The Progress Report: Clean Energy Is Crushing It

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Emma Varvaloucas: Hello, Progress Report denizens. It is me, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, as per usual. But unlike per usual, I do not have Zachary with me today. He may be back next week. He may not be back next week. Zachary doesn’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows, but the world will, will find out. But regardless, we’ll, we’ll have news coming at you right now that you don’t usually see in your news feeds or your podcast episodes or your newsletters, unless of course you are subscribed to the Progress Network’s newsletter, which if you’re not, you should be. It’s also called What Could Go Right?

So without further ado, let’s jump into, I’ve got my usual smorgasbord of random data indicators from around the world. So let’s talk a little bit about poverty. Countries all over the world publish their poverty indicators at different times of the year. And right now we’ve got an interesting grouping of Indonesia, Iraq, and Europe. So let’s, let’s start with Iraq. They have just launched in partnership with the United Nations, a multidimensional poverty report.

So lots of people have different ways to measure poverty. Multidimensional is the one that takes into a variety of factors. It’s kind of the most thorough way to measure poverty, and they have launched this multidimensional poverty tool for the first time. So one thing that we can say off the bat, off to the great start, they have found that there’s been a 50% reduction in the national indicator for multidimensional poverty since 2011. And if you want to know what their poverty level looks like, if you measure it more traditionally just by income, that’s also on the decline. That currently stands at 17.5% of the population. So a, a decently high poverty rate there in Iraq, but they are decreasing it slowly but surely it looks like, and as we know, the better data you have, the better you can do to continue slashing that down because you actually know where to focus.

So leaving Iraq, we have more good poverty news. Indonesia’s poverty rate has fallen to a 20 year low in March of 2025. So we’re a little bit behind on this because they just released this data in late July, but this is the poverty rate as of March 2025. It stood at just under 8.5%, which is the lowest level recorded in the past to decades, and that is just using per capita, per month measure. So this is not multidimensional poverty rates, how Indonesia prefers to measure poverty within its own borders. And last but not least, as we’re just talking about some poverty declines around the world, let’s talk about Europe, specifically child poverty.

Now, Europe is so advance that they, this particular report is not measuring poverty nor multidimensional poverty. They are so advanced that they actually risk the at risk of poverty rate. So these are kids that are not even technically in poverty, but they present to be at risk for it. So there has also been a pretty small decline across Europe as a whole. But if we’re looking country by country, out of the 27 countries that they measured, we have seen declines between 2010 and 2024 for 18 out of those 27 countries. Two of those countries saw no change, so let’s say 20 outta 27 countries were either no change or improved and seven went in the wrong direction.

We can give a nice big shout out to a few of these countries that have saw really massive decreases. One of them is Latvia, which saw an over 10% decrease in their at risk of poverty rate for children. Lithuania had a nearly 6% one, and I believe Poland. Yeah, Poland had nearly 9% decrease. So we can give a shout out to, we’ll do one more. We’ll give a shout out to Romania, which saw nearly 6% decrease.

And if you’re interested in the ones that increase, it’s not the ones that you would normally expect to be honest. It’s a lot of the more quote unquote. Put together, nations are advanced or rich or however you wanna look at it. We’re looking at Sweden, we’re looking at France, Luxembourg, and then a couple small other ones like Malta and Bulgaria. But like I said, 20 of those 27 countries either saw no change or decrease. So overall, positive news. Positive news across the board here for Iraq, Indonesia, and Europe.

Moving on, let’s talk a little bit about renewables. Another one of our favorite topics here. We have a pretty interesting study coming out about China, which claims to have found for the first time that clean energy inside of China is driving a decline in emissions.

So it’s not the first time that emissions in China have declined. They declined pretty precipitously during the lockdown, during the pandemic, but then rose again just as precipitously and reached a new record high, I think it was in 2023 or 2024. And since then, China is the world’s biggest emitter. So what they do matters more than anyone else on this earth when it comes to the climate.

Since then, their emissions have, it’s like a plateau, a little bit of a dip since then, which is a big deal because it’s the first time that that’s actually because renewables are displacing coal. So up until now, China has been both building renewables at a breakneck pace like wind and solar, but also building coal plants at a breakneck pace because they have so much electricity demand and new electricity demand that they’re.

They’re trying to meet, they’re trying to deal with their blackout issues that they’ve been having, particularly from 2020 to 2022. So they’ve just been built, you know, whatever the energy is, they’re like, let’s build it. Coal, wind, solar, we don’t care. We need to get electricity to our people. Now, for the first time, the clean energy is actually meeting all of that electricity demand.

So what’s gonna happen now is the big question. They could kind of go one of two ways. They could start shutting down coal plants essentially and going whole hog on renewables. But if there’s enough pressure from the coal industry inside of China to not do that, they could go the opposite direction, shut down some of the wind and solar to give the coal industry a little bit of breathing room, but overall, obviously it’s a big deal that renewables are displacing coal inside of China for the first time, and experts are saying that it just might make China a little bit more of a cooperative player on the global field, that they are actually able to meet electricity demand.

Because they don’t have that internal pressure now, right? Like now they’re a little bit freer to make decisions that are going to be good for the environment without having to sacrifice much for their people when it comes to electricity in particular. So I. Let’s see what happens. China has not delivered the targets and plans that they were supposed to deliver this year, so far their climate targets and plans. So we’re not exactly throwing them a bunch of flowers here and giving them their flowers and saying, oh, China, you’re so amazing. But still, there is a sign that some things are changing within China vis-a-vis clean energy. And it’s important, important trend to pay attention to.

Moving right along. We’re talking a little bit more about renewables. Ember has a report out that they’re saying that there’s first signs of evidence that solar pickup is really taking off or happening at scale in many countries in Africa. And this is from an analysis of solar panel imports from China. So it this. Most of the panels that they’re importing are from China, but still it’s limited data. It’s, it’s looking at it from a particular angle. The last 12 months they say they saw a big rise in their solar panel, imports rose about 60%. Solars exist in Africa for a long time, but there are only two countries that can measure their, I believe it’s solar capacity, not solar generation in gigawatts rather than megawatts. It’s, yeah, installed solar capacity. So there are only two countries inside of Africa that can measure their installed solar capacity in gigawatts rather than megawatts. And that’s South Africa and Egypt.

And now Ember is seeing that across Africa, they say in at least 20 countries, they’re installing mass amounts of solar panels, which if they install them, could really lead to a lot of significant amounts of electricity generated. They offer up Sierra Leone as an example. They say that they’ve imported, Sierra Leone has imported so many solar panels over the last 12 months that it could generate the electricity equivalent to 61% of their total. 2023 electricity generation.

So just to give you an idea of like how, how much they really are importing, they’re not quite reaching Pakistan levels. If you’ve listened to other progress reports in the past, Pakistan has gone through this absolutely insane solar boom in the last two years. So Africa is not quite copying or doing what pakistan is doing at that level yet, but it is the first time that we are seeing evidence that Africa is taking up solar panels in a big, big way.

So those are, well, I’ll give you one more. Let’s say, let’s do one more. I’ll leave off with a joke one so that we, we aren’t too serious today. A new study just came out in the US. You guys might remember that, I know we talked about this on the podcast that the US released it’s first over the counter birth control a couple of years ago, and a study has come out to look at who are the people using this over-the-counter birth control? Again, birth control that you can get without having to go and get a prescription from your doctor. About a quarter of them, actually, more than a quarter of them are people that weren’t using birth control previously. And the people that are using this over, over the counter birth control are more likely to live in rural areas. They’re more likely to be adolescents and they’re more likely to be uninsured.

So all those stats taken together paints a pretty clear picture of this birth control is reaching people that contraception was previously not reaching, which really seems like a success to me, I suppose not if you’re coming from a more traditionally conservative point of view, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna call it as I think that’s progress.

And last but not least, so we aren’t too, too serious today. I would like you to know that NASA has announced that they have discovered a new moon orbiting Uranus. That’s all I got for you. You can, you can take that and remember, say without whatever jokes that you wanna tell to your friends, to your family. There is, there is a new moon and it is orbiting Uranus and that’s all I have to say about that.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve got for you today. Thank you for bearing with me through all of those random poverty indicators. And so it’s always hard to make those super fascinating and sexy for people because it’s dry, but a lot of that stuff represents, you know, millions of people living substantially better lives than they used to. So, you know, we can try to keep those, those people in mind when we’re talking about all those dry numbers.

And that’s what I have for you this week and we’ll see, we’ll see what we have for you next week, whether it’s me or Zachary or our AI replacements or who knows? Maybe it will be somebody you’ll never heard from before. But thank you so much for listening. As for usual, we really appreciate you being here. We really appreciate you spending your time with us and hopefully. The news that we share on The Progress Network and on the progress report in particular is helping you to look at the world a little bit more evenly and giving you a little bit of hope in what is definitely trying times and dark times.

So thank you so much to the Podglomerate for producing. Thank you as always to Zachary, even though he’s not here with us today, but he’ll be back when he is able to be back. And again, if you have any thoughts, questions, concerns, existential crises, anything that you would like to communicate to us, you’re always welcome to write to us at hello@theprogressnetwork.org or if you have any good news that you’d like to share, it’s, that’s really the main point of that. But again, you know, we take all kinds of emails.

Thank you so much, and until next time.