Investing in the ecosystems that sustain us ⊗ The (Sino-)future is now ⊗ Actually existing solarpunk

Investing in the ecosystems that sustain us

The future is clouded with risk, whether from the uncertain blessings of AI or the certain curses of climate change.

I’m always disappointed when we only seem to be able to value nature by assigning dollar amounts to it, largely so we can price its destruction. This piece is not that, and even addresses the cringy feeling I mention. The author argues that economic thinking must shift from treating nature as a passive resource to be protected, toward recognizing ecosystems as generators of economic value that merit investment. It critiques GDP for counting nature’s destruction as “wealth” and omitting essential, non-market contributions, drawing our attention to a complementary metric, the Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP), to make nature’s “infravalue” visible and actionable. Moving beyond an “environmentalism of fear” and mere neutrality (carbon, land, plastic), the author urges a shift toward nature positivity: actively managing ecosystems to create value via material substitutes (e.g., bamboo-for-plastics), non-material benefits (health and cultural value), and regulating services (cooling, flood control, purification, watershed stability that supports hydropower and grids).

China features as a leading testbed: cities like Shenzhen and Beijing use GEP to guide investment, protect nearly half of urban land as nature, and fund ecological infrastructure, with national guidelines issued in 2022. Pricing and integrating ecosystem services into public and private decisions, alongside familiar tools that price emissions, is framed as essential to development in the Anthropocene. The piece closes by contrasting the ready embrace of digital “immaterial” value (crypto, AI, attention markets) with reluctance to treat ecosystem services as economic; accepting that “the development of trees is integral to the development of people” would mark a needed transformation of economics.

Today, an increasingly mainstream environmentalism of fear is premised on the fragility of nature and seeks to guard against the inherent rapaciousness of people. But nature is not merely a fragile entity requiring protection; it is also a generative source of value that merits cultivation. As both exploiters and beneficiaries of nature, people should be incentivized to invest in the ecosystems that sustain them. […]

Most of nature’s economic contributions are like infrared radiation: Although felt by people, they lie outside the visible spectrum of existing metrics and markets. […]

Since achieving industrial modernity under the sign of GDP, China is now navigating toward sustainability with GEP as a compass. It is perhaps no coincidence that while GDP emerged in the U.S. at a time of economic and geopolitical crisis, GEP has emerged in a new superpower of the 21st century as it confronts the myriad challenges of the Anthropocene. […]

While appeals to material interests and calculations may seem disagreeable to many, appeals to sentiment, sanctity and nostalgia have their own limitations and even dangers. Becoming a structural feature of public and private decision-making requires compelling economic rationales, the pecuniary language of practical sense.

The (Sino-)future is now

In various ways, this on is kind of a messy piece at TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&), but lots of things I didn’t know about and had to look for (I linked a few below). The author is very pro-China but I’m saying this more for tone and to set expectations than to highlight mistakes or falsehoods, it’s just a stance I don’t read often (enough?).

The article presents China’s green development initiatives as evidence of a viable alternative to Western capitalism’s resistance to environmental transformation. China has achieved results once considered impossible—reforesting the Xishan Mountains, restoring Chongming Island and its surrounding wetlands—while leading in technologies from climate satellites to smart infrastructure. These advances come as China’s most economically vital regions, including Shandong, Shanghai-Jiangsu, and the Greater Bay Area, face extreme climate risks that demand rapid adaptation.

The piece contrasts this trajectory with the escalating global crises ahead: 200 million climate refugees by 2050, 2.4 billion workers threatened by excessive heat, and 250,000 additional annual deaths from climate-related causes by mid-century. While acknowledging persistent challenges like misinformation and wealth inequality, the author frames “socialism with Chinese characteristics”^[1] as offering better prospects than a capitalism that continues to resist green innovation while consuming both the poor and itself. In his view, China’s economic restructuring and foreign policy approach, centered on Global South solidarity and multipolarity, represents a shift away from the unilateral global system that has produced these mounting threats.

^[1] The author, Josef Gregory Mahoney, is a senior research fellow with the Institute for the Development of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics at Southeast University in Nanjing. Take it as a well educated take from him, or preaching for his choir.

All of which begs the question: Are we truly in the moment of great change or are we stuck in time? […]

We can also point to the remarkable efforts to clean up Chaohu Lake and reestablish wetlands surrounding Anhui’s Hefei, which will provide that city with sufficient water resources and carbon traps to sustain the new “silicon valley” being developed there. […]

Some are already slaves to the matrix, so to speak, victims of misinformation and information cocoons, and not just a few given the way such phenomena are impacting mental health, markets and election outcomes in some countries. […]

As capitalism continues to eat the poor and itself, as it continues to resist in too many corners green innovation and green transformations, we might instead consider the brighter prospects of socialism with Chinese characteristics, where positive economic restructuring is accelerating, and where a new model of foreign policy is promoting solidarity with the Global South and a shared future for humanity, slowly transforming the unilateral, unipolar global system into a multilateral, multipolar reality.

Actually existing solarpunk

Small but powerful might be a good way to summarise this very short piece by James Bridle. Just ponder these quotes for a few minutes. General Energy Transition! (Also, have you read Deb’s How Infrastructure Works yet?)

In fact, this is already happening, as the FT reported last year. Once you factor in the savings on an electricity bill, it is already cheaper in the Netherlands and Germany to install solar PV panels as garden fencing, than to use wood. […]

“Actually existing AI” is a phrase I use a lot, to separate reality from hype. “Actually existing solarpunk” is one I might start using. Because I genuinely believe that a general energy transition is more possible than general artificial intelligence, and more exciting and more equitable.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• RADAR Agency, Future of Trust. “Trust is how hope lives between Trust has always been the invisible infrastructure. The glue that holds society together, the lubricant that makes commerce flow. The question now: what comes after? If post-trust is the refusal to believe, perhaps the next frontier is post-reality — when you can’t trust photos, videos, data, or even your own feed.”
• Eurasia Development Landscape 2040. “The Horizon Scanning report presents the results of a regional foresight process led by UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub (IRH), capturing emerging signals and trends that are shaping the future of development across the Europe and Central Asia region.”
• Imagining the UN’s next horizon, by the Department of the Possible. “This paper presents a vision for shifting how we work, lead, and collaborate across the UN system. It presents four shifts that we need.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Weibo’s new open source AI model VibeThinker-1.5B outperforms DeepSeek-R1 on $7,800 post-training budget. “Despite its compact size, VibeThinker-1.5B achieves benchmark-topping reasoning performance on math and code tasks, rivaling or surpassing models hundreds of times its size, even outperforming Chinese rival DeepSeek's famed R1 that went viral at the start of this year—a 671-billion parameter model—on formal reasoning benchmark.”
• AI requires a rethink of the apprenticeship model for knowledge professionals. “Future-ready professional firms are the ones that focus on new forms of mentoring and training. ‘A lot of the process with AI is not going to be happening in a big conference room where people can observe how others do it. It’s going to be happening on your personal computer, on your screen or on your phone. So there needs to be a different approach to conveying some of the basic skills on how people will need to work and be trained — and to train themselves to some extent.’”
• Chatbots are pushing sanctioned Russian propaganda. “ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Grok are serving users propaganda from Russian-backed media when asked about the invasion of Ukraine, new research finds.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Silos for Sunshine: we’ve mastered harvesting the sun, but storage is the gamechanger. “The shift to renewables represents an agricultural revolution for energy, moving from searching and extracting scarce fuels to harvesting abundant sunlight in place. Much as granaries and refrigeration transformed food markets, storage will turn electricity from perishable to persistent, unlocking a new era of energy abundance.”
• A housing complex designed to tackle loneliness wins Britain’s Best Building. “Britain’s best new building is more than just a senior living center. The Appleby Blue Almshouse, which won this year’s prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize, brings one of the UK’s oldest forms of social housing to the modern era by incorporating designs that tackle loneliness and social isolation among older adults.”
• China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for past 18 months. “China added 240GW of solar capacity in the first nine months of this year, and 61GW of wind, putting it on track for another renewable record in 2025. Last year, the country installed 333GW of solar power, more than the rest of the world combined.”

Asides

• The world’s lemurs are going extinct. This is the only way to save them. Nooooo!! “Madagascar is the only place on Earth where lemurs exist. There are more than 100 lemur species, and nearly all of them are at risk of extinction, including the sifaka. Their foe is deforestation; all lemurs depend on trees for food and shelter, and half or more of the country’s forests are now gone.”
• Ying Ang zeroes in on the fleshy underbellies of fungi in ‘Fruiting Bodies’. “Ying’s images glimpse a variety of common mushrooms from ground level. Her lens pokes through blades of grass to peer upwards at the spongy underbellies of the growths, capturing their unique textures and colors in impeccable detail.”
• ‘They're a very elusive species’: The 10-year effort to photograph the rare hyena stalking a diamond mining ghost town. Look at the first two pictures and tell me that doesn’t look like the evolutions of a Pokemon! “At night, the long-abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop is almost empty. The tourists who visit this early 20th-Century settlement near Namibia's Atlantic Coast for its sand-filled buildings have all gone back to their accommodation for the night. But there is still some movement in the deserted streets. Between the shadowy wrecked buildings and alleyways half submerged in sand, there is the skulking form of a lone brown hyena.”
• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Teaser Trailer (2026). “A ‘Man From the Future’ arrives at a diner in Los Angeles where he must recruit the precise combination of disgruntled patrons to join him on a one-night quest to save the world from the terminal threat of a rogue artificial intelligence”