Climate Change is an existential threat.
It’s a massive problem, and it requires massive changes for us to solve it.
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about it, and seen a lot being done about it.
But are we making progress? Let’s take a quick look:
CO2 Emissions Are Still Increasing Most Years
To get climate change under control, we need to get greenhouse gas emissions from human activities first to stop rising, then down to zero (or negative!). Here’s a chart about CO2 emissions, which is the largest category of GHGs (75%).
As of 2023 (where this dataset ends), CO2 emissions were still going up most years. This is obviously not good. Climate models that show how to limit global warming to +1.5ºC rely on emissions peaking between 2020 and 2025, and roughly halving by just 2030.
If you spend enough time online, you might have seen the above summarised by an anti-renewables campaigner as “We’ve spent all this money, and it hasn’t even stopped emissions going up!”
But ! … Peak CO2 Emissions Is Very Close
… and already in the past for many countries.
While looking at continually growing emissions is not a great feeling, looking at the rate of growth (the first derivative of the above chart) shows us some very encouraging signs:
- In high-income countries, emissions are already heading down, not up. They’ve been doing this for 15 years now. And the world hasn’t ended.
- While the rest of the world had a period of rapid growth in emissions, that growth has rapidly reduced. They’re still emitting a lot each year, but at least the amount isn’t growing quickly any more.
- The total CO2 emissions of the world is now very close to going negative, averaging growth of less than 1% per year for the last decade.
In short, the richest nations are already weaning themselves off fossil fuels (and seemingly faster as time progresses) while the rest of the world looks like they’ll be following that lead soon.
Some Reasons To Be Hopeful
It’s disappointing that we’re only now looking like we’re about to turn the corner of preventing emissions from increasing, and we still have to reverse 200 years of growth in a very short time frame. But there’s some positive feedback loops that might help swing things around rather rapidly:
- A significant portion of fossil fuels are used just to extract, process, and transport fossil fuels! So as we start consuming less fossil fuels, that in turn requires less fossil fuels to get them out of the ground and into a burning machine somewhere. If we’re lucky, perhaps the sources that require the most in-process emissions will be the first to be left in the ground.
- Many renewable energy assets (solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, EVs) currently have significant CO2 emissions in their supply chains from mining, industrial processes, and transport, simply because that’s where a lot of our energy comes from today. As we deploy these assets, building the next generation of renewable assets will result in less emissions, because they’ll be partially built using clean energy. Each time we go around that cycle, replacing a given amount of fossil fuels with a renewable asset “costs” us less emissions than replacing the same FF amount did previously.
- The rate at which we’re deploying solar and wind power is the fastest in history, and it looks like it’s still getting faster. Battery energy storage system (BESS) prices are still plummeting most years, and EVs are only just getting a foothold in many countries but rapidly accelerating on their take-over of the transport world. If these exponential tailwinds continue, there’s a good chance that GHG emissions could drop off not gradually but precipitously – though this relies on renewables deployment outpacing growth in energy demand.
So, Are We Making Progress On Climate Action?
Absolutely, yes!
By zooming in on growth rates and separating out the leading nations vs the followers, we can see the trend that is happening amongst the world’s richest nations: the massive win which is the now negative growth (i.e. contraction) in CO2 emissions. And as that trend is moving further away from zero, it’s an accelerating shift. We also see that the rest of the world is not too far behind in terms of moving closer to a phase where they’re shrinking their fossil fuel dependence.
Of course, we should be going faster. As fast as practical! But the efforts we’ve been putting in over recent decades are paying off, and there’s reasons to hope that a rapid downwards shift in emissions across the globe is just around the corner.
Charts Data Source
Global Carbon Budget (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data