What Could Go Right? 3 Transformative Trends You Won’t See in the News

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3 Transformative Trends You Won’t See in the News

1. The Electrotech Age Has Begun

The energy think tank Ember, in a new deck that’s more than 100 slides long, has proposed a fresh way to look at the green energy transition: 

Humanity has already progressed through a series of technology shifts, the deck says, from the First Industrial Revolution all the way through information technologies. The latest shift is the “electrotech revolution,” in which a combination of renewable energy, electrification, and AI will unlock energy abundance at a scale we’ve never seen before.

Unlike fossil fuels, electrotech becomes cheaper as it scales. It’s more efficient—burning fossil fuels wastes a lot of energy—and gives us access to 100x more energy, via the sun. Plus, it’s a national security boon. Once electrotech has been purchased, it can be used for decades, liberating fossil-fuel importing countries from a system of constantly fluctuating prices—and potentially aggressive petrostates.

Who is the world’s first electrostate? China. Its massive electrotech production has already allowed emerging markets to leapfrog the Global North in terms of electrification. 

There’s a lot more to this deck than I can fit, but you can take a look at its executive summary (or the full thing) here.

2. The World’s Poor Have Become Richer, and Child Poverty Is Bending Downward

In June 2025, the World Bank updated their extreme poverty data, resetting the international poverty line from living on $2.15 per day to $3.00 per day. That had the effect of adding 125 million people onto the estimated number of those living in extreme poverty.

It’s not the setback that it seems, however, because the world’s poorest have actually become richer: As Our World in Data explains in detail, the new poverty line adjusts higher than what can be accounted for by inflation, and is also the result of individual countries raising their own poverty lines as incomes increase within their borders. The world’s poorest, according to the new data, can actually buy and consume more (16% more, to be exact) than in the past. The $3.00 international poverty line thus sets a more ambitious standard for what we should consider extreme poverty.

Whether measured by the old poverty line or the new, the defining contours of global extreme poverty are the same. It’s increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, where populations continue to grow in fragile or conflict-ridden economies. Progress there has stalled out. 

Half of the global population living on less than $3.00 per day are children. During the Covid-19 pandemic, child poverty numbers were extremely concerning, rising for the first time since they started to be accurately measured. But they’ve recovered since then; nearly 100 million children have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the past decade:

The current number represents about 19% of the world’s children.

3. Mobile Money Accounts Are Growing like Crazy

Mobile phones and the Internet have massively boosted the proportion of the global population that has a financial account, from just over half in 2011 to 79% today, according to the latest installment of the Global Findex Database. Financial accounts are both a symbol of financial health—people don’t tend to get them unless they have enough money to maintain them—and a pathway to it, enabling easy transfers and purchases and formal saving, with interest. Four out of 10 people in low- and middle-income countries now formally save, up from 24% in 2021.

Much of the growth in financial account ownership is being driven by mobile money accounts. The brainchild of telecommunications companies in East Africa, these accounts allow someone to send or receive money via text, often outside of the traditional banking system. Increasing chunks of the developing world use them to get paid, receive government benefits, and loan or borrow cash from friends and family: 40% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa, and nearly the same in Latin America and the Caribbean, have a mobile money account.

We’re used to blaming our phones for so many ills that sometimes we take what they have enabled for granted. “Many of today’s common financial behaviors barely existed in 2011,” the report points out. Their increasing access shouldn’t be taken for granted, either.

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What Could Go Right? S7 E29: Turning Science Fiction Into Reality with Ed Finn

Can today’s science fiction become tomorrow’s guidebook for change? Zachary and Emma sit down with Ed Finn, the visionary behind the Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU and academic director of Future Tense. Ed explores the intersection between sci-fi and real world science, the complexities of new technologies like AI and gene editing, and why our imaginations can be the launchpad for tomorrow’s innovations and building the future we dream about. | Listen now

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By the Numbers

80M: Increase in the number of children supported by national school meal programs since 2020, bringing the global total to at least 466 million.

73%: Share of adults worldwide who feel safe walking alone at night where they live, a record high.

62–70%: Australia’s new emissions reduction target for 2035. The country is on track to lower emissions 43% from 2005 levels by 2030.

1927: Last time the Chicago River was safe enough to swim in, until this year. It’s part of a global river-cleanup trend.

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Quick Hits

🌊 The world’s first treaty to protect the high seas will become legally binding in January 2026. The agreement will provide an international framework to preserve biodiversity, among other measures. (Related: Resources have been committed to developing the world’s first indigenous-led marine protected area.)

🌲 We’ve already passed peak agricultural land use. As farming has become more efficient and landless crops replace land-intensive ones, acreage previously used for agriculture is being freed up and reforested around the world. (Related: the world is on track for record harvests again this year.)

🚘 Cars with solar panels will become available in the US as early as next year, as companies in the cottage industry for sun-powered vehicles and add-on solar panels ship their first products.

🦟 Brazil is utilizing two new tools to turn the tide against dengue fever: a cheaper, more effective, and locally produced vaccine, as well as a biofactory that produces mosquito eggs infected with a bacterium that interrupts the virus’ transmission to humans.

⚖️ This week in tech regulation: Italy is the first EU country to pass a comprehensive AI regulation law; Sweden is the latest country to ban phones in schools; Brazil has passed a landmark law protecting children’s rights online; and OpenAI will introduce a version of ChatGPT with parental controls.

💡 Editor’s pick: Autocracies are weaker than they may seem.

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TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• The era of dark passions | NYT ($) | David Brooks
• Our allies are asking: Why does Putin still own Trump? | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman
• The journalist taking on Hezbollah from inside Lebanon | Middle East Uncovered | Faisal Saeed Al Mutar
• Bolsonaro’s conviction is a win for democracy and accountability | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat
• What the research really says about immigration politics | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
• US funding of international organizations has collapsed | CGD | Charles Kenny
• How Spinoza overcame 17th-century cancel culture | The Atlantic ($) | Arthur C. Brooks
• The real world is making a comeback | Flourishing Friday | Clay Routledge
• Violence entrepreneurs | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway
• Charlie Kirk, free speech, and American hysteria | The Edgy Optimist | Zachary Karabell
• Why we love Marx and hate environmentalists | The Ecomodernist | Ted Nordhaus
• Spencer Cox for president? | NonZero | Robert Wright
• The dangers of ‘consequence culture’ | NYT ($) | Suzanne Nossel
• What the government autism announcement got so wrong | NYT ($) | Maia Szalavitz