According to a BloombergNEF report released on the 14th of January, there are more than $500 billion in clean-energy technologies investments, and this is the first time ever for such peaks. The technology sector has always been expected to increase in capital, and investing in clean energy is definitely a big step.

Clean-Energy Technologies Are Expanding

If the world is to adequately address climate change, such investment highs should just be the beginning in the technologies that are making energy and other materials cleaner. It’s Clean-energy technologies

Clean-energy investments are accelerating due to a series of overlapping factors, such as increasing political goals (including the US elections) and falling costs.

VC Investments Are Also Breaking Records

The BloombergNEF report comes on the heels of a previous one, showing that the venture capital investments are also breaking records. The report shows that the VC investments in technologies are majorly aimed at combating climate change.

Low-carbon energy investment reached $501.3 billion in 2020, which is 9% more than in 2019. What’s interesting is that despite the ongoing world pandemic, this is a significant increase.

The tally also includes investments in renewables, energy storage, electric vehicle charging stations, carbon capture projects, hydrogen production, and more with the largest areas of investment being renewable energy and electrical transportation.

It’s Too Good to be True

There’s always a but to every good statement. In this particular case, the big problem is that the report mentioned above reflects another border trend, which is that investment often lags in technologies beyond renewable electricity and electric cars. As already stated, a huge portion of the investments goes to carbon capture and industrial processes such as cement.

However, this is still good news and if the clean-energy trends keep up, an even bigger increase will be reported next year according to the International Energy Agency.

One of Yale’s massively popular courses is called ‘Happiness’, and is now available online. The course is free for anyone interested and is supposed to help people find joy in these troubling times. During the previous month, more than half-a-million people signed up to watch and listen to “The Science of Well Being,” which was originally a course that professor of psychology Laurie Santos was teaching on campus. Now, the course is available online and for free.

The happiness course, as it is also known, shows details of research that looked into the misconceptions about the things that make humans happy. It also reveals the concrete steps that people can take to live a happier and more fulfilling life.

The Happiness Course Has Had Some Amazing Turnout

From March 2018 to March 2019, the total enrollment for the class was some 539,000 people. This made the online course the most popular in Yale’s history, and by the end of March 2020, the numbers went as high as 1,153,744. Notably, 631,980 people enrolled in March alone, which is contributed to the stay-at-home policies around the globe. More than ten million people have visited Yale’s website recently, showing unprecedented interest that professor Santos called “a bit surreal.”

Professor of psychology Laurie Santos believes that people are just as focused on evidenced-based methods for staying physically healthy as they are on ways to improve their mental health, which should explain the major interest in her course.

The Course Offers Wellness Activities for a Better Life

The course aims to engage viewers in a series of challenging activities that are designed to help them build more productive habits and increase their happiness levels. Professor Santos also reveals some misconceptions about happiness to prepare the audience for these tasks. She shows that the mind has some annoying features that lead people to think in a certain way which can be unproductive and could lead to a bad mood. The research shows ways that can help people succeed in changing their behavior and incorporating specific wellness activities into their lives.