| The Earth School’s delightful animations illuminate the climate challenge. |
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| | SUMMER SESSION: School’s out, and in its stead, we find ourselves returning to TED-Ed’s Earth School, which speaks to learners of all ages with its climate-oriented animations. With keen analysis, wit, and visual flair, the Earth School unpacks complicated ideas with disarming simplicity and directness. Their top 30 videos have garnered nearly 30 million views across YouTube, Facebook, and TED.com, appealing to audiences across the world.
Here are a few of our favorites: |
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| | | 🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation Test Track: Mexico’s new Mexico City-to-Toluca train, El Insurgente, cuts a two-hour highway trip between the cities to about an hour for under $6. The new train is a preview of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s plan to build around 2,000 miles of new passenger rail by 2030 (The Economist). Power Shift: Battery-charged EVs outsold all other fuel categories in Germany for the first time in June. They captured 28.4 percent of new registrations, as compared to 28.1 percent for hybrids, 20.5 percent for gas-powered vehicles, and 11.4 percent for diesel. This marks a big step forward for Germany, where pure EVs make up less than 5 percent of Germany’s 61 million registered vehicles (InsideEVs).
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| U.S. STILL IN THE GAME: While China is the clear leader in battery energy storage systems (BESS), perhaps the critical technology for scaling clean energy over the next five years, two U.S. manufacturers are more than holding their own. According to Wood Mackenzie, Tesla is the world’s second-largest storage supplier, while Fluence ranks seventh.
In this rapidly maturing, hyper-competitive market, long-term “execution certainty” and financial resilience matter more than simple hardware pricing, Wood Mackenzie says. The winners will be companies that can help meet the surge in global energy demand by navigating trade barriers, tariffs, and local technical standards.
Meanwhile, Ford Energy has announced plans to provide at least 20 GWh of BESS per year in the U.S. The auto giant’s subsidiary has repurposed a plant in Glendale, Kentucky, to turn batteries originally designed for EVs into stationary storage systems and bolster the grid’s resilience. |
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| | 💡 2.0 – Decarbonize the Grid Compute the Cost: With AI data center construction and electricity use both climbing sharply, Microsoft’s total emissions rose 25 percent in fiscal 2025, to around 20 million metric tons of CO2. Microsoft said the figure would have been lower but for last year’s decision to pause its purchases of a type of carbon credit that doesn’t directly incentivize new carbon-free energy (Bloomberg). Power Play: Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order to pause new hyperscale data center construction in New York State for a year, the first state-level moratorium of its kind in the country. The freeze applies to all projects of 50 megawatts or more, at a time when nearly 12 gigawatts of data center load sit in the state’s grid interconnection queue (ESG Dive).
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| 🐄 3.0 – Fix Food Warming Signs: A cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to contaminated produce has spread to 31 states this summer, with Michigan alone logging more than 3,300 cases since late June. Researchers are discerning a larger warming-driven pattern, similar to those previously seen with waves of cicadas and rising West Nile transmission (Forbes). Waste Not, Sweat Not: A community garden in East London is testing what organizers call the world’s first sauna heated by food waste. One of 27 initiatives for low-income British boroughs, the project feeds scraps from a nearby housing estate into a small-scale anaerobic digester that produces methane for heat (The Guardian).
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| 🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature Overexposed: Wildfire smoke from Canada, East Coast heat, and Texas flooding hit simultaneously this month, testing a FEMA disaster-response system that has already absorbed deep funding cuts under the Trump administration. Emergency management experts warn that overlapping disasters, as seen with Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, can strain federal capacity fast when multiple states request help at the same time (Bloomberg). Sunny Side Up: Earth is reflecting less sunlight back into space than expected, leaving the oceans to absorb more heat as sea-surface temperatures hit record highs in both June and July. The loss of planetary “shade” comes partly from fewer cooling clouds, partly from cuts to sun-reflecting sulfur pollution. The trend adds urgency to near-term cooling tools, such as methane cuts, more efficient air conditioning, and, some say, solar geoengineering (The Economist).
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| 🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry Sunset Clause: China will end an 11-year tax break on solar cells and lithium batteries, phasing in a 4 percent consumption tax by 2028. The policy ends a decade-long exemption for two clean-tech sectors China now dominates, while leaving newer technologies like perovskite solar cells, sodium-ion batteries, and solid-state batteries exempt (Bloomberg). Recycling Reality: Two advanced recycling sites in the U.S. have suspended operations in recent weeks, leaving just seven such plants operating nationwide, down from 11 in 2023. The closures followed environmental violations tied to air pollution and hazardous waste, and deepened doubts about whether this category can scale (New York Times).
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| 🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon Cap and Trade-Off: The European Commission is expected to fold carbon removal into its emissions trading system for the first time, part of a broader plan to cut emissions by 90 percent by 2040. A central EU purchasing authority could give carbon removal startups the government-backed demand they’ve long lacked, though watchdogs warn that weak rules could let polluters buy credits without delivering real climate benefits (Heatmap News).
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| 🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy Current Events: The European Commission proposed a target to double electricity’s share of energy consumption in the EU to 47 percent by 2040. While more than two thirds of EU electricity comes from homegrown clean energy, electricity’s portion of energy demand has stalled at 23 percent over the past decade (European Commission). Wasted Watts: The Trump administration is moving to repeal federal efficiency mandates for household appliances and make future efficiency updates more difficult. Existing appliance efficiency standards have lowered U.S. energy demand by more than 6 percent and saved the average household $576 per year, making the pullback oddly timed for a moment of rising energy costs (New York Times).
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| 🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action Herd Mentality: Farmers and ranchers are emerging as a new organized opposition to data center buildout, pushing back on projects that compete with agriculture for land, water, and electricity. The latest flashpoint surfaced in Montana, where a local utility bought roughly 6,000 acres of cattle-grazing land for what’s widely expected to become a large-scale data center site (Wall Street Journal). Weathering Opinions: Sixty-one percent of U.S. voters now agree that extreme weather has grown more frequent over the past five years, according to a new Data for Progress poll. Heat may be the most salient instance of extreme weather, with 67 percent of voters saying climate change worsens heatwaves and 88 percent supporting state heat protections for workers (The Guardian).
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| ⚡ 9.0 – Innovate! Ground Floor: A new wave of startups is trying to engineer hydrogen production underground rather than just search for natural deposits. Vema Hydrogen signed a conditional 10-year deal to supply the data center firm Verne up to 36,000 metric tons a year as soon as 2028. While the approach is drawing vast sums of venture money, the Trump administration’s rollback of clean hydrogen tax credits has added funding uncertainty across the sector (Heatmap News). Price Check: While Lazard’s annual cost-of-energy benchmark shows that unsubsidized solar and wind remain the cheapest new-build power in the U.S., costs rose across nearly every technology for the first time in years. Tariffs on lithium-ion imports and new sourcing restrictions on foreign battery components are driving the storage cost increase, despite an enduring investment tax credit (Lazard).
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| 💰 10.0 – Invest! Money Follows Megawatts: Climate tech venture funding jumped 55 percent in the first half of 2026 to more than $26 billion, the strongest first half since 2022, with data center-related technology accounting for more than a third of the total. With the top 10 deals capturing more than 40 percent of all funding, and overall deal count falling 25 percent, it’s clear that fewer, larger bets are driving the numbers (ESG Today). Bank Shot: Multilateral development banks committed a record $162 billion in climate finance last year, including almost $103 billion for emerging economies–nearly half of it from the World Bank. The Bank’s recent retreat from a 45 percent climate-lending target is a live risk, even as overall MDB finance remains on track for 2030 goals (Reuters).
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