Avatar, 2025 Climate Lists, Clean-Forward China, & more!

Hey climate heroes! Welcome to The Climate Roundup, where we round up the change, er the news about climate and the environment. As part of the Gen E community, we thank you for making climate action part of everyday life. (Reading this newsletter counts!)

Sign up for The Climate Roundup weekly newsletter here

In Pop Culture:

The third installment of the Avatar franchise, Fire & Ash is out in theatres and you bet I’m excited to see it. Apparently, Avatar fits a recent trend of earnestness in movies, as a potential reprieve from the neverending cycle of bad news we endure in modern times (see below). Sure, maybe that’s a big part of why I personally love the world of Avatar, because it’s about the beauty of environmentalism: loving and respecting all the natural living wonders of our planet, and how mutually symbiotic that relationship can be. Avatar creator and director, James Cameron, is a true modern environmentalist and he visualizes and emotes this relationship magnificently, while also exhibiting the horrors of the industrial complex. Reviews about Fire & Ash suggest disappointment in Cameron’s supposed recycling of themes from the last movie. But in a world where environmentalism is often at the bottom of most people’s priorities, isn’t it a message worth repeating? We’ll see, as the box office keeps the score. I’ll certainly be supporting it there.

Philanthropy At Work:

🌳 One Tree Planted just released their 2025 Wrapped video. This year they planted 27 million trees and restored 48,000+ hectares of land across the globe, from koala habitat in Australia to wildfire recovery in California’s Sierra Nevada. They also planted 160,000+ trees in Acre, Brazil to support 180+ farming families, and deployed urban greening projects in 15+ cities. A powerful reminder of how reforestation strengthens ecosystems and communities at the same time.

✊ Environmental Defense Fund closed 2025 with major wins for climate and public health. Their supporters (including you!) took 326,735 actions across all 50 states, fueling victories like Colorado’s new rule requiring oil and gas companies to phase out methane-polluting equipment and a federal court decision upholding transparency requirements for a Trump-era climate report. EDF also helped shape a landmark global shipping framework aiming to cut maritime emissions and move the sector toward net-zero by 2050 (if it’s not further delayed!).

🌊 Surfrider Foundation wrapped a huge year for coastal protection. Across the country, 50,000 volunteers joined more than 800 cleanups, removing 114,000+ pounds of trash from beaches and waterways. Their grassroots network also advanced policy wins to protect shorelines, reduce plastic pollution, and defend clean water in communities that depend on it. A big year for ocean stewardship driven by local action.

Environmental News:

🥼 We’ll start with the worst and hope it never comes to fruition, as it will be fought to the death. The Trump admin announced they will dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, saying it’s a hub for “climate alarmism”. Founded in 1960 and based in Colorado in an architecturally intriguing building, NCAR is one of the world’s best research centers in understanding the science of how Earth’s weather systems work. The center has made major contributions to weather prediction, storm forecast modeling, and crucially, climate modeling that is used globally. Our atmospheric climate is changing. Erasing the evidence and our knowledge base to predict what’s coming and how it will impact our weather systems and beyond to fit a short-term political agenda is an act of the lowest intelligence.

🤔 Last year was the hottest on record, and this year is trending towards being the second or third hottest ever. For a look at more of the details into a climate-focused year in review, Grist has it for you. They cover the extreme weather events, Trump’s massacre on US environmental policy and science, the AI-driven data center boom fueling dirty energy expansion, but also how solar is now dirt cheap, and renewable energy is growing faster than polluting energy, beating out coal in electricity generation this year for a global first.

😖 Procrastination is a defining human trait (think about it vs other species). Especially when it comes to how humans deal with climate change. What good are new climate laws when they are continually delayed? It’s laughable when industries expend energy fighting in 2025 to delay an inevitable change going into effect ten years into the future. Maybe instead they could use their energy to make the necessary changes for which they have an entire decade! That takes us over to the EU, where addressing climate change has typically been a priority. But this year, the EU has been weakening and delaying laws that have allowed ample time for companies and everyone to prepare for (we know how fast companies can move if they decide to, ahem, AI). What’s at risk includes a ban on the production of gas cars by 2035, deforestation-prevention measures in consumer goods supply chains, and the requirement of company disclosures of the environmental impact of their operations. All very logical stuff that so obviously should have been status quo by now, with all that we know about human-caused pollution and extraction of resources.

🇨🇳 A 2025 bright spot, counter to many other headlines from this year, has been China’s emerging status as the world’s first electrostate. This has been years in the making, but it feels as though their clean economy dominance has truly exploded this year. It is undeniable and unstoppable. And while most other countries complain about market fairness, the bottom line is that China’s success in clean economy output means planetary success for us all, in the eventual overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This doesn’t mean China’s hands are clean in global emissions accounting, far from it. They are still the world’s largest emitter and responsible for half the world’s coal consumption. No question they need to clean up their side of the street faster. But it’s not so far-fetched to bet they will. The most recent global coal outlook from the IEA suggests China’s coal use will tick downward by the end of the decade. To go deeper, Bloomberg dives into the socio-economic impacts of what that means for a country so historically dependent on coal. Still, their domestic clean energy growth is astounding. One hard-hitting example is the latter part of the following quote from the journal Science, which crowned renewable energy growth as its ‘2025 Breakthrough of the Year’: “China’s solar power generation grew more than 20-fold over the past decade, and its solar and wind farms now have enough capacity to power the entire United States.” So to those people who love to challenge the feasibility of the clean energy transition in our own country, we can now say that China’s already done it (sure, sure without accounting for intermittency concerns for which we do have solutions). The point is, if there’s a will, there’s a way. And right now, China has more will than the world combined. To further drive home the point of how future-forward China is looking, the New York Times has a first-person account from on the ground, where the country’s embrace of electrifying everything has them “experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes.”

More Climate Meets Culture:

😎 This one’s from us to you first, dear friends. We’ve been working on some intentional merch here at Gen E to visually support the modern environmental movement we’re building. It’s literally show-ing up. Drop One is live here.

🤓 Bloomberg recommends 8 climate books, both fact and fiction. Many sound intriguing in the cli-fi genre, though I can never bring myself to live in the future dystopian Earth scenarios where there is one forest left standing or similar. Still, these stories serve as motivation to keep fighting now, and they are important creative expressions. Maybe in 2026…

📚 Or maybe circling back to environmentally-plotted children’s books is the way to go. Learn which ones inspired the careers of today’s scientists and conservationists. An uplifting perusal!

🗣️ “Greenlash” is Grist’s vote for climate word of the year, and they weave together a succinct account of this climate action backlash that is sweeping across all facets of American society. Combine that with the official dictionary words of the year (“AI slop”, “rage bait”, and “6-7”) and it’s clear humanity needs a fresh start next year. So rest up, we’ve got work to do!