TED Countdown Summit 2025 takes place against the backdrop of a fast-moving climate crisis and an energy transition that’s fully underway. On day 1, a remarkable line-up of speakers, spanning sectors and geographies, gathered to put a thumb on the scale and tip the world in the right direction. Here are some key takeaways from day 1:
The clean energy era will be an age of radical abundance. Renewables entrepreneur Matt Tilleard tears down the old narrative of energy as a zero-sum game, showing how the renewable revolution is shifting power from those who hoard fuel to those who innovate and deploy technology. He makes the case that renewable tech will become too plentiful for any OPEC-style chokehold, so power will be shared instead of controlled. Clean energy visionary Lei Zhang picks up this thread in the Gobi desert, home to one of the world’s largest green hydrogen projects, exploring how this and other barren landscapes hold more energy reserves than the world consumes today. “Where others see emptiness, I see abundance,” he says. James Irungu Mwangi, founder and CEO of Africa Climate Ventures, completes the vision by showcasing how Africa’s young workforce is already turning waste biomass and sunshine into jobs, food security and scalable carbon removal — proving climate action can pay today and supercharge growth tomorrow.
Sustainable relationships with nature create opportunity and address climate challenges, at every scale. At the local level, Kenyan farmer Josephine Waweru demonstrates how small-scale technological solutions like solar-powered irrigation can transform individual farms and lives in the face of climate uncertainty. At the national level, civic entrepreneur Ilona Szabó de Carvalho advocates for an economic paradigm that values standing forests over cleared land, creating “nature superpowers” through bioeconomies and innovative financial mechanisms. Both Waweru and Carvalho emphasize that nature-aligned economies outperform destructive practices.
