloomberg

Since this time last year, four countries — Belize, Colombia, Kuwait and Portugal — have raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 years. We loved hearing the back story about the effort in Colombia, which took 17 years to pull off.

China removes endangered pangolin from official medicine guide. Guilingji, a traditional medicine containing pangolin ingredients, has been eliminated from the 2025 Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China, the country's official standard for clinical prescriptions. The decision will hopefully reduce demand for the world's most trafficked mammal. World Animal Protection

Uganda has officially declared the end of the Ebola disease outbreak, less than three months after the virus was confirmed in Kampala. The WHO has praised the government’s swift response, which included immediate contact tracing, border health measures, and the rapid establishment of treatment centres. The last confirmed Ebola patient was discharged on 14 March.  WHO

India has left paper-heavy processes behind with digital public infrastructure. Aadhaar, the $1.5 billion national digital ID system, has helped the government save over $42 billion by cutting fraud and errors in public benefit programs. In banking, identity verification costs dropped from around $12 to just 6 cents, unlocking access for millions more people, especially in rural areas. Gates Foundation

New data in from the United Nations: Between 2000 and 2023, the global maternal mortality ratio fell by 40%. At the beginning of this century, a 15-year-old girl faced a 1 in 130 global lifetime risk of maternal mortality; by 2023, this had more than halved to 1 in 272. UNICEF

The EU is in the midst of finalizing a plan to completely end imports of Russian fossil fuels; the European Commission first pledged to quit Russian fossil fuels in 2022 as a response to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. The imports won't completely end until 2027, but in the meantime, Czechia has achieved full independence from Russian oil for the first time in its history; the country now receives no supplies through Russia's Druzhba pipeline, ending a 60-year dependency. This is significant because Czechia previously received half its oil from Russia and had an EU exemption from the 2022 Russian oil ban.

Hearing this it's perhaps no surprise that Ember reports energy security has become a primary driver pushing post-industrial nations towards renewables.

Since the end of World War II, under the Pax Americana, the United States dominated global geopolitics, and oil dominated energy markets. During this period of relative US-guaranteed stability, the world built a massive dependency on fossil fuel imports. Today, with global trade under greater threat than at any time since World War II, the world’s heavy dependence on fossil imports for essential energy supplies looks increasingly risky.

And speaking of national security, back in 2023, Virginia Heffernan wrote what we still consider to be one of the greatest ever pieces of tech journalism, about chipmaking at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Along with the United Microelectronics Corporation, TSMC is the linchpin of Taiwan’s so-called 'Silicon Shield'; together the two companies produce almost two-thirds of the world’s silicon chips, including the chips in every product built by Apple.

By revenue, TSMC is the largest semiconductor company in the world. In 2020 it quietly joined the world's 10 most valuable companies. It's now bigger than Meta and Exxon. The company also has the world's biggest logic chip manufacturing capacity and produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world's most avant-garde chips-the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles on which the international balance of hard power is predicated.

TSMC's latest advance? A 1.4-nanometer chip, set for high-volume production in 2028, which could be up to 30% faster and 60% more efficient than current (3nm) chips, as well as 15% faster and 30% more efficient than the 2nm processors set to go into production later in 2025.

Shanghai Auto Show offers a clear-eyed view of the car industry's future. For nearly two decades, the Shanghai Auto Show was a showcase for gasoline consumption. No longer. This year, it was wall-to-wall electric vehicles - a shift that comes as the world's largest oil consumer embraces electrification. The country's top driller sees oil demand peaking this year, with air travel and petrochemicals now the only growth areas. Bloomberg

Time to talk about vaccines in Africa, where it's estimated that in 2023 they saved 1.8 million lives, nearly half the global figure of 4.2 million – largely thanks to the 'Big Catch-Up,' from WHO, UNICEF, Gavi and partner governments. In related news, Mali has become the 20th African country to introduce a vaccine for malaria and the first to implement a hybrid approach: children will receive the first three doses based on age, with the fourth and fifth doses administered seasonally ahead of the high malaria transmission season.

Meanwhile, Mozambique is leading Africa in malaria digitalisation, as labour-intensive, manual data collection has been replaced with an integrated digital system; campaign duration has dropped from up to two weeks to just five days as a result. And, while malaria vaccinations have been the showstoppers, many of the Big Catch-Up's inoculations have been more routine; HPV vaccination coverage among girls rose from 28% in 2022 to 40% in 2023, and the WHO is reporting a 93% vaccine-driven drop in polio cases from 2023 to 2024.

Argentina is celebrating the creation of Patagonia Azul Provincial Park, an immense coastal-marine area roughly the size of Yosemite National Park. Spanning 2,950 km², the new park will safeguard one of the most biodiverse areas of the Argentine Sea with over 50 species of seabirds, kelp forests and rocky intertidal areas that are home to a diverse range of sea life. MercoPress

🤞 Great pics and videos from Tompkins Conversation here.

Conservation victory in Nevada halts wildlife killing across 6.2 million acres of wilderness. A court has ordered the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services in Nevada to fix its “deeply flawed environmental analysis” that involves lethal control of native wildlife at the behest of livestock producers. The decision keeps native carnivores like mountain lions and coyotes from being killed across Nevada’s 65 congressionally-designated Wilderness Areas and 62 specially-protected Wilderness Study Areas. Wild Earth Guardians

Nevada’s wilderness and other specially protected areas should be sanctuaries for wildlife and places where people can experience true wildness—not landscapes laced with traps, snares, and cyanide bombs.
Paul Ruprecht, Nevada Director for Western Watersheds Project 

First evidence showing psychedelics act on the brain and the immune system. Scientists have discovered psilocybin and MDMA don't just alter brain perception—they fundamentally disrupt communication between the brain and the immune system. This groundbreaking research shows psychedelics prevent inflammatory cells from clustering around the brain's outer layer during stress, potentially explaining their therapeutic effects. Nature

And finally, the Goldman Prize 2025 has recognised seven grassroots activists who dared to take on corruption and corporate power. This year’s oldest winner was Batmunkh Luvsandash, an 81-year-old former-electrical-engineer-turned-herder whose anti-mining activism led to the protection of 200,000 acres of the East Gobi Desert. Check out an interview with Batmunkh here, or read more about all seven winners in The Guardian.