In the first six months of the year, renewables like solar and wind generated more electricity than coal for the first time ever, according to a report published Tuesday by Ember, an energy think tank.
But at the same time, the International Energy Agency on Tuesday lowered its forecast for renewable energy growth in the United States over the next five years by almost 50 percent.
These two new forecasts put hard numbers on trends that have been moving in opposite directions: As the United States moves swiftly away from policies that address climate change, renewables are making big gains in the rest of the world.
Taken together, these updates tell a story of uneven progress. In the United States and the European Union, greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector were up in the first half of 2025. In China and India, they were down.
In India, installations of renewables grew faster than demand for energy. Some analysts see this development as an early indication the world is approaching an important tipping point for fossil fuels.
Renewables take a small lead over coal
The first half of 2025 saw an inversion in a long-term trend: renewables generated more electricity than coal, the burning of which is the largest contributor to climate change worldwide.
“We are seeing the first signs of a crucial turning point,” Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember, said in a statement.
Globally, the difference between renewable and coal electricity generation was small. Both coal and renewables generated just over a third of electricity in the first half of the year, and renewables contributed about 1.2 percent more than coal did.
What made this possible, said Raul Miranda, global program director at Ember, was that global installations of renewable energy outpaced electricity demand growth, putting solar and wind in a position to put a dent in fossil fuel consumption. Enough solar was installed to meet more than four-fifths of new energy demand, Ember found.
“There’s an increasing number of geographies where building new solar is essentially cheaper than just operating those existing coal units,” he said.
In the U.S., for example, a 2023 study found that 99 percent of coal plants were more expensive to run than renewable replacements would be.
Meanwhile, China installed more solar and wind than the rest of the world combined in the first half of 2025. It has been exporting so much solar equipment that some countries in Africa have been able to significantly expand their electricity capacity.
Ember’s finding was roughly in line with the I.E.A.’s forecast, which found that renewables are expected to surpass coal for electricity generation by the end of 2025 or mid-2026 at the latest.
The United States is another matter
This summer, Republicans in Congress passed legislation that rolled back Biden-era tax incentives for wind and solar installations, electric vehicles and other renewable energy projects. The Trump administration has also attacked the wind industry, rolled back regulations that would have made it more expensive to continue operating fossil fuel plants, and canceled grants that support renewable energy projects.
The I.E.A. took this all into account when it revised its estimate of U.S. renewables growth over the next five years, and the new forecast is almost 50 percent lower than the one it issued just before the presidential election in 2024.
Globally, the I.E.A.’s new forecast for renewable growth by 2030 is 5 percent lower than last year, driven in large part by U.S. policies, and to a lesser extent by shifts that lowered China’s forecast.
At the United Nations global climate negotiations in 2023, nearly 200 countries pledged to triple renewable energy installments by 2030. Even given the growth of renewables outlined in the I.E.A. report published on Tuesday, the world is still not on track to meet that pledge.
India’s striking growth
In India, the world’s fourth-largest economy, fossil fuel electricity generation fell in the first half of 2025. Coal fell by 3 percent, and gas fell by 34 percent, the Ember report found. This was due in part to the country’s rapid build-out of wind and solar and in part because of mild weather that resulted in lower demand for air-conditioning.
But even if the first half of the year had been as hot as last year, Ember estimated, coal use in India would still have fallen a bit because growth in clean energy was more than three times as large than demand growth.
Fatih Birol, the I.E.A.’s executive director, called India’s progress a “very impressive result” driven by government policies like support for rooftop solar and quicker permitting for hydropower projects.
“The tipping point is when you start to have solar and wind actually being faster than the demand growth, because then that allows you to fill in the gap, or fill in the role that once was filled by coal or fossil fuels broadly,” Miranda said.
India’s rapid renewable growth is expected to continue, the I.E.A. found. It is now expected to be the world’s second-largest market for renewables growth over the next five years. Most of the new power capacity is expected to come from solar farms.
Our oceans
The very hungry microbes that could, just maybe, cool the planet
Fifty miles off the Tuscan coast, in a sparkling blue expanse broken only by rocky, forbidding islets, including the real-life Island of Montecristo, ancient creatures are roosting beneath the waves.
They spend their days feasting on an unlikely source of nourishment: methane, a potent greenhouse gas that leaks out of cracks in the seafloor.
Lately, researchers have been trying to put these microorganisms to work on an urgent task. If their appetites can be redirected to other sources of their favorite gas — namely, the hundreds of millions of tons of planet-warming methane emitted each year from oil and gas sites, livestock and wetlands — then they might just help slow climate change. — Raymond Zhong
Climate law
Can cities sue over climate change?
The Maryland Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday on an issue facing judges nationwide: Whether or not local communities can sue oil companies over their role in climate change.
The leaders of Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County sued some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies in 2018 and 2021, alleging a decades-long disinformation campaign to mislead the public about what causes global warming. The companies’ deception, they argued, encouraged the burning of oil and gas, which unleashed more of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the world and causing damage in Maryland including storms, extreme heat and sea-level rise. — Karen Zraick
The Trump administration
Trump signs order to approve mining road through Alaskan wilderness
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the government to approve a 211-mile industrial road that would cut through pristine Alaskan wilderness to reach a proposed copper and zinc mine.
The president ordered the Interior Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue all necessary permits for the road, known as the Ambler Access Project, which was blocked last year by the Biden administration.
The Trump administration also said the government would invest $35.6 million in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the Canadian company Trilogy Metals. — Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman
One last thing
Listen to the sounds of climate change
Climate change is usually measured and understood in numbers. But you can also experience the planet’s changing climate by listening.
As part of this year’s Climate Forward conference, we wanted to find a new way for attendees to understand how our planet is changing. We spoke with scientists and researchers who are capturing natural soundscapes before they change forever.
We compiled the work of three researchers to create an audio installation, called the Sounds of Climate Change, that offers a sonic tour of the underwater Arctic, a melting glacier and the Amazon rainforest.
Listen to the first recording below:
More climate news from around the web:
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India is in early talks with insurers about establishing a nationwide insurance program linked to climate change, Reuters reports. “The scheme would adopt a parametric insurance model, where policyholders receive a predetermined payout when specific weather thresholds such as rainfall, temperature or wind speed are breached.”
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The Trump administration’s next phase in its fight against solar energy includes trade measures and permitting delays, The Washington Post reports.
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Heatmap News explains the wave of climate legislation that California passed this year, which includes measures to lower energy costs and streamlined approvals of some new oil wells.
Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
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