Global Energy Outlook, Climate Money, Solar Helps Jamaica, and 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!)

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Pop Culture:

🏞️ Here’s a nice Sunday read about a life impressively lived, and still going at 104. Miss Betty Reid Soskin found herself at 60, became a national park ranger at 85 and retired at 100, not to mention all the other life she lived. Rock. Star. It’s a true story about how it’s never too late in life to connect with your true self and be whoever the hell you wanna be.

Philanthropy At Work:

🧑‍🚒 EDF is part of a coalition of partners that launched FireSat, a satellite that orbits Earth and detects fires. The purpose is to detect wildfire early enough to stop its spread. Once the full fleet of 50 satellites is deployed, they’ll be able to monitor the entire planet every 20 minutes. FireSat was recognized by Time magazine last month as one of the best inventions of 2025. Let’s hope FireSat has a better fate than MethaneSAT, the methane pollution tracking satellite, which was sadly lost to the ether earlier this year.

Environmental News:

📈 The International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook report, which is the marquee document everyone looks at to understand what’s happening with the world’s energy mix. It informs decisions. The report analyzes policy, market trends, and pledges to predict the ups and downs of fossil fuels and renewables. Because we are in an undeniable energy transition to clean sources, the IEA predicts the timeline for when dirty fossil fuels will peak and phase out. Naturally, Trump doesn’t like the reality of a world without profitable pollution, so over the past year, he has threatened the IEA to withhold funding (the US is the biggest contributor to its work), and his administration has been bullying the org to stop saying that fossil fuels will peak in the near or medium future. And alas, the IEA caved. It brought back a line of analysis that it had scrapped in 2019, which uses only current policies, assuming nothing will change for decades, to predict the energy future. In this Trump-friendly scenario, oil and gas demand show no signs of slowing down through 2050, which also means global emissions do not decline. That scenario can also be known as ‘game over’.

🙎‍♀️ But don’t fret because that’s not going to happen, not on our watch. The rest of the world, and good old capitalism won’t let it. Renewable energy, and particularly solar, is just too cheap and fast to come online to suddenly stall out, particularly in our power hungry world. So now meet the IEA’s second scenario, which uses both current and stated energy policies. In this version of the future, we do see a decline in oil beginning this decade, though gas holds strong, barely declining by 2050. The constant in both scenarios is that growth in renewable energy continues to outpace all other sources. Reading between the lines of this influential report, despite the snapshot view of fossil fuels’ last stand, we’ve got momentum on our side, the clean side. Godspeed.

☀️ After Hurricane Melissa destroyed parts of Jamaica, people with solar panels on their homes and businesses got power back the next day, and served as a helpful resource for their neighbors in need. Turns out solar panels not only provide clean, cheap energy, but they’re also pretty resilient when battered by extreme weather.

👍 Here’s a good progress update for near-term renewable energy projects in the US. The folks behind them have worked speedily to get their projects up and running in time to benefit from the Biden tax breaks for renewable energy before they go away, thanks to the Republican clean energy slaughter. A new report finds that “76% of solar projects and 86% of wind projects slated to come online by the end of 2028 are already safe-harbored”, meaning they will receive those credits, which is crucial for these such projects to live on. Together, they represent about 33 gigawatts of energy capacity, which translates into enough electricity to power roughly 25M US homes with near zero emissions. That ain’t nothin.

🇧🇷 Meanwhile at the climate summit in Brazil…At the end of the day, COP is about directing money towards climate solutions and a better future. So here are some examples of what we want to see: money flowing where it needs to go. A group of 10 multilateral banks, which exist to help developing countries survive, committed to providing $185B for adaptation efforts to help low and middle income countries be more resilient to the ravages of a warming world. Bill Gates got his wish of focusing more climate dollars on human health. The Gates Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and other large philanthropies created a new fund of $300M to go towards addressing the effects of climate change on human health. Did Bill need to make such a movement-damaging fuss about the topic? The answer is no. And finally, a mix of four governments and several philanthropies renewed a pledge to give $1.8B over the next five years to protect and manage Indigenous land. This group successfully dispersed $1.8B over the last five years, so they’re doing it again. Bravo.

Over On The Gen E Insta: