Donald Trump is passionate about climate change. Addressing the U.N. General Assembly this week, he called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” The “global warming hoax,” he went on to rant, is a “globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies.” After speaking for nearly an hour, Trump returned to his core themes: “Immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet,” he brayed. “Countries that cherish freedom are fading fast because of their policies on these two subjects. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Trump might be pleased to know about the findings of a new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, IISI, and Climate Analytics. The fifth Production Gap Report, released earlier this week, analyzes the gap between countries’ plans to produce fossil fuels, and national and global goals to reduce planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions—in other words, just how far off we are from reaching our stated targets. The results—while likely just the sort of thing Trump might appreciate—should disturb anyone not eager to render the future even hotter, wetter, and more chaotic than it’s already on track to be. The world’s governments now plan to produce 77 percent more fossil fuels than is consistent with limiting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius. Oil and gas production is expected to increase through 2050, with total production of those fuels on track to be 2.5 times greater than is needed to limit warming to two degrees Celsius.
“Every year that countries fail to make progress in curbing fossil fuel production and use, it becomes harder for the world to achieve its climate goals,” the report’s authors warn. “Even with rapid and concerted efforts starting today, fossil fuel production in 2030 will likely exceed the levels in the 1.5ºC-compatible scenarios presented in this report.”
Like Trump’s election in November, these numbers should prompt profound soul-searching. Just a few years ago, newspapers, C-suites, and diplomatic conferences buzzed with talk of an “energy transition” that would unite businesses and governments behind the goal of a more sustainable world. In 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—then U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance—launched the Global Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ, which claimed to have gotten $130 trillion of private capital “committed to transforming the economy for net-zero.” As Carney put it, this “rapid, and large-scale, increase in capital commitment to net-zero, through GFANZ, makes the transition to a 1.5°C world possible.”
Two separate studies published earlier this year found that record heat in 2024—the hottest year on record—very likely indicates that the world has already breached that 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. The largest financial institutions that signed onto GFANZ and its component parts—including the Net-Zero Banking Alliance—have fled those formations. NZBA announced that it was suspending activities late last month amid departures by JPMorgan, Citi, and UBS; GFANZ is “restructuring.” Carney’s government has now rolled back Canada’s carbon tax and regulations on auto sector emissions while refusing to commit to near-term emissions reductions targets.
Generally speaking, a transition refers to one thing becoming something else. While the world certainly hasn’t stopped building out renewable energy—and in some cases is doing so at a blindingly fast clip—we’re not poised to replace fossil fuels anytime soon. But the concept of an “energy transition” has always been a slippery one, imagining some remote, ill-defined destination. ExxonMobil says it’s working “to lead in an energy transition” through modest investments in things like hydrogen and carbon capture and storage; Exxon also plans to boost its oil and gas output by 18 percent over the next five years. Aramco has pledged its support to the “transition” on its website. CEO Amin Nasser urges a “transition strategy reset,” and has called on policymakers to “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately, reflecting realistic demand assumptions.” What is it, exactly, that we’re meant to be transitioning away from, or towards? And to what end?
If the energy transition is meant to refer to the proliferation of a loosely related group of technologies, then there’s plenty of good news. More than 90 percent of new power installations worldwide were renewable as of this year. Solar, in particular, is experiencing a global boom. In the first six months of 2025, economic historian Adam Tooze notes, China installed 250 gigawatts of solar—more than the U.S. has installed total, and twice as much as is installed in Germany. The country is building a remarkable 74 percent of wind and solar projects, and makes two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles. Low-cost exports of these technologies are helping other countries deploy them rapidly; on the back of surging imports, Pakistan has now become the world’s sixth-largest solar market.
But if the energy transition is meant to imply that at some point the world will stop using fossil fuels, then progress on that front has been painfully slow. While coal is typically considered a thing of the past in the United States and Western Europe, global demand—driven primarily by China, India, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—has never been higher, having grown by 16 percent since 2020 as countries continue to burn coal for both electricity and heavy industry. Last year, China accounted for 93 percent of the world’s new coal power construction. Three-quarters of the world’s steel is currently produced using refined coal. Global steelmaking capacity—already responsible for roughly seven percent of global emissions—is expected to increase by 6.7 percent through 2027.
There’s no one-to-one substitution, in other words, between “fossil fuels” and “clean energy.” As Jean-Baptiste Fressoz writes in his fascinating history of transition thinking, More and More and More, what have been understood as previous energy transitions—i.e. from wood to coal—have in reality been a “symbiotic expansion of all energies.” Wood built the railroads that ship coal, and continues to provide heat for the poorest third of the world’s population. As of 2019, wood generated “twice as much energy as nuclear fission, twice as much as hydroelectricity, and twice as much as solar and wind power combined,” Fressoz notes.
Some kind of change is happening in the global energy system. Transition is probably the wrong word for it. More than 20 percent of cars sold worldwide in 2024 were electric. Solar power is 41 percent cheaper and wind power is 53 percent cheaper globally than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, a report released by the U.N. this summer states. Yet the changes required to align corporate and governmental priorities behind the project of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius don’t resemble the smooth, lucrative curve Carney envisioned a few years ago. “The climate imperative,” Fressoz writes, “does not call for a new energy transition, but it does require us to voluntarily carry out an enormous energy amputation: to get rid, in four decades, of the proportion of the world’s energy—more than three-quarters—derived from fossil fuels.”
Until it became a popular buzzword in climate circles, as political scientist Jonathan White points out, talk of transition among wonk-ish types often referred to attempts to turn former Eastern Bloc countries into market economies. These transitions were painful and chaotic for the people living through them, and extraordinarily lucrative for opportunistic ex-Soviet elites who laundered mass privatization into vast fortunes with the help of Western advisors. The idea of a green transition, by contrast, “evokes a drawn-out process under the control of elites, clear in its destination and receptive to expertise,” White writes. “It pictures an old order in steady retreat, and a new one on the path to consolidation.”
With Trump back in the White House and climate commitments lagging elsewhere, it’s worth reflecting on whether soothing, popular stories about the “energy transition” have harmed or helped efforts to reduce emissions. Trump is wrong about renewable energy, of course. But those of us who want to build more of it ought to be honest with ourselves about the fact that zeroing out emissions will be a much bigger undertaking.
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