If you were asked to list the top global news stories of 2021, off the top of your head, what would they be? Chances are you’d come up with some combination of COVID-19, economic woes, political conflict, Afghanistan, natural disasters, and maybe some space billionaires and Free Britney thrown in for good measure. Oh, and don’t forget the Suez Canal!

What’s probably missing from your list is any good news, which seems pretty strange. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, surely a few positive things happened this year? Researchers would say it’s because of our negativity bias — we’re wired, apparently, to pay attention to and remember things that are shocking or scary. What if there’s a simpler explanation though? What if the reason we can’t remember any good news is because nobody reported it in the first place?

For the past several years, we’ve been putting that idea to the test, seeing whether it’s possible to carve out a tiny little corner of the internet dedicated exclusively to stories of progress. Not fluffy, feel good stories, but big stories of real, lasting change for people and the planet. Over time, we’ve gotten better at digging them up and this year, managed to find hundreds. Boiling them down to just 99 was a struggle, but we got there in the end, with only a tiny bit of cheating.

We hope you enjoy the list, and while you’re reading perhaps ask yourself: why do so many of these stories come as a surprise? The answer, we think you’ll find, is pretty simple. They never appeared on your screen or in your newspaper at all.

1. Let’s kick off with by far the biggest good news story of the year: the COVID-19 vaccines. Nine billion doses were administered across 184 countries, and almost 60% of the planet has received at least one dose (in four months it’ll be 75%). This is by far the most successful global health initiative ever undertaken. In less than two years not only did we come up with a way to overcome a brand new disease, but rolled it out to more than half of humanity.

The vaccines have been incredibly effective, even against the new variants, with the global death rate falling by more than half from earlier this year. Naturally, the media has focused on all the problems — hesitancy, unequal access, ‘pandemics of the unvaccinated’, resistance to mandates etc. Lost in all the noise is the simple fact that by far the majority of the world’s population has enthusiastically embraced the vaccines, and as a result, for the first time ever we have the chance to end a global pandemic on our own terms.

Don’t take it from us though, take it from this guy, who just got his booster:

“The vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind.”

Donald J Trump
22nd December 2021

2. It wasn’t just COVID-19. The WHO approved a long awaited malaria vaccine, revitalizing the fight against one of humanity’s oldest foes, as well as a new polio vaccine, which was rolled out to over 80 million children in Africa. Other achievements included the introduction of a licensed Ebola vaccine and the launch of a landmark new global plan to tackle meningitis. Liberia became the first African country to introduce the typhoid conjugate vaccine, which was given to over two million children in just weeks, and a new study revealed that the HPV vaccine has reduced cases of cervical cancer in England by nearly 90% since 2008, with over 100 countries now using it as part of a global plan to eliminate the disease. Oh, and this didn’t get a single mention in the news, but back in January, a report in The Lancet looking at ten different diseases estimated that vaccines saved the lives of 37 million kids between 2000 and 2019. Surely that’s worth at least one headline?

3. China successfully eliminated malaria this year (it used to have 30 million cases a year in the 1940s), as did El Salvador, the first country in Central America. Globally, 40 countries have now achieved this milestone. Côte d’Ivoire became the second African country to eliminate sleeping sickness, and The Gambia became the third African country to eliminate trachoma, an amazing achievement given that in the 1980s it was responsible for almost 1 in 5 of the country’s cases of blindness.

4. One of the four major flu viruses that circulate in humans looks like it might have gone extinct this year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Yamagata virus has not been detected since April 2020 anywhere in the world. Together with the Victoria flu virus, it used to be responsible for somewhere between 290,000 and 650,000 deaths every year.

5. The latest data on AIDS (you remember, the other global pandemic) revealed there were1.5 million new HIV infections last year, a decline of 30% since 2010, and the lowest total number since 1990.

6. The same report said that 9.4 million people around the world are now receiving treatment for Hepatitis C, reversing the global trend of increasing mortality from the disease for the first time ever. Egypt has been the standout here — six years ago it had one of the highest Hepatitis C burdens in the world, at 7.6%, or 40,000 deaths a year. Thanks to a huge public health effort, by 2021 the burden had fallen to 2%, and public health officials are saying they are now on track to eliminate it altogether.

7. Lots of good news on cancer this year. The American Cancer Society said there was a 2.4% decline between 2017 to 2018 — the largest one-year drop ever — and that between 1991 and 2018, cancer mortality has fallen by 31%. Similar declines have happened in Europe. A new study showed that 4.9 million cancer deaths have been averted on the continent in the last three decades.

6. A lot of that is down to less smoking. In November, the WHO released its Global Tobacco Trends report, showing that at the turn of the century, around a third of the world’s adults were tobacco users. By 2020, this had declined to under a quarter, and is projected to fall even further to one fifth by 2025. Also, both Japan and New Zealand announced this year they would be completely smoke-free within the next decade.

9. It’s been two years since Canada legalized recreational cannabis, and one of the many positive benefits has been a drastic decrease in opioid prescriptions. This year, a study compared prescriptions before and after legalization and found that average doses of opioids per person have fallen to less than 20% of their former levels.

10. India has the largest public health insurance scheme in the world, providing 500 million people with free healthcare. In its 2021 budget, spending on the program was doubled, from 1% to 2% of GDP, the largest single public investment in the country’s history. Imagine the kind of headlines this would have received if it happened in the United States or Europe?

11. Haiti announced that it had successfully controlled the largest cholera epidemic ever recorded in a single country, while simultaneously improving maternal and child healthcare. There have been no confirmed cases of cholera there since January 2019, and the quality of maternal and child health has improved significantly in the last decade.

12. A new paper in The Lancet showed that de-worming initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa in the last two decades have resulted in a significant decline in cases among children, from 44% in 2000 to 13% in 2019. This is a huge win for one of the world’s most underrated public health problems, improving the lives of millions of people and driving economic development.

13. Stroke is a hidden killer — the second-leading cause of death worldwide, and the third-leading cause of death and disability combined. New research released in September this year revealed that quietly and largely uncelebrated, we’ve made amazing progress, with the age-standardised number of cases decreasing by 17%, and deaths by 36% in the last two decades.

14. Two conservation stories in particular should really have received more coverage this year. September saw the creation of the North-Atlantic Current and Evlanov Sea Basin, a vast, protected area off the south west coast of Ireland, and then in October we got news of the new Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, a mega-MPA linking the waters of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica, and containing some of the richest pockets of ocean biodiversity on the planet, including the Galapagos Islands. Together, these two protected areas cover more than a million km² of ocean.

15. In 2021 the US government trebled the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s largest coral sanctuary, created the country’s 63rd national park: New River Gorge, in West Virginia, finally banned the use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos on food crops, suspended all drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and restored full protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

16. The Biden Administration also reversed a Trump era ruling that allowed sand mining on protected beaches, reinstated environmental protections for two major national monuments in Utah and one off the coast of New England, and reintroduced protections for waterways and wetlands across the United States, reversing another Trump era ruling, and ensuring clean drinking water for millions of Americans and safe habitat for thousands of wildlife species.

17. 2021 was a landmark year for conservation in China, with the establishment of a network of five national parks, covering a total of 230,000 km² and containing nearly 30% of the country’s key wildlife species. The national park system, which has been in the works since 2015, will be the world’s most extensive, covering 18% of the world’s third largest country by land area.

18. After nearly 20 years of negotiations, the Peruvian government established the 2.5 million acre Yavarí Tapiche Reserve for uncontacted peoples deep in the Amazon rainforest, the Naso people of Panama secured their ancestral claim to 400,000 acres of some of the most pristine forests in Central America, and a team of conservationists banded together to save a 234,000 acre biodiversity hotspot and wildlife corridor at the intersection of Mexico, Belize and Guatemala.

19. Some of Australia’s most beautiful natural sites, including the Daintree, the oldest tropical rainforest in the world, were returned to their traditional owners this year: four parks, covering more than 160,000 hectares, will now be managed by the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people.

20. In Montana, 18,000 acres of wildlife reserve, known as the National Bison Range, was formally handed back to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and in Maine, the Passamaquoddy tribe bought back their ancestral land of Pine Island.

21. Ecologists reported that the Mississippi River is the cleanest it’s been in more than a century, with pollution down to 1% of what it was in the 1980s, while the most comprehensive survey of the Thames in 60 years found that the river, once declared biologically dead, is now “home to myriad wildlife as diverse as London itself.” The biggest river success story however, came from China, which passed a landmark environmental law protecting the Yangtze, one of the country’s two ‘mother rivers,’ banning all industrial projects, sand mining and all fishing, including in tributaries and the estuary (more than 400 million people live in the Yangtze basin).

22. Glasgow gave the green light to create a massive urban forest consisting of 18 million trees, a rewilding project in England that’s reclaimed 128,000 acres of industrial wasteland was reported to have created 5,000 new jobs plus a new national forest, and half a million acres of the Scottish Highlands were committed to being rewilded over the next 30 years, becoming Europe’s tenth official rewilding area.

23. Indonesia reported that it has restored more than two million hectares of damaged, carbon-rich peatlands in the six years since the toxic haze crisis of 2015, and last year, the country achieved its fourth consecutive year of decline in deforestation. India announced a 25% increase in mangrove cover since the 1980s thanks to restoration efforts, and China revealed that its coastal wetlands have experienced a significant recovery in the last decade, thanks to several conservation projects started back in the 1990s.

24. Africa’s largest tropical rainforest, Salonga National Park, was removed from UNESCO’s list of threatened sites, following 20 years of sustained conservation work, and a new reserve dubbed the ‘Amazon of Europe’, spanning Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia, received official UNESCO heritage status, the first biosphere to cover five different countries.

25. Three years ago, Pakistan launched the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, a plan to reforest vast swathes of one of the most deforested countries in the world. Critics scoffed, but they’re being forced to eat their words: the country has now planted 1.5 billion trees, and is also conducting one of the biggest mangrove restoration projects in the world.

26. Three different sites — an Alaskan archipelago dubbed the ‘Rat Islands’, Lehua Island in Hawaii and Redonda Isle in the Caribbean, were all declared rodent free this year after decades of conservation efforts. In all three locations, the pace of ecosystem recovery and increase of native wildlife populations has shocked even the most cynical of conservationists, shining examples of how quickly nature can bounce back if given a chance.

27. A comprehensive plastic ban went into effect in China in January, including items like straws, utensils, nondegradable bags and postal or courier packages, and in July, the EU banned single-use plastic plates, cutlery, straws, balloon sticks and cotton buds. India announced a ban on a long list of single plastics effective July 2022, the Maldives kicked off the first phase of a plan to completely eliminate single plastics by 2023, and New Zealand announced that single-use plastics would be phased out by 2025, with bans on cotton buds, packaging, cutlery, straws, and fruit labels beginning next year. ABC

28. Barcelona announced a new scheme to give citizens free, unlimited public transport for three years in return for giving up their private vehicles, Paris took back space from cars, opening linear parks on old highways along the Seine, phasing out diesel cars, opening bus lanes, raising parking meter prices and plowing bike lanes down hundreds of streets, and the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham finalized a plan to divert car traffic out of the city and introducing zero-emissions cross-city buses, cycle ways and pedestrian lanes.

29. Abortion rights were consistently in the news this year, for good reason: American women’s right to a safe and legal abortion is in imminent danger of being taken away; Polish women have already lost theirs. Amidst the legitimate alarm however, you might have missed the ‘green wave’ that swept through Latin America in 2021. Argentina formally adopted a new law legalizing abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, both Mexico and Ecuador decriminalized abortion, and Chile took its first step towards legalization by expanding legislation that currently restricts the procedure to special circumstances. Across Latin America it is now legal for women to choose what happens to their bodies in Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Cuba, Guyana, and three Mexican states.

30. Egypt’s cabinet toughened its laws on female genital mutilation, imposing jail terms of up to 20 years, and Somalia’s Puntland region outlawed the barbaric procedure. Pakistan abolished the outdated practice of virginity tests on rape victims, Iran passed a new law protecting women against domestic and other forms of gender-based violence, and Lebanon criminalized sexual harassment with a new landmark law that drastically expanded its definition.

31. The Dominican Republic definitively banned child marriage this year. Previously, girls from the age of 15 were allowed to marry, and 36% of Dominican girls married before the age of 18.

32. In the Philippines the minimum age of sexual consent was raised in September from 12 to 16 years old, overturning a century-old law on statutory rape, a historic win for child rights advocates who fought for this for years. France also took a major step forward in protecting children against sexual abuse this year by setting the minimum age of sexual consent at 15, and made birth control free for all women aged 25 and under.

33. New Zealand passed world-first legislation for paid bereavement for miscarriage, giving women and their partners time off to grieve before returning to work, New York announced it would no longer prosecute prostitution, and in Mexico the law was amended to give women with disabilities equal access to protection from domestic violence.

34. In July, four women in South Africa successfully overturned a set of apartheid-era marriage laws, giving around 400,000 elderly black women equal access to matrimonial property, and Uttarakhand became the first state in India to grant women co-ownership of land, in a landmark amendment that affected 350,000 girls and women overnight.

35. Tanzania said it will allow pregnant girls and teen mothers to resume secondary education, overturning a four year ban, women in Malaysia finally won the right to pass citizenship onto their children born overseas, Saudi Arabia officially allowed single, divorced or widowed women to live independently without permission from a male guardian, and a new law in the United Arab Emirates allowed non-Muslims to marry, divorce and get joint child custody, making it the first Gulf country to reform marriage laws formerly based on religious principles.

36. Same-sex relations were decriminalized in Angola, overturning a 134 year old colonial statute, and in September, Switzerland became the 30th country to legalize gay marriage, followed by the 31st, Chile, in December. Across Catholic Latin America, same-sex marriage is now legal in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and 23 of Mexico’s 32 states. Love is love.

37. Attitudes to sexuality can and do change, sometimes in the space of a single generation. Support for same-sex marriage in the United States in 2021 reached an all time high of 70%, up from 60% in 2015 when it was legalized, and from 27% in 1996, when Gallup first started asking the question.

38. Attitudes to race can change too. In one of the largest shifts of public opinion ever recorded, Gallup said this year that 94% of American adults now approve of interracial marriage, a huge leap from 4% when the poll began in 1958. People over the age of 50 reported the biggest shift, increasing their approval by 64% in the past 30 years.

39. Kazakhstan abolished the death penalty, making permanent a nearly two-decade freeze on capital punishment in the authoritarian Central Asian country. More than two-thirds of the countries in the world have now abolished the death penalty in law or practice, according to Amnesty International. EJI

40. Kazakhastan also announced that it is officially nuclear free, after scientists ground down the last 2.9 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, rendering it useless for bomb-making. The historic moment comes after 30 years of denuclearization, and represents one of the least celebrated, yet most successful examples of post-Cold War diplomacy.

41. The United Nations ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons this year, the first ever global treaty to ban nuclear weapons and all activities related to them. It’s not the end of nuclear weapons — none of the nuclear-capable countries signed on — but it is a historic milestone in the decades long campaign by civil society groups for disarmament.

42. A new report on cluster munitions revealed that more than 110,000 landmines covering 135 km² were destroyed globally last year, a new annual record, and that over a million landmines have been cleared in the last decade.

43. Worldwide, democracy appears to be under threat, but remember — bad news travels, good news doesn’t. When Afghanistan’s government collapsed, the whole world watched. But when Indonesia, the most world’s most populous Muslim country, produces the planet’s most effective democratically elected leader — Joko Widodo — almost no one hears the story.

44. In a mountainous, desert nation of 35 million people known for its mosques, mausoleums and ancient Silk Road sites, 80% of eligible voters cast votes this year, showing the strength of emerging democratic norms in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s neighbour. There was also a welcome win for democracy in Zambia, with voters peacefully electing a new president for the third time in the country’s history.

45. The European Parliament voted in support this year of banning biometric mass surveillance, stating that individuals should only be monitored if they have been suspected of a crime. The landmark resolution should put an end to the automated recognition of people in public spaces through biometrics, and also prohibit predictive policing which increases the risk of discrimination.

46. Incarceration rates in the United States fell to a 24 year low in 2019, plummeted a further 14% in 2020, to 1.81 million people, and then fell again in 2021, to 1.77 million. There are now half a million fewer people in prison in America compared to 13 years ago, and empty prisons are being repurposed into homeless shelters, educational farms, and even movie studios. These changes are due to incredible, uncelebrated activism, and largely unheralded changes in criminal laws, sentencing patterns and a decline in violent crimes.

47. New Jersey became the 14th US state to legalize marijuana this year, dismissing 362,000 related cases and releasing 1,200 people from probation. New York legalized it in April, as well as New Mexico, and both states also immediately started expunging the criminal records of individuals with past marijuana-related convictions. A new poll showed that more than two in three Americans now support legalizing marijuana (a decade ago less than half of the country was in favour). This might just be one of the most successful rebrands of all time. It’s not weed or pot any more, it’s medicine.

48. A significant majority of people in wealthy countries now believe that having people of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds improves society. In the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan, 8 out of 10 people believe greater diversity is a benefit, and even in relatively culturally homogenous countries like Japan and Greece, the share has increased by double digits in the last four years.

49. Bangladesh, home to 160 million people, celebrated a ‘development miracle’ in 2021, its 50th year of independence. In the last three decades, GDP per capita has increased seven fold, 24 million people have been lifted out of poverty, life expectancy has risen to 73 years, infant and maternal mortality rates have fallen by a factor of five, the literacy rate has increased from 35% to 74%, and more than 97% of the population now has access to electricity, up from 62% in 2014.

50. Infant mortality rates in the Philippines were reported to have dropped by 25% in the last decade, and in Cameroon, the country’s latest demographic and health survey rerevealed that pregnancy related mortalities had fallen by 40% since 2011.

51. The UN released its latest data on family planning. The total number of women and girls around the world using modern contraception now stands at 320 million, with 60 million new users in the last seven years, and nine million in the past year alone. Progress has been particularly strong in Africa, where the number of modern contraceptive users has grown by 66% since 2012.

52. Air pollution is falling across a vast swathe of 15 countries in Africa, from Senegal in the west to South Sudan in the east. It’s the result of rapid urbanization and economic development, leading to a significant decrease in fires traditionally used for land management. “As middle and low-income countries grow you often see more emissions. It’s nice to see a decline occurring when you’d expect to see pollution increasing.”

53. A massive, bipartisan clean water bill was approved 89–2 by the US Senate. The legislation will improve water quality, remove lead pipes from schools, and update infrastructure for the impacts of extreme weather and climate change. 40% of the funds will target underserved, rural, and tribal communities.

54. In India, millions of people have gained access to clean water in the last two years. About 11.2 million, or 38% of all households in disease-vulnerable regions now have access to clean water, up from 2.9% in 2019, and another 11.8 million now have running tap water, up from less than two million in 2019.

55. In the past two decades, almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa has made gains in female literacy. In 2000, the proportion of women who could read and write was around 46%; today, it’s close to 60%. Even more encouragingly, the literacy rate for young women (15–24) has soared to 72%, and is now just below their male peers.

56. US poverty was reported to have fallen to 9.1%, the lowest level ever recorded, and childhood poverty experienced its largest ever one year decrease, dropping from 15.8% to 11.9%. The US government also launched the most ambitious food assistance program in its history to help the 25 million Americans who still don’t have enough to eat.

57. Further north, Canada revealed that the number of children below the poverty line had plummeted from 1.1 million to 680,000 since 2015, and said it was on track to halve domestic poverty by 2030.

58. 100 of the world’s biggest companies will now pay a minimum tax rate of 15% after the first global revamp of corporate tax rules in over a decade. 136 countries signed the new global tax agreement this year, which will raise an additional $150 billion for governments per year.

59. A study in The Lancet of 21 low, medium and high income countries found that there had been no increase in suicide rates during the pandemic and that 12 countries (including the United States) actually recorded a decrease.

60. There was an update on Sustainable Development Goal Number 7 (access to electricity). Naturally, not a single media outlet reported on it. Good news: the number of people without access to electricity has declined from 1.2 billion to 759 million in the past decade, access to clean cooking solutions has grown by 1% annually, and 420 million people now get their electricity from off-grid solar systems.

61. The Social Progress Index measures health, safety, education, technology, and human rights across the world’s population. This year’s edition said that 147 nations recorded a better score than they did a decade ago, with just four countries (the US, Brazil, Syria and South Sudan) doing worse. “Progress is advancing across the world, but it remains slow and uneven.”

On the surface, it felt like we went backwards on climate this year. Catastrophic heat waves, floods and hurricanes, rebounding emissions from a global economic recovery and the fuel crisis, a sobering IPCC report and a much-anticipated meeting in Glasgow that ended up being disappointingly light on action. Doom and gloom however, is never the full story. Underneath all of that, the tectonic shifts of the energy transition continued, driven by a simple piece of economic logic: it is now cheaper to save the world than it is to ruin it.

62. 2021 was a record-breaker for renewables globally, with 227 GW of new capacity installed, a 4.7% increase over 2020 levels. Storage grew three-fold, while offshore wind installations doubled compared to 2020. Solar additions of 180 GW meant more solar was added this year than the combined record for coal and gas capacity additions this century. 245 GW of global giga-scale green hydrogen was announced worldwide in 2021 too, six times the levels seen in 2020.

63. Early-stage investment in climate tech companies skyrocketed, tipping over $50 billion in 2021, and the proportion of venture capital dollars going into climate tech soared, from around 6% to 14%. On the flipside, finance continued to flee fossil fuels. Swiss Re closed a major loophole in the reinsurance market, Citigroup become the first major US bank to rule out coal plant expansions, the Asian Development Bank ended all financing for coal mining and plants, and the Federal Bank of India said it would not finance any new coal, a first for an Indian financial institution.

61. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, sold its entire portfolio of companies focused on oil exploration and production, the Dutch ABP, the world’s fifth largest pension fund, said it was divesting from all fossil fuel companies, South Korea’s National Pension Service, the world’s third largest pension fund, ceased all coal investments, as did FirstRand, Africa’s biggest bank, and the AIA Group, Asia’s largest Asian insurance company.

62. Following the COP meeting in Glasgow, 90% of the global economy is now covered by national net-zero emissions targets, up from 68% in 2020. “We now have almost universal acceptance of the 1.5C target — that’s a big step forward.” More than 450 firms with $120 trillion in assets also joined former Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney’s Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero,committing to steer the global economy towards net-zero emissions and a 1.5° C limit.

63. This might have been our favourite (and most wonky) energy news this year: Goldman Sachs, the notorious tree hugging, left-leaning woke investment bank, said that financial markets have starting pricing in climate risk, effectively creating their own carbon price. It’s pretty much impossible to now finance new coal, and the cost of capital is more than 20% for offshore oil, 12% for LNG and just 4% for renewables. Like we said: it’s cheaper to save the world than it is to ruin it.

64. A new report showed that in the six years since the Paris Agreement was signed, more than three quarters of planned coal projects have been shelved, 44 governments have committed to ending coal, and a further 33 have cancelled their pipelines. The remaining pipeline is now spread across just 37 countries, 16 of which have only one project.

65. According to the latest estimates from the Financial Times, almost no new coal-power plants will make back their upfront costs. Specificially, 92% of facilities proposed or under construction globally would cost more to build than the future cash flow they would generate. Pipelines? More like pipe dreams.

66. The biggest energy story you didn’t hear was that Guangdong, China’s most populous province and one of its most industrialized, banned the construction of coal plants in the Pearl River Delta, the first ever crackdown on coal by a major Chinese province. Then there was the one you did hear about — Xi Jinping announced that China would not finance or build any new coal-fired power projects abroad, a huge deal for the world’s biggest coal financier.

67. Things then got even worse for coal at COP26. Thanks to Glasgow, 90 new coal power projects will be cancelled, another 130 are looking highly questionable, and 750 coal-fired power plants around the world now have phase-out dates, up from 380 before. A further 1,600 coal plants are now covered by carbon neutrality targets, 95% of the world’s total. Not bad for two weeks right?

68. But wait… there’s more. Hungary and Greece said they would close their last coal plants in 2025, Portugal shut down its last coal plant nine years ahead of schedule, Romania said it would close all coal mines by 2032, Canada said it would no longer approve coal mining projects, Sri Lanka stopped building new coal plants, North Macedonia and Montenegro became the first countries in the Western Balkans to announce coal exits, Spain said it would stop coal consumption completely by 2030, Germany’s newly formed coalition government announced a plan to quit coal by 2030 too, eight years ahead of schedule and at the end of the year, India announced it was considering a proposal to halt all new coal plants.

69. Climate activists had a great year, finally forcing Harvard, the richest university on earth, to divest from fossil fuels, Chubb, the world’s largest property and casualty insurer, to walk away from Canada’s tar sands expansion. Endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth $40 trillion have now partially or fully divested from coal, gas and oil stocks.

70. The Keystone XL pipeline was officially terminated, cementing one of the biggest environmental victories of all time. Activists managed to delay the $9 billion, 830,000 barrel per day, Alberta oil sands ‘dirty climate bomb’ for 12 years, and in the process, give birth to much of the modern climate movement.

71. While climate politics at the federal level in the United States was disappointing, 28 different states passed either comprehensive climate or clean energy legislation, stopped fossil fuel industry backed efforts, or made major advancements through statewide boards. Thanks to policies passed in 2021, nearly 40% of people in the United States now live in a place dedicated to 100% clean electricity.

72. The US EPA issued its first major regulation directly limiting greenhouse gases, requiring an 85% reduction of HFCs by 2036. This will eliminate the equivalent of 4.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, three years’ worth of emissions from the electricity sector. Fridge and air conditioning lobbyists, it seems, don’t have quite the same clout with Joe Manchin. China also agreed to limit emissions of HFCs, as the country began enforcing its obligations under the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which took effect in September.

Solving climate change isn’t just about decarbonizing electricity, industry and agriculture, but also transport, which accounts for a third of global carbon emissions. On that front, it’s been a standout year. So good in fact, that for the first time ever we’re giving EVs their own section (we usually include them with clean energy).

73. 2021 was the year that the world’s carmakers finally seemed to accept the inevitability of an all-electric future. General Motors said it would eliminate the sale of all fossil fuel powered cars and SUVs by 2035, Jaguar said it would stop selling them within the next five years, and Hyundai said no more after 2040.

74. Ford said it would sell only EVs in Europe from 2030, Fiat said it would be an all electric company by 2030, Volvo said its entire car line-up would be fully electric by the same year, and both Audi and Daimler-Mercedes announced they were no longer developing new combustion engine models.

In terms of products, there is no longer any rational reason to opt for a combustion engine in the near future.

Wolf-Henning Scheider
CEO, Mercedes Benz

75. In March, the IEA said that the global demand for gasoline had peaked, and was unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels given the shift to electric vehicles, and in July, the world officially rid itself of leaded gasoline, after a refinery in Algeria used up the last stockpile. It took a 40 year campaign by the UN to achieve this, and it’s estimated elimination will prevent more than 1.2 million deaths annually.

76. If you remember just one number from this section, make it 10%. That’s the proportion of global vehicle sales that are now electric. To put this in perspective, in the first quarter of 2010, 395 electric vehicles in total were sold worldwide, 0.002% of passenger car sales. In the last quarter of this year, 1.7 million were sold, of which more than half were in Asia.

77. Sales in Germany and China were particularly mindblowing. More than a third of new German cars sold are now plugins, while in the world’s largest car market EV sales have reached nearly 20%. In October, the Tesla Model 3 was the best selling car in Europe (not the best selling electric vehicle — the best selling car, overall), and Hertz bought 100,000 of them for its new fleet, the largest electric car order of all time.

78. In May, Ford unveiled its new electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, whose petrol-powered counterpart, the F-150, is the biggest selling pickup truck in the United States. The real gamechanger however, were the first customer deliveries for all electric carmaker Rivian’s new truck, and the company’s subsequent $100 billion plus valuation, higher than GM or Ford.

79. It wasn’t just passenger vehicles that had a good year. Ebike sales continued to boom, and trucks also proved they were poised for electrification, as 13 models were released in the US alone. Also, we heard that the global fleet of battery powered buses has increased by 22% since 2019, and 18% of all municipal buses on the road worldwide are now zero-emissions.

80. Canada and Chile announced bans on sales of combustion vehicles by 2035, the EU proposed a plan to do the same (although it’s not law yet) and then the really big one: at COP26, 37 countries, including the UK, India, Mexico, Morocco and Turkey, committed to phasing out gas car sales by 2035 in rich countries, and by 2040 in poorer ones.

81. Thanks to progressive policies over the past 24 years, California announced that it had clocked up a 78% reduction in diesel particulate pollution, the toxic black stuff from car exhausts, and that the cleaner air had resulted in 82% fewer deaths from heart and lung disease. New York also became the second state after California to announce combustion engine ban, after governor, Kathy Hochul, signed a bill requiring all passenger vehicles sold in the state to be emissions-free by 2035.

82. In December, the US EPA issued new rules that significantly tighten greenhouse gas emissions levels for new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks sold in model years 2023 through 2026. All told, these standards will cut carbon emissions by 3.1 billion metric tons by 2050, equivalent to two full years of emissions from all transportation in the United States.

83. Animal rights activists in the UK and Spain won major victories this year with landmark reforms that legally recognize animals as ‘sentient beings, preventing cruelty and mistreatment, and in the United States, activists celebrated big wins on trophy hunting, state-funded wildlife killing experiments, cage confinement, and a historic ban on fur.

84. The EU voted to phase out the use of animals in laboratory experiments, saving eight million monkeys, dogs, cats, rabbits, mice and rats a year, Virginia became the fourth state in America to ban cosmetic animal testing and Mexico became the 41st country to do the same, after Save Ralph, an animated film about a rabbit cosmetic tester, spurred 1.3 million people to petition for new legislation.

85. Consumption of wild animals was reported to have dropped by almost 30% across China, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the USA due to shifting cultural tastes and concerns about COVID-19, and an undercover investigation forced South Korea’s largest dog meat auction house to close, with advocates now calling for a permanent ban on all slaughtering and processing of dogs for food.

86. Tanzania said it was hopeful of reaching its ‘zero-elephant-poaching’ target after making thousands of arrests, including 21 kingpins of the illegal trafficking trade. Since 2014, its elephant population has increased by 17,000. Malawi also reported a dramatic reduction in wildlife poaching and trafficking, thanks to tougher penalties, with 90% of wildlife criminals serving an average of four and half years in prison since legislation was amended in 2017, and no international ivory seizures linked to the country since.

87. Good news for the global dawn chorus (go on, open it, trust us). 400 years after being wiped out, the UK’s crane population has passed a crucial milestone on its road to recovery, in Chile, the population of the Burrowing Parrot was reported to have increased from 217 in 1986 to over 4,000 today, and in Namibia fisherman said they have reduced the accidental deaths of seabirds from 30,000 per year in 2009 to just 215 at last count, thanks to bird-scaring lines (a sort of nautical scarecrow) on fishing boats.

88. The bald eagle has quadrupled its population in the past decade with more than 300,000 birds soaring across American skies, the California condor is returning to its home skies after nearly a century thanks to the efforts of the Yurok Tribe, and Bulgaria now has a stable population of around 80 griffon vultures, more than 40 years after the birds were declared extinct.

89. Turning the tides, Gabon passed landmark measures to protect the country’s 69 species of sharks and rays, and Mozambique passed a powerful new fisheries law protecting dolphins, whale sharks and manta rays, off the back of news that the country’s largest marine conservation area has cut illegal fishing by nearly half.

90. The population of four endangered tuna species — Atlantic bluefin, Southern bluefin, Albacore and Yellowfin — are all showing signs of recovery thanks to the enforcement of fishing quotas over the past decade, and in the United States, overfishing has essentially ended with 91% of stocks now reporting recoveries. Not just good news for the planet, but for fishing communities too. “We’re catching bigger fish and getting more bang for our buck.”

91. In North Cyprus, nest counts of green turtles have increasing by 162% and loggerhead turtles by 46% since 1993 and in Cape Verde, the number of nests has increased from 10,000 to almost 200,000 in the past six years, thanks to conservation measures and new laws to criminalise the killing, trade, and consumption of sea turtles.

92. The US government ramped up its protection of endangered humpback whales this year, declaring 300,000 km² of the Pacific Ocean as critical habitat. It’s a big win for conservationists who sued the federal government in 2018 over its failure to designate protected areas, which are proven to double the chance of species’ recovery.

93. Animal rights activists in China pulled off an incredible rescue mission, removing 101 moon bears from a bile extraction facility and transporting them over 1,200 km to a rehab centre. It took years of planning, and involved three convoys of nine trucks each, and a dedicated team of vets and carers who will continue to rehabilitate the bears as they settle into their new home.

94. China doubled the number of wild animals protected under its conservation rules, imposing hefty fines on the trading and consumption of 500 species, including many birds and wolves. It comes after 30 years of Chinese environmental groups fighting for animals to be added to the protected list.

95. Chinese officials also announced that they no longer consider giant pandas an endangered species. There are now 1,800 giant pandas living in the wild, thanks to a series of conservation initiatives in recent years. Those initiatives have also benefited other species: Siberian tigers, Asian elephants, and crested ibises are all seeing population increases too.

96. The population of the critically endangered Grauer’s gorilla has doubled, with numbers up from 3,800 in 2016 to 6,800 today, thanks to conservation efforts in the Oku Community Forests in the Congo. Across Europe, the population of European bison has tripled in the last 17 years, in Vietnam, the population of the Delacour’s Langur, a critically endangered monkey, has quadrupled in the past 20 years.

97. In Kazakhstan, the Saiga antelope has more than doubled its numbers since 2019, in the UAE, the population of the Arabian oryx has increased by 22% in the last four years, and the mhorr, or Dama gazelle, is on the road to recovery thanks to a rescue mission by an army captain from Spain 50 years ago. The descendants of the rescued gazelles now number 4,000 and have been reintroduced in Tunisia, Morocco, and Senegal.

98. The Polish wolf has recovered to an estimated population of 3,000, a massive leap from the 60 in existence in the early 1970s, and in Scotland, the number of beavers has more than doubled in the last three years, thanks to illegal re-wilding efforts by environmental activists.

99. Nepal revealed it is on track to become the first country to double its tiger population. It’s part of TX2, a global imitative supported by Russia, Nepal and 13 other countries. Nepal’s tiger population has grown steadily from 121 tigers 11 years ago, to 235 tigers 3 years ago and the country is likely to reach the 250-mark next year.

100. One more, just for good measure. Did you hear that humanity invented the first new pasta shape in over a century? It’s called Cascatelli, which means little waterfall in Italian — designed for maximum sauceability, forkability and tooth sinkability. Don’t say we don’t bring you the big stories here.

99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn’t Hear About in 2021 was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This story first appeared in the Future Crunch newsletter, a regular roundup of good news, mind-blowing science and the best bits of the internet. You can subscribe for free over here.

It’s been more than a month since you last heard from us.

A full moon has waxed and waned, then waxed again, and a great darkness has settled on the land. As the plague enters its seventh season, a virulent new strain has emerged, threatening all our hard won gains. Once again our hospitals buckle under the pressure and the science of mask-wearing regresses into hapless debates about freedom. Once again our doctors and nurses are asked to do the impossible, despite having done it hundred times over. From Algeria to Mexico to Indonesia, the body counts rise and the curves bend in all the wrong directions. Charlatanism, conspiracy and political propaganda thrive, moving at light speed through the networks. Once again, our political leaders are exposed as utterly inadequate to the task at hand.

Catastrophe is in the air. Days ago, the largest peer-reviewed process of all time confirmed that we are in the midst of the greatest planetary crisis we’ve faced since we came down from the trees. July was the hottest month ever recorded; the Earth is hotter than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age. Heat waves settle across entire continents, floods rip through Germany, China and Japan, drought stalks Myanmar, Venezuela and Mali, wildfires explode across the Pacific Northwest, the Mediterranean and Siberia. Our scientists tell us humanity is unequivocally responsible for these events. “In the past, we’ve had to make that statement more hesitantly. Now it’s a statement of fact.”

The Arctic will be ice free soon and our grandchildren probably won’t see the coral reefs, and yet the few thousand bankers, industrialists and politicians responsible for this, the greatest of all crimes, switch tactics from denial to delay, clutching their forty pieces of silver to the grave. Under smoke-red skies ageing billionaires ride their metal phalluses into the heavens, with wrinkled lips and sneers of cold command. Back here on Planet Earth, tin pot tech emperors sell soma dreams of The Metaverse to the masses, while billions of their fellow human beings struggle to put food on the table.

In the graveyard of empires, 20 blood-soaked years of ‘nation building’ has unravelled in days. A sect of religious fanatics has swarmed back into power, overrunning the country with shocking swiftness and plunging millions of women and girls into a terrifying real life version of the Handmaid’s Tale. Democracy’s flame sputters out in the last remaining holdout from the Arab Spring, Nobel peace prize laureates wage war on their own citizens, emboldened autocrats everywhere tighten their grip, and in the Caribbean, storm-lashed rescuers search for survivors in the rubble.

Pax Americana has never looked shakier. In Florida, the once and future King lurks, squamous in his gilded lair, leaching poison into the body politic. In the east, a new rival grinds Xinjiang and Hong Kong under its boot, and looks across the Taiwan Strait towards the last remaining isle of freedom. The networks of trade will be no match for the drumbeat of war, should it come. The markets will not help either. Animal spirits have taken hold of all but the most prudent of investors, regulators wrestle with the spectre of inflation, and the dream of home ownership disappears beyond the reach of an entire generation.

This is the story of Collapse.

It’s the oldest one in the book, and we are all intimately familiar with its lurid details. It’s on the front page of every newspaper and at the top of all of our feeds. You can tune it out or turn it off, but you cannot ignore it.

Here’s another story.

In the last month, over a billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world, more than 30 million a day. Almost a third of humanity has now been reached; by the end of this year we will have dosed half the people on earth: the single most extraordinary public health achievement in our species’ history. The vaccines are unbelievably effective. Less than 1 in 25,000 of fully vaccinated people exposed to the Delta variant have ended up in hospital, and only 1 in 100,000 have died. Global death rates are climbing among the unvaccinated, yes, but they’re still well below the highs of earlier this year. The pandemic isn’t over, but an end is firmly in sight.

In the process of containing the virus, Homo sapiens has figured out how to manipulate the basic machinery of life, tinkering with the flow of genetic information from DNA to RNA to make proteins, the intricate nanomachines that perform most tasks in living things. This technology was still years, perhaps decades away from being approved, but thanks to the ultimate real world clinical trial it’s now as much as part of medicine as antibiotics or painkillers. Trials are already underway for mRNA vaccines for everything from cancer to malaria and HIV. Their impact will stretch far beyond this pandemic, potentially saving hundreds of millions of lives.

It’s not just the science that’s leapt forward a decade; the process knowledge for making, distributing and administering those vaccines at scale has accelerated. The labs, grow vats, glass vial factories, warehouses, trucks, refrigerators, forms in triplicate, computer systems, training manuals and hard-earned know-how will be with us long after the COVID-19 headlines are gone, a public health legacy felt for generations to come. In the background, another medical revolution is brewing in the form of psychedelic therapies, which stand poised to transform mental health as decisively as vaccines once transformed infectious disease.

That IPCC report makes grim reading yes, but there are also reasons for hope. A decade ago the world was on track for a particularly terrifying climate future. China was building a new coal plant every three days and global emissions were increasing at a rate of 3% per year. Ten years later, we’re in a very different place. Clean energy is now definitively cheaper than dirty energy, making climate change a solvable problem by expanding the universe of the possible. In the past, nations faced an impossible trade off between climate disaster or material impoverishment. Today, thanks to the efforts of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, that trade off no longer exists.

We’ve begun fixing the problem. The world has produced more electricity from clean energy — solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear — than from coal in the past two years. 32 countries have absolutely decoupled their emissions from economic growth, and global emissions will start falling this decade as the energy revolution takes hold. Is it enough? Not yet, but the darkest climate futures of a decade ago are no longer in play. With continued effort it’s possible to lower the curves even more. It will take heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation and visionary commitment. It will mean making profound changes in our societies, economies, our ways of doing things. The good news? We know how to do it.

From India, come reports that wind and solar capacity have passed the historic milestone of 100GW, even as no new coal plants were switched on in the first quarter of this year. Coal pipelines have collapsed in Turkey and the Philippines, Sri Lanka just ruled out any new plants, and in South Africa, the state utility says it is now “virtually impossible” to get finance for its coal projects. In the United States, the EIA has released data showing that the number of producing coal mines declined by 18% last year.

Slowly but surely, the not-so-invisible hand of the market is starting to bite. A new analysis just revealed that the UK’s low carbon economy is now worth £200bn, four times the size of the country’s manufacturing sector. More than 75,000 businesses, from wind turbine manufacturers to recycling plants, now employ more than 1.2 million people in Britain’s green economy — a fact not lost on its vote-grubbing politicians. In Europe, the average cost of electricity from renewables is now half the price of fossil fuels, two thirds of the continent’s electricity is generated from zero carbon sources, and coal generation is 16% lower than this time two years ago.

Climate tech investments are smashing all previous records. Three weeks ago, two global asset managers, TPG and Brookfield, closed a combined $12.4 billion in climate investment funds. That’s more money committed in a day than used to be raised in years. Mercedes just became the latest car brand to announce it’s going all-electric by 2030. In Alaska, a federal judge just blocked a massive new oil drilling project, citing climate concerns, and Greenland just banned all oil exploration, despite being home to billions of untapped barrels. In Sweden, the first delivery of green steel made without coal has been made and Baowu, the world’s largest steelmaker, fired up its first large scale hydrogen-based forge two weeks ago, and good luck finding a news story anywhere about that.

After forty years of trickle up economics, the pendulum is swinging back in favour of fairness. In the United States a combination of stimulus checks, food stamps, unemployment benefits and child tax credits has reduced the number of Americans living in poverty by nearly half this year. That’s the largest short-term poverty reduction in the country’s history, a 45% decline from 2018. Two bills are currently working their way through Congress right now, the biggest investments in remaking the economy, rebuilding infrastructure and expanding the social safety net since the New Deal, and the most significant action to confront climate change in US history.

In the Himalayas, India and China have completed troop disengagement from the Gogra area of eastern Ladakh as part of an agreement reached during their latest round of military talks. In Rwanda, the health ministry says it has made astonishing progress on combating viral hepatitis, and in Mozambique, hundreds of thousands of people just gained access to clean water and electricity following the completion of a project in the central province of Manica. In the DRC, tens of thousands of former child miners are now attending school, two years after the government made primary education free for all.

Iraq has just reclaimed 17,000 looted artifacts in its biggest-ever repatriation, in Mexico, women have made historic gains in recent elections and in Argentina, the government just guaranteed the right to gender identity for people who don’t recognize themselves as either female or male. Three weeks ago, Sierra Leone’s parliament voted unanimously to repeal the death penalty, making it the 23rd African country to prohibit capital punishment. “This vote is a major victory for all those who tirelessly campaigned to consign this cruel punishment to history and a strengthening of the protection of the right to life.”

In Indonesia, one of the world’s biggest palm oil growers has announced a plan to rehabilitate an area half the size of New York to atone for its past clearing of rainforests and peatlands. In Bolivia, a massive new two million acre reserve has been established on the Amazon’s deforestation frontier, thanks to a partnership between indigenous communities and private donors. Last month, the United States restored protections for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, home to thousands of watersheds and fjords, and more than a thousand forested islands. The new protections will end large-scale old growth logging and support restoration, climate resilience, and recreation.

Not to be outdone, Canada has announced major new conservation funding for its Prairie provinces, conserving up to 30,000 ha of wetlands, grasslands, and riparian areas, on top of restoring 6,000 ha and enhancing another 18,000 ha. At the beginning of this month, the World Heritage Committee removed the Salonga National Park, Africa’s largest protected rainforest and home to 40% of the Earth’s bonobo apes, from its list of threatened sites. A fortnight ago, Thailand banned sunscreens containing the chemicals that damage coral from all of its marine national parks, and France joined Germany in outlawing the culling of male chicks.

India’s government recently re-affirmed its commitment to banning all single use plastic next year, and Target, one of the world’s largest retailers, just committed to a 20% cut in virgin plastic by 2025, joining Walmart, Coca-Cola and Mattel, who have made similar commitments in the last year. From picturesque Mediterranean isles to New York’s bustling harbor, oyster colonies are depolluting the sea, and off the coast of Scotland there are four no-take zones now and climbing, as the idea spreads further afield. Across vineyards and olive groves in Spain, a new regenerative agriculture model is taking hold, allowing grass and wild flowers to flourish between the trees. In Beirut, they’re up-cycling rubble from last year’s explosion into public amenities like sidewalk pavement, trash bins and benches.

Off the west coast of the United States, orca whales just received new protections, expanding their critical habitat from the Canadian border down to Point Sur in California, an additional 41,206 km² of foraging areas, river mouths and migratory pathways. Further north, recent sightings of the North Pacific right whale offer hope that one of the rarest of the large whales may finally, be starting to recover. In Spain conservationists are reporting there are now 1,100 Iberian lynx in the wild, thanks to one of the most successful reintroduction programmes of all time, and from Nepal, comes new data showing the number of tigers in the country has almost doubled in the past ten years.

This is the story of Renewal.

We’re not sharing it to balance some kind of imaginary scale, or look on a bright side that doesn’t exist. We’re living through a pandemic that continues to cause untold suffering, our climate future is still genuinely scary, and it’s impossible to imagine the fear and anguish of millions of people in Afghanistan right now. Instead, we want to remind you that even during the darkest of times, there is always another set of stories out there. You won’t find them on the front pages of the New York Times and you definitely won’t get them from your Apple News feed, but they’re all true, and they’ve all happened in the last month too.

As Jane Goodall says:

These are stories that should have equal time, because they’re what gives people hope.

Kurt Vonnegut, the great observer of the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization, once said that his ‘prettiest’ contribution to culture wasn’t his novels, but his Master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago. His idea, which was rejected because “it was too simple and looked like too much fun” was that stories have shapes, and that the shape of any given civilization’s stories are as interesting as the shape of its arrowheads or pottery.

To illustrate his point, Vonnegut plotted the story of Cinderella on a graph, charting misery versus ecstasy over time. The arrival of the fairy godmother kicks off a step by step climb in fortune, leading to a high point at the ball, followed by a sudden reversal at the stroke of midnight. The good times come roaring back though, thanks to that glass slipper, leaving our protagonist even better off than she was before. This arc, said Vonnegut, is evident in some of our favourite stories, from the New Testament to Jane Eyre and Frozen. It’s immensely satisfying, hence its enduring appeal.

There are other story arcs too. In Rags to Riches, a continuous upward climb towards happily ever after (and in Riches to Rags, the opposite). In Man in a Hole, the main character gets into trouble, then gets out of it again (Alice in Wonderland, Finding Nemo), or even better, double Man in a Hole, for double the emotional impact (hello Harry Potter and The Lion King). In Icarus, there’s a rise, followed by a fall (Jurassic Park, The Great Gatsby, actually pretty much anything with the word ‘great’ in its title), while Oedipus is the tragic mirror image of Cinderella giving us Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and The Godfather.

The shapes are different, but the dramatic mechanism is always the same: a change over time, moving between good and ill fortune. This up and down motion reveals a deeper meaning, hints at an underlying pattern, gives us a moral code to make sense of the chaos of real life, or perhaps just an emotionally satisfying ride. Put simply, stories have to narrate change. If there is no rise or fall it isn’t a story. It’s a series of events.

Our story arcs are a legacy from the Greeks, who gave us tragedy, a genre built on rises and falls that peak with a climax. Aristotle called the moment of maximum intensity peripeteia — which translates to reversal — and named the aftermath catharsis, the release of emotional energy. That’s how we all know pride comes before fall and that the darkest hour is always before the dawn. It’s why Frodo and Sam save The Shire and sail off into the sunset, and why Dorothy returns to Kansas, forever changed, yet still insisting “there’s no place like home.”

Story arcs also show up in our history. Ever noticed how different time periods always seem to alternate between collapse and renewal? The ‘Dark Ages’ comes after the sacking of Rome, followed by some medieval mud and blood but then from out the darkness, hallelujah! Renaissance and Enlightenment! It’s worth pointing out that the women and men who lived during the thousand years before the arrival of the Ninja Turtles were not conscious of living in the Middle Ages, nor were the alchemists dicking around with heavy metals aware they were in the midst of a scientific revolution.

The labels we give to the past aren’t descriptors. They’re propaganda. They depend on who’s telling the story, and are applied post facto, usually for political purposes. Remember — when Europe’s peasants were supposedly grubbing around in the dirt, the Ming Dynasty was building The Great Wall and creating encyclopedias. The words we give to things are powerful. That’s how the genocide of an entire people becomes a country’s glorious founding myth, and why making something great again is always a good marketing strategy.

Look, we get it. We also want to make sense of this moment in time. We want the waveform to collapse, and for the world to resolve itself into clear focus, telling us where we are in the grand narrative of human history. Are we on the way up, or on the way down? After 18 months of this craziness we’re all starving for narrative certainty. Are all those awful stories of Collapse the harbinger of something even worse, or are they the dark before Renewal’s new dawn?

The truth is that we do not, and cannot know.

Real life is not a story, and history isn’t a moral arc.

Perhaps there’s a better way of thinking about Collapse and Renewal.

Instead of expecting them to follow each other in sequence, like they do in our stories, what if we consider them as things that happen in parallel? In making sense of the world, what if we give up trying to figure out whether we’re in the upswing or the downswing of history and instead, make peace with the idea that we’re in the middle of both — the long-awaited fall from grace and the journey to the promised land.

This idea, of a ‘Great Turning’ existing side by side with a great collapse, is one we first came across in the work of ecological philosopher, Joanna Macy, and it’s become one of the cornerstones of our worldview. It accepts that the signals for disaster are everywhere we look, and so are endless examples of human progress, environmental stewardship, ecological restoration and extraordinary acts of kindness, all densely entwined and far too complex to resolve into a simple three act structure.

Over the years, this philosophy has crystallized into an image of history as a thickly woven rope, comprising billions of individual threads. Each thread represents an individual story line, but they’re so densely braided it’s impossible to label any specific era, or predict what’s coming next. The combinations aren’t random; some patterns seem to come up again and again, but the vast, tangled mass prevents easy characterization.

For us, this rope metaphor provides a better sense of perspective. Take that thick black global pandemic strand. It’s just re-appeared for the first time in over a century, but should disappear again fairly quickly. Scarily, the glowing red filaments of climate change are starting to show up everywhere, and expanding all the time. They’re hopelessly snarled up in a tangle of extractive capitalism, technological innovation, ecological collapse and regenerative practices, and nobody really knows how that’s all going to play out.

The colonialism and slavery strands are mostly gone, thank god, but the racism and sexism ones are proving much harder to get rid of, and the blood-soaked strings of war, while far less common than they used to be, seem unlikely to ever disappear. The bright blue cords of democracy are fraying around the edges, which is worrying but then again, it’s not the first time that’s happened. On the upside the grey strands of poverty are far less prominent than they have been at any other time in our past, although still far too prevalent, while the sickly white threads of preventable childhood disease are gradually tapering out.

This is the story of humanity, not as narrative, but as a shared, evolving experience. Like Vonnegut’s story arcs, it’s an idea that should be held lightly, and used only as a starting point. We prefer it though, because it gives us hope. Not the hope of a new dawn and not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on towards prosperity, but hope for something much better; something that we are all a part of and that we each have a responsibility to work for, and hard.

Ultimately, there’s no way of judging whether we’re living through Collapse or Renewal. Future generations will decide that for us. The only thing that matters is the part we play. We can choose which strand of the rope we belong to. We can add to its grand weave, in the way we treat other people, in the daily work we do, in the decisions we make about where to put our energy, in the leaders we vote for and in the words that come out of our mouths.

And if, in the end, our worst fears come true, and we find ourselves in the last days, standing on the mountaintops, watching the waters rush in and the flames licking at the walls, whose company would we rather be in? The cynics insisting “we told you so?” Or the people saying “You know what? We gave it everything we had.” We know our answer. We’ll be here, telling stories of Renewal, come what may.

Here’s Jane Goodall again.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

We’re a team of science communicators based in Australia. We curate stories of human progress, and help people understand what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology. More than 40,000 people subscribe to the free version of our email newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Ever his whispering was in your ears, poisoning your thought, chilling your heart, weakening your limbs, while others watched and could do nothing, for your will was in his keeping.”

Well that escalated steadily for four years. The fallout from the #MAGA riot is pretty much the only story on the internet right now and with reports of further insurrection looming ahead of a presidential inauguration, the National Guard being deployed in force and a second impeachment on the table, it’s hard to really think about anything else. Amidst all the finger pointing, one of the biggest missing pieces seems to be the culpability of the mainstream press and to understand why, it helps to turn to JRR Tolkien. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to use Lord of the Rings metaphors once you’re over the age of 15 but just bear with me here.

First off, let’s acknowledge that for sheer entertainment value, this one was hard to beat. Shirtless shamans and white supremacists rampaging through the halls of Congress makes for some great television and if you think that sounds disrespectful to the memories of the five people who died, then you may not have been paying attention to what the news media has actually become in the last two decades of American life.

This is the kind of thing people now want to see happen, a prime-time product that combines the adrenaline of live sports with the intrigue of an HBO drama and the suspense of reality television. Breathless live commentary? Check. Endless replays and slow-motion analysis from multiple angles? You’ve been watching them all week, and so have we. Whispered conversations in the corridors of power and courtiers scrambling to realign loyalties? Take your pick. The lead character in imminent danger of leaving the show forever? Legions of fans, including some dressed in animal skins, are literally howling in protest.

While a lot of the blame has been placed on social media, not nearly enough has been given to the big news companies. They’ve done unbelievably well from the Trump story, especially in the last year, with a pandemic, a movement for racial justice and an election giving viewers even more reasons to tune in. Fox News viewership was up 43% in 2020, MSNBC climbed 23% and CNN jumped 83%. Fox News even made the top 10 for adults aged 18–49, despite its older skew, while CNN was up a whopping 95% percent in that demographic and had its most-watched prime time ratings ever.

America is now home to a political-media complex that profits on malice, division and indignation, yet professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. That’s why when the barricades came down, the cameras were there beaming images to the news anchors to gasp at in horror. The revolution was televised, packaged up and sold to millions who tuned in to see what would happen (NBC and ABC’s coverage of the mob dominated prime time ratings on the evening of January 6th, drawing in 5.4 million and 4.2 million viewers, respectively).

In the aftermath, more of the same. A bad day for US politics is now the darkest day for democracy since 1816. Donald Trump isn’t just a politician who miscalculated — he’s the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War. A bunch of armed away fans are suddenly fascist terrorists who tried to overthrow the government (they weren’t). This might be an unpopular opinion to share with some of our more left-leaning US readers, but the truth is that this wasn’t a coup or an insurrection. There was no real evidence of coordination between government officials, civilian or military. An ugly protest turned into a riot and then a lynch mob, and they should all be arrested and thrown in jail, but it wasn’t ever a real threat.

What all the Beltway pundits seem to be missing is that the goal wasn’t to overturn the results of the election or take Nancy Pelosi hostage. Last Wednesday’s riot was more like Comic Con for far-right streamers — an opportunity to meet other like-minded fans in meatspace, and grab the world’s attention. In that respect, it was an outstanding success. The QAnon/MAGA crowd suddenly have a rich new set of real world events and martyrs to add to their mythology, and in the midst of the worst week of the pandemic yet, with over 4,000 US citizens dying every day, these maskless assholes have earned the kind of mainstream coverage that social media influencers can only dream of, bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of a ‘viral’ flashmob.

America’s ageing, baby boomer politicians are playing right into their hands. The Democrats are doing their best Neymar impression, rolling around on the floor and clutching their knees in agony, while Republicans — having committed the most horrible of fouls — are now pleading with the referee for national unity. Leaving aside the sheer cynicism of this gambit from the party of voter suppression, border walls and “Lock her up!” you have to admit that once again, it’s all very dramatic, and hard to turn away from.

Journalists scavenge for loot on the battlefield, scrambling for an angle that will rake in even more eyeballs and dollars. It’s a GOP civil war! AOC felt like her life was in danger! Will the impeachment scuttle Biden’s agenda? Anything that doesn’t fit the story format, which includes most of reality, is discarded, and the enormous narrative-making machine grinds along underneath, setting up a cliffhanger finale. A presidency built on fear, rage and division is climaxing in three acts: an insurrection, an impeachment and an inauguration (and wait until you see what’s in store next season).

It’s been just two months since former US president Barack Obama solemnly told The Atlantic that his country was “entering into an epistemological crisis”, observes Gillian Tett. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work,” he declared. “And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” For most people, the obvious cause of this crisis is social media. There seems to be a clear link between the arrival of Twitter and Facebook and the transformation of US politics into a bloodsport.

In its own way however, this idea is an example of disinformation itself. There is a profound disconnect between broad public concern with social media’s impact on public discourse, and persistent scientific evidence that shows exposure to online fake news is concentrated in a tiny minority of users. According to the most recent Pew survey, less than 20% of Americans rely on social media as their major source of political news. Television by contrast, is the primary source of political news for about 30% of the population, and news websites or apps account for another 25%.

That means that television and newspapers, not Twitter, are responsible for the conspiracy theories. Take, for example, the Big Lie of mail-in voting during the 2020 elections. Around half of Republican voters considered fraud a major problem with voting by mail, and more than half pointed to Democrats as the most likely perpetrators of election interference. This lie, despite being repeatedly disproven by the most rigorous academic and legal investigations, set the foundations for Trump to claim that the election was stolen from him — leading eventually to the incitement of last week’s riot.

To understand how disinformation about the mail-in ballots spread, Professor Yochai Benkler, and his team from Harvard Law School analyzed 55,000 online media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 posts on public Facebook pages. Their findings showed that the lies that shaped the views of tens of millions of American voters did not originate in social media or via a Russian attack. Instead, they were driven by some of the biggest media outlets in the country, including not just Fox News, but ‘centre-right’ outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

What this means is that the usual suspects in public debates about disinformation were not the central actors in voting disinformation. There were no instances where clickbait factories, fake pages (Russian or otherwise), or Facebook’s algorithms could explain any peak in engagement that was not better explained as having been set in motion and heavily promoted by political figures and elite right-wing media personalities, and disseminated to millions by major media outlets. “Social media” the study concluded, “played only a secondary, supportive role.”

For a democracy to work, elections need to not be viewed as existential risks, arguments need to be made off the basis of a shared set of facts, and political opponents need to treat each other in good faith and respect each other with intellectual honesty (and try not to burn any buildings to the ground). On all of these counts, mainstream American news companies are, and will continue to be, a far greater threat to democracy than Facebook or riot mobs or Donald Trump.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Grima Wormtongue in the past week. Not Peter Jackson’s over-the-top, sleazy version, who was the most obvious bad guy in all of movie history (the less said about his butchering of the King of the Golden Hall scene the better). I’m talking about Tolkien’s original Wormtongue, who’s a little more like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones. “Upon the steps sat a wizened figure of a man, with a pale wise face and heavy-lidded eyes (…) he laughed grimly, as he lifted his heavy lids for a moment and gazed at the strangers with dark eyes.” Malevolent and brooding, certainly, but not Brad Dourif’s cartoon-villain troglodyte.

Wormtongue is of course, part of a rich tradition of sinister councilors whispering in a kindly King’s ear, from Jafar to Dominic Cummings. What makes him unique however, is the way he controls Théoden. By constantly restating bad news, and casting events in the worst possible light, he keeps the king confused and disheartened. Interestingly, he didn’t start this way: according to Tolkien he was originally an ordinary serving man in Théoden’s court, but driven by greed and self-interest, he is eventually corrupted by a great and powerful evil.

As reports of Saruman’s forces gathering on the border come in, Wormtongue emphasizes the impossibility of defeating them, and repeatedly reminds the king of how his son, Théodred, was killed in a skirmish with marauding orcs. Théoden slumps deeper into despair, emboldening his shadowy aide, who becomes ever more brazen, siphoning of the king’s wealth (including his sword), and setting his sights on his niece, Éowyn. It’s a bit like hypnosis, without the trance. Gandalf, who has not “passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls,” breaks through with his powers of persuasion, drawing on Théoden’s inner core of strength, but not before great damage is done.

If that’s not the most obvious metaphor for 21st century news media, I’ll eat my Herugrim. A sinister but familiar councilor, constantly restating bad news. Whispers of dark forces gathering on the horizon. Past traumas repeatedly brought up and dissected in detail. A greedy force, slowly siphoning off our wealth and attention even as it corrupts our fair sons and daughters. If you don’t believe me, read these headlines in Wormtongue’s voice and you’ll find they make a lot more sense (this is actually an excellent way to maintain sanity when reading most news sites on the internet).

Tolkien’s warning, unlike Peter Jackson, was subtle and elegant, but also very clear. Wormtongue, and his master, Saruman, both thought they could thrive as servants of wickedness, but were inevitably corrupted. It’s a warning we should heed in 2021. Far too many people in the news media today believe it’s possible to serve cruelty and avarice without being tainted. They’re wrong too. While we shouldn’t be ignoring them, we should also remember they are selling us commercialized contempt.

This is a difficult and scary time in the United States. Honestly though, did we ever think the Trump era would end in anything other than chaos? The moment will pass, the inauguration will go ahead and America may even emerge stronger from the crisis, but only if it can get that insidious voice out of its ears. As Théoden exclaims after Gandalf restores his courage, “If this is bewitchment, it seems to me more wholesome than your whisperings. Your leechcraft ere long would have had me walking on all fours like a beast.”

Wormtongue Inc. was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If we want more people to devote their energy to making progress against large global problems, we should make sure that more people know that it is possible to make progress against such problems.

@MaxCRoser

There’s been so much loss, grief and heartbreak in 2020 that it feels almost wrong to be compiling our traditional annual list of good news. Things can and do fall apart, and this year it felt like they really did. Amazing as it may seem however, there were also big wins for conservation, living standards, peace, safety and human rights, clean energy, and yes, even global health. The reason you didn’t hear about them is because good news doesn’t sell advertisements or generate clicks, and that was more true in 2020 than ever before.

Progress isn’t a straight line and it doesn’t happen by magic. It depends on people who, even during the darkest of times, believe that it’s possible to make the world a better place and who are willing to roll up their sleeves to do the work, even when the cameras aren’t watching. These are their stories, and off the back of a horrible year, we think it’s more important than ever to celebrate them. We hope you agree.

Conservation

1. The British territory of Tristan da Cunha created the largest ever protected area in the Atlantic Ocean, and the fourth largest in the world. The 687,000 km² sanctuary is a no-take zone, meaning fishing and other harmful activities are now prohibited, to protect wildlife found on and around the chain of islands, including albatross, penguins, whales, sharks and seals. Nat Geo

2. Belize added another jewel in its crown as a global leader in ocean conservation. In August, it increased the size of its Sapodilla Cayes reserve to 1,300 km² to encompass the Cayman Crown, one of the best preserved reef ecosystems in the region, home to many endangered species of corals, as well as previously undocumented reef types. EDF

3. In October, the Seychelles reported that one third of its territorial waters are now protected, covering 410,000 km² of ocean (an area larger than Germany) and Samoa launched an ambitious new ocean conservation strategy, with a commitment to create 36,000 km² of new fully-protected marine protected areas by 2025, 30% of its territorial waters. BBC

4. In November, 14 countries, responsible for 40% of the world’s coastlines, signed a new pledge to end overfishing, restore fish populations and stop the flow of ocean plastic in the next 10 years. Each of the countries also committed to making sure all oceans within their national jurisdictions, a combined area roughly the size of Africa, are managed sustainably by 2025. Guardian

5. The most incredible environmental group you’ve never heard of, Pristine Seas, revealed this year that in the past decade they’ve inspired the creation of 23 marine reserves — two-thirds of the world’s fully protected marine areas, covering an area of more than five million square kilometers. In the next decade they believe they can double what’s already been accomplished. Nat Geo

6. In December, a new report by the UN’s FAO revealed that after decades of pressure, fisheries in the Mediterranean and Black Sea are turning the corner. The percentage of overexploited stocks fell from 88% to 75% between 2014 and 2018, and since 2018, the number of fish stocks with high relative biomass has doubled.

7. In perhaps one of the most globally consequential yet under-reported stories of 2020, China issued new rules for its distant water fishing fleet. The country’s Wildlife Protection Law will now apply at sea, ships will no longer be allowed to ‘go dark’ or approach marine protected areas, ship captains who break the rules will lose their license for five years and company managers will be banned for three years. Earth.org

8. In the Pacific Northwest, the Yurok tribe began the reintroduction of the Californian Condor to its ancestral lands along the Klamath River, and also signed a historic deal to begin the largest dam removal project in US history, freeing up 600km of spawning grounds for salmon and other migratory species like steelhead trout and Pacific lamprey. “These efforts are as much about ecology as they are to right the wrongs that took place in this country for the last 200 years.”

9. At the turn of this century, Staten Island’s landfill was the largest garbage dump in the world, three times larger than Central Park, with trash mounds 20 stories high. Today, it’s a green oasis, and one of the most unlikely urban ecological restoration success stories of all time. The radical fix? Bury the rubbish, plant some grass and do nothing for 20 years. NYT

10. A new study from Yale revealed that the mass of electronic waste generated by Americans has been declining since 2015. The biggest contributor is the disappearance of large, bulky cathode-ray tube TVs and computer monitors. The total number of electronic devices entering the waste stream is also levelling off, due to ‘convergence’ e.g. smartphones doubling up as cameras.

11. New satellite data revealed this year that the UK’s woodlands now cover as much of the country as they did during the Middle Ages, thanks to 20th-century forestry and rewilding practices (Robin Hood eat your heart out). There’s plenty more space too — researchers say the area could be doubled without impacting important habitats, arable farmland or peat bogs.

12. For the last 20 years the world’s largest seagrass restoration project has been running off the coast of Virginia, and during that time the ecosystem has gone from near death to full flowering. Over 70 million eelgrass seeds have been planted by volunteers. “Today, as far as I can swim, I see lush meadows, rays, the occasional seahorse. It’s beautiful.” Science News

13. A grassroots effort to restore Appalachia’s mountaintops has now seen over 187 million trees planted on over 1,000 km² of former mining sites, and following a concerted reintroduction effort, those sites are now home to the largest population of elk east of the Mississippi. NYT

14. More than 2 million people in northern India planted over 250 million trees as part of a government plan to tackle climate change, Pakistan announced the creation of 15 new national parks, expanding protected areas from 12% to 15% of the country, and Afghanistan announced the creation of the Bamyan Plateau National Park, its fifth ever protected area, and the second-biggest at 4,200 km², home to the ibex, urial and the Persian leopard.

15. Singapore created its new 400 ha Sungei Buloh Park, part of a wider initiative to convert industrial areas back to natural landscapes, and Vietnam established a new 22,132 ha tropical forest nature reserve called Dong Chau-Khe Nuoc Trong, whose name means “clear water in the ravine.” It is home to 40 globally threatened species, including the singing gibbon and the saola, a mysterious antelope-like bovine with a pair of long, straight horns known as the Asian unicorn.

16. Attitudes in China towards the eating of wild animals changed drastically in 2020. Up to 90% of the public now supports strict bans on the trade and consumption of wildlife, and more than 15,000 people were prosecuted for wildlife crimes this year, a 66% increase from 2019. China also removed dogs from the list of animals that can be treated as livestock, signalling the beginning of the end of the sale of live dogs for food and fur across the country.

17. Vietnam banned the sale of protected wildlife at wildlife markets as well as all imports of wildlife dead or alive, including eggs and larvae. The new directive included recommendations that conservationists have been trying to get passed for years, including tougher penalties for crimes involving wildlife trade and cracking down on domestic markets. WaPo

18. Global meat production fell by more than 1% in 2020. This came off the back of a decline in 2019 too (there have never been two consecutive years of decline). We’re already at peak pasture, and it now looks like we might be approaching peak pork and beef. Bloomberg

19. Poland, the world’s third-largest fur producer after China and Denmark, banned fur farming (a law that will spare the lives of more than five million animals) and Kopenhagen Fur, the world’s largest fur auction house, announced it would close its doors within the next three years, citing the impact of COVID-19 and years of steep price drops.

20. Germany started converting 62 military bases west of the old Iron Curtain into nature reserves for eagles, woodpeckers, bats, and beetles, Peru began reforesting the area around Machu Picchu, and Seattle reported that after two decades of clean up efforts, the Duwamish River is the cleanest it’s been in 100 years.

21. Senegal revealed that over 152 million mangrove buds have been planted in the Casamance Delta in the past decade, Madagascar launched a drive to plant 60 million trees to mark 60 years of independence, and Uganda launched a project to restore 3 million trees to the Albertine Rift Forests, close to where Dr. Jane Goodall began her career.

22. Kenya reported that its elephant population has more than doubled from 16,000 in 1989 to 34,000 today. The number of elephants poached is also down significantly from previous years — just seven in 2020, compared to 34 in 2019 and 80 in 2018. The number of lions living in the country has increased by 25% too, from 2,000 in 2010 to 2,489 in 2020. DW

23. Spain reported that there are now 894 Iberian lynx in the wild, up from just 92 in 2002, one of the best conservation success stories of modern times. The EU also earmarked €18 million to keep the project running for the next five years, giving conservationists a real shot at restoring a stable, genetically diverse population. La Vanguardia

24. Two decades ago, the Burmese roofed turtle was thought to be extinct. Conservationists have since helped the population recover to nearly 1,000 animals, some of which have now been successfully released into the wild in Myanmar. “This is one of the best global turtle conservation successes we have. We came so close to losing them.” NYT

25. Blue whales — the giants of the sea — appear to be returning to South Georgia. The subspecies was heavily exploited by commercial whalers in the early 1900s, and though hunting blue whales was banned in 1965, the leviathans have remained rare visitors to Antarctica — until now. A 2020 survey by the British Antarctic Survey recorded 58 sightings, reinforcing other indications that the blues are coming back.

26. For the second year in a row Iceland, one of three remaining whaling nations, decided not to hunt any whales, thanks to changing public opinion and falling consumption of whale meat. Announcements by the country’s two whaling companies suggested this may be the permanent end of the annual hunt. NatGeo

27. Bowhead whales — the only baleen whale that lives in the Arctic year-round — are approaching pre-commercial whaling numbers in US waters. Once hunted to just a few thousand individuals, and on the brink of disappearing forever, their numbers rebounded to about 10,000 by the turn of the 21st century and have now reached at least 16,800. “This is really one of the great conservation successes of the last century.” Guardian

Global Health

28. At the beginning of this year, the only thing the world’s scientists knew about the novel coronavirus was its genetic profile. Less than twelve months later, Margaret Keenan rolled up her sleeve at a hospital in Coventry, a week before her 91st birthday, to become the first patient injected with a globally approved Covid-19 vaccine, effectively kickstarting humanity’s fightback. It’s one of the greatest medical achievements of all time. FT

29. In 2020 Myanmar became the second country in southeast Asia to completely eliminate trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness. The achievement was part of a bigger global trend: the number of people at risk from trachoma has been reduced by 92% in the last 17 years, from 1.5 billion in 2002 to 137 million in 2020, and 13 countries have now eliminated it altogether. WHO.

30. Togo became the first African country to officially eliminate sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease that’s fatal if untreated. The achievement comes after more than two decades of sustained political commitment, surveillance and screening, and is also part of a bigger success story — there are now fewer than 1,000 cases of sleeping sickness globally. WHO

31. Senegal reported that it has cut its rate of stunting prevalence in half, from 34.4% to 18.8%, since 2002. Improved access to post-natal care, education, water and sanitation now means the country has the lowest stunting burden in French-speaking West Africa. Exemplars

32. Africa announced this year that it is officially free from wild polio. 25 years ago the disease still paralyzed more than 75,000 children across the continent every year. Since then, billions of oral vaccines have been provided, preventing 1.8 million cases. It’s one of the greatest healthcare success stories of all time, and an extraordinary human achievement. BBC

33. There was a major breakthrough in 2020 in the fight against AIDS. A new antiretroviral administered as an injection six times a year was shown to be 89% more effective at preventing HIV in women compared to standard ARVs, which are taken as a daily pill. “A major, major advance. I don’t think we can overemphasize its importance.” NYT

34. Meanwhile, AIDS deaths continue to fall. The number of people dying from the disease has fallen by 5.4% in the last year, reaching the lowest level since 1993. Also crucially, for the first time ever, more than two thirds of HIV-positive people around the world now have access to anti-retroviral treatments. UNAIDS

35. The WHO revealed that malaria deaths have reached the lowest level ever recorded, a drop of almost 60% in the last two decades. Take a moment to let this sink in: between 2000 and 2019, 1.5 billion malaria cases and 7.6 million malaria deaths were averted globally.

36. The WHO also published its annual tuberculosis report this year, showing that between 2015 and 2019, global deaths fell by 14%. In fact, progress against TB puts malaria in the shade — since 2000, treatments have averted more than 60 million deaths.

37. What’s the biggest threat to children around the world? It’s not AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis — it’s pneumonia. In 2011 the disease claimed the lives of 1.3 million children before their fifth birthday (18% of all child deaths around the world). Last year, that number dropped to 672,000, a fall of almost 50% in less than a decade. Stop Pneumonia

38. In 2020 we discovered that humanity is winning its fight against the second leading cause of disability in the world — elephantiasis, a horrible parasitic disease causing irreversible disfigurement. In the last 20 years, the number of annual infections has fallen by three quarters, from 199 million to 51.4 million, and last year three countries, Malawi, Kiribati and Yemen, eliminated it altogether. The Lancet

39. The proportion of the world’s children under the age of five infected with hepatitis B has now dropped to just under 1%, down from 5% in the early 2000s. 85% of kids around the world are now getting all three doses of the HBV vaccine — and Gavi says it is on track to avert a further 1.2 million infection-related deaths between 2021 and 2035. WHO

40. Speaking of Gavi (the global vaccines alliance), in June it announced that it had raised $8.8 billion to fund its immunization programs for the next five years, exceeding its original target of $7.4 billion. This will help immunize 300 million more children by 2025 against measles, polio and diphtheria. Reuters

41. More than one million people in the UK gave up smoking during the COVID-19 pandemic. More people quit smoking in the year to June 2020 than in any year since surveys began in 2007. BBC

42. Four years after Chile embraced the world’s most sweeping measures to combat mounting obesity, consumption of sweetened drinks has dropped by nearly 25%. During the same period, there’s been a 5% increase in purchases of water, diet soft drinks and fruit juices without added sugar. NYT

43. How many times have you heard someone say that because we’re living longer, we’re more likely to experience cognitive decline? Not true. New research this year showed that the risk of a person developing dementia in the US and Europe is now 13% lower than it was in 2010 (Alzheimer’s is falling too, by 16% per decade). Researchers think it’s down to less smoking, better cardiovascular health, and better education. NYT

Peace, Safety & Human Rights

44. A new report by the Global Peace Index showed that since 2007, the majority of the world’s countries — 113 countries — have reduced their armed forces, 100 have reduced military expenditure and both imports and exports of weapons have reached their lowest levels since 2009.

45. Remember the good old days when terrorism was front page news? The 2020 Global Terrorism Index reported that deaths from terrorism fell for the fifth consecutive year, and that the terrorism situation had improved in 103 countries — the highest number of countries to record a year-on-year improvement since the inception of the index.

46. The Falkland Islands announced this year that it had cleared all its landmines, nearly 40 years after the end of the war between Britain and Argentina. Tens of thousands of mines and bombs have been removed since 2009 by a team of specialist de-miners, many of them from Zimbabwe. “We never thought the islands would be completely mine free, this is a momentous change.” BBC

47. Italy abolished anti-immigrant decrees installed by former populists, and reinstated humanitarian protection for migrants and refugees. The government has also cut the time needed for citizenship applications from four years to three. “Tonight a wall comes down. Onward towards a country with more humanity.” The Local

48. Mexico changed its laws to prohibit holding children in immigration detention centers, shifting responsibility to the country’s family development agency, and Colombia allowed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants to legalize their presence in the country through work permits.

49. Over the past five years Germany has opened its borders to 1.7 million people fleeing war and persecution: arguably the greatest humanitarian act of the 21st century. The decision has paid off. In August, the country revealed that more than half are employed and paying taxes, and over 80% say they feel a strong sense of belonging. Guardian

50. Kazakhstan joined an international protocol on the abolition of the death penalty, the 88th nation to become a signatory, which fulfils a fundamental right to life and human dignity. The country’s head of state, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, quoted Kazakh poet and philosopher Abai, stressing the need for “love, compassion, bold actions, deeds and thoughtfulness.” Astana Times

51. Saudi Arabia and Palestine banned child marriage in 2020, making 18 the minimum age for weddings, and Bangladesh reported progress too. The proportion of girls being married there before the age of 18 has dropped from 64% in 2010 to just over 50% today. In actual numbers, that means 10 million girls in Bangladesh have been saved from child marriage in the past decade. UNICEF

52. Iran approved a measure to criminalize child abuse and neglect, Saudi Arabia abolished the practice of flogging convicts and banned the death sentence for minors, and the United Arab Emirates overhauled some of its strictest Islamic laws, including the criminalization of ‘honour killings’, tougher penalties for sexual harassment and the decriminalization of suicide and attempted suicide.

53. Pakistan approved a new anti-rape law, prohibiting the disclosure of the identity of rape victims, creating a national sex offenders register, abolishing antiquated two-finger testing, and setting up special courts for rape cases, and in Sierra Leone a five year old ban preventing pregnant teenagers from attending school was reversed.

54. Sudan officially ended 30 years of Islamic state rule, deposing its dictator and ushering in combined military and civilian government. It also outlined wide-reaching human rights reforms including abolishing public flogging, scrapping the death penalty for renouncing Islam, and outlawing the practice of female genital mutilation, a major victory for women’s rights campaigners. NYT

55. New Zealand started providing free sanitary products in schools across the country in an effort to tackle period poverty, and a few months later, Scotland became the first country in the world to introduce free universal access to period products, making access to tampons and sanitary pads in public buildings a legal right. “Scotland will not be the last country to make period poverty history — but it now has a chance to be the first.

56. Amidst the craziness of the US election, this one didn’t make the headlines. Since 1965, Gallup has been polling Americans about whether they want immigration levels to decrease, increase, or remain the same. In 2020, for the first time in the poll’s history, more Americans said they wanted to increase immigration than decrease it. Cato

57. We had to dig for this one, seeing as it did not appear in a single mainstream news publication. The US Justice Department released its most recent crime data, showing that violent crime in the United States decreased by 0.5% last year, the third consecutive year of declines, and property crime dropped by 4.1%, the 17th consecutive year of declines. Hellholes, anyone?

58. Crime is declining in France too. While the idea of ensauvagement — long a dog whistle of the far right — is now being parroted by all sides of French politics, the truth is that nearly all major crimes are lower than they were a decade ago. Since 2006, acts of physical violence outside the home have decreased by 8% and thefts with physical violence or threat have dropped by 61% in the same period. NYT

59. Costa Rica legalized same-sex marriage in May, becoming the 28th country to do so. In June, the US Supreme Court passed a landmark ruling protecting LGBTQIA+ citizens from workplace discrimination. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the decision: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that person based on sex.” BBC

60. Later that month, lawmakers in Gabon voted to decriminalize homosexuality, reversing a 2019 law. Sylvia Bongo, Gabon’s First Lady, said that parliament had “restored a fundamental human right: that of loving, freely, without being condemned.” Thomson Reuters

61. In July, Montenegro became the first country in the Balkans to allow same-sex civil unions. That made it the first European country outside both Western Europe and the EU to legalize same-sex civil partnerships. “A big step has been taken towards equality, but the road to real equality is still ahead of us.” Euro News

62. In October, more than 130,000 people turned out for Taiwan’s LGBTQIA+ pride rally, marching through the streets of Taipei in a colourful celebration of equality made possible by the island’s successful vanquishing of the coronavirus. The parade came a day after two same-sex couples joined a mass wedding hosted by the military for the first time, another gay rights landmark in Asia. SBS

63. In December, Bhutan became the second Asian country after Taiwan to legalize same-sex relationships and in Nepal, authorities said they would count LGBTQIA+ people for the first time in the national census to help sexual minorities gain better access to education and health schemes. Reuters

Living Standards

64. The coronavirus pandemic raised serious questions about whether authoritarian regimes were better at handling pandemics than democratic societies. They weren’t. Eight of the top 10 most successful responses came from democracies. Success appeared to rely less on being able to order people into submission, and more on having a high degree of trust and societal compliance. Bloomberg

65. China birthrate fell to its lowest level since 1949, and is now below that of England and Wales. That’s representative of a bigger global trend — a major new study revealed that the average number of children a woman gives birth to has fallen from 4.7 in 1950 to 2.4 in 2017, and will drop below 1.7 by 2100. That means that global population is now on track to peak in the middle of the 21st century. BBC

66. Did global inequality in the last two decades get worse, or better? New research this year showed that during the 2000s and 2010s, the global Gini coefficient dropped by 15 points and the earnings share of the world’s poorest half doubled. The reason this feels so surprising is that most of us hardly ever read journalism written by people from Asia, Africa and South America. Uppsala

67. This year’s Social Progress Index, which measures the social and economic performance of all the world’s countries over time, revealed that the world had improved on 8 of 12 key measures in the past decade. 95% of countries improved by one point or more, and only 2% declined.

68. What once sounded like a progressive pipe dream — legalize it — took a big step towards reality in 2020. In the United States, New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, Mississippi and South Dakota all legalized either recreational or medical marijuana, Washington DC decriminalized psilocybin, and Oregon became the first US state to decriminalize the personal possession of all drugs, including cocaine, methamphetamine and opioids. Wired

69. Argentina broadened the use of medicinal cannabis, allowing it to be prescribed for any condition backed by scientific evidence, and letting people grow it at home. New rules also state that cannabis should be made available for free in the country’s public health system for patients without insurance. Yes, you heard that right. Publicly funded medical marijuana. Vice

70. The UN removed cannabis for medicinal purposes from a category of the world’s most dangerous drugs. It’s a watershed moment; a highly anticipated and long-delayed decision that will clear the way for a global expansion of marijuana research and medical use, and bolster legalization efforts around the world. The New York Times

71. A UNICEF report on the Swachh Bharat Mission, India’s massive sanitation drive, showed that it has brought major benefits to poor households across the country. The average benefit per household was US$727 per year, mainly from health savings such as reduced diarrhoea incidence (55%) and savings from sanitation access time (45%).

72. Indonesia, the fourth most populated country in the world, reported a significant decline in its number of illiterate people, from 4.63% of the population in 2011 to 1.78% in 2019. That means that almost 8 million adults there have gained the ability to read and write in the last decade. Jakarta Post

73. UNESCO reported that since 1995, the proportion of girls receiving primary and secondary education has increased from 73% to 89%. In actual numbers, that’s an extra 180 million girls in school compared to a generation ago (and three times more women are also now enrolled in universities). Reminder — educating girls and empowering women is the single most effective way to combat climate change.

74. The IEA’s annual report contained a hidden nugget of very, very good news this year. The number of people without access to electricity dropped from 860 million to 770 million, a new record low. Africa has made particularly good progress; the number of people gaining access to electricity doubled from 9 million a year in 2013, to 20 million a year by 2019.

75. China reported that it has lifted over 50 million people out of poverty in the last five years. The country’s requirements are stricter than the World Bank’s; in addition to having sufficient income, China doesn’t consider people to be out of poverty until they have enough food and clothing, guaranteed basic healthcare, access to compulsory education and safe housing. Bloomberg

76. The US imprisonment rate reached its lowest level in more than two decades, with the greatest decline coming among black Americans, whose imprisonment rate has decreased 34% since 2006. As rates have fallen, former prisons, jails, and detention centers are being converted from facilities that confine people into ones that support them, such as mental health clinics, community centres and homes for former convicts.

77. A new study showed that air quality in Europe has improved dramatically in the past decade. Thanks to the implementation of better environmental and climate policies, around 60,000 fewer people died prematurely due to fine particulate matter pollution in 2018, compared with 2009. For nitrogen dioxide, the reduction is even greater; premature deaths have declined by about 54%. EEA

78. A new analysis of NASA satellite data showed that global sulfur dioxide pollution levels fell by 6% last year. SO2 emissions fell in all three of the world’s top emitter countries — India, Russia and China, only the second time ever that this has happened. Researchers said it was due to falling coal usage, especially in India. Air Quality News

Clean Energy

79. 2020 put humanity back in the global climate change fight. Carbon emissions fell by 2.4 billion tons, or 7%, the largest drop ever recorded. The decline was most pronounced in the United States (-12%) Europe (-11%) and India (-9%). It’s important not to be triumphalist: these reductions have come at the expense of a great deal of human suffering. But we can welcome the result, even if we abhor the way in which it has been delivered. DW

80. Although overall energy demand plummeted this year, clean energy proved remarkably resilient. Wind, solar and hydro accounted for nearly 90% of new electricity infrastructure installed in 2020 and net installed renewable capacity grew by 4% overall, reaching almost 200 GW.

81. Prices continued to fall too. Industry benchmarks showed that the average cost of onshore wind around the world is $26 a megawatt-hour and utility scale solar is $29. Forget coal — that means that building new wind and solar is now cheaper than keeping many of the world’s existing gas plants running (gas-led recovery, anyone?) Lazard

82. 2020 saw an unprecedented acceleration in national climate pledges. South Korea became the first Asian country to set a 2050 net zero emissions goal, followed by Japan, and then most importantly, China, which committed to net zero by 2060 — perhaps the single most important development in climate policy since the Paris Agreement.

83. The list goes on. Argentina also committed to net zero by 2050, Finland, Austria and Sweden brought their net zero dates forward, the UK pledged to reduce emissions by 68% in the next decade, and the EU set a new goal of reducing emissions by 55% in the same time period. Countries representing around 42% of global carbon emissions now have ‘somewhat credible’ net-zero targets. Global Citizen

84. It wasn’t just governments. The number of major global companies committed to reducing their environmental impact increased by 46% in the last twelve months. That included Apple, the world’s most valuable company, which committed this year to becoming carbon neutral across its entire supply chain by 2030, and Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, which is targeting zero emissions by 2040, without offsets.

85. Despite the global auto market being turned inside out, global electric vehicle sales grew by 28% this year. That was largely thanks to sales in Europe, which exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts by experts in 2020. One in 10 new cars sold were electric or hybrid, triple last year’s sales, and forecasts suggest market share will hit 15% in 2021, as manufacturers scramble to comply with tighter emissions standards. Ars Technica

86. California became the first US state to say it would ban the sale of new internal combustion engines by 2035, starting the clock on a future that would’ve been unthinkable a few years ago. Automakers now have 15 years left until their products become illegal in one of their most important markets. It’s a big deal. California consumes about 1% of global oil production. NP

87. In 2020, the world’s one-millionth public electric vehicle outlet was installed, Germany extended its subsidies for electric vehicles by four years and made it mandatory for all gas stations to include electric chargers, and the EU committed to one million public chargers by 2025, from fewer than 200,000 today.

88. Notorious latte-sipping, radical greenies, BP said that as a result of the pandemic the world has reached peak oil. The company now estimates demand will fall by at 10% this decade and by as much as 50% over the next 20 years. Bloomberg

89. In 2012, Exxon was the most valuable company in the world, an unassailable colossus at the height of its power. This year, it got booted off the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and wrote off $17bn-$20bn worth of its natural gas assets, the biggest write-down in the company’s history. FT

90. Denmark, the EU’s biggest oil producer, announced an end to all new oil and gas exploration in the North Sea as part of its broader plan to phase out fossil fuel extraction by 2050. It’s the first major oil-producing country to take such a step, another body blow to the global oil industry. “It’s a tough decision, it’s an expensive decision, but it’s the right decision.” Vox

91. The size of the global coal power fleet fell for the first time ever in 2020, with more plants shutting down than starting operations. Sweden and Austria became the second and third European countries to exit coal altogether, India said it would stop importing thermal coal in the next four years, Pakistan and the Phillipines said they would no longer approve new coal plants, and Bangladesh put 28GW of coal on the chopping block — more than Australia’s entire capacity.

92. This year saw blacklistings of coal by BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Citi, BNP Paribas, and Japan’s three mega banks, the largest private financiers of coal in the world. 138 globally significant banks, insurers, and asset managers have now announced their exit from coal, 46 of them coming in 2020 alone. The rate accelerated by 50% this year. IIEFA

93. The United States passed legislation to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas that is widely used in air conditioners and refrigeration. Lawmakers were swayed by a combined push from industry and environmentalists (unlike coal, oil and natural gas, HFCs don’t have a lobby). WaPo

94. In Canada and the United States, climate activists and indigenous groups won a number of major battles. In February, Canadian company Teck Resources pulled out of planned operations in the oil sands, in June the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Keystone XL pipeline were shut down, and in November all six major US banks ruled out financing for oil and gas development in the Arctic.

95. The UK’s biggest pension fund, with over nine million members, divested from fossil fuels, and after an eight year fight, New York announced it would be getting rid of all oil and gas stocks from its $226 billion financial portfolio. It’s the first US state to do so, and the largest pension fund to dump fossil fuel investments ― ever, in the entire world. NYT

96. Hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element, had a great year. The project pipeline for green hydrogen expanded from 3.5 GW to 15 GW in 2020, and dozens of countries announced new policies, meaning that about half of the world’s gross domestic product now has credible hydrogen strategies. Bloomberg

97. The world’s largest cement producer, LafargeHolcim, became the the first global building materials company to commit to reducing its emissions, and committed to 100% carbon neutrality by 2050 (reminder: the cement industry causes 8% of global carbon emissions). FT

98. Two of the world’s largest steel producers, Nippon Steel and POSCO, announced carbon neutral goals by 2050, and Swedish iron-ore giant, LKAB, announced it would be investing €39bn to decarbonize, the largest industrial investment ever made in Sweden. It’s one of the most consequential energy investments of all time — because it moves us a lot closer to decarbonizing the steel industry, which is also responsible for 8% of carbon emissions.

…

99. and finally we’re sorry, but we couldn’t resist. After four years of no pets in the White House (the longest stretch since 1840) two German shepherds, Champ and Major, are moving in. Major will be the first ‘First Dog’ from a shelter, reflecting a growing embrace by Americans of shelter dogs — more than 1.6 million were adopted last year, and forced euthanasia has fallen by more than two thirds since 2011. Nat Geo

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You can also find us on social media… or on a conference stage if you’re in the right place at the right time

99 Good News Stories From 2020 You Probably Didn’t Hear About was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In Internet slang, a troll is a person who intentionally upsets people by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing unrelated discussions, either for the troll’s amusement or a specific gain.

Urban Dictionary (2020)

On the 8th November 2016 I was in a professional training session when the news starting coming in. It was about 11:00 in the morning here in Australia when they called Florida, provoking some anxiety, followed by panic as North Carolina went down and finally sheer disbelief as the Blue Wall collapsed and the reality of a Donald Trump presidency crashed through. I don’t remember a single word of the workshop but I’ll never forget that awful, hollow feeling in my stomach as I sat hunched in a cheap plastic chair, thumbing uselessly at my phone screen and thinking over and over again “this is going to be a long four years.”

It has been a long four years, longer than any of us could ever have imagined. Four exhausting years of shithole countries and bleach injections, love letters to dictators and very fine people on both sides. Four years of children in cages, ILLEGAL VOTES, pornstars, tear gas photo-ops, missing tax returns and big, beautiful walls. Through it all the constant refrain, impossible to escape, Trump, Trump, Trump, the champion of the downtrodden, the artist of grievance, the unmasker of the elites, the denouncer, the insulter, the despoiler of idols.

Now that it’s over the relief is palpable. Even as he clings on the curse is lifting, and if that’s true for someone overseas I can’t imagine what it’s like if you’re one of the 80 million Americans that kicked out the country’s worst ever president. No mincing words here. He’s the first US president to serve only one term, be impeached and lose the popular vote twice. That’s an embarrassing trifecta. History will not be kind to Donald Trump and as the shock of all the lying fades we’ll be left with his chief legacy — the death of more than 300,000 Americans by the time Joe Biden is inaugurated.

As the dust settles it looks like most of the country’s institutions have held up pretty well. Despite all the handwringing the legislative and judicial branches have retained their independence from the executive. Trump was too lazy to be an authoritarian. His signature achievements, a tax cut and the appointment of hundreds of conservative judges, would have been exactly the same under any other Republican president. Plenty of norms were trampled sure, but in that sense he may even have done the country a favour by exposing the ugliness that always lay beneath Washington’s thin veneer of civility. Yes, he coarsened public discourse, hollowed out the federal service, damaged America’s international reputation and further entrenched partisan divides, but that’s a pretty light sentence for a country to get away with during a populist moment.

One institution however has been irrevocably damaged. The free press, one of liberal democracy’s most important bulwarks, tasked with providing citizens with a full and clear view of public affairs, utterly failed at their job. Instead of informing the public they warped perceptions by making sure Trump was always front and center, from early-morning tweetstorms to the monologues of late-night comics. Perhaps nobody in history has better proven the maxim that there’s no such thing as bad publicity; the cycle of outrage and the eager selling of that outrage, made Trump president and then kept him there. America’s journalists should take a long hard look in the mirror because they were willing accomplices every step of the way.

Each time a taboo was broken or a lie was uttered, a parade of well-groomed anchors and university-educated journalists fell over themselves to condemn him, but what they never grasped — and still don’t — was that Trump didn’t deal in the currencies they were used to, money and influence. He dealt in a new currency, attention. In a world of news hyperinflation, with journalists wandering around with wheelbarrows full of worthless stories because it now costs one million news to buy a loaf of bread, Trump’s Twitter feed wasn’t the ravings of a madman. It was a work of art by the first great genius of the attention economy.

From the day he rode down that golden escalator he made sure the cameras were focused on him and he never let them waver. He quickly learned he could suck the oxygen out the room with political incorrectness: calling Mexicans rapists, mocking a disabled reporter, pledging to ban Muslim immigration. In November 2016 America was enjoying solid growth, low unemployment, record-high graduation rates and record-low uninsured rates and crime rates, but thanks to the press Trump successfully portrayed the country as a dystopian hellscape that he alone could fix. By the end of his campaign news companies had given him $2 billion in free advertising, a win-win for both sides as profits soared and Trump rode the headlines all the way into the White House.

Once there he wasn’t the first president to prioritize rhetoric over substance, but he did take it to a new extreme, using the power of the office to amplify the signal. Trump was to social media what Roosevelt was to radio and Kennedy was to television, only more sinister, the pioneer of the never-ending fireside rant. He made it clear he could do and say whatever he wanted, which felt daring and thrilling to people who’d been told for years that their prejudices were no longer welcome in polite society. In the process he harnessed the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party — xenophobia, anti intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown people — and weaponized them into a political strategy that the National Review’s Rich Lowry calls “middle-finger politics.”

The more shocking and outrageous the lies, the more furious the elites became, bolstering his authenticity and making his supporters love him even more. If the public’s attention flagged for even a second, he’d crack the whip with another 280 characters of vitriol, forcing himself back onto the frontpages. The media seemed utterly unaware of why he was so difficult to defeat: having learnt nothing from their mistake in enabling his election, they kept delivering him the most valuable of contemporary commodities — eyeballs. His strategy worked perfectly. Trump wasn’t just the first White President. He was the first Troll President, willing to say anything to get our attention, and once you understand that you understand why he seemed immune to any scandal.

What finally made him vulnerable to defeat wasn’t his tax returns, or special investigators digging up campaign ties with Russia, or even an impeachment. It was his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. After three successful years of smoke and mirrors, middle-finger politics ran into the cold hard reality of bio-politics. His disdain for scientific and medical expertise and refusal to endorse even the most rudimentary preventive measures was according to medical experts, directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. The crisis required the US government to perform its most basic duty of protecting the public. Instead, everything broke, because you can’t rally or spin your way out of a pandemic.

For Trump, the biggest problem wasn’t that Covid-19 killed Americans. It was that it took attention away from him. No matter how hard he trolled he was always upstaged by the virus, with its terrifying death counts and unprecedented hammer blow to the economy. That’s why he continued to insist it would go away, because to admit otherwise would mean he was no longer the most important story in America. “Covid, Covid Covid, all they want to talk about is Covid” he complained at a rally in Pennsylvania seven days before the election. “We are rounding the turn, and we have the vaccines coming out very soon, years ahead of schedule.”

America though, wasn’t rounding the turn. The country is setting global records for daily cases and death tolls now exceed 2,000 people a day. If you’re still in any doubt about what this presidency was always about consider the fact that right now, in the middle of America’s worst Covid-19 wave yet, Trump has stopped any pretense of of governing and is now concentrating entirely on his effort to overturn the result of the election. As the reins of power slip at last from his grasp, he’s making one last desperate attempt to remain relevant because this is a man that deals in only one currency — attention — and he’s willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of people, including those who most avidly support him, in order to keep it.

At midday on the 20th January 2021, Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. His share of the popular vote is likely to exceed 51.3%, the highest percentage for a challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. He will face a Republican party determined to keep their base in a constant state of anger and crazed denial. Right-wing media will fan the flames; right-wing social media groups will pour gasoline on the fire. Trump will almost certainly not concede and is unlikely to invite Biden to the White House or attend his inauguration. Everything he and his MAGA sycophants do over the next few weeks will be about staying in the headlines and the media will obediently play along. Will he or won’t he? What will he do next? Every time his name is uttered in public it’ll keep his malignant spell in place a little longer.

After almost six years though, I’m no longer willing to play the game. I’ve been rubbernecking the car crash since Trump first announced his candidacy in 2015, marinating in the toxic emotions that he inspired and perpetuated: outrage and fear, helplessness and grief. I tried to stop many times. I quit reading the news, deleted Twitter and installed internet timers. Sometimes I managed to stay away for weeks at a time. Inevitably though the screen would flicker back on and I’d get sucked in again. Even though I knew I was being manipulated I kept refreshing my feed, listening to the political podcasts, waking up each morning and wondering what had happened in the latest episode of the most toxic reality show ever created.

Last week as I watched the 2020 election results roll in, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many hours of my life I’d spent reading and thinking about Donald Trump. I was horrified. If I’d dedicated that time to anything else — picking up a musical instrument, learning a foreign language or writing a book — I’d be an expert now. Every time I’ve paid him attention, I’ve been paying with all the other things I could have attended to but didn’t. The heart-to-heart talk I could have had with my father on the phone, the afternoon walk I could have taken with my daughter, the fresh feeling I didn’t have the next morning. The resource Donald Trump depleted wasn’t just my attention. The resource he depleted was my life.

Online communities learned a long time ago to stop feeding the trolls. You don’t defeat a troll by arguing with them or reasoning with them. You certainly don’t defeat them by writing about them. The only way to defeat a troll is to ignore them and not give them what they so desperately crave. They’re not looking for your approval, they don’t care whether you hate them either. All they want is your attention. That’s why this is the first and the last ever article I will write about Donald Trump. I very much look forward to never having to waste another minute of my life thinking about him again.

We’re a team of science communicators based in Australia. We curate stories of human progress, and help people understand what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology. More than 40,000 people subscribe to the free version of our fortnightly email newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The First Troll President was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m the writer of the Future Crunch newsletter, a weekly roundup of science, technology and good news you might not have heard about. More than 40,000 people subscribe to the free version (you should too). You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The last few years haven’t been easy for coal, gas and oil companies. They’ve come under growing pressure from climate activism and divestment campaigns, and the rapid growth of cheaper alternatives. COVID-19 however, has put everything on fast forward, brutally exposing their frailties, wiping billions from market valuations, and catapulting them into situations they thought they would only have to deal with five or ten years from now. It’s the biggest shock to the global energy system in more than seven decades, with the drop in demand this year set to dwarf the impact of the 2008 financial crisis. Many energy analysts are now saying something that would have been unimaginable a few months ago — it looks likely that global carbon emissions peaked in 2019.

The historic decline in global emissions is not something to be celebrated. It comes at an unimaginable cost, hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and devastating economic trauma around the world. Nor is a peak guaranteed. If governments do not learn the lessons of the last financial crisis, and put clean energy technologies — renewables, efficiency, batteries, hydrogen and carbon capture — at the heart of their plans for economic recovery, then this brief, unlooked-for window of opportunity will close. There are good reasons to believe though, that this time will be different, because this time, it’s all about the money.

“If demand for fossil fuels bounces back in 2021 by half the amount it fell in 2020, and grows at 0.5% a year, it would take 8 years to get back to where the industry started. And in the meantime, the renewable energy revolution has not stopped.”

Kingsmill Bond, Energy Strategist, Carbon Tracker

Black rocks burning

Coal has been the hardest hit, with global coal-fired power generation set to fall by more than 10% this year. That’s the problem with being the dirtiest and most expensive source of electricity. You’re the first thing that gets switched off, and you don’t get switched on until demand comes back up again. The key issue is what economists call the ‘marginal cost.’ The idea is simple: once you’ve built your power stations, it’s more expensive to run the ones that need fuel than the ones that rely on wind, rain or sunshine. Think about it. Coal-fired electricity requires you to keep on digging up black rocks, transporting them to power plants, and setting them on fire. Once you’ve installed your wind turbine, solar panel or hydropower plant though, the electrons come pretty much free of charge.

A similar economic logic applies to natural gas — demand is on track to decline by 5% in 2020, the largest recorded year-on-year drop since natural gas was developed at scale during the second half of the 20th century. Renewables will be the only energy source that will grow in 2020, with their share of global electricity generation projected to jump by 5% this year. Adding momentum is the fact that renewables keep on getting cheaper. Not only is clean energy now the lowest cost source of power generation for at least 85% of global power generation, it’s actually cheaper to build new wind and solar, including battery storage, than to continue operating 40% of the world’s existing coal capacity.

Money talks. It doesn’t matter how strong the coal and gas lobby has been, how many officials they’ve bribed or how many campaign donations they’ve made — the inexorable logic of economic gravity is taking hold. Those companies hoping to eke it out for another few years have suddenly, like Wile E. Coyote, discovered that there’s no ground under their feet. Union leader Nicholas Klein’s often misattributed aphorism comes to mind. First they ignored clean energy, then they laughed at it, then they fought it with every dirty trick they had, and now they’re on the wrong end of a battle they cannot win.

The bad news is coming thick and fast. In the United Kingdom, where humanity’s industrial experiment first began, the country didn’t switch on a coal plant at all between the 10th April and the 17th June, and permanently retired two coal plants during lockdown, leaving just four in operation. Eight years ago, about 40% of the country’s electricity came from coal. This year, it’ll be a rounding error. Renewables have filled the gap; their output was higher than fossil fuel generation in the UK for the first time ever in the first quarter of 2020, with wind energy alone supplying almost as much electricity as natural gas.

Across the Channel, thermal coal has been eviscerated, with imports to Europe plunging to lows not seen in 30 years. Thanks to the EU’s slow ratcheting up of the carbon price, four fifths of the continent’s coal fleet is already more expensive to run than to build new wind and solar. This presumably, is why, since March, Sweden and Austria have closed their last coal plants, Poland and the Czech Republic have scrapped planned coal expansions, Portugal has brought forward its planned coal shutdowns by two years, Italy’s largest utility has brought forward its closures by five years, and seven of Spain’s remaining 15 coal-fired power stations have been retired after the owners admitted they couldn’t afford to keep them open any more. Two years ago, 15% of electricity in Spain came from coal. In May this year, it contributed just 1.4% of the power mix.

It’s Germany however, that has surprised analysts the most. In Europe’s industrial powerhouse, and the fourth largest economy in the world, coal only supplied about 20% of the power mix in the first half of the year (compared to 31% in 2019) and more than half of electricity has come from renewables. This remember, is a country that’s been hammered by environmentalists from the one side for its refusal to abandon coal, and from the other by carbonists for its ‘profligate’ spending on clean energy. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, it looks possible that Germany’s remaining 40GW of coal power will shuttered by the middle of this decade, well ahead of the government’s 2038 deadline. Someone, somewhere, is muttering Ich hab’s dir doch gesagt under their breath (just not sure who).

This is not intended as a criticism of environmentalists — far from it. Their untiring efforts have slowly but surely shifted the climate conversation to the center of debate in Brussels. It’s been a grueling process, the result of decades of activism, painstaking planning, lobbying, and death by committee. The reward, when it came though, was quick. The European Green Deal, in the space of less than 24 months, has gone from NGO wish list to the new defining mission of the European Union, and more than $572 billion, or 30% percent of the bloc’s massive stimulus package has been allocated for investments in policies to fight climate change. The way Europe sees it, if every nation in the world is going to be in debt for at least the next decade, they might as well be paying for something that solves the biggest challenge of the 21st century.

That same political calculus of course, is nowhere to be seen in the United States. In 2018, the current president declared that “coal is indestructible” and that “the coal industry is back.” The current president is of course, not exactly the world’s most reliable purveyor of facts, and has an interesting way of defining, ‘back.’ Last year saw an 18% decline in coal generation, a 15% fall in coal consumption, and a 53% drop in the value of coal stocks. Coming into 2020, the US coal industry was already in the middle of its very own Kodak moment, punchdrunk from a combination of climate activism, cheap gas and renewables.

The lockdowns have acted like a clean uppercut to the jaw: as demand for electricity has plummeted, expensive coal has been the first thing to go. The latest estimates suggest that US coal generation this year will provide less than 18% of power supply, and analysts predict it could fall to just 10% in five years, down from 50% a decade ago. By contrast, renewables will account for over a fifth of electricity generation this year, surpassing coal for the first time since 1885, when the Statue of Liberty first arrived in New York. Nobody in the coal industry, it appears, is laughing any more.

Don’t drill baby, don’t drill

They’re not laughing in the oil and gas sector either. It wasn’t that long ago that energy executives and their lobbyists in Washington were celebrating the shale gas ‘miracle,’ a vast reservoir of cheap energy unleashed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, turning the country into the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. The miracle however, was built on shaky ground (sorry, couldn’t resist). Shale oil and gas producers burned through $342 billion of cash in a decade using borrowed money, with nothing to show for their shareholders, and more than 200 companies, owing over $130 billion in debt, have filed for bankruptcy since the beginning of 2015.

Drill baby drill? More like burn, baby, burn. The country now has just 189 active drill rigs, down from 675 in March. 30% of operators are now technically insolvent, 20% have stressed financials, and the industry is looking at a further $300 billion in write-downs. The spectacular implosion of the global gas and oil markets has revealed a house of cards, an industry built on debt and based on the assumption that profitability would eventually materialize. It never did, and investors have finally lost patience. Last month alone, seven oil and gas companies declared bankruptcy, including Chesapeake, the poster child of America’s drilling renaissance, a company that, a decade ago, was worth $37.5 billion.

Adding insult to injury, earlier this month three major North American oil and gas pipelines were stymied. First to go was the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, after legal challenges drove costs up to $8 billion from about $4.5 billion. The next morning, a federal judge ordered the shut-down of the Dakota Access Pipeline. While a subsequent court order has allowed it to keep operating during the appeals process, it’s still an extraordinary victory for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, considering how much money is at stake (the owner of the pipeline alone will lose a billion dollars if the pipe is shut down). Later on the same day, the US Supreme Court upheld a decision to suspend construction on parts of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, leaving it in a limbo from which it will likely never return.

The pipeline setbacks in North America demonstrate the potency of the opposition the gas and oil industry now faces from tribes, community activists, landowners and those fighting for a clean energy transition. Despite three executive orders, relentless regulatory rollbacks and the federal government’s complete abandonment of climate policy, the US environmental movement has managed to tie these projects up long enough for public opinion to shift, and more importantly, for the business cases to fall apart. The tactics of delay and frustrate that have been used so effectively by fossil fuel giants to prevent meaningful action on climate change are now being used against them, hitting them where it hurts the most, in their back pockets.

It’s tempting to celebrate, but also worth remembering that while executives will get golden parachutes, workers will bear the pain. The US coal mining industry, which employed 70,000 people at the end of 2014, had laid off almost 20,000 of them before the pandemic hit, and between January and June this year a further 9,400 jobs were lost. In the oil and gas industry, more than 100,000 oil and gas jobs have been lost since March, most of them in the support activities market. This goes against what so many climate advocates recognise as crucial: a ‘just transition’ that ensures hydrocarbon workers are not collateral damage. Many of those jobs aren’t coming back, and the people that have lost them are going to be angry, and hurting. Their future, like so many other things, is now at stake in the United States’ 2020 presidential election.

“What’s front and center has been the extreme volatility and carnage that’s occurred in the energy sector. These companies are now in survivor mode, never mind thinking about the energy transition.”

Jennifer Rowland, Senior Analyst, Edward Jones

The last great hope of the coal barons

What about Asia? The hardest truth of the climate crisis is that while most of the advocacy is taking place in the West, humanity’s collective future will mostly be decided by what happens in the East. The United States and Europe may be the world’s second and third biggest carbon emitters, but Asia is home to more than 60% of humanity, and emits more than half of global carbon emissions. Most of that comes from coal — the continent makes up more than three quarters of global coal consumption, and most analysts expect the appetite for coal to roar back after briefly being tripped up by the virus.

Most analysts however, aren’t looking at the underlying economic dynamics. Take India for example, the fourth largest carbon emitter in the world, and the world’s second largest coal consumer. In February this year, the Minister for Coal, Pralhad Joshi, said India would eliminate all imports of thermal coal by 2024, and a month later, the country revealed its first reduction in carbon emissions in four decades. The pandemic has accelerated these trends. Electricity from coal-fired power fell from 75% in March to 63% in May, and coal imports by more than a third. Meanwhile, clean energy sources, benefiting from a ‘must-run’ status compelling power companies to use solar or wind energy whenever it is generated, rose from 16% to a never-before-seen 28% of the energy mix. The pandemic has tipped the scale in favour of renewables, and peak coal production and consumption in India now looks like it may happen this decade, years ahead of schedule.

The sight of blue skies across the country hasn’t gone unnoticed either. India’s leaders, echoing their counterparts in Europe, are already talking about a green recovery, their warm feelings for clean energy spurred on, no doubt, by some cold-blooded financial calculations. The cost of adding solar electricity is now about 2.5 rupees per unit generated, compared with around 4.5 rupees for new coal capacity. Public and private actors alike in India are suddenly thinking very carefully about whether they want to invest in highly polluting new coal-fired power plants with payback periods of 20–30 years, at double the cost of deflationary, politically popular renewables.

Coal is facing political and economic headwinds in other parts of Asia too. In May, South Korea’s government was re-elected on a pledge to phase out domestic coal use, with many in the ruling coalition pushing to end financing of overseas projects. It’s the first major Asian country to commit to a zero-carbon target by the middle of the century, and a few days ago, the new government confirmed a $61 billion Green New Deal to create 1.9 million jobs through 2025, and help its economy recover from the impact of the coronavirus. The plan will move Asia’s fourth-largest economy away from its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and towards environmentally friendly industries.

In June, the Philippines approved a resolution calling for a climate emergency response, which includes not permitting any new coal plants, and Bangladesh announced it was considering cutting its coal pipeline to just 5GW. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, is also shifting course. Stung by international criticism at last year’s UN climate conference in Madrid, the government has announced it will close 90% of its coal-fired power plants by 2030. While the actual plan is vague on details, it’s the first serious indication that a phase-out is up for debate.

Perhaps more importantly the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, which last year provided over $4.8 billion in financing for overseas coal plants in Southeast Asia, has announced new rules, saying it will now support only efficient generators and only in countries that have a national strategy to reduce carbon emissions. In practice, this means overseas financing will fall to a fraction of its previous levels. While it’s not a complete break with coal, it is, as the environment minister Shinjiro Koizumi has pointed out, “a big, positive move” that reflects a new mentality in Japan, one that goes beyond the legacy of Fukushima.

The Godzilla of Coal

Ultimately though, none of this matters without China, the perennial monster in the room, the place where all roads in energy eventually lead. China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, the largest producer and consumer of coal, the largest importer of oil and gas, and by far the largest emitter of carbon. It’s also notoriously secretive, with accurate information hard to find, and the political tea leaves difficult to figure out. This makes it simultaneously the most important, and least understood country in the world when it comes to talking about the future of fossil fuels.

In China, coal is still king; half the world’s coal is mined and burned there, it accounts for about 65% of the electricity mix, and employs over 3.5 million people. Unlike Europe, the United States and India, China appears to be doubling down on dirty energy. Carbon dioxide emissions have surged as lockdowns have eased, rising 4–5% year-on-year in May. With the Communist Party focused on symbolic poverty targets (next year is the centenary of its founding) and bracing for economic headwinds from the US trade war and the fallout from COVID-19, approving coal plants has been an easy win for provincial officials trying to stimulate growth.

In the first six months of this year at least 40GW of coal power projects were approved, and more plants have been allowed to start construction than in 2018 and 2019 combined. That means there is now 97.8GW of coal-fired power under construction and another 151.8GW at the planning stage. That’s a total of 250GW in development — more than the entire coal power capacity of the United States — and yet to keep the world to under 2 degrees, China’s coal capacity is going to have to be cut by 400GW within the next decade. These kind of numbers put everything in perspective, showing exactly why the climate fight is going to be either won or lost in China. It seems like an almost impossibly tall order.

Impossible, that is, until you start following the money. Coal, remember, is expensive. Almost half of the country’s fleet is losing cash, and around 70% of coal plants now cost more to run than building new onshore wind or utility-scale solar (thanks, in no small part, to all those years of ‘profligate’ spending by Germany). China actually has far more coal-fired capacity than it needs, with the average plant sitting idle for more time than it generates power. The country’s coal barons are in the same predicament as their counterparts in Europe, the United States and India: they’ve run off the financial cliff. The industry might be able to run on the fumes of its considerable political and social power for a few more years, but eventually gravity is going to kick in.

The state won’t prop up failing industries forever, especially polluting ones, and if this sounds contradictory, well, then welcome to the maddening game of trying to figure out energy policy in China. On the one hand, Beijing has relaxed restrictions for coal plants, on the other, it’s just issued a directive stating that all ‘outdated’ mines will be required to shut permanently by the end of 2020. The best way to understand this is as a tug of war between competing interests within the Party — the carbonists, who care primarily about growth and employment — and the modernists, who care about moving the economy towards low-carbon technologies and services. Sound familiar? The only difference between China and the rest of the world is that in China, the fighting doesn’t take place out in the open.

Ultimately it’s going to come down, as it so often does, to the economics and on this front it’s looking bad for the carbonists everywhere. This year alone, we’ve seen blacklistings of coal by BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Citi, BNP Paribas, and Japan’s three mega banks –Mizuho, MUFG, and SMBC Group — the three largest private financiers of coal globally. This brings to 133 the total number of globally significant banks, insurers, and asset managers that have now announced their exit from coal, 41 of them coming in 2020 alone. The rate has accelerated by 50% this year.

Coal is also becoming harder to insure, with 19 of the world’s biggest 35 insurers now saying they won’t touch it. Insurers have also divested coal from roughly $9 trillion of investments, almost 40% of the industry’s global assets. For now, Asian banks, export credit agencies and private-equity firms are keeping the coal pipeline going, but as more global banks retreat, operators will face higher financing costs, a vicious circle that makes coal even less affordable. Financial institutions, unmoved for so many years by the moral argument against pumping carbon into the atmosphere, seem to have suddenly discovered a conscience now that the economic argument is convincing. Who would have guessed?

The worst hit industry in the world

It’s not just coal anymore, either. Big Oil is in serious trouble too. Coming into the 2020s, it seemed likely they would enjoy at least another five years of dominance before renewables and electric vehicles combined to put them into slow decline. These remember, are some of the richest and most powerful institutions in human history — since 1990, the six biggest private oil companies have earned more than $2.4 trillion in combined profits. In 2019 alone, they reported profits in excess of $55 billion, making Big Oil one of the most profitable industries in the world. When you’ve been riding that high for that long, there’s very little incentive to change, climate refugees and coral reefs be damned.

COVID-19 changed all of that, crushing demand just as a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia flooded the world with cheap oil, a perfect storm that drove the price of benchmark crude, briefly, into negative territory. While it’s now recovered to about $40 per barrel, that’s still far below what oil firms need to make a profit. Forget tourism or retail or even airlines — nobody has been hit harder by this pandemic. As much as $1.8 trillion will be wiped from the revenues of oil and gas companies this year — the worst-hit sector in the world. Just to put this in perspective, that’s six times greater than the impact on the more visibly affected retail sector. 20 oil and gas companies defaulted on their debt for in 2019. In 2020, the number is 18, and we’re only halfway through the year.

“I don’t think we know how this is going to play out. I certainly don’t know,” Could it be peak oil? Possibly. I would not write that off,”

Bernard Looney | CEO, BP

It’s not going to get better. The longer the planes sit on the tarmac and the cars sit in garages, the greater the glut becomes. BP says it expects the price of oil to now remain a third lower than expected for decades to come, meaning it will have to leave some of its reserves in the ground, and last month slashed the value of its assets by $17.5 billion. It was later joined by Shell, which cut its dividend for the first time in 80 years, and announced a $22 billion write down. The economic reality of both COVID-19 and the climate crisis is starting to bite, and for the three European majors, the writing seems to be very clearly on the wall.

In February, BP announced it would be carbon neutral by 2050, and was followed with similar commitments by Shell and Total in April. This is going to require massive investments in wind, solar, biofuels, battery and offsets such as avoided deforestation. Over the long term, that strategy will undermine the value of more oil and gas assets, especially if the more pessimistic global economy projections materialize and it takes longer for oil demand to recover, if it recovers at all. The added sting? All three are saying they will now pull out of industry lobbies that oppose climate action.

In stark contrast, their North American counterparts, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, are hanging on in the hope that the good old days will eventually come back. They won’t — and certainly not if institutional investors have their say. Oil and gas stocks, for so long a mainstay of traditional portfolios, are now looking like an increasingly bad bet. Although the decline began in 2015, it’s accelerated in the last year, falling by 35% while shares in major renewable firms have risen by the same percentage. In 2007, 12 of the 100 largest companies in the S&P 500 were oil companies. Today, there are just two, and the entire sector is now worth less than Apple’s $1.5 trillion market capitalization.

A few weeks ago, an electric car company, Tesla, overtook the world’s biggest private oil and gas firm, ExxonMobil in valuation. Everyone thinks the car company is wildly overvalued (it is, they only sold 367,500 cars vehicles last year) but then again, nobody seems to point out that the oil companies are wildly overvalued too. Most of their valuation depends on them being able to exploit existing and future reserves, and if they can’t then they’re in deep trouble. This was all true before the pandemic of course, but the tide has suddenly gone out far quicker than anyone expected. The leviathans of energy, accustomed to swimming in an ocean of readily available capital, suddenly find themselves in a shrinking inland sea, and nobody wants to be stuck with the beached whales.

A window of opportunity

So where to from here? 2020 has been the worst year ever for fossil fuels, and that’s good news for humanity. It is however, a tragic reprieve. This is not what a just transition looks like, and the consequences of such widespread economic devastation, on top of the human suffering, are still unknown. There are no guarantees either — while the momentum is now clearly in favour of clean energy, the considerable political and social power of dirty energy cannot be underestimated. Many companies will cling on right to the bitter end. Make no mistake, we’re still in for a long and ugly fight.

Nevertheless, the events of the last few months have provided humanity with a new window of opportunity, a once in a generation chance to change course before it’s too late. It’s premature to suggest that the current pandemic marks the end of fossil fuels, but it’s not a stretch to call it the beginning of the end of the largest and most powerful industry in human history. That, at least, is something that is worth celebrating. These are historical times, in more ways than one.

The next time you switch on the news, keep an eye out on what’s happening in the global energy markets. You might just be pleasantly surprised.

We’re a team of science communicators based in Australia. We curate stories of human progress, and help people understand what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology. More than 40,000 people subscribe to the free version of our email newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

2020 Is The Worst Year Ever For Fossil Fuels was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Arundhati Roy — The Pandemic is a Portal

“When this is all over.”

Five simple words, a mantra for troubled times, comforting us with the idea that it’s all temporary. When this is all over, we’ll take longer walks, watch our parents read to their grandchildren, laugh at our friends, and never take hugs for granted again. In a few months, the storm will pass, and we’ll emerge blinking into a world where the air has been washed clean, and the Himalayas, perhaps, are still visible on the horizon.

The uncomfortable truth though, is that as this first wave of lockdowns ease and we try to return to our normal lives, this isn’t going to be over. We now know a lot more about the nature of COVID-19, and it’s not looking good. Early reports suggested it was a standard variety respiratory disease. We’ve since learned that it attacks not only the lungs, but most of the body’s vital organs. Science Magazine describes it as a “ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes.”

It’s extremely contagious, with high lethality, yet can also be passed on by ‘super spreaders’ who don’t have symptoms. The virus is zoonotic (it comes from another species) and novel (our species has no preexisting immunity), which means it’s going to roam the world until enough people are immune, or until we create a safe vaccine and administer billions of doses. The former is unthinkable, because it would mean the death of millions, the latter is at least a year away, assuming everything goes perfectly (it won’t).

The implication is that we’re not just looking at a single lockdown, but at a succession of them — not just one mother-of-all-economic-shocks but overlapping waves of shocks that threaten the foundations of the global economy. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the ILO is now predicting the loss of 195 million jobs (compared to 22 million in 2008–2009) and the IMF says the collapse in global output is likely to exceed that of any recession in the last 150 years — that is, in the entire history of capitalism. “We really are in uncharted territory,” says Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “We have a monster mash-up of the Great Depression in size, the crash of 1987 in speed, and 9–11 in terms of fear.”

We’re not going back to normal.

Most of us are still trapped in the mental coordinates of a world that isn’t waiting for us on the other side. You can see this in the language journalists are still using. The coronavirus is a ‘strategic surprise’ and we’re still very much in the ‘fog of war,’ dealing with the equivalent of an ‘alien invasion’ or an ‘unexpected asteroid strike.’ As I said back in March though, this is not a natural disaster, like an earthquake, a one-off event from which we can rebuild. It’s not a war or a financial crisis either. There are deaths, but no combatants, no physical resources have been destroyed, and there was no initial market crash, although obviously the markets are now reacting.

The crisis is of the entire system we’ve built. In another article, I described this as the bio-political straitjacket. We can’t reopen our economies, because if we do then more people will die. We can’t keep them closed either, because our entire way of life is built on growth, and without it, everything collapses. We can give up our civil liberties, submitting to more surveillance and control, but as Amartya Sen would say, what good is a society if the cost of our health and livelihoods is our hard fought for freedoms?

This picture is a pretty good snapshot of where most of the world’s liberal democracies stand right now. All three elements of the straitjacket are perfectly in play. On the frontlines, the healthcare workers, expected to survive on claps rather than protective equipment. Bearing down on them, an economy powered by fossil fuels and driven by people who still believe there’s no such thing as society. At the moment it’s stuck in neutral, but there’s a 3.6 litre V6 under the hood of that thing and eventually the urge to stomp on the accelerator is going to become overwhelming.

There’s plenty to be outraged about here, but no obvious solutions. Our political factions have spent so long arguing that Oceania has been at war with Eurasia that we can’t imagine any other way. The crisis is being spun into a partisan Rorschach test in front of our eyes. The conservatives favour a swift economic restart and bemoan the comeback of the state. The progressives urge more intervention, and insist on longer lockdowns. Everyone ignores the socialists, who circulate manifestos and anxiously thumb their revolutionary rosaries. The realists fret about the rise of nationalism and the ascendance of China, while the pluralists scratch their heads over the failure of global governance, and the retreat of globalisation.

Lost amidst the ideological squabbling are those hit hardest by the pandemic, the migrants, day labourers, refugees, the urban poor, the undocumented, the homeless and the marginalised. As the rich loot the coffers (the cost of tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent in the US government’s $2 trillion stimulus was greater than the amount funded for all hospitals in America) and the chattering classes learn how to bake sourdough, millions are left without protection from both the virus and the lockdown measures, stranded as support networks collapse, and already precarious sources of income disappear.

The debate about the correct response to COVID-19 is utterly inadequate to the brutal realities of this moment. What’s happening now is going to transform everything, in ways large and small, a forever fork in the road, and it’s going to get a lot, lot worse before it gets better.

This is not a rant, nor is it a counsel of despair. There’s hope on the horizon. In her extraordinary essay, The Pandemic is a Portal, Arundhati Roy explains that pandemics force us to think the world anew; they are a gateway between an old world and a next, new era. As we step through we can drag our old ways with us or we can “walk through lightly, with little luggage,” honouring our dead by having the courage to try something else.

There are people lighting the path, if we’re willing to look. In the last decade, the ideas of two economists, Mariana Mazzucato and Kate Raworth, have been slowly but steadily gaining traction, adopted by cities, countries and even entire continents, making the rare leap from ivory tower to the real world. In combination, they give us a way to escape the straitjacket. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, as they say, although this time around our cliches are evidently in need of some long overdue diversity training.

Let me try to explain.

CONTENT WARNING: Political Economy Stuff ahead. It gets pretty dense through this next section. I know that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; if your eyes start glazing over, remember it’s not your fault, it’s mine for not making it accessible enough. Bearing this in mind, and in the interests of really beating our titular metaphor to death, I’m going to use the central motif of a portal — a circle — as a guide.

Let’s start with two circles, illustrating the status quo.

In 1981, in his inaugural address, Ronald Reagan declared “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In the forty years since, this view has come to dominate economic policymaking in the West. The market, if left alone, will drive innovation and allocate resources in the most efficient way, creating a bigger pie and leaving everyone better off. The state’s role is to uphold property rights, perhaps do a bit of regulatory ‘nudging’ here and there and take care of ‘externalities’ like, uh, climate change. As Evgeny Morozov points out, these ideas were based on blueprints from the Cold War: more competition and less solidarity, more creative destruction and less government planning, more market dependence and less welfare.

Over the course of a few, crazy months in 2008, the accepted wisdom was turned on its head. We learned that at the heart of our profit-driven, private financial economy is a state-managed entity, the central bank. When markets function normally, it remains in the background. As soon as they break down though, it becomes the ‘lender of last resort.’ In country after country the state made loans, bought assets from private banks, funds and other businesses desperate for cash and because it was the ultimate backer of currency, its budget was unlimited.

Once the crisis passed however, memories faded. Even though the ‘states bad, markets good’ story had been exposed as a sham, for a generation of policymakers trained at the same universities, the old habits died hard. They looked at the huge debts racked up by governments and concluded that budgets should be re-balanced and public services cut, staking out a battleground over which the left and the right have been fighting ever since. The left has spent the last decade calling for fairer distribution, higher taxes, and more public spending, while the right insists we need lower taxation, less wasteful government, and more growth and efficiency.

Almost every political fight, including the culture wars, can be traced back to this false binary. States versus markets. Equality versus efficiency. Redistribution versus growth. Those circles haven’t just remained separate — they’ve drifted further apart. The growing ideological rift explains why the last few years have felt so gridlocked, with our elected representatives seemingly incapable of addressing 21st century challenges like inequality, forced migration, privacy, climate change, ecological collapse… and of course, pandemics.

Which brings us to 2020. In the last few months, the playbook from 2008 has been dusted off. As of the 10th of April 2020, governments across the globe had announced $10.6 trillion in stimulus measures, the equivalent of eight Marshall Plans. “POW!#*@ BAM&$# SMASH! @#$% KABOOM* #!@?% That’s the sound of the Fed’s big bazooka” goes one typical report. Once again, we’ve been treated to a crash course in how much power the state does have — how much it can accomplish when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. Bloomberg journalist Pankaj Mishra sums it up nicely: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”

However, while the bazookas have temporarily shored up the financial system, this time around the economic collapse is going to be much bigger, and the bailouts are going to be a lot more expensive. The central bankers are using the tools of the last crisis, but few seem to be wrestling more broadly with the question of how the world is changing and what our economies are going to look like on the other side.

ENTER STAGE LEFT: Mariana Mazzucato

One person who has been wrestling with that prospect is Mariana Mazzucato. While many of her colleagues have spent the last decade scolding capitalism, she’s been re-imagining its basic premises. Where does growth come from? What is the source of innovation? How can the state and private sector work together to create the dynamic economies we want? She started asking these questions in 2011, appalled by cuts to public services in the United Kingdom, and angered by the prevailing narrative that such measures were necessary to boost competitiveness.

Mazzucato decided to delve deeper into the history of the world’s most innovative companies, and discovered that the long-accepted binary of an agile private sector and a lumbering, inefficient state was a myth. Her research revealed that government agencies have played a critical role in the development of most of the general purpose technologies that now drive economic growth, such as the internet, GPS, the smartphone, clean energy, fracking, and pharmaceuticals. All of these were funded in their early stages by public dollars.

Silicon Valley luminaries such as Apple, Google, Tesla and SpaceX, she argued, owe their success at least as much to state-funded research as they do to visionary founders. As she says in a recent profile in Wired, “History tells us that innovation is an outcome of a massive collective effort — not just from a narrow group of young white men in California. If we want to solve the world’s biggest problems, we better understand that.”

Echoing Amartya Sen, Mazzucato believes that in order for societies to succeed they need both the invisible hand of free markets and the visible hand of good governance. In this view, the relationship between our two circles is very different. Rather than pulling in different directions, they’re symbiotic. For as long as we can remember, we’ve been told that all the exciting bits of the economy belong to the private sector, but she turns that idea on its head, showing us that the state has been there all along, an unloved and underappreciated driver of innovation and co-creator of wealth.

Not only has the state been stepping in as the lender of last resort when markets fail, it’s been acting as an ‘investor of first resort,’ creating and shaping new markets, embracing uncertainty, and taking risks nobody else is willing to shoulder. Our failure to recognise this has allowed an overly financialised business sector to get away with murder. Private companies have been able to suck value out of the economy for decades, piggybacking off basic government research and then using the profits to buy back their stocks, inflating the value and rewarding CEOs and shareholders. Again and again, we see this story playing out in industries like airlines, banking, pharmaceuticals, tech, property and agriculture.

This time around, she says, when big business comes begging for help, the state should wise up, and socialise both the risks and the rewards, embracing its ‘entrepreneurial spirit.’ If the public sector is crucial to major technological developments then taxpayers should get a larger share, through royalties or equity, or by including conditions that steer businesses towards value creation instead of value extraction. More research and worker training — less share buybacks and golfing.

Of course, when public investments go wrong, there’s the danger of public uproar. Mazzucato suggests that to counter this, the rewards should be made more explicit. “Voters will be more willing to accept the (inevitable) failures” she points out, “if they see that those are compensated by important success.” A lot of this requires a shift in language. She argues that progressives are losing around the world because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth.

Government agencies have an opportunity in the wake of this crisis to rebrand themselves as the heroes rather than the naive patsies. Instead of using words like regulate, fix or spend, they should be talking about how the state finances, creates and invests. That’s a lesson we could learn when it comes to the mind-numbing energy debate here in Australia, and it’s one that climate change activists could take to heart around the world, too. “If we continue to depict the state as only a facilitator and administrator, and tell it to stop dreaming,” she writes, “in the end that is what we get.”

The good news is that a lot of people are listening. In the past few years, Mazzucato has been everywhere. She’s a rockstar economist, advising everyone from Cyril Ramaphosa to Nicola Sturgeon and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her most influential piece of work however, was the design of the European Union’s new, €100 billion research and innovation agenda, centred around five mission areas: adaptation to climate change; cancer; healthy oceans and waterways; climate-neutral and smart cities; and soil health and food. That program was signed into law in 2019. When asked about what it meant to her, she replied, “I’ve influenced politicians, but having a parliament vote on something I wrote is just fantastic. That’s what I want: to bring about change.”

What Mariana Mazzucato is offering us here is something both broad and scarce: a compelling new story about how the left and right can work together to get us to a better future. It tears down the artificial binary between saving lives and saving livelihoods, interlinking the circles of the state and the market and showing us they are intimately involved in delivering both of these goals. It’s a huge step in the right direction, a way to do capitalism differently.

On it’s own though, it’s not enough, because waiting on the other side of this crisis is an even bigger curve that needs flattening.

“When this is all over.”

It’s not just a comforting mantra for those of us stuck at home. It’s a policy prescription. In the corridors of power, the discussion is focused doggedly on defeating the virus, facilitating recovery, restoring growth and getting back to normal. There will be other pandemics in the future though, potentially worse than this one, and looming large on the sidelines, the heavy weight of climate change. Going back to normal guarantees more trouble down the line. Framed this way, COVID-19 isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. As systems thinker Gregory Bateson has written, “That is the paradigm: Treat the symptom to make the world safe for the pathology.”

The true disease, the ‘pathology’ he’s talking about here, is an economy that’s built for perpetual growth. For the past century, this has brought untold benefits to humanity — if you’ve been following our work at Future Crunch for any length of time you’ll know we think that’s something worth celebrating. Thanks to the miracle of growth and the extraordinary inventiveness of capitalism, our species has lifted billions out of poverty, dramatically improved global health, expanded literacy and education, and given three quarters of adults on earth access to the greatest information resource in human history.

The miracle cannot continue forever. Global economic development has also fuelled a dramatic increase in our use of Earth’s resources, first driven by the resource-intensive lifestyles of today’s rich countries, and more recently redoubled by the rapid growth of the global middle class. In our modern day excitement about all the bits, bytes and electrons, it’s easy to forget that the global economy is still built on atoms, molecules and cells. Our system of just-in-time, industrialised manufacturing — from food production to the making of electronics, vehicles, packaging, plastics, textiles and buildings — is anchored in linear, carbon-intensive supply chains that replace natural ecosystems with man-made toxicity.

At some point, we’re going to hit a wall. If we get a ‘V-shaped recovery’ and manage to return to our former average annual growth rate of 3%, the global economy will be three times bigger by 2050 than it is today. Let that sink in for a minute. Even if we can do what Mazzucato suggests, and get states and markets working together to, say, clean up our entire energy system and provide healthcare for all (and that’s the biggest ‘if’ of all time), we’re still going to be making and consuming an unimaginable amount of stuff. Our ecosystems won’t be able to handle the load. Our two century long experiment with industrialism is self-terminating. Either we figure out a way to end it ourselves, or it does the job for us.

Writing these words feels deeply uncomfortable. They sound radical. I understand this, which is why I’m so hesitant to put them out there. Serious people dismiss de-growth as unrealistic, an idea from the fringes, stuff for anthropologists, ecologists, and Russell Brand. You can’t just slam on the brakes, they say. Look at what’s happening right now; the consequences are catastrophic. That Dodge Ram is built for forward motion — we might be able to replace the engine with a battery, but there’s no way we can stop it.

It’s also dangerous. How, for example, are we supposed to build all those roads and hospitals, or make all those wind turbines and solar panels, if we’ve got an economy that’s going in reverse? Not to mention, it’s all very well for those of us sitting at the top of the pile to say ‘stop’ but what about the bottom billion, still waiting for their chance to climb the socioeconomic ladder? In the last three decades China has grown its GDP per capita by a factor of eight, and in the process pulled off the single biggest transfer of wealth to the global poor in human history. It’s unfair to insist other nations shouldn’t follow suit.

We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy. And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one. Nobody’s been able to show us a way out.

Until now.

ENTER STAGE RIGHT: Kate Raworth

Like Mariana Mazzucato, Kate Raworth started asking questions in the wake of the last financial crisis. She went a step further though, and decided to tackle the most sacred cow in all of economics — the assumption that economies should always grow.

She explains that it wasn’t always this way. Today, we think about economics as a technical subject, a game of graphs and numbers. The first economists however, were more like moral philosophers, trying to articulate what a society’s goals should be, and what the best way of getting there was. In the early 20th century, that changed. Economics became more ‘scientific,’ shaking off questions about what ought to be and focusing instead on explaining the complexities of the economy itself. Discussion of the economy’s goals disappeared from view, creating a moral vacuum at its heart.

Into that space stepped a measurement — gross domestic product, created in the 1930s as a way for policymakers in the United States to track the country’s recovery from the Great Depression. What was initially a snapshot became a time series, and over the next half century, GDP growth evolved from being a political goal to a political necessity, and eventually, de facto policy. Today, if you pick up any popular economics book, or follow any famous economist on Twitter, you’ll see that they talk about efficiency, productivity and growth as if these values were self-explanatory.

They’re not. For as long as any of us can remember, our proxy for progress has been an ever-rising line heading upwards and to the right. However, as Robert Kennedy said more than fifty years ago, that line measures “neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” We can now add another criticism to his list. If we continue using GDP growth as our metric for success, then we’re going to destroy the conditions that gave rise to human civilisation itself.

We need new metrics, and we need a new mindset. “What we have are economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive,” says Raworth. “What we need, especially in the richest countries, are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” When she tried to represent this goal visually, she came up with… two circles. Welcome to doughnut economics.

In this diagram, humanity’s resource use radiates out from the centre. The inner ring, the social foundation, represents the minimum that we need to live a thriving life. Below it, falling into the hole, are all the people who don’t have access to basic needs such as food, water, healthcare, education, political voice and housing, things that everyone needs for a life of dignity and opportunity. As a society, our primary goal should be to get everyone over that boundary.

However, in doing so, we can’t let our resource use overshoot our ecological limits, represented by the outer ring. Beyond that lies critical planetary overshoot in the form of ocean acidification, chemical pollution, air pollution, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss, and climate change. In the middle lies a sweet spot — shaped unmistakably like a doughnut — that is both an ecologically safe and socially just space for humanity. Our task in the 21st century, she says, is an unprecedented one: to bring everyone into that safe and just space.

Raworth has been drawing this doughnut in meeting rooms and at conferences around the world for years. She recounts the story of how in 2011, in the run up to a conference on sustainable development, she showed it to European officials and the British representative piped up. “We hear the Latin Americans talk of Pachamama and find it all a bit fluffy” he said — waggling his hands in the air to illustrate — “but I can see that this is a science-based way of saying something that’s actually not so different.”

Change of course, doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a hard slog. Raworth is just the latest in a long line of thinkers who’ve been making similar arguments for decades. It doesn’t matter how good your idea is, you have to repeat it over and over again until the small ripples turn into larger ones. The doughnut has made an appearance at the headquarters of the OECD, World Bank and the UNDP, at the World Economic Forum, and in 2015 during late night negotiations on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, insiders reported that a large version sat on the table as a reminder.

Over the years, Raworth’s argument for the doughnut hasn’t changed — but the world has. 2020 now feels very different to 2011. This pandemic is forcing us to look for a new compass, and what previously sounded radical suddenly looks sensible. The City of Amsterdam certainly thinks so. A few weeks ago, it announced that its post-pandemic recovery strategy will be based on the world’s first City Doughnut economic model. We are now going to learn what it takes for a city of 1.6 million people to make the difficult choices and emotionally confronting decisions required to make the transition to a circular economy. This is an idea whose time may finally have come —which is appropriate, because those two concentric rings don’t just look like a doughnut.

They look like a portal.

“When this is all over”

The next time you catch yourself saying it, remember:

It’s not a mantra. It’s not a policy prescription. It’s an invitation, to rethink the kind of world we want to live in. Our two guides, Mariana Mazzucato and Kate Raworth, offer us a pathway out of this mess and a compass to guide us there. Are their prescriptions unrealistic? Perhaps. Optimistic? Definitely. But remember, over the long term, the future is always decided by optimists. As Kevin Kelly says, to be an optimist you don’t have to ignore the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

So imagine an economy on the other side of the portal, one built not on the principle of efficiency, or even sustainability, but on adaptability. Instead of insisting that we should return, or stop, or reverse, we have a chance here to achieve dynamic balance. Growth can happen — yes Marc Andreessen, it’s time to build — but there should be social and ecological boundaries that help us understand what the right thing to build is, allowing us to differentiate among sectors that should grow and need investment (clean energy, public transport, education, health) and sectors that need to radically de-grow (oil, gas, coal, advertising, finance).

On the other side of the portal, we will need the dynamism of the market, with its unparalleled ability to create, innovate and allocate efficiently. However, it should be backed by an innovative state, one that’s willing to fund basic research and take risks on brand new technologies the marketplace hasn’t even dreamed of. The state should also be there to protect citizens from the market’s inevitable swings, crashes and wealth-concentrating effects, providing healthcare, liveable wages, housing, basic income, political voice, and freedom from discrimination.

Linear supply chains could slowly but steadily be replaced by circular ones, agriculture transformed from an extractive to a regenerative activity, and ecosystems treasured for what they truly are — the source of all life — rather than just providers of economic services. As biomimicry thinker Janine Benyus puts it, ‘when a bird builds a nest in a tree, it takes care not to destroy the surrounding forest in the process’. An economy designed like this would be far better equipped to deal with future shocks. Decentralised, clean energy infrastructure would be more resilient in the face of natural disasters, and healthcare would cease to be zero-sum, in recognition of a truth this current pandemic is showing us all too clearly — the health of one is the health of all.

This is of course, a far more ambitious agenda than what’s on the table in even the most progressive countries right now, but it’s one worth fighting for every inch of the way.

That fight needs to begin now.

We need a new message.

Don’t wait until this is all over.

We’re a team of science communicators based in Australia. We curate stories of human progress, and help people understand what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology. More than 38,000 people subscribe to the free version of our fortnightly email newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Portal Economics was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Nobody saw it coming.

While that statement is technically true (most experts thought it would be a flu virus, not a coronavirus), you can’t say we weren’t warned. Back in 2007 for example, the US Department of Health and Services conducted an audit of the federal government’s strategic stockpile, and found only 12,000 ventilators. Aware that this wasn’t enough for even a mid-sized pandemic, and with the memories of SARS and bird flu still fresh in their minds, they put out a tender for 40,000 new devices. The winning bid came from a small Californian company called Newport, who promised to deliver the entire order for less than $3,000 per unit.

This was innovation in action! The government would save time and taxpayer dollars, and Newport would gain the prestige of being a federal supplier, making up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world. The contract was awarded in 2010, and initially, everything went perfectly. Prototypes were submitted, a design was chosen, all the approvals granted and then in 2012, just as they were about to start production, Newport was bought by a larger medical company called Covidien.

Almost immediately, the project stalled. The margins didn’t look attractive to the new bosses, and they worried that a cheap, portable ventilator would undercut their existing product line. By 2014, Covidien’s executives said they wanted out, complaining the contract wasn’t profitable enough. The government had to go back to the drawing board. This time they went for the safer, slower, less ambitious option, awarding the contract to Philips. It would be another five years before all the approvals were granted, and in December 2019 the government ordered 10,000 units, setting a delivery date for mid-2020.

The rest, of course, is history.

On the surface, the lessons of this debacle, so brilliantly reported by Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, seem obvious. In our last newsletter, we pointed out that the media is scrambling for narrative. In the early stages it was mostly ‘us versus them’ stories. Now though, it’s the human error angle that’s getting the most traction. The schadenfreude is irresistible. A gaggle of (mostly British and American) pundits is rushing forward to explain how their societies have been very foolish during their seven years of plenty. “We were warned again and again that this would happen,” they cry, “and yet we didn’t prepare!”

These are easy pickings; choose-your-own-adventure morality tales about the incompetence of bureaucrats/evils of capitalism/bravery of innovators/greed of overpaid fat cats. Unfortunately, in our quickness to judge, we’re missing a far more important lesson about the limits of our political and economic imaginations. To show you what we mean, we’re going to need to zoom out a little.

The COVID-19 storm has already ravaged several countries, while in others, it’s still approaching. Even as the peak recedes in places like Bergamo, Madrid and Paris, the coffins are piling up in New York, Tehran and London, and the black clouds are gathering over Delhi, Ankara and São Paulo. In Jerusalem, they’ve just closed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The last time that happened was in 1349, during The Black Death. Most countries have realised that in order to save lives, they need to keep their citizens at home.

This is obviously the right thing to do. A flattened curve however, is a longer curve, and the longer the curve, the greater the economic damage, since quarantines are contrary to the market’s need for mobility and dynamism. Policymakers are therefore faced with a second imperative: save livelihoods. In the short run, they’ve cobbled together unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus packages, but these are reactive measures, and not sustainable. The recessionary spiral is only just beginning, as the initial economic data reveals a cratering of trade, reined-in business investment, cowering consumers and surging unemployment that’s sparing few industries.

Far worse is expected in the days and weeks to come. According to Harvard economist, Kenneth S. Rogoff, it’s shaping up as the deepest dive for the global economy in over 100 years. “Everything depends on how long it lasts, but if this goes on for a long time, it’s certainly going to be the mother of all economic crises.” The world’s nations are walking across a knife edge between an epidemiological and economic debacle, and even if they make it through, they face problems down the line. Releasing lockdowns too soon risks triggering a second wave, as people harbouring the virus spill back into public. Places like Hong Kong and Singapore, having made it through the first wave, are already reporting sharp rises in infections as they loosen restrictions on businesses and re-open borders.

There is an alternative. The sociologist Charles Tilly famously argued that “war makes the state” — and that’s true of pandemics, too. Historically, quarantines have required navies, police and a monopoly on the use of force over a wide area. The 21st century equivalent looks like something out of the worst nightmares of Charlie Brooker: mandatory installation of apps that track your movement, digital surveillance, drones searching for people without face masks, CCTV cameras installed outside the homes of the quarantined, police making arrests for minor infractions while on lockdown.

This strategy of hitting the epidemic hard and fast, then seeking to curtail further outbreaks using enforcement and surveillance — ‘the hammer and the dance’ — is what China did in Wuhan, using an army of supervisors, monitors and paramilitary police. Scaled to the size of a city like London or New York, the equivalent would be 50,000 people in uniforms — something like the entire NYPD including auxiliaries — devoted exclusively to enforcing quarantine. Buying a cappuccino in Beijing these days now involves a temperature check, leaving the barista your contact info and using your mobile phone’s location tracking to prove you’ve not been to any “hotspots” recently.

South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have deployed more high-tech, less suppressive approaches, but ones which still feel deeply uncomfortable for anyone living in a liberal democracy. It’s an awful bargain; essentially, we’re being told we can save both lives and livelihoods, but only if we monitor and control the behaviour of the entire population, in individual and mass cases, at a scale and intensity never before seen in the democratic world.

Journalist Jeremy Cliffe calls this the coronavirus trilemma: we can pick two of three things, but we cannot have them all: save lives, save livelihoods, or uphold cherished civil liberties. We prefer to think of it as the bio-political straitjacket; it’s what happens when politics as usual is thrown out the window, and our woefully under-prepared leaders suddenly find themselves making life-and-death decisions for millions of people because someone chose the wrong time to eat a bat.

Once you understand the contours of the straitjacket, the panicked scramble of most politicians around the world makes far more sense. It explains for example, why we’re now seeing the imposition of measures that would have been unthinkable even a few weeks ago. Faced with a seemingly impossible dilemma, the easy way out is to start suspending civil liberties. This is a choice that’s been most clearly made in east Asia, but it’s starting to happen in other places now too.

The United Kingdom’s new coronavirus bill gives police and immigration officers the authority — in place for the next two years — to arrest and detain people suspected of carrying the virus. In Peru, over 21,000 people have been arrested and given a permanent criminal record for violating lockdowns. In South Africa, Kenya and Pakistan there have been numerous reports of police brutality, and in Rwanda anyone found flouting curfew is forced to sit for a day in the hot sun in an open stadium. There have been arrests for spreading ‘fake news’ in Morocco and 1,600 people have been detained in Jordan for violating a stringent lockdown in the city of Irbid, home to the al-hirak al-sha’bi anti-government movement.

Indeed, for authoritarians, the bio-political straitjacket is a gift. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has issued death threats if lockdowns aren’t obeyed. “My orders to the police and the military is that if a commotion breaks out and they put up a fight that puts your life in danger, shoot them dead.” In the space of a few weeks, the prime ministers of both Hungary and Israel have effectively been given the power to rule by decree, without interference from courts or legislature. The first thing Viktor Orbán did with his fancy new pandemic powers? Strip away transgender rights. Likewise, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was twisting in the political winds, suddenly finds himself back in the driving seat, and Israel’s national security agency now has leave to access infected individuals’ phone records.

India, with an increasingly militant Narendra Modi at the helm, is drifting in this direction too. In Rajasthan, the government has made public the personal details of those under home-quarantine. In Karnataka, quarantined people are required to send selfies every hour throughout the day. Tamil Nadu is using a facial recognition app to track quarantined people. And last week, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched a contact tracing mobile app called Aarogya Setu, which live-tracks the location of the users.

Not all surveillance is inherently malign, and some of the new technology tools being deployed are helping. Within ten days of detecting their first imported case for example, Taiwan’s officials had created a phone tracking ‘digital fence’ system that now monitors more than 55,000 people. In South Korea, texts are sent to the public identifying potentially infected individuals and sharing information about where they’ve been. The UK, Germany, Austria, Italy and Belgium are all using data from major telecommunications companies to track people’s movement. It doesn’t have to be digital either — Cambodia has an analogue, phone-in system where all Cambodians report their diseases faster than almost any other place in the world.

These measures have, undoubtedly, saved lives. In the long run however, civil rights and privacy advocates are understandably worried that emergency measures may become permanent, so enmeshed in daily life that we forget their original purpose. That’s why strong, pluralist institutions matter. Civil liberties are less easily suspended in liberal democracies with a well-defined rule of law, and independence between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. Unfortunately, that means their range of choices is narrower too.

For most Western countries, the decision has been to save lives first, avoid stamping down too hard on civil liberties, and then save livelihoods using the state. Unprecedented programmes of government spending have been set in motion, with some even going so far as to write cheques directly to citizens. These measures feel like they’ve been made grudgingly though. The truth is that most of the world’s liberal democracies are so deeply biased towards financial values (as opposed to social, or environmental values) that the decision to save lives still feels like economic suicide.

After decades of being held hostage by the ideas of old, dead guys from the 1970s, we’ve internalised the belief that what motivates people best is not “the public good” but a desire to make a profit. We’ve spent so long being told that we have to compete savagely with others, that nobody else can be trusted, that the health and wealth of our own nation comes first, and that long-term, collective thinking is less important than individual survival, that we quite literally cannot imagine any other way of living.

Nowhere do these strictures seem more obvious than in the United States. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of Milwaukee blocked the governor’s executive order to suspend in-person voting for the state’s primary. A judge had to quite literally order people to stand in line and risk their lives in order to vote. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. The bio-political straitjacket dictates that there are no good options. Given an unwavering commitment to civil liberties, and in the absence of either a social welfare system or public healthcare, policymakers in the US have to choose: save lives OR save livelihoods.

That’s why the politics of coronavirus revolve so strongly around the interplay between the death curves and what’s happening on Wall Street. The signal comes straight from the top. The man democratically elected by 47% of Americans to be their leader takes two things seriously: television ratings, and stock market performance. Every night, the press pack dutifully rolls over to help him broadcast another must-watch episode. Which states are gonna get the masks and ventilators? Who’s being nice and who’s being nasty? OMG check it out it’s a miracle drug!

Even as the bodies pile up, those around him are clamouring to re-open the economy, insisting they won’t let the cure be worse than the disease. Others have put it more crudely: sacrificing a portion of the population might be better than watching the stock market tank. The rest of us can only watch in horror. Too late, American citizens are being forced to reckon with Adam Smith’s basic insight, abandoned by liberal economics, that if markets are social institutions, then they must be moral institutions too.

This is what a pandemic does. It exposes people’s unsubstantiated beliefs in the superiority of their ways of living. South Korea and the United States discovered their first cases on the same day. South Korea now has 204 dead — a ratio of 4 deaths per 1 million people. The US death ratio (50 per 1 million) is 12 times worse, and rising quickly. The world’s richest nation, blessed with the most advanced medical technologies ever invented, is on a trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from the coronavirus than any other developed country on Earth.

Which brings us back to our opening story, about how the US federal government tried to build a new fleet of ventilators, and failed. The moral of the story seems to be two-fold. The first is that American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values control over effectiveness and outcome. Second, that we should beware of entrusting public health to the marketplace. Market forces might deliver extraordinary, mind-bending, innovations in medicine, but they don’t deliver cheap, accessible, life-saving public health care. That now seems abundantly clear, and hopefully the lesson will be heeded in every country in the world once the dust settles.

For us though, there’s a more important lesson, which is that our reactions to this story reveal our beliefs in a false binary. We too readily accept that there’s a trade off between the goals of the state and the goals of the market, between public good and private profit. That’s the real kicker in all of this — the bio-political straitjacket is not real. It’s a belief system, founded on outdated 20th century ideas about the best way to organise society.

The good news? There are ways out, approaches that allow us to escape the straitjacket, and they’ve been shown to us by two visionary economists: Mariana Mazzucato, with her research on the entrepreneurial state, and Kate Raworth, whose concept of doughnut economics is now being embraced by Amsterdam as a model to clean up the post coronavirus economic mess.

You can read that story by clicking on the link below.

Portal Economics

We’re a team of science communicators based in Australia. We curate stories of human progress, and help people understand what’s happening on the frontiers of science and technology. More than 37,000 people subscribe to the free version of our fortnightly email newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The Bio-Political Straitjacket was originally published in Future Crunch on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.