China’s EV push, Africa’s record solar growth, and a U.S. grid under pressure all point to the same reality: the clean energy transition is accelerating—but the economic and political stakes are rising.

CANADA…THE WORLD’S NEXT EV POWERHOUSE? When Canada forged a “new strategic partnership” with China last month that slashed tariffs on a small number of Chinese-made EVs, the headlines focused on geopolitics and the implications for U.S. carmakers and the U.S.-Canada relationship. But on February 5, as Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a sweeping plan of incentives and tax breaks, we saw that the China deal was just one part of Canada’s broader bet on electric vehicles, including several new or revived climate-positive policies:

• Tougher emissions standards beginning next year, tied to an expectation that EVs will account for 90 percent of Canada’s new car sales by 2040.

• A restored $3,600 (U.S.) consumer rebate for EV purchases, excluding Chinese-made vehicles.

• Lower corporate tax rates for clean vehicle manufacturers.

• Accelerated tax deductions for EV plant investments.

  
  

Granted, it wasn’t all good news for the planet. Carney also repealed a mandate to make all Canadian new car sales electric by 2035–a target designed to align with net zero by 2050. While reactions have been mixed, some in the climate world see this compromise as a case of climate pragmatism that will make decarbonization policies more durable–and effective–in the long term.

Canada’s EV advances inch the world closer toward Speed & Scale’s targets to electrify transportation.

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🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation

• Recycling the Supply Chain: In a move to help break China’s dominance in rare earths, U.S. startup Cyclic Materials has raised $75 million to scale recycling of old e-bikes, hard drives, and discarded electronics. While recycled materials could meet up to 25 percent of U.S. rare-earth demand within a decade, the effort still faces major hurdles around scale, scrap availability, and practical economics (Wall Street Journal).

• EVs Take the Wheel: While hybrid vehicles continue to dominate the new car market in the EU, all-electric battery EVs surpassed gas-only cars for the first time. Battery EVs accounted for 22.6 percent of registrations last December, as compared to 22.5 percent for all-combustion cars. The milestone signals growing momentum toward electrification amid intensified competition, as Chinese EV makers surge and European brands work to scale affordable models (Reuters).

OKR Highlight

AFRICA’S SOLAR SURGE: The make-or-break continent for the clean energy transition set a record for solar growth in 2025 at 4.5 GW–and could add more than six times that much in just three years, according to a new report by the Global Solar Council. Which countries are leading Africa’s surge? South Africa, Egypt, and–more surprisingly–Nigeria, a major oil producer.

To reach its electrification leapfrog potential, Africa will need $46 billion in investment by 2030, much of it for privately financed rooftop and other distributed solar that accounts for nearly half of new capacity. For climate, the stakes could not be higher. Africa’s increasingly urbanized population is projected to rise to 1.7 billion by 2030 and to 4 billion by the end of the century, when it will surpass Asia as the world’s most populous continent.

💡 2.0 – Decarbonize the Grid

• Power Shift: U.S. energy growth is going almost entirely green, with new data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing that solar, wind, and battery storage will account for more than 99 percent of net new generating capacity this year. Explosive growth in solar and storage is rapidly closing the gap between renewables and natural gas, a sign that the energy transition is being driven by economics more than policy (U.S. Energy Information Administration and Electrek).

🐄 3.0 – Fix Food

• Rooting for Carbon: Racing to meet its 2030 carbon-negative goal, Microsoft agreed to buy a record 2.85 million soil carbon credits from Indigo Carbon. The deal reflects growing demand for nature-based carbon removal, even as concerns persist around measurement, permanence, and the risk of offsets overshadowing direct emissions cuts (Reuters).

• Meat the Problem: The Trump administration’s new food pyramid promotes higher meat and dairy consumption–a shift, critics say, that flatly contradicts climate and health science. Former Obama advisor Sam Kass argues that the new guidance could drive higher food-system emissions by promoting livestock, the largest single source of agricultural climate impact (Grist).

Check out the Climate Tech Map’s latest updates

The Climate Tech Map launched last fall with a simple goal: to map the innovations that move the climate needle. For each week leading up to SF Climate Week, we’re releasing new content on the leading opportunities in climate tech.

Check out Speed & Scale’s Ryan Panchadsaram’s thoughts on the most promising solutions to fix our food system.

🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature

• Grid on Thin Ice: As gas-powered systems strain to heat homes and generate electricity, a brutal winter is exposing the U.S. power grid’s brittleness. Without accelerated investment in home efficiency and new large-scale transmission projects, or expansions of nuclear, geothermal, and wind, grid operators will continue to burn dirtier fuels to avoid blackouts during cold snaps (New York Times).

• Melting Budget: New research shows that emissions from thawing permafrost and Arctic wildfires are eating into the global carbon budget—the CO₂ humanity can emit while staying below 2°C of warming—by about 17 percent. The findings underscore that these largely irreversible emissions leave far less room for meeting temperature targets than climate plans now assume (Nature).

🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry

• AI’s Physical Limit: The growth of artificial intelligence is facing a hard physical limit, as data centers run into grid constraints that shift value from chips to natural gas, turbines, and copper. The winners of the next AI phase won’t be model builders, but the companies that can deliver electricity and wiring more quickly (Forbes).

• Seams Under Stress: Climate change is forcing the fashion industry to confront supply-chain risk head-on, with heat, floods, and storms threatening factories, raw materials, and workers worldwide. In response, the industry is moving away from top-down climate pledges and toward more practical, supplier-led solutions (Vogue).

🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon

• India Captures the Carbon: India is committing $2.4 billion over five years to scale carbon capture solutions across steel, cement, power, refining, and chemicals. With carbon capture now included in India’s Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, projects could eventually earn new revenue streams to complement public funding. Loose end: Methodologies to verify captured emissions have yet to be finalized (Carbon Herald).

• Removing the Silos: Carbon removal has grown from a fringe idea to a fast-scaling field, according to Noah Deich of Columbia’s Center for Global Energy Policy. Deich argues that the next phase is to embed carbon removal as an outcome across the economy–to make it a core function of society rather than a niche climate solution (Noah Deich).

🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy

• Paying for a Hotter Grid: A new PowerLines report finds that electric and gas utilities sought nearly $31 billion in rate increases in 2025, more than double 2024 requests and the largest total on record. While the drivers vary by state, they typically include replacement of aging infrastructure, storm recovery and climate resilience costs, volatile fuel prices, and rising electricity demand from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification (Power Lines).

• Rare Earth Insurance: With China controlling roughly 90 percent of global rare-earth processing, the Trump administration is moving to build a $12 billion U.S. critical minerals stockpile. The initiative, called Project Vault, frames access to gallium, cobalt, and other rare minerals as essential to both manufacturing competitiveness and national security (Wall Street Journal).

• Proving It Pays: Congress quietly advanced the bipartisan PROVE IT Act, which directs the Department of Energy to compare the carbon intensity of U.S.-made goods to those from foreign competitors. The plan is to generate U.S.-controlled emissions data as the EU rolls out its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (E&E News).

🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action

• Making the Climate Case: According to a new McKinsey analysis, the once-unifying appeal to limit global warming to 1.5°C has weakened amid higher interest rates, geopolitics, and policy volatility. Future climate progress, the firm says, will need to be driven by a broader mix of economic, security, and competitiveness incentives. McKinsey points to falling cleantech costs, more climate-savvy capital markets, and national strategies that link decarbonization to growth and resilience as reasons for cautious optimism (McKinsey Sustainability).

• Proof Moves People: In a Stanford-led study of more than 30,000 participants, the most effective messages increased people’s willingness to take public climate actions by 30 percent and political actions by nearly 14 percent. The winning formula: Show concrete evidence that collective climate efforts have driven real policy change, and pair it with optimistic, socially rewarding messaging (Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability).

⚡ 9.0 – Innovate!

• Sodium Levels Up: Chinese researchers have developed a sodium-sulfur battery that operates at 3.6 volts at room temperature, more than twice the voltage of existing sodium batteries. The breakthrough could make energy storage far cheaper and easier to scale. The new battery safely delivers lithium-like performance and a projected cost as low as $5 per kWh (Chemistry World).

• Drilling Toward Scale: Due to faster drilling, lower costs, and surging electricity demand from data centers, investment in next-generation geothermal surpassed $2 billion in 2025, up 80 percent year over year. The IEA estimates that advanced geothermal could meet up to 15 percent of global electricity demand growth by 2050, provided policy support helps it scale (International Energy Agency).

💰 10.0 – Invest!

• Protect to Prosper: Vietnam launched a $102 million climate finance initiative to protect forests, cut nearly seven million tons of emissions, and support climate-smart livelihoods across the Central Highlands and South Central Coast. Backed by the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Green Climate Fund, the project will protect 1,930 square miles of natural forest and restore 560 square miles of agroforestry land over six years (Hanoi Times).

• Labels in Flux: Global ESG funds saw $84 billion in net outflows in 2025, the first year for net redemptions on record. The pullback resulted from a mix of U.S. political backlash, regulatory uncertainty, ESG label changes in Europe, and persistent concerns over greenwashing (Bloomberg).

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