Today
We’ll often see headlines quoting how many gigawatts of new solar farms or coal plants China is building. But it’s hard to get a meaningful sense of scale for how electricity generation in China is changing.
The chart puts it in perspective.
In 2025 alone, China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). This is compared here to the total amount of electricity that whole countries generate each year. Germany generates almost exactly that amount. That means China effectively added a Germany-sized grid to its electricity system in just one year.
What’s also quite staggering is that almost all of this new generation came from solar and wind. China generated 340 TWh more electricity from solar than the year before: that’s more than our home countries, the UK and Spain, generate from all sources each year.
Low-carbon sources grew so much that coal power in China actually fell slightly.
May 14
Japan closed down most of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011, and nuclear production dropped dramatically.
You can see this in the chart above, which shows Japan's electricity mix since 1985. It’s based on data from the Energy Institute.
Fossil fuel plants — notably coal and gas — were ramped up to keep the lights on. The first nuclear reactors only came back online in 2015, under stricter rules from a new safety regulator created after the disaster.
As of early 2026, 15 reactors are running — out of 54 before Fukushima — and nuclear's share of electricity is still only around a third of its pre-2011 level.
May 12
Crop yields across Africa have lagged far behind the rest of the world — the regional average is around 2.5 times lower than the global average.
But some countries in the region show that yields can grow much faster. Ghana is one example. In the chart, you can see its cereal yields compared to the average for Africa as a whole.
Several government programs contributed to this growth.
In 2008, the Ghanaian government launched a fertilizer subsidy program; it had some impact on yields but was relatively modest.
The largest shift came from the introduction of the Planting for Food and Jobs program in 2017, which dedicated large public funds to distributing improved seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs to farmers.
The data shown is based on nationally reported statistics, and some researchers question the exact size of the reported gains.
But the result that yields have gone up looks robust: independent modeled assessments estimate that maize and rice production are over 40% higher than they would have been without the program.
May 9
In the late 20th century, a handful of countries — led by Brazil and the United States — turned to liquid biofuels to reduce their dependence on foreign oil markets, producing transport fuels from cheap crops instead.
In the early 2000s, interest in biofuels ramped up sharply, and not just in the Americas. They came to be seen as a leading method to decarbonize road transport. This was because today’s alternative to the combustion engine, the electric car, was still far too expensive.
Over the last two decades, global liquid biofuel production has grown sevenfold, as the chart shows.
Electric vehicles are now far cheaper and, in some places, cost-competitive with petrol cars, so biofuels are no longer seen as the central answer to low-carbon transport.
Yet, the world produces more of them than ever, and this is expected to grow over the coming decade, largely due to fuel standards and national policies that have promoted them.
May 7
Around 1.3 million people die from road injuries across the world every year. That includes the deaths of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians.
That’s around 2.4% of deaths from all causes.
As the chart shows, this death toll has been similar for decades, in the range of 1.25 to 1.35 million deaths each year.
However, with a larger global population and many more cars on the road, this means the death rate from road injuries — the number of deaths per 100,000 people — has fallen.
May 5
Solar and wind energy have grown quickly in recent years, but global electricity demand has grown faster. So while their share of electricity generation kept rising, it wasn't enough to push fossil fuels into absolute decline.
But in 2025, that changed. According to Ember's Global Electricity Review, low-carbon electricity sources grew faster than demand, pushing some fossil fuels out of the mix.
Global electricity generation increased by around 850 terawatt-hours (TWh) from 2024 to 2025. As you can see in the chart, solar and wind accounted for nearly all of this growth. While the world still burned slightly more gas, this was more than offset by a decline in coal and oil.
To reduce carbon emissions, fossil fuel use needs to keep falling in absolute terms — not just in the power sector but also in other energy and industrial sectors.
May 2
In 2018, my colleague Max Roser wrote an article titled “The Internet’s history has just begun”. His point was that while the Internet had already changed the world, large changes lay ahead because billions of people weren’t using it yet.
In this chart, I revisit that observation using more recent data from India, the world’s most populous country.
When Max wrote his article, roughly one in five people in India were online. The chart shows that since then, adoption has grown much faster than in the decades before. Today, more than 70% of India’s population is online — close to the global average.
When you look at related trends in the adoption of communication technologies, you see that much of the sudden acceleration in growth after 2018 was driven by mobile phones.
Mobile phone subscriptions in India took off in the early 2000s and had already reached 75 per 100 people by 2015. Internet access accelerated through its mobile networks, which were made affordable by new technologies and market competition — including a major market disruption, which started in 2016 when a new low-cost entrant drove down prices.
