10/13/2026
Act local, track global:
• Co-located renewable energy — basically solar panels and grid batteries on the same site — attracted $25 billion of global investment in the first half of this year, doubling previous records.
• As part of an Australian plan that rolled out last year, more than 500,000 batteries have been installed to capture solar energy, so much of which is now generated that even homeowners without panels benefit from free power.
• Africa installed 100,000 solar panels each day this year — a 45% increase for the third consecutive year.
• Methane leaks in aging oil and gas facilities are a serious global problem; in Turkmenistan, which had the most in the world in 2023, they’re pulling the “emergency brake.”
• File under committed: With a population of just six million people, Bulgaria became one of the world’s highest battery storage capacity countries in less than two years.
• Germany — the EU’s largest economy — just became the third country, after France and the Netherlands, to establish a plan to phase out fossil fuels, citing energy independence as a primary concern.
• London’s iconic Spitalfields Market is now solar-powered.
• In Cuba, the fuel crisis has spawned an explosion of solar-powered, EV tricycles – reducing air pollution, costs, and time in transit.
And finally (drumroll, please) it’s time to rethink the world map. The one we currently recognize was established in the 16th century and is distorted: Africa is depicted as equal in size to Greenland, even though it is in fact 14x bigger, a choice some call “cartographic colonialism.” Now, the UN voted unanimously minus one – guess who? – to phase out the Mecator map and adopt the 2018 Equal Earth design, on which the U.S. and EU look (accurately) smaller. (Photo: The Guardian)
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