Hey everyone!

While the current news cycle can be pretty overwhelming, we've collected three news stories that I think you'll genuinely appreciate.

One is about a smaller but very biodiverse country doing something great for its animals. Another is a solar energy milestone on a massive scale. And the third is a reminder that some partnerships are built to last.

Grab your coffee and read on!

When we think about threats to wildlife, poaching and deforestation usually get the attention. Roads rarely make that list, but maybe they should. Every year, millions of animals are struck by vehicles while trying to move between habitats that roads have sliced apart. For sloths, monkeys, and tapirs, that stretch of asphalt can be the difference between finding food and mates, or not.

Costa Rica has just made it a legal requirement to fix that. Under a new law, any new road construction or major upgrade now has to include wildlife crossings built into the plan. What that looks like depends on the animal: rope bridges strung above the road for monkeys and sloths, tunnels underneath for animals that stay on the ground. The technology already existed. What was missing was the requirement to actually use it.

The stakes are especially high here. Costa Rica holds around 6% of the world's known species in a country smaller than West Virginia, home to jaguars, tapirs, four species of sea turtle, and more bird species than all of North America combined.

It's also the same country that took its forest cover from about 20% in the 1980s to more than half today. This law fits right into that track record.

And the approach isn't a guess. The Netherlands and Canada have used wildlife crossings for years, and the data from both shows a real drop in roadkill along with animals reclaiming corridors they'd lost. Costa Rica is simply putting that evidence into law.

I love seeing a country treat roads and nature as part of the same plan instead of two things fighting each other.

If you'd told an energy analyst in 2010 that China would, within fifteen years, have more installed solar capacity than coal capacity, most of them would have found that very hard to believe.

Coal is embedded in China's industrial history in a way that is hard to overstate. It powered the manufacturing boom that lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The idea that solar would overtake it in installed capacity seemed a very long way off.

But, for the first time ever, solar has overtaken coal in installed capacity. When the country's National Energy Administration confirmed that, it was a genuine landmark. As of the end of July, solar power capacity reached 1,286 gigawatts, just ahead of coal's 1,285 gigawatts. 

Now, to be honest, installed capacity measures how much electricity a source could produce at full output, not how much it actually generates. The sun doesn't shine all day, so coal still produces more of China's real, day to day electricity than solar does. But this threshold still matters enormously, because it shows exactly where the money and the infrastructure have been heading, and that trend is not slowing down.

And the pace behind it is hard to overstate. In 2023 alone, China added more new solar capacity than the entire United States had built in its whole history. China also makes the vast majority of the world's solar panels, and that scale has helped drive the cost of solar electricity down by more than 90 percent over the past decade. That price drop doesn't just help China. It's made solar the cheapest way to build new electricity almost anywhere in the world.

It's worth pausing when two major democratic partners deliberately choose to move closer together, especially in a week when that choice actually happened in front of a standing ovation.

On September 16, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used her annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg to invite Canada to become the EU's first ever "associate member." Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was seated in the chamber as she said it, and when the applause came, he stood, walked over, and embraced her. "We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world," von der Leyen told him.

To be clear about what this actually means: associate membership does not exist yet as a formal EU status. Von der Leyen is opening the door to build one, not handing Canada a finished deal. Carney himself has said he's after a "unique alliance," not full membership in the bloc, and Canada's own incoming ambassador to the EU said afterward that "we're not there" yet. So treat this as a serious opening move, not a signed agreement.

What makes it land is the foundation already underneath it. Canada and the EU already have a real trade relationship. CETA came into effect in 2017 and wiped out tariffs on most goods moving between them. This new proposal builds directly on that, with talk of extending cooperation into technology, critical raw materials, energy, and defense.

The timing says a lot too. This comes in the middle of a trade conflict between Canada and the United States, with tariffs as high as 50 percent hitting Canadian exports. Rather than turning inward, the EU and Canada chose to lean toward each other instead.

We read your feedback that you sent for this newsletter (thank you!) and some of you also asked us to include the sources. So here they are:

Alright, that's it for today.

I hope this edition gave you a few reasons to feel good about the week ahead.  Thanks so much for reading, Luis & Freddy🌻

Feel free to share some feedback!