The Weekly Anthropocene

January 29, 2026 was my last full day in China. My flight out from Shenzhen took off just before 2 AM on the 30th local time, just within the 240-hour visa-free travel period. I spent most of that day just writing from a cafe in Shenzhen. My batteries are running a bit low after ten straight days of researching and reporting an article a day! I’m glad I wrote some regular Daily Dose posts in advance before leaving for China; they’ll set to publish next week.

I did pay a quick visit to the flagship store of DJI, a Shenzhen-based company that’s perhaps the world’s leading drone-maker. They were showcasing several giant agricultural drone models used for precision application of fertilizer or pesticides to reduce wastage and runoff, a rapidly disseminating agricultural innovation that can increase productivity while reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Here are some recent incredible climate and energy news items from China, just from the period of my journey.

The end-of-year Chinese grid numbers for 2025 are, as has become usual lately, ridiculously record-breakingly huge. The amount of new electricity-generating capacity from all sources China has built since 2021 alone (over 1,500 GW) is now larger than all electricity-generating capacity in the United States of America. The amount of new electricity-generating capacity China built in 2025 alone (over 540 GW) is 12% larger than all capacity in India.

For context, America has the world’s second-largest national grid after China, and India has the third largest. China is building large-nation-sized amounts of new power supply every year, and most of it is solar, wind, and batteries. China’s solar capacity alone is now past 1,200 GW, catching up towards the total U.S. grid figure. China built 315 GW of new solar power and 119 GW of new wind power in 2025, again breaking their own record. Coal plant utilization rates keep dropping. Non-fossil sources (renewables, hydro, and nuclear) now account for over 60% of Chinese electricity-generating capacity (not quite the same as generation). This is all happening so freaking fast and at such a gargantuan scale.

Analysts, myself included, are running out of ways to describe China’s clean energy build-out. It’s completely unprecedented in the history of the world. The Bloomberg article with the above chart includes the phrases “power supernova,” “super robust numbers going from record to record,” and “It’s becoming quite ridiculous.”

And there’s just more and more new cool stuff being built. Clean energy keeps scaling up and diversifying in incredibly fascinating ways. A megawatt-scale floating wind turbine (a blimp with an integrated turbine that generates power!) was just successfully tested in Sichuan. The S2000 Stratosphere Airborne Wind Energy System (SAWES) is the world’s first grid-connected power-generating airship. Its 2,000-meter altitude allows it to access stronger and more consistent winds then transmit power down to the ground through cables. That’s yet another brand-new electrotech invention coming out of China, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it scales up quickly.

There’s also more and more incredible news on the ecological restoration front. From 1978 to 2024, China’s government planted billions of trees and shrubs in a 3,000-kilometer greenbelt encircling the Taklamakan Desert. The desert has shrunk substantially in recent years as plant life took root and spread, and a new study has analyzed satellite data to find unexpectedly high carbon sequestration in the newly created landscapes, described as “shrublands like Southern California’s chaparral.”

Meanwhile, major climate and energy related news items from the U.S. recently have included pointless withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and many UN agencies, probably-illegal federal rugpulling of billions of dollars in loans meant to support American entrepreneurs building domestic clean energy supply chains (as manufacturing spending keeps declining), closing major climate laboratories, probably-illegal stop-work orders against nearly-complete offshore wind farms, forcibly keeping money-losing coal plants open, and a massive 22 GW of renewables projects “blockaded” by deliberate Interior Department permitting snarls. National sabotage to an extent that’s truly painful even to read about, an entirely self-inflicted electricity shortage being paid for by every American household.

Not to mention, you know, “the fascist scum in the White House sent their lawless paramilitary thugs to do state-sponsored executions, then lied about it.” Or the zillion other horror stories of crime, corruption, cruelty, and cowardice from this regime.

Honestly, it’s been a real mind-screw to be in China and writing about Chinese accomplishments while there are such horrible things going on in my birth country, the United States of America. At this point, how the hell do I write a newsletter about humanity's efforts to combat climate change without it sounding like pro-China propaganda?

Which, to be clear, I really don’t want to do! I am well aware that the Chinese government does horrible evil stuff too. Heck, there were entire majority-minority Chinese provinces I wasn’t allowed to go to alone as a foreigner, places like Tibet and Xinjiang. A big part of the reason the current U.S. horrors are so well-known is that there are still amazing cultural, legal, and individual defenders of democracy fighting to protect freedom in America. If there were Minnesota-style freedom-defending civil society activists and local government officials in Xinjiang, we’d have a lot more reporting on and resistance against the atrocities being committed at Uighur internment camps, but any such efforts have been crushed by the fully entrenched Chinese autocratic system.

But it really sucks that you can now plausibly make comparisons about governments attacking minorities at scale in Minnesota and Xinjiang! That trying to argue for the U.S. over China is now a question of comparing the nature of each side’s specific territorial threats against neighbors, ideological purges of government officials, or heinous mass internment camps based on ethnicity! As long as this “neo-royalist” monster is in the White House, China/U.S. rivalry increasingly looks less like a contrast between autocracy and democracy and more like a contrast between functional autocracy and dysfunctional autocracy. It’s a deeply painful moment.

And yet, humanity still progresses. We forget how bad the past was, and underrate how many extraordinary positive changes continue to take place in the world.

Humanity is still producing record-high crop yields despite climate disruption.

Newly invented malaria vaccines are rolling out across Africa, saving tens of thousands of children. A biomedical revolution is giving sight to the blind and creating custom cures for genetic diseases.

We’re seeing record-low deaths from natural disasters even as the storms get supercharged, thanks to widespread weather forecasting and early warning alerts.

A surge of cheap solar and EVs, mostly made in China, is helping entire continents “leapfrog” over the smoggy decades of fossil-fuel dominance straight to a solarpunk future.

Record extinctions of wildlife appear to have peaked and begun declining.

A new international treaty will allow marine protected areas on the high seas.

Estimated emissions and warming trajectories to 2100 have declined sharply as renewables have outgrown almost anyone’s expectations.

In the arc of human history, nation-level spirals into political insanity are, sadly, far from unprecedented. Sometimes big important countries end up with a cruel maniac in charge and spend years or decades withdrawing from world affairs and scientific leadership as they enter a spiral of human rights abuses and self-harming policies. The rest of the world just keeps creating new advances ready to deploy, as the good people of that self-harming nation struggle on to lead the way back to sanity.

Chinese history is perhaps a perfect example of this. The vile Mao Zedong’s rule of China produced multiple world-historically atrocious mass death events within a decade. What a nightmare it must have been to live through the Great Chinese Famine in the late 1950s and then the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s! Destruction far worse than anything happening in the U.S. right now. And now, mere decades later, China has become a leading scientific, technological, and ecological powerhouse.

India's “Emergency” in the 1970s is another example. Hopefully it’s more relevant to the United States, as it involved an elected leader suspending constitutional rights to rule as an autocrat (including mass forcible sterilizations) but then after just a few years losing an election to an opposition party that restored constitutional rule.

If Donald Trump was Dictator of Earth and was doing all the evil fascist shit he's doing, I’d be seriously terrified that all of humanity was entering a Dark Age. That we might experience worst-case-scenario catastrophic climate change and/or eventually lose the entire knowledge-seeking philosophical structure of the Scientific Revolution, succumbing to a postmodern medievalist “demon-haunted world” of cults and conspiracies and chaos and cruelty.

But he’s not all-powerful, at home or abroad. Heroic Americans keep fighting for their liberty and their constitutional rights, and the rest of the world just keeps doing smart things like “clean energy” and “vaccines” and “free trade” despite bloviating idiots in the White House yelling at them to stop.

Solar still keeps growing in the U.S. despite all the attacks, just slower than in other countries. At this point, the sheer energy economics mean that the world will decarbonize, and America will catch up sooner or later. And more and more people keep mobilizing to fight for freedom and against fascism, and I’ll try to support that with my writing. I’m extremely confident that the world will continue to get better. A lot of the most important big-picture civilization systems on the planet, especially in energy, are finally trending in the right direction. That’s bigger than any one country.

One could almost think of “leadership in scientific and technological progress that benefits all of humanity” as a baton that's passed between nations. Or perhaps more accurately, a flaming torch, that can light many others without losing its own flame and then, if it goes out, be relit by the other torches it sparked in the past. It is immensely good for humanity that there’s so much incredible innovation coming out of China today, in fields from battery chemistry to coastal wetland management. I’ve been closely following climate and renewable energy news since I was a small child, and I can honestly say that today, thanks to the progress humanity is making, I’m less worried about catastrophic climate change than I’ve ever been. And as an American, I profoundly hope that China’s remarkable reinvention of itself can serve as a reminder and an example of how great nations can overcome self-inflicted horrors and become inspiring leaders once again.