Abe Woldeslassie spent seven years in St. Paul, guiding Macalester’s men’s basketball program to heights never previously imagined. The Scots reached a MIAC tournament title game and experienced multiple 15-win seasons under the head coach.

But when the Minneapolis native was contacted by a fellow Minnesotan about an opportunity to get back into Division I coaching, he felt the need to go.

Tim Bergstraser is a 34-year-old St. Cloud native who led Minnesota State-Moorhead to three straight Division II NCAA tournament appearances. In the offseason, Denver University hired Bergstraser to lead its program.

Bergstraser asked Woldeslassie to join him on his staff.

Woldeslassie obliged, noting Bergstraser was someone he knew and trusted. He liked that Denver is a private school with high academic expectations, like Macalester, and is in a large, pro-sports metro area like the Twin Cities.

Woldeslassie noted there would never be a “right” time to leave Macalester, but this made sense.

“I just turned 40 in October, and I felt like if I’m going to make this move, Macalester is in a great place, I’m leaving on great terms,” he said. “And not that it was ever going south, but I never wanted it to get to a point where you overstay your welcome.”

He enjoyed the process of he and fellow coach Conner Nord building Macalester from the ground up, and saw a chance to do something similar at Denver, a program that’s never been to the Division I NCAA Tournament.

“I thought, ‘Hey, it’d be cool if we were the first here,’” Woldeslassie said.

The Pioneers are off to a good start. A program that won just 11 games a season ago is 8-8 this season, already sporting impressive wins against the likes of Northern Colorado and Colorado State ahead of its Summit League conference opener Sunday in, yes, St. Paul.

A tilt with conference-favorite St. Thomas is a homecoming of sorts for many people in the program. Two players and three coaches — including associate coach Spenser Bland, a Plymouth native and Bethel alum — are Minnesota natives.

But it’s especially meaningful to Woldeslassie, for a number of reasons. He was a head coach in St. Paul just last season. He spent the first two years of his collegiate career playing junior varsity for St. Thomas, where he was recruited to by then-assistant coach Johnny Tauer — now a friend — before transferring to Macalester.

Woldeslassie has only seen photos of St. Thomas’ new arena and savors the shot to coach a game in the building on Sunday.

“We’ll have a lot of friends and family in the stands,” he said. “I think there will be a lot of red in the stands of the new arena.”

This may be Denver’s only trip to St. Paul in the foreseeable future. The Pioneers are replacing Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference next season, a move that figures to bring more prominence and visibility to the program but also more challenges. That’s one of the best mid-major conferences in the country.

Early returns suggest the new staff is built to handle it, just another adjustment for the Pioneers coaches who were thrown into the turbulence that is Division I athletics. Woldeslassie last coached at this level in 2018 as an assistant at Siena before taking the job at Macalester.

This was all before looser NCAA transfer portal rules, Name, Image and Likeness opportunities, revenue sharing and massive conference realignment.

“You almost couldn’t have envisioned, in 2018, what’s going on today,” Woldeslassie noted. “I think people would have laughed at you if you said this was going to happen.”

But it’s reality, one that makes quickly rebuilding a perhaps more feasible and more complex at the same time.

“It’s new for all of us, and it seems like every day it’s changing,” Woldeslassie said. “It’s like, ‘This is the rule today,’ and a week from now, that rule may not even exist. So, we have to adapt.”

Denver doesn’t have any high school kids committed for next season, its focus currently centered on transfers, junior college and international players. And the Pioneers won’t be able to afford every player they’d like to recruit.

But Woldeslassie thinks Bergstraser is doing a great job guiding the roster construction and connecting with those already in the program.

“I think we’ve done a great job getting the right people,” Woldeslassie said. “We’ve had some really great wins already this year, and I think we’re going to have a really good season in the Summit.”

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So much climate news comes out in any given week that it can be hard to keep up with it all. Much is gloomy, but there are positive developments all the time — so many, in fact, that it’s easy to miss some of the things that have been happening.

For the past few years, I’ve been compiling year-end lists of the more neglected good and bad climate stories to give an idea of the immense amount of change as the world transitions to new sources of energy amid a gathering environmental crisis.

Here’s my selection of major developments over the past 12 months:

You might not know it from the prevailing mood of Trump-era defeatism, but in some parts of the world, decarbonizing electricity is approaching its endgame. Roughly three-quarters of power generation in the UK and Europe this year came from non-fossil sources, putting them in about the same place as Brazil and Canada, whose vast hydroelectric resources traditionally gave them some of the cleanest grids.

With more renewables added each year, current projects under construction and in late-stage development should put Europe’s grid between 80% to 90% clean energy, the level at which further advances will start to get far more difficult without massive battery usage, new flexible technologies, or both. That means a looming slowdown in renewable deployment, something that many will regard as some sort of failure. In fact, it’s a testament to the monumental achievement so far, and an example the rest of the world should now emulate.

As much as 8% of the world’s emissions come from the production of cement — but the collapse of China’s real estate boom is turning that tide. The country’s output through October was the lowest since 2009, suggesting that the full-year total will be in the region of 1.7 billion metric tons. Combined with the sluggish 1% to 2% pace of growth forecast in the rest of the world, that suggests global consumption will be the lowest since 2012.

There may be further to fall. China still consumes 1.2 tons of cement per capita, about four times the rate of the rest of the world — but construction starts, a leading indicator for demand, are collapsing even faster, with commercial groundbreaking at its weakest since 2005. Developed countries use only about 16% of global cement, and China is now developed in all but name. A boom like the one we saw over the past decade will never return. Even India and sub-Saharan Africa won’t be big enough to take its place.

If you were looking only at the parlous state of electric vehicle sales in some developed markets — the U.S., say, or Japan or Italy — you might think the entire technology is faltering. Far from it. Plug-in cars have been comprising more than half of all sales in China and just under a third in Europe in recent months. More dramatic, though, is what’s been happening in less-noticed developing countries.

EVs have had a sales share of more than 20% in recent months in Turkey, Thailand, and Vietnam, while Indonesia isn’t far behind. Markets as diverse as Nepal, Ethiopia, Laos, Armenia and the United Arab Emirates are adopting EVs far faster than many developed countries. Some 27.3% of all passenger vehicle sales worldwide in the September quarter came with a plug, according to BloombergNEF. If you think the EV revolution is losing speed, it’s probably just a sign that your own domestic market is getting left behind.

I did a similar here’s-what-you-missed exercise last year. Here’s my attempt at an unbiased assessment of that:

China’s solar industry has endured a season in hell. We argued that rising sales and thinner spending would restore profitability. China’s big six solar players have indeed cut capital expenditures to about half of last year’s level, but new rules at home and ongoing trade protectionism elsewhere mean BloombergNEF expects installations this year to rise only about 16% — a pedestrian pace for this sector. Far from returning to the black, losses are deepening, with little sign of relief in sight.

Sales of plug-in cars in Europe hit a speed bump in late 2024, leading many to predict that the region’s shift to electric vehicles was stalling. We argued the slowdown was temporary, with performance in 2025 likely to far outstrip predictions of 3.2 million sales. That looks to be on the money. By the end of September, the year-to-date growth rate was 28%, which should translate into nearly 3.9 million sales across the full year, just a pip short of the 4 million number we pegged.

A key element of electricity-bill increases after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the pivotal role played by surging gas in setting the cost of power across the entire market. We argued that the rise of lithium-ion was likely to shave these peaks by giving batteries a bigger role and flattening the extreme spikes seen in previous years. That seems to be playing out in some places: Wholesale prices in Australia’s main grid fell about 8% from a year earlier in the September quarter, thanks in part to reduced volatility and batteries undercutting gas.

The course of the energy transition never did run smooth — but I’ve noticed over the past few years of writing these lists that events in retrospect look much better than the depressing prospect you get from a cursory look at the news. Let’s hope that pattern plays out in 2026, too.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

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Kids ‘n Kinship provides friendships and positive role models to children and youth ages 5-16 who are in need of an additional supportive relationship with an adult. Here’s one of the youth waiting for a mentor:

First name: Natalie

Age: 10

Interests: Natalie is a fifth-grader and an oldest child. She likes to be active and play outside; she hopes to try track, swimming or soccer. She also likes to play Roblox and watch her shows. Her favorite school subjects are music and gym, and is learning to play the clarinet in band. Her favorite foods are burgers and sushi.

Personality/Characteristics: Natalie’s guardian describes her as “pretty outgoing, sometimes a little shy, and definitely an overthinker.” Natalie names her family as her favorite people. She’s happy when she is playing with her friends and sometimes gets annoyed with her younger brother and sister.

Goals/dreams: Natalie would love to have the super power to teleport! She says she’d teleport home when she’s at school and doesn’t want to be there anymore. She dreams of becoming either a singer or doctor. Her guardian hopes a mentor will help to give her experiences outside of spending time on her phone and to be another supportive adult who can help her talk through her thoughts and feelings.

For more information: Natalie is waiting for a mentor through Kids n’ Kinship in Dakota County. To learn more about this youth mentoring program and the 39+ youth waiting for a mentor, sign up for an Information Session, visit www.kidsnkinship.org or email programs@kidsnkinship.org. For more information about mentoring in the Twin Cities outside of Dakota County, contact MENTOR MN at mentor@mentormn.org or fill out a brief form at www.mentoring.org/take-action/become-a-mentor/#search.

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Philosopher George Santayana once famously observed, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Unfortunately, our nation’s collective memory doesn’t seem to even extend back two decades.

Last month, Fannie Mae dropped the requirement that borrowers have a minimum credit score of 620. Freddie Mac had made a similar change earlier in the year. A credit score measures a person’s likelihood of paying back a loan. While it isn’t perfect, credit scores are widely used to evaluate risk. This change will make is easier for people with lower credit scores to obtain home loans.

Bill Pulte, director of U.S. federal housing, declared this a “big deal for consumers.”

It’s understandable that Pulte and these organizations would seek to help want-to-be homeowners. Home prices are at or near record highs around the country.

Removing this barrier might seem sensible. Pulte insisted this is a “small or nothing deal for underwriting.” But this ignores the fine print.

Decades ago, Congress created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to bolster the nation’s housing market. The companies don’t loan money directly. Instead, they purchase loans from banks. They then repackage some of those loans into mortgage-backed securities that investors purchase. Backed by the federal government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee the principal and interest payments on the loans they sell. Their reach is extensive.

This arrangement gives banks more money to lend. In theory, this keeps a steady supply of funding available for potential homebuyers. One might wonder if artificially inflating the amount of money available to lend has contributed to the country’s soaring home prices.

But anyone who remembers the 2008 housing crash should hear alarm bells going off. While there were several factors for the financial collapse, one underlying cause was risky home loans. Those mortgages had been sold and then repackaged as mortgage-backed securities. When borrowers stopped repaying their loans, the value of those securities plummeted. That rippled through the entire economy. The effects of that recession lingered for years.

That’s reason enough to be concerned about this move. The government should be very careful about opening the door to risky borrowers, especially when prices are at record highs.

What the housing market needs is more supply.

Washington should seek to lower prices, not lending standards.

— The Las Vegas Review-Journal

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