It was the best of times it was the blursed of times. Some solutions are more advanced then I ever would have expected them to be by 2026, but our political and information landscape is like a grotesque parody of the worst-case scenarios I might have imagined in 2018 or 2019.
In the good column, the adoption and affordability of EVs in China has happened so quickly – surpassing sales of gas cars by the end of 2024 — and these cheap EVs are also displacing North American gas cars throughout Asia and South America. The price of solar and battery farms has continued to plummet to the point that governments have to intervene to protect fossil-fuel power generation from competition by cancelling projects and refusing permits. We see cheap, local solar taking off in developing countries with unreliable electrical grids. Countries like Pakistan and Nigeria have been installing solar power at all scales, including huge amounts of local and off-grid generation. It looks like many developing countries will virtually skip the fossil fuel era and go straight to green technologies as they develop.
As soon as we get the political will, the technology needed to support an extremely rapid and affordable decarbonisation now exists.
But on the political front things look truly bleak. Inflation and income inequality has created a global cost of living crisis which has displaced climate as a key challenge – even though much of the inflation in areas like insurance and food is driven by climate change. The pandemic lingers. Racism and xenophobia are surging. Our information ecosystem is more and more distorted by AI, propaganda and concentrated ownership. Twitter – once the main source of reliable journalism and up to the minute academic news – is now little more than a shrine to Elon Musk’s twisted carnival of grievances.
Tiktok, the main source of political news for many young people, was recently taken over in the United States, by Oracle, a software giant owned by Conservative Larry Ellison. CBS News was bought out by Larry Ellison’s son and has been rapidly overhauled to support Donald Trump’s distorted worldview.
It feels as though AI is crowding every corner of the internet with incoherent and unreliable nightmare fuel while journalists are being fired in droves at the Washington Post and throughout the industry.
With all these crises, very few people are in a position stable enough to much care what the world is like twenty or thirty years.
Community and Daily Needs
In this landscape, we think the best way to do climate action is to combine it with other work. Environmentalism that happens alongside efforts to build community, combat racism, clean-up the information ecosystem or simply provide food and shelter are how we will rebuild the trust and stability needed to tackle ambitious political projects like decarbonisation.
Indeed, in many situations the environmental answer IS the more affordable answer and the one that builds community and helps people connect and converse face to face. An excellent example is repair cafes and clothing swaps where people gather in person to save money by reusing and repairing instead of ordering fast fashion or flimsy, but trendy, electronics online.
These are the types of projects we were profiling in our podcast Future Mending Radio. In 2025, we had episodes about:
- The biggest clothing swap in Toronto
- Free Geek Electronics Repair
- An environmental org in Scarborough with a focus on daily needs
- Solarpunk Fiction
- The Chocosol Chocolate Company
- Bike Party
And now Future Mending Radio is back for another season after a longer than expected hiatus.
Climate Pledge Collective 