In January, a total of seven gas-powered cars were sold in all of Norway. This year, Pakistan expects that parts of the country will get more electricity from decentralized rooftop solar than from its entire electricity grid during parts of the day. In the United States, where we often tell ourselves we are in the grips of climate backlash and fossil fuel retrenchment, Texas has been setting new solar records through frigid February, around 90 percent of all new power capacity installed anywhere in the nation last year was green, and the share of renewables is expected to be even higher next year. The new “breakout star” of the battery world is the notorious petrostate Saudi Arabia, the countries with the biggest growth in solar power are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia’s breakneck pursuit of clean energy too cheap to meter is so far along that electricity prices in some regions have fallen by a third in a single year. Parts of the country have announced that they will be giving away electricity for free for three hours a day. That isn’t an accident. It’s a state promise, which Australians can expect to take to the bank going forward.
These days, it sometimes seems as if the whole world is retreating on climate and green energy, with the fever of alarm giving way to what’s been called a new energy realism. Part of this is simply the return of President Trump, who still calls global warming a hoax, who took a wrench to President Joe Biden’s landmark climate bill, who promised oil and gas executives he would do their bidding in exchange for sufficient campaign contributions, who justified the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, partly by citing the country’s oil reserves, and who just announced that the federal government has entirely revoked its longstanding commitment to treating carbon emissions as a harmful pollutant and global warming as a serious problem.
The repeal of the endangerment finding is an outrage: a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil declaration of indifference to an ever-intensifying crisis. But it isn’t just Trump: Liberal politicians who used to routinely invoke the existential stakes of climate change have moved on, too, now preferring to talk about energy affordability. And it isn’t just America, either. In Europe, imports of natural gas are expected to reach record highs this year, and China, which has become the global face of green energy over the last half decade, has been building more coal plants than at any point since before the Paris agreement. World leaders mostly skipped the last big climate conference, as they did the one before it. Few countries anywhere in the world are passing new climate policies into law anymore. After a period of growing concern and accelerating momentum, the project of greening the world’s energy systems certainly feels as if it has been thrown into reverse.
But by the most straightforward measures, that’s simply wrong. There is more green stuff being installed than ever, and judged simply as a global infrastructure project the volume is pretty staggering. In 2024, 92.5 percent of all new power capacity installed around the world was renewable. In 2025, it’s believed that global green installations were even greater. And even in Trump’s United States, which has been behaving in many ways like a petrostate, more than 92 percent of utility-scale electricity capacity planned for 2026 is green.
The transition is more complicated than the headline figures suggest, and even the near future looks uncertain, especially ahead of China’s big Five-Year Plan announcement next month. In fact, the International Energy Agency recently revised its short-term renewable forecasts a bit downward, partly in response to changes in U.S. and Chinese policy. But in the big picture, I.E.A.’s global outlook is nevertheless still clear: Between 2025 and 2030, more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity anywhere in the world is expected to be renewable.
Fossil power has the advantage of incumbency, and the challenge of decarbonization is bigger and thornier than just solving electricity, which itself takes more than simply paving the world in solar panels. But if the energy transition is a race to build the future, green is not just winning but running away with it. The advantage, globally, is 10 to one.
That’s not to say victory over warming is at hand. New power only changes the existing system on the margins, and the old system is pretty dirty. To this point, new green energy has mostly supplemented rather than displaced fossil fuels. Globally, emissions are still climbing, if slowly, and temperatures are not only rising but rising at an accelerating rate, raising the uncomfortable possibility that the world’s climate system may be more sensitive to emissions than almost anyone had bargained for. And meaning that however quickly the green transition is unfolding the climate future still looks treacherous — about which I promise I will write more soon.
But when I wrote in dismay last fall that we seemed to be giving up on climate politics a decade after the Paris agreement, I heard from leaders and advocates around the world that I was being too downbeat, focused too much on empty rhetoric and hit-or-miss policy momentum, not focused enough on taking the concrete measure of change on the ground.
In the fall, Christiana Figueres, the former head of the U.N.’s climate change body, told me that climate politics didn’t matter nearly as much as “climate economy”— the combination of cheap solar and battery power, the price volatility of fossil fuels, domestic energy crises and geopolitics pushing countries toward energy autonomy and the relative ease of installing new renewables are all powering the global transition even under conditions of policy uncertainty. Canada’s former environment minister Catherine McKenna and Britain’s current energy secretary Ed Miliband made similar points. From nearly everyone I spoke with, what I heard was this: While the policy landscape might be a bit bumpy and public arguments less reliably green than they were a few years ago, neither offers a comprehensive measure of the state of play. And when you look past them, you don’t see the end of climate action but something that looks much more like progress, if not a takeoff. You know what? They have a point.
A decade ago, the challenge of global decarbonization appeared intimidating enough that to many, it seemed the only way to surmount it was through politics. A decade later, we’ve lost a lot of political momentum, and the spirit of solidarity that seemed for a time to prompt it has evaporated. But in the most obvious sectors, at least, the transition is powering ahead anyway. When I spoke to Nicholas Stern — whose 2006 report warning about the underappreciated risks of unmitigated warming helped shape climate politics for the decades that followed — he lamented the loss of political attention but nevertheless expressed what he called “a heavily guarded optimism.” “I don’t think we’d get Paris if we started it now,” he acknowledged. “But back then, none of us anticipated that we’d be discussing the end of the internal combustion engine anytime soon, either. And now it’s coming.”
So for a moment, allow me to play, if not climate optimist then transition optimist, at least. It’s a pretty straightforward job, since the numbers somewhat speak for themselves. Globally, sales of gas-powered cars have declined by more than 20 percent since their peak, which we already passed a decade ago. Since then, sales of electric vehicles have grown almost 30-fold. In 2019, only 3 percent of car sales globally were electric; in 2025, a quarter were. In the European Union, full E.V.s and hybrids were more than half of all sales. In China, the world’s largest car market, it’s more than half. And the global pattern pops up in some unexpected places. In Nepal, for instance, 76 percent of new cars sold in 2024 were E.V.s. In Ethiopia — where the government was so desperate to stop importing so much foreign oil, it took a heavy-handed policy intervention in 2024, banning the importation of gas-powered cars — E.V. sales grew from close to zero to more than half of all new registrations that year.
By global standards, the United States is a relative laggard — enough so that the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather recently suggested the country could end up, 30 years from now, looking like Cuba does today, with roads crowded with gas-guzzling clunkers. But even here sales of gas-powered cars between 2016 and 2024 were down more than 2.5 million per year. Over the same period, American E.V. sales are up 10-fold.
You see a similar pattern when looking at solar power installations across the developing world, where decarbonization was long assumed to require significant subsidy and support from places like the United States and Europe. But in Algeria solar installations recently grew 33-fold in a 12-month period, with many other countries across the African continent tripling or more over the same period (even though oil imports still exceed solar panels in most of Africa’s biggest markets). As the Global Energy Monitor put it earlier this month, “the center of gravity for new clean power has shifted decisively toward emerging and developing economies.”
“We’re moving fast, but we’re nowhere near moving fast enough,” says Stern, whose new book describes a world poised at the crossroads, not yet taking full advantage of what he calls the growth opportunity of the century. “Every time you look at the technology, it looks better,” he says. But every time you look at the science, it gets worse.”
In China, by far the world’s largest emitter, emissions have been falling slowly now for about two years, marking what is likely to be an emissions peak. Simply put, this has never happened anywhere else before. Many rich countries of the world are well past their emissions peak — another fact about the green transition few outside of energy and climate circles appreciate. But those encouraging downward emissions slopes all depict periods of deindustrialization. Not China’s.
As for India, long viewed as China’s natural carbon successor? Its power sector emissions are falling for just the second time in 50 years. And more than that: India is moving away from fossil fuels faster than China did, according to a new analysis by Ember — transitioning at an earlier stage of economic development, that is, having produced less than a quarter as much carbon, cumulatively, as China has to this point.
This is especially remarkable given that for all that talk about its staggering emissions, China actually began moving away from fossil fuels much faster than the rich countries of the West ever did. India’s economic mix is different, less dependent on manufacturing and heavy industry, but at comparable levels of G.D.P., Ember found, India is both generating far more solar and using far less coal than China, which did it much faster than Europe or the United States. At a comparable level of electrification, India is using just one-sixth as much coal as China did. And there are those who believe that the transition in sub-Saharan Africa will be even faster — which could be a great blessing, given that barely half of the region has access to electricity today, with some estimates of the number lacking it floating around 600 million for 15 years now.
Where does this all leave us? Still far from a global power system dominated by low carbon sources. In the United States, we are stumbling forward, driving emissions slightly up in the short term but still heading for slow declines in the years ahead. Overall, we are still so far north of recent climate targets, there is now a robust debate among climate advocates about what new goals or measures to use, since the old ones are so obviously irrelevant. And an awful lot of talk from the more climate complacent that the world has moved on to other concerns, tacitly accepting a future of much more climate disruption. But if the political mood has darkened, one last data point shines out to me like a beacon: In 2026, the world may well spend more on green energy in total than it devotes to military spending. And if not this year, it seems safe to say, it will probably happen soon.
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