After a year like 2025, it’s easy for anyone who inhales large quantities of online news to be downhearted.
This was a year that began with a terrifying salute from the world’s richest man. His government IT department, known as DOGE, swung a wrecking ball at the agency that oversees U.S. overseas aid; many experts say widespread disease and famine will be the result. There was already a famine in Gaza, ceasefire notwithstanding. Ukraine remains at war. Climate change is still a thing, 2025 was one of the hottest years on record, and the tech industry’s obsession with AI data centers is making it worse.
But in many cases, this wasn’t the full picture. Elon Musk, faced with multiple protests and a Tesla boycott, left his controversial government role in May to spend more time with his tech companies. DOGE died, unlamented. In December, the World Health Organization reported fragile gains in feeding Gaza that inched the region out of its famine. Ukraine remains undefeated while peace efforts continue. Renewable energy and conservation efforts had a banner year too. And attempts to rein in AI’s worst excesses scored notable wins in 2025.
All in all, there are plenty of reasons for us to be seriously concerned about the world that 2025 left us — but also plenty of reasons to not get depressed. Here are 25 stories that might help us welcome 2026 on more hopeful notes.
1. China’s carbon emissions dropped, for real.
This was the year China really started to clean up — and we’re not just talking about DeepSeek, a surprisingly powerful and energy-efficient AI model coming out of nowhere in January to show up its U.S. rivals.
“Electricity supply from new wind, solar and nuclear capacity was enough to cut coal-power output even as demand surged,” energy analyst Lauri Myllyvirta noted, in a study finding China’s carbon dioxide emissions dropped for the first time under growth conditions. (Previous CO2 drops happened during economic downturns and the COVID pandemic.)
China, currently the world’s largest emitter of CO2, also pledged to increase its wind and solar capacity another six times by 2035. The country is already responsible for 74 percent of all large-scale solar and wind power construction.
2. EV sales are surging everywhere.
You might have expected that the Tesla boycott, along with the Trump administration’s decision to kill a popular electric vehicle tax credit, to have a negative impact on sales of these more eco-friendly cars. But that’s not what happened.
In September, the number of EVs sold around the world broke through the 2 million-a-month mark for the first time ever, according to analysts at Rho Motion. That’s a 24 percent rise year on year, and a 20 percent increase month on month. EVs are hottest in Europe and China, and adoption is slowest in the U.S. But the biggest surprise is the “rest of the world” category, where EV sales are up a stunning 48 percent in 2025 so far.
3. Solar power is so much cheaper than coal …
This was the year that renewable energy produced more electricity than the world’s dirtiest energy, coal, for the first time, according to a report from the energy analysts at Ember. Coal simply no longer makes economic sense. For the price of a gigawatt of coal power, one 2025 analysis found, you can now get two gigawatts of solar power.
That’s bringing about a solar sea change in India, one of the last few coal powerhouses in the world. The subcontinent saw coal drop below 50 percent of all energy capacity in 2025 for the first time, and added more than 30 gigawatts of solar and wind energy (enough to power nearly 18 million homes). And that’s just the start — Indian renewable capacity is expected to increase by 50 gigawatts a year in 2026 and beyond.
4. … that countries are starting to give it away for free.
Another former coal powerhouse, Australia, notched up an impressive global first for solar power in 2025. Call it a green energy dividend: The country has so much capacity it will start offering three free hours of electricity per day to households regardless of whether they have solar panels or not. Renewables, in other words, are starting to achieve what nuclear power could not — becoming “too cheap to meter.”
SEE ALSO:
The orb-like Ocean-2 turns wave power into renewable energy
5. The energy storage industry is crushing it.
All that increased renewable capacity matters less if you can’t store it in large batteries for rainy (or wind-free) days. Luckily, grid storage is on a roll right now around the world — even in the U.S., where tax credits were phased out for renewables in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” but not for the batteries that are needed alongside them.
Storage companies had set an eye-popping target back in 2017: 35 gigawatts of batteries hooked up to the U.S. power grid by 2025. At the time, that represented an eightfold increase in capacity. In the end, they didn’t so much as reach the target as blast through it; the figure stood at 40 gigawatts and rising in the third quarter of 2025.
6. The world agreed to protect 30% of international waters.
The High Seas Treaty sounded pretty cool when the United Nations drew it up in 2023. It would be like a Paris Agreement for the oceans, a framework for making 30 percent of international waters — the areas beyond any country’s control — into “Marine Protected Areas” (MPAs) with limits on shipping, fishing, and other destructive human activities.
There was a catch: 60 countries’ legislatures would have to ratify the treaty first. Experts expected this process to take five years or longer. In fact, the 60th ratification came in September. The next step is to decide on the MPA locations, but some countries aren’t waiting: 2025 saw the creation of the world’s largest MPA so far.
7. Dozens of endangered species came back from the brink.
Congratulations to the green sea turtle, which is off the endangered species list as of 2025 thanks to a population rebound. It joins other conservation success stories such as the peregrine falcon, the American alligator, several species of rhino, the okapi, the Cape vulture, and the tiny kangaroo-like brush-tailed bettong.
Mashable Light Speed
8. The ozone hole continues to heal.
And if humanity required evidence that international treaties really can fix the planet, the incredible shrinking ozone hole was on hand to remind us. Scientists announced in December that the gap in the Earth’s protective radiation shield had been its smallest in six years. This continues a long-term trend where the annually variable hole is closing up — entirely the result of the Montreal Protocol.
9. The AI bubble didn’t burst — yet.
Three years after OpenAI first shook the world with ChatGPT, there seems to be a sudden and near-unanimous agreement that investors have sunk too much money into the industry; even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now says it’s a bubble. That’s why an unusual amount of eyes were on NVIDIA earnings in November; the chip maker had become a $4 trillion company on the back of special AI-friendly GPU chip sales, and its success is pretty much keeping the entire U.S. economy out of recession.
Luckily for anyone with a stock-based retirement plan, NVIDIA did well enough to avoid a 1929-style stock market meltdown. And in a “best of both worlds” result, NVIDIA stock has been on a gentle downward trend since those earnings, which suggests that the air might be leaking out of this particular tech bubble in much the same way it did with the dotcom bubble in 2000 and 2001: Slowly enough for a smooth landing.
10. AI companies ditched some of their most ill-advised ideas …
So long, Character.AI chatbots for teens. Farewell, weird AI-generated profiles on Meta. Don’t come back any time soon, ChatGPT-powered teddy bear.
11. … and crumbled when it came to creators.
In 2025, the scramble to feed AI models with the work of creatives without paying them led to one of the largest copyright payouts in history. Warned by a judge that it was faced with a much larger fine if it went to trial, Anthropic agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit from writers for a total of $1.5 billion — or $3,000 per book in an online archive that was used to build its Large Language Models without the writers’ consent.
Not only did that set a precedent for future lawsuits, “it proves AI companies can afford to compensate copyright owners,” noted the Copyright Alliance. Indeed, Anthropic raised another $13 billion at the same time as the settlement. Another case is in the works that may yet set a precedent for visual artists: Midjourney, which is valued at $10 billion and is also facing a massive copyright lawsuit from the world’s major visual entertainment companies.
SEE ALSO:
The Mashable 101: The creators shaping the internet in 2025
12. Some creators got Universal Basic Income for life.
AI may not in fact be coming for all our jobs, but it’s certainly coming for our artists — witness the terrifying rise in AI slop in 2025, fed on the hard work of artists who detest it. So it’s high time at least one country started paying its human artists simply to exist. That country is Ireland, which announced it would turn its Basic Income for Artists (BIA) pilot scheme into a permanent program, starting in 2026. The BIA pays 2,000 artists around $1,500 a month.
13. Kids are getting more protections from ill effects of tech.
Like it or not, there’s a growing body of evidence showing that social media and smartphones are risky for our children, especially status-sensitive teens. Social media in particular can lead to depression, while being chronically online in general can be isolating, so there are plenty of reasons to want to get your kids off their phones in 2026.
But 2025 was a year in which more companies and political leaders started to take the risk seriously. Roblox, hit with a wave of lawsuits over a game platform that has attracted half of all kids in the U.S., became the first to use facial recognition age checks that aim to prevent users under 13 from chatting outside game-based “experiences”; this will become mandatory in January. Meanwhile, Australia went whole hog, banning all social media accounts for kids under 16, and an increasing number of states in the U.S. are enacting bans on smartphones in schools.
14. We figured out how to regenerate heart cells …
Heart disease remains the planet’s biggest killer in 2025, but there’s plenty of promising research that could bring heart attack numbers down. Most crucially, we have figured out how to do something the body can’t — regenerate damaged muscle tissue in the heart. In November, Mayo Clinic researchers revealed they’d done that in the lab for the first time, using reprogrammed stem cells.
15. … and pioneered new ways to fight cancer.
What some experts are calling a “golden age of cancer treatment” continued in 2025, becoming more personalized and less invasive at its cutting edge. Top of the promising list: An mRNA cancer vaccine, developed at the University of Florida (despite U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to defund such research) that revs up the immune system’s ability to attack cancer cells.
Meanwhile, gene therapy treatment for aggressive leukemia has shown astonishing success, and we’re figuring out how to destroy some tumors using nothing but sound waves.
16. There are blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease now.
In the U.S., the FDA cleared the way for two powerful new diagnostic tools that can detect Alzheimer’s in elderly brains via a simple blood test. That means treatment can start earlier on one of the world’s biggest killers — one that has likely gone under-reported for years.
17. Surgeons can operate remotely around the world.
In June 2025, a surgeon named Dr. Vip Patel removed a patient’s prostate. Nothing unusual about that — except the fact that Patel was in Florida, and his patient was 7,000 miles away in Angola. The operation was the first transcontinental robotic telesurgery approved by the FDA.
The surgery was “a critical step toward delivering high-quality surgical care to remote, rural and underserved communities that have long lacked access,” Patel noted. “This is more than innovation — it’s a humanitarian leap forward.”
18. CRISPR saved a child’s life for the first time.
We’ve known for years that the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR has the potential to revolutionize medicine. But 2025 was when the rubber met the road — specifically at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where a six month-old with a rare genetic disorder received the first dose of his bespoke treatment, and is now thriving.
19. Eye implants let the elderly see again.
In a landmark study published this year, 38 people with age-related macular degeneration — the leading cause of blindness in the over-50s — had a chip inserted into their eyes. Combined with special glasses, the technology lets a majority of them see again — creating hope for an estimated 5 million people around the world.
20. Love still wins.
The U.S. Supreme Court may have made a series of questionable decisions in 2025, many of them via its creepily-named “shadow docket.” But its conservative majority also refused to revisit its decade-old decision that made same-sex marriage the law of the land. Meanwhile, Thailand became the first country in south east Asia to grant the same rights to its LGBTQ citizens — and celebrated with a mass wedding.
SEE ALSO:
9 LGBTQ creators discuss not backing down from Pride
21. The National Guard is going home.
The U.S. president’s ability to deploy the National Guard at will, a power that was much feared at the start of 2025, has been checked. On the last day of the year, the Trump administration finally stopped fighting a court order to return control of troops in Los Angeles to the governor of California. A week earlier, the Supreme Court ruled against a deployment in Chicago. Most of the troops in Portland are returning home.
They remain in Washington, D.C. for now, as the administration appeals legal orders from a judge there, and have just arrived on the streets of New Orleans — though they won’t be assisting any immigration crackdowns.
22. Millennials and Gen Z are changing the face of politics.
Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old incoming mayor of New York City, owes his victory to a wave of younger voters which helped drive turnout to its highest level in decades. But he wasn’t the only one. Political observers this year noted greater participation on both sides of the aisle from younger voters and younger candidates — a welcome change for a country that is about to have its second octogenarian president. Some are even talking of an alliance between Millennial and Gen Z voters.
23. There’s a surprising amount of policy agreement in America.
Mamdani and Trump’s Oval Office meeting may have produced the most heartening moment of 2025: Two bitter enemies, who’d previously called each other “communist” and “fascist” respectively, united on the key issue of affordability. There’s strong support across both red and blue states for reducing medical debt, leaving Obamacare subsidies in place, legalizing cannabis at the federal level, creating more affordable housing and improving public transit.
24. Bipartisanship still exists …
We won’t sugarcoat it: For anyone hoping that Congress would provide a check on that almost-octogenarian authoritarian, 2025 was a mostly terrible year. But legislators did have a few moments of bipartisan agreement — most notably on the release of the Epstein files, which Trump opposed until it was clear the bill would pass with veto-proof majorities.
25. … and a bipartisan majority wants to regulate AI.
Congress’s other big bipartisan effort this year? Removing a moratorium on state-level regulation of AI companies from that Big Beautiful Bill, which went down 99-1 in the Senate. Trump tried to enact the moratorium by executive order, but he’s on shaky legal ground doing so — and a coalition of Republican and Democratic state attorneys general strongly oppose it. Given the pressing need for more regulation and widespread public distrust of AI, 2026 may be the year humanity fights back.
