How was it for you? A bit grim? Many people will be eager to see the back this year, the year of US President Donald Trump, Twitter, terrorism, Yemen, Libya and the plight of the Rohingya, as well as environmental degradation and almost daily doomsday warnings about the multiplying threats to sustainable life on Earth.
However, the big, bold headlines tell only half the story — perhaps not even that much. Away from the hysteria of daily news, it is possible to discern progress, joy, breakthroughs and that rarest commodity of all: optimism.
ENERGY
Illustration: Tania Chou
From the north of England to South Australia, this year has proved to be the year that large-scale battery storage came of age, smashing cost and scale barriers and breaking into the public consciousness.
This is important, because storing energy is seen as a crucial complement to the renewable revolution sweeping the world.
Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc, known for its luxury electric cars, is increasingly making headlines for using batteries to tackle local energy problems around the world.
In post-hurricane Puerto Rico, the firm installed solar and batteries to help a hospital. Near Jamestown, South Australia, it completed the world’s biggest battery storage plant in response to a blackout that sparked a political row over renewables and energy security.
In the UK, big utility companies such as EDF Energy are building giant battery plants in Cumbria and Yorkshire to help the National Grid manage an increasing amount of renewable power.
Former E.ON chief executive Tony Cocker said: “If you’re a large power plant owner today and not looking at batteries, you’re almost negligent.”
He believes batteries now stand more chance of being built in the UK than new gas power stations.
The driving force for these batteries is the meteoric rise in renewable power, which they complement. Global “clean” energy investment this year is expected to narrowly beat last year’s US$287.5 billion.
Another big reason is that the cost of batteries, like those of renewables, is coming down fast.
“We’ve seen a halving of battery costs in the last five years. We’re expecting another halving again,” said Mark Futyan, merchant power director at the UK’s biggest energy company, Centrica.
Experts think this is just the beginning. As costs fall, the International Renewable Energy Agency predicts a 17-fold rise in the amount of battery storage installed worldwide, from 2 gigawatts today to 175 gigawatts by 2030.
SCIENCE
It was the year that alien life suddenly became a little more possible.
Firstly, a space probe detected water, salt, methane and other organic compounds beneath the frosty exterior of a small moon called Enceladus, which is orbiting Saturn.
Importantly, it also found molecular hydrogen, which microbes can use as an energy source.
The spacecraft, NASA’s Cassini, found so much that scientists concluded it must be made in an underground ocean, perhaps in hydrothermal reactions like those seen around hot vents that teem with life on Earth.
A NASA team wants to go back to Enceladus to collect any alien microbes that might find themselves caught up in plumes of vapor and summarily flung into space.
Further discoveries made this year a standout year for astronomers.
The European Southern Observatory and NASA’s Spitzer space telescope spotted the largest batch of Earth-sized planets 40 light years away around a star in the constellation of Aquarius. Three of the seven worlds are in the “Goldilocks zone,” where the temperature is thought to be neither too hot nor too cold for water to run freely, marking them out as potential homes for extraterrestrial life.
In the world of medicine, it was a “superficial” achievement that provided the biggest wow factor.
Faced with a young Syrian boy who had lost 80 percent of his skin to a devastating genetic disorder, doctors in Germany teamed up with Italian scientists to grow him a new skin. The team took cells from a patch of healthy skin and modified them to correct the faulty DNA that caused the disease. From these they grew sheets of the skin to patch the boy up.
Two years on, he is doing fine: He needs no medicine or ointments and is back at school. The treatment was sought as a last resort and remarkably transformed the boy’s life.
PHILANTHROPY
Last year, Manchester United’s Spain international Juan Mata gave an interview in which he made remarks that were unusual for a soccer player.
“Real life is the one my friends live,” he told the Spanish television program Salvados. “They’ve had to look for work, sign on to the dole and emigrate. That’s normal life now. My life as a footballer is not normal. With respect to the rest of society, we earn a ridiculous amount. I don’t enjoy the business side of football, I love the game. I’d take a pay cut if there was less business involvement in the sport.”
This year, that conversation crystalized into an idea.
In August, Mata announced he would each year donate 1 percent of his salary to a fund that would support soccer charities such as Juergen Griesbeck’s streetfootballworld. He then encouraged other professional soccer players to follow suit as part of an initiative he called Common Goal.
At the time of writing, Common Goal has 33 members. They include some of the biggest names in soccer, including the Italian international defender Giorgio Chiellini, Germany’s Mats Hummels and the Japanese playmaker Shinji Kagawa.
Charlie Daniels, Bruno and Alfie Mawson have signed up from the English Premier League, as has Duncan Watmore from the Championship. The greatest contingent of players are from the German Bundesliga.
There are also nine female professionals committed, one manager and — perhaps most significantly — Union of European Football Associations president Aleksander Ceferin.
Common Goal has not immediately been embraced by the wider soccer community, but the number of players who have taken the pledge continues to grow.
“This is an attempt to embed philanthropy at the core of what football is about,” Griesbeck said.
It is an idea worth shooting for.
ECONOMY
The global economy is arguably in its best shape for about a decade.
In its annual health check in October, the IMF said that the trade in goods around the world would grow more than 6 percent next year and generate GDP growth at a rate that matched this year’s 3.7 percent.
As so often in the past, the US economy is the engine for this expansion, but the first real burst of synchronized global expansion since the 2008 financial crash has also needed Europe, Japan and China to leap into action, and to a great extent they have.
The World Bank also counted sub-Saharan Africa among the regions to see a jump in growth, from 1.3 percent last year to 2.4 percent this year after a modest turnaround in recession-hit Nigeria and South Africa.
The only drag on the global average — because its growth rate has gone backward — was the UK, which was growing at about 3 percent in 2014 and must survive on half that this year.
However, the IMF, while welcoming the resurgence in growth, said the global economy’s recent recovery might not last.
WOMEN
While the endless stories of sexual misconduct that dominated the news cycle made for grim reading, some solace was found in the global #MeToo movement.
As allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein opened the floodgates for other accusations against men, personal stories began pouring in from women — and men — in all industries around the world.
The origins of #MeToo can be dated back to more than a decade ago, when Tarana Burke created the campaign as a grassroots movement to reach sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities.
However, the current movement began on social media after a call to action by the actor Alyssa Milano, one of Weinstein’s most vocal critics, who wrote: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”
In the space of days, millions of people used Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to disclose the harassment and abuse they faced in their own lives, and the story became a conversation about men’s behavior toward women and the imbalances of power at the top.
More than 68,000 people have replied to Milano’s tweet, and the #MeToo hashtag has been used more than a million times in the US, Europe, the Middle East and beyond.
Facebook said that within 24 hours, 4.7 million people around the world had engaged in the #MeToo conversation, with more than 12 million posts, comments and reactions.
“I don’t think we [should] underestimate how much of an impact is being made by the way in which women can just speak out about their experiences, because we’re just not represented in the news media, and films and literature,” said Caroline Criado-Perez, feminist campaigner and cofounder of The Women’s Room.
EUROPE
It was the year that was going to mark the beginning of the EU’s demise.
In January, the continent was reeling, seemingly on the ropes after the twin blows of the UK’s Brexit vote and Trump’s victory in the US. A wind of Euro-skeptic, anti-establishment change was set to blow across the continent.
The Dutch and French governments would inevitably fall like dominoes to the forces of Dutch Party for Freedom head Geert Wilders and French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, then riding high in the polls. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party would sweep triumphantly into the Bundestag.
With the populists in the ascendant, a beleaguered EU, shaken by the refugee crisis and a wave of bloody terror attacks, unable to shake off a stagnant economy and stubborn unemployment, would crumble.
The heavy defeats of Wilders’ and Le Pen’s parties in March and June respectively put an end to that narrative, helped by municipal election losses by Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in Italy.
The momentum swung the other way — in Europe, or at least western Europe, populism was in decline. Not only that, but Europe’s economy was emerging from its torpor, growing at its fastest rate for five years — and twice the rate of the UK’s.
Unemployment across the bloc fell below 10 percent for the first time since the start of the eurozone crisis. The public had stood up to terror. The refugee issue was still far from resolved, but was not the continent-consuming crisis it was in 2015.
With Britain’s Brexit turmoil instilling a new sense of unity and purpose in Europe’s leaders and French President Emmanuel Macron and his transformative pro-European agenda in charge, the EU was back.
Approval ratings for the bloc soared, as did hopes that Macron’s economic reforms at home would kick-start the stalled Franco-German engine that has historically powered the union and produce far-reaching reforms in the EU itself.
The setback for German Chancellor Angela Merkel provided a reality check. Germany is still struggling to put together a government. Nonetheless, Europe closes this year in far better health than it started.
ANIMALS
Like the proverbial glass, is the planet half empty or half full? This year it was reported that up to 50 percent of all individual animals had vanished in recent decades and scientists said that Earth’s sixth mass-extinction event was happening more rapidly than previously thought.
However, people have become more cognizant than ever of the species with whom we share our planet — as well as ones that do not.
A bad year for imaginary animals was a good year for real Asian black, Tibetan brown and Himalayan brown bears, all cited by scientists as the source of supposed sightings of Yeti in the Himalayas.
We learned that we are one of not seven, but eight surviving great apes, after the discovery of a new orangutan in Indonesia. The Tapanuli orangutan, Pongo tapanuliensis, has frizzier, more cinnamon-colored fur than Sumatran orangutans. The smaller-skulled Tapanuli males possess large mustaches, while the Tapanuli females sport beards.
A new species of gibbon discovered in the rainforests of southwest China was named after Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.
In a galaxy far, far below, the fragile-looking Mariana snailfish became a star of Blue Planet II. This year it was officially judged to be the deepest-living fish in the ocean, able to survive at depths of 8,000m.
More mundanely, a better regulation of fishing has helped North Sea cod stocks recover from near collapse. The fishery was awarded sustainable status by the Marine Stewardship Council.
Of the species that endure in the Anthropocene, many are being resurrected with dedicated conservation action. More than a century after its extinction from mainland Australia, the banded hare-wallaby has been brought back, with 60 individuals reintroduced from small islands to repopulate 7,800 hectares of mainland cleared of feral predators such as foxes and cats that caused its demise.
There is hope for the snow leopard, which was moved from endangered to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of most vulnerable species.
Another moving in the right direction is the Rodrigues flying fox from Mauritius, brought back from danger of extinction by reforestation programs and better legal protection against hunting.
A “back from the brink” conservation program was launched in the UK to save special habitats and 20 overlooked species, including the bearded false darkling beetle and the shrill carder bee.
The biggest land mammal is to be helped by another ban. The British government’s outlawing of pre-1947 ivory sounds trivial, but the UK is the biggest exporter of legal ivory in the world and this shutdown is to prevent illegal ivory being laundered by criminals, with more than 50 elephants killed by poachers every day.
FORESTS
Environmental defenders have notched up several heartening victories this year, despite the powerful and sometimes murderous forces they are up against.
In Ghana and the Ivory Coast, governments are drawing up plans to prevent the clearance of forests for cocoa plantations after Mighty Earth campaigners exposed the links between illegal deforestation and the chocolate produced by Mars, Hershey’s, Nestle and other global brands.
Brazilian President Michel Temer was forced to backtrack on plans to open up swathes of the Amazon rainforest to mining companies after a global outcry led by indigenous groups, conservation groups, climate advocates, the Catholic Church and anthropologists.
In Indonesia, nine indigenous communities have claimed land rights and are pressing Indonesian President Joko Widodo to formalize their ownership of ancestral territory.
However, such campaigns are fought at a heavy price. So far this year, 170 environmental and land defenders have been killed, according to Global Witness, which is collaborating with the Guardian in tracking the victims.
TECHNOLOGY
While other sectors of technology had their ups and downs this year, the smartphone category reached a new level of maturity, which means there has never been a better time to be a buyer.
With the introduction of the iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the top end of the market has become more expensive than ever.
Simultaneously, features that were once considered the realm of the flagship smartphone are now available at prices less than a fifth of an iPhone X.
The fingerprint scanner, the quality camera, the high-resolution screen, day-long battery life, on-device encryption and 4G connectivity are all now ubiquitous.
Highly capable phones are now available for as little as US$200, performing as well as, or better than, top-end devices did four years ago.
When functional devices start at just US$67 it means the smartphone has been commoditized.
Developed markets such as the UK and western Europe have reached smartphone penetration in more than 80 percent of the population, but the availability of a mobile Internet service in less developed and developing nations is still growing.
According to data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, mobile broadband subscriptions are increasing annually to more than 30 percent in developing nations and to more than 50 percent in less developed nations, where the smartphone is the primary Internet device and mobile broadband is more affordable than fixed.
Thanks to the smartphone, the Internet is mobile-first and reaching more people in more places.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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