Climate Good News
Around the world people are taking the initiative to mitigate climate change.
Here are some good news briefs compiled and summarized by Jayne Freudenberger, climate committee chair, League of Women Voters of Bellingham-Whatcom County.
A Simple Dietary Option Delivers Meaningful Emissions Reductions
Here is another good reason to work on salmon recovery. A simple food trade-off in our diets can have an outside effect on climate change. Researchers in the UK have just released a study, proving that swapping a beef steak for salmon once a week could cut each human’s emissions by 7.3 kilograms of CO2 per week, saving fuel.
Played out to 2050, this would bring down each person’s emissions from 26.38 kg CO2 to 19.07 kg CO2 each week, tallying up to a 28 percent long-term reduction in food-related carbon emissions by 2050.
Comparing the salmon for beef scenario was one of four different strategies studied by the scientists. The other measures were business-as-usual, meaning the country would continue on its current dietary trajectory; a measure to reduce the UK’s overconsumption of protein, another to align national diets with the UK National Health Services’s (NHS) recommended ‘Eat Well’ diet; and a final one to transform the country’s consumption patterns in line with the globally recommended, plantforward EAT Lancet Planetary Diet. Each study was a projected timeline out to 2050.
Unexpectedly, switching one meal a week from beef to fish and the ease of this solution certainly has its advantages. Even better, if countrywide, meat and dairy consumption were cut by a third to handle the lesser amount of protein that doctors recommend, personal CO2 emissions would go down by over 10 kilos per person per week, resulting in a long-term reduction of 39 percent. Vegetarian diets would have even better results, but the simple beef for salmon one night per week has a larger chance of success.
Fish like salmon are already a familiar option in the UK, but the country consumes less oily fish than health professionals recommend, so there’s already a national incentive to get more fish onto the British plate. Sounds familiar to their cousins across the pond, too. But be aware, farmed fish does not have the same nutrients; eat that meal from wild salmon stocks for the best results.
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Baverstock et al. “Adapting the source of protein in diets to reduce carbon emissions: a UK case study exploring aquaculture.” Environmental Research Food Systems. 2026: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2976-601X/ae6709
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France and Denmark Ban PFAS
France became the second EU country behind Denmark to take independent action against perand polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), passing a bill to ban the manufacture, import, and sale of the toxic “forever chemicals” in cosmetics, clothing, footwear, and ski wax. It went into effect in 2026.
The bill also introduces PFAS monitoring in drinking water and imposes a new €100 fee per 100 g of PFAS released into the environment. While the bill is not comprehensive — kitchenware was excluded due to industry pushback — it is a positive step forward.
PFAS are known to persist in the environment for decades, accumulate in living organisms, and have been linked to a range of health risks including cancer and hormone disruption. France’s move signals growing momentum in Europe to phase out these hazardous substances before broader EU regulations take effect.
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Euronews.com: Getting rid of PFAS: Can Europe put an end to the “forever chemicals?” https://www.euronews.com
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Europe Far Exceeds Other Countries Combating Climate Change, but More To Be Done
Europe takes the top 15 places in the annual Environmental Performance Index published by Columbia University and released every two years. It ranks countries from around the globe on their commitment to sustainability.
The index focuses on 47 different indicators which are split into 12 categories, including climate change mitigation, air quality, forests, water resources, waste management and biodiversity.
Using data from major research institutions, international organizations, and other information collectors such as the World Resources Institute and the EU’s Copernicus, each country is scored from zero to 100.
Estonia ranks number one with a score of 75, closely followed by Luxembourg (74) and the United Kingdom (72). Europe owes this success to strict laws and rapid greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. Greenhouse gases are invisible gases in the air (like carbon dioxide) that trap heat from the sun and make the earth warmer.
Estonia has lowered its reliance on electricity generation from domestic oil shale, an energy-rich sedimentary rock. While oil shale remains the main energy source in the country, a boom in renewables is helping Estonia wean off fossil fuels — primarily through the power of solar.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Estonia is aiming to accelerate its clean energy transition with a target to cover 100 per cent of annual electricity with renewables by 2030. It’s part of the country’s wider target to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
Estonia also won out thanks to efforts to bolster biodiversity and ecosystem protection. More than 50 per cent of its land mass is covered by forests and protected wetlands — making it home to more than 300 bird species.
While Europe performs well, experts warn it is not doing enough to fix farming pollution. Farm pollution comes from things like animal waste and chemical sprays that wash into rivers and harm nature. Furthermore, European countries will struggle to maintain their pace without adopting more aggressive goals.
Other parts of the world lag far behind. In fact, 7 of the top 20 G-20 nations — a group of the world’s biggest economies — received a “very low” rating for their climate efforts. The U.S. ranked 27th mainly because of its climate impact.
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Euronews.com: “Europe takes the top 15 spots” by Liam Gillivern, 12/07/2026: https://www.euronews.com/2026/07/10/sweeping-victory-for-europe-as-15-nations-top-climate-scoreboard-seethe-full-list
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Optimism About the Future From Our favorite Climate Guru
Bill McKibben holds out the possibility of a bit of optimism — the advances in green technology make a new climate politics possible — one that doesn’t just talk about sacrifice and disaster prevention, but presents decarbonization and green energy as a way station on the path to somewhere better.
Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better — not less and worse — was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now, we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.
McKibben says, “The stuff that we spent my whole lifetime calling alternative energy from the sun and the wind is now the obvious, common sense, straightforward way to produce power. Sometime earlier this decade, we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire. It is then ‘the Costco’ of energy.”
The most optimistic of the major modelers is Mark Jacobs — the one whose predictions have come by far the closest to reality over the last two decades. He’s very clear. He’s modeled the data for, I think, now 150 countries, showing how you can provide all the power you need from sun, wind and water.
All of a sudden, there really is an abundance of energy. So, we’re not short of energy, but we are short of time. If we’re going to make any real difference in the single most critical issue that humans face — which is the rapid heating of the Earth — then we have to do this very fast, faster than economic forces and things by themselves would produce.
We used to have this whole set of things we called hard-to-abate sectors — things like steel making. In the last couple of years, people have started figuring out how to do this with electricity.
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The New York Times: “The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate” — Ezra Klein Talks to Bill McKibben, July 10, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-billmckibben.html
