India's power-sector emissions flat

 

From Carbon Brief

A surge in clean energy has kept carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in check across India’s power sector, with no growth from the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2026.

This is the first time in more than 50 years that there has been no growth in India’s coal power over a two-year period, even as electricity demand grew overall.

At the same time, both oil and gas consumption have fallen across the nation for two years in a row, helping alleviate the shock of the Hormuz crisis.

Nevertheless, the new six-monthly analysis for Carbon Brief shows that India’s [total] emissions grew by 3.7% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, due to increases from steel, cement and other sectors.

Other key findings for the first half of 2026 include:

• India’s power-sector emissions flatlined at 2024 levels, after a 2.2% decline in the first half of 2025 and a 2.3% rise in the same period this year.
• Clean energy met all of the 7% rise in India’s electricity demand over the two years, adding 63 terawatt hours (TWh), equivalent to the total demand of Switzerland.
• India has added 77 gigawatts (GW) of solar in this two-year period, helping meet 60% of the rise in electricity demand overall.
• While fossil-fuel generation stagnated, generators added 8.5GW of new coal capacity, leading to fewer running hours and increased costs to electricity consumers.
• CO2 emissions from oil and gas fell by 7% year-on-year, extending a reduction that began in 2025, despite higher demand for road transport fuels.
• Steel and cement emissions grew by 8% year-on-year, reaching a 23% share of India’s total CO2 in the first half of 2026.

If the pace of India’s clean-energy expansion is to continue, it will need to upgrade its electricity grid, rapidly build out energy storage and boost the flexibility of coal power.

While clean-energy expansion is covering most or all of India’s power-demand growth, the fossil-fuel industry continues to pursue major capital investments.

This includes large amounts of new coal-power capacity, ambitious plans for the conversion of coal-to-chemicals and efforts to boost domestic coking coal production for the steel sector.

While CO2 output from the power sector is flat, with oil and gas in decline, India’s emissions still went up due to the contribution from industry.

India lags behind its competitors – including most large emerging economies – when it comes to electrifying its industrial sector.

Faster progress would enable clean electricity to substitute for fossil fuels in industry, as well as for power, offering the potential for India to cut its emissions overall.

[Read more here] 

 As you can see from the top chart, India's power-sector emissions have risen steadily for over 50 years, as you would expect from a rapidly growing economy.  The last time India's emissions from the power sector fell was during Covid.  This time, they've fallen at a time when India's economic growth rate has been high.   A peak in these emissions makes a peak in India's total emissions much easier to achieve.

It is striking that the two of the high growth middle-income developing economies, India and China, are on the brink of peak emissions.  Both countries have much lower per capita emissions than the US, with China emitting 9.9 tonnes per person per year, and India just 2.9, compared with the US's 17.5 and Germany's 7.8.  But they are the most populous countries on Earth, and what they do to cut emissions really matters.  So this is good news.

Solar capacity outpaces coal in China

 

Source: Our World in Data

From EuroNews

China's solar energy capacity has surpassed that of coal-fired power for the first time ever.

"As of the end of July this year, China's installed solar power capacity reached 1.286 billion kilowatts," China's National Energy Administration (NEA) said.

"For the first time, photovoltaic installed capacity surpassed coal-fired power, becoming the largest power source category in China," it added.

The country's coal-fired power installed capacity, the energy body said, stood at 1.285 billion kilowatts [1,285 GW — a typical coal power station is 1 to 2 GW]

Solar generation rose 15.5 per cent in the first seven months of 2026 compared to the same period last year to 802.4 billion kilowatt-hours, about one-eighth of the country's total, the NEA said in another statement.

China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases that drive climate change, has pledged to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

The NEA said China's installed solar power capacity and power generation "have maintained a steady trend of rapid growth," with it playing an "increasingly prominent role" in guaranteeing electricity supply and driving the energy transition.

Coal has been China's key power generation source for decades and a key driver of planet-warming emissions.

But the country's coal-fired power generation fell by nearly two per cent in 2025, despite rising energy demand in the world's largest emitter, data reviewed by the AFP news agency showed in February.

It marked the first decline in six years, with some analysts saying it was the first time on record that coal generation dropped at the same time as power demand rose.

China has seen an explosive growth in its renewable installation, with coal's share in its energy mix edging down in recent years.The country installed a record 315 gigawatts of solar power and 119 gigawatts of wind power capacity last year, over 80 per cent of total newly installed power generation capacity, according to the China Electricity Council.

EU countries are trailing behind China when it comes to renewables, partly because China started their transition to clean energy much sooner. [This seems incorrect. China's solar capacity on 2000 was just 0.03 GW, compared with 0.2 GW in Europe and 0.59 GW in the US.  China's capacity only exceeded Europe's in 2017.]  As an example, in 2023 China installed between 180 and 230 gigawatts of solar, compared to 58 gigawatts in all European countries combined.

China's ownership of clean technology parts and patents makes a big difference to how quickly and cheaply they can install, as well as cheaper labour.

China's energy grid is also more efficient at handling energy from multiple sources, where as Europe's grid has been called "outdated". Hybridisation has been recommended as a solution.

Remember, this is capacity, not output.   Solar output is constrained, often curtailed by the grid operator, because of excess capacity in coal.  China is still building coal power stations, despite low capacity factors, and electricity utilities have quotas to use coal power in preference to solar and wind.  For China to significantly reduce emissions, it will have to rejig the electricity market.  When it does, emissions should plummet.

PV panel prices just keep on sliding

This shows the costs of photovoltaic (solar) panels, in constant dollars, from Our World in Data.  In 2024, PV panels cost just 0.2 per cent of what they cost in 1975, and 70% of what they cost in 2020, a compound annual rate of decline of 12%, despite the bounce during and after Covid.  This trend is likely to continue.

Since battery costs are falling even faster than panel costs, solar is getting closer and closer to being able to provide baseload power, as increased storage capacity becomes affordable.   In 2020, solar provided 3.2% of the world's electricity, in 2025 it reached 8.7%, and it seems likely that by 2030, it will be 23.6%, assuming the growth rate of the last 5 years continues.  Given the impact of the Iran war on gas prices outside the US, even this jump may prove too conservative.  

This is the first oil crisis where there is an alternative:  solar plus storage, and EVs.  Repeated oil crises have shown how unwise it is to rely on oil and gas.  The great irony of Trump's war is that it will accelerate the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.  

The next el Niño---James Hansen

 From James Hansen's Climate Uncensored Substack

You can read the full article yourself, and I'll just post the main chart and the conclusion here.

Fig. 1. Global surface temperature (relative to 1880-1920 base period).[1]
click on chart to enlarge

 Abstract: 

The world seems headed into another El Niño, just 3 years after the last one. Such quick return normally would imply, at most, an El Niño of moderate strength, but we suggest that even a moderately strong El Niño may yield record global temperature already in 2026 and still greater temperature in 2027. The extreme warming will be a result mainly of high climate sensitivity and a recent increase of the net global climate forcing, not the result of an exceptional El Niño, per se. We find that the principal drive[r] for global warming acceleration began in about 2015, which implies that 2°C global warming is likely to be reached in the 2030s, not at midcentury.

The key lines on the chart are the 1970-2010 linear trend, of an increase of 0.18 C per decade, the linear trend from 2010 to the present of 0.3 C per decade (last 15 years) and the linear trend from 2015 to date of 0.41 C per decade.

It's really a clear-cut proposition:  either we slash emissions very fast, or there will be climate catastrophe.  Yes, emissions have probably peaked, but they're only likely to fall slowly at first, and for the rate of increase in temperatures to slow to, say, 0.1 C per decade, we will need to cut emissions by 2/3rds or 3/4qtrs.

Can we do that?  

The chart below, from Our World in Data, shows emissions by sector, which includes direct emissions, as well as indirect emissions.  For example, you could be burning oil directly to heat your house, or using fossil fuels indirectly, via electricity.  Electricity generation produces roughly 30% of global emissions.  Apart from aviation and shipping, almost all of the sectors in the red quadrant can be electrified.  Converting the grid to green tech will be a huge step towards eliminating all emissions from these sectors.

So it is possible.  But that means green electricity, and the electrification of everything.  Wind and solar and batteries instead of coal and gas power stations, plus EVs and heat pumps.  Electric trains, electric planes, electric ships.  Chemicals and cement.  Landfill.

And we need to deal with emissions in agriculture.  That will be complicated and will vary by source, so the sooner we start, the better.

It's doable.  But will we do it?  It's up to us.

Source: Our World in Data

 

EU to cut emissions by 85%

 From Reuters

The European Union agreed on Wednesday to set a legally binding climate target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, and buy foreign carbon credits to cover 5% of the emissions cuts, goals that fell short of its original plan.

Negotiators from EU countries and the European Parliament reached the deal in the early hours of Wednesday, they confirmed in separate statements.

In practice, the target will require an 85% emissions reduction from European industries, and payment to developing countries via carbon credits to cut emissions on Europe's behalf to make up the rest.

The goal goes beyond most other major economies' emissions-cutting pledges, including China's. Still, it fell short of that recommended by the EU's climate science advisers and was weaker than Brussels' original plan for the goal, reflecting disagreement between EU governments over the speed and cost of their green agenda.

"The target delivers on the need for climate action while safeguarding our competitiveness and security," said Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard, who negotiated the deal on behalf of EU governments.

The EU also agreed to consider the option in future to use international carbon credits to meet a further 5% of its 2040 emissions reductions - potentially further softening the domestic efforts required.

The target, which is designed to keep Europe on track for its pledge to have net-zero emissions by 2050, represented a political compromise after months of negotiations.

Countries including Poland, Slovakia and Hungary had opposed deeper CO2 cuts as too strenuous for industries struggling with high energy costs, cheaper Chinese imports and U.S. tariffs.

Other EU members, including the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, cited worsening extreme weather events and the need to catch up with China in manufacturing green technology as reasons to set a high target.

To win over opponents, the EU also agreed to delay the launch of a politically sensitive carbon price for fuel by one year, to 2028.

The Parliament and EU countries must each approve the target for it to become law - usually a formality that waves through pre-agreed deals.

Europe's CO2 emissions peaked in 1990, and have fallen 40% since then.  Their emissions have fallen much more in percentage terms than other large countries, and other big polluters (China and India) are still going up.   An 85% cut in emissions from 1990 would reduce Europe's emissions to those seen in the year 1900.  Imagine if other countries were to do the same!

If every country committed to cutting emissions by just 3% a year, global emissions would halve by 2050 (still not zero, for sure, but better than the status quo) and fall by 90% by the year 2100.   And such a target is eminently achievable, if we switch electricity generation to renewables, switch our vehicle fleet to EVs, and replace gas and oil heating with heat pumps.

Source: Our World in Data

 

Does the news reflect what we die from?

 From Our World in Data

More than 80% of people — including surveyed Americans, Brits, Germans, and Italians — say they follow the news because they “want to know what is going on in the world around them.”1 It’s not just that people expect the news to inform them about what’s going on in the world. Most think that it does. When asked what emotions the news generates, “informed” was the most common response.2

This is what media outlets themselves promise to do. Here are several quotes from the New York Times’s mission statement:

“We seek the truth and help people understand the world. [...]

We help a global audience understand a vast and diverse world.”

However, as we’ll see in this article, the media focuses on a particular sliver of our world, leaving much of the “vast and diverse world” largely out of their reporting. We’ll investigate this through the lens of health, looking at causes of death and reporting in the United States.

As we’ll discuss, our point is not that we should want or expect the media’s coverage to perfectly match the real distribution of deaths, although we’d argue that it would be better if it were less skewed. We wrote this article so that you, the reader, are aware of a significant disconnect between what we often hear and what actually happens.

It’s easy to conflate what we see in the news with the reality of our world, and keeping this mismatch in mind can help you avoid falling into this trap.

We focused on causes of death and media coverage in the United States in 2023.

The full list of all causes of death is very long, and since many causes are very rare, we didn’t investigate all of them. But our analysis accounts for 76% of all deaths in the US in 2023.3 It includes the 12 leading causes of death in the US, plus homicide, drug overdoses, and terrorism, since they receive a lot of attention in the media.

We used data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to calculate each cause’s share of the total.4 We then compared this to the relative share of articles that mentioned these causes of death in three media outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the news website of Fox News. We selected these three because they are among the biggest national news organizations, are extremely popular, and are seen as being on different parts of the political spectrum.

To count the number of mentions, we relied on Media Cloud, an open-source platform regularly used for media analysis. In an extended methodology document, we provide many more details on how we constructed the data. Two things are important to mention here.

• For each cause of death, we included synonyms in our search. So, when searching for mentions of “homicide”, we also included mentions of related terms such as “murder”, “killer”, and other terms. For “heart disease”, we included terms like “heart attack”, “cardiac arrest”, “heart failure”, and many others.
• We only counted articles where a cause of death — or its related terms — was mentioned more than once. This ensures that our analysis is focused on reporting on causes of death rather than just articles that mention a cause of death in passing. Additionally, this approach reduces the number of false positives and noise in our results.

You can see the results of our analysis in the chart below.

There are two big takeaways from this analysis. The first one is that the actual distribution of deaths shown on the left is very different from the causes of death that the media talks about.

The second insight is how similar the distribution of coverage is between the three media outlets. While there are some differences (Fox News was a bit more likely to mention homicides, for example, while the NYT did the same for terrorism), these are much smaller than we might expect. While right- and left-wing media might differ in how they cover particular topics, what they choose to write or talk about is similar.

The insight in this comparison, then, is not about differences between partisan media. It’s about the difference between actual causes of death and what the news tells Americans about. Those differences — as we can see in the chart — are huge.

Heart disease and cancer accounted for 56% of deaths among these 15 causes, but together they received just 7% of the media coverage. Other chronic issues, such as strokes, respiratory problems, diabetes, and kidney and liver disease, were also very underrepresented in the news.

Rare — but dramatic — events such as homicides and terrorism received more than half of all media coverage, despite being much smaller causes of death in the US. Terrorism, in particular, is a very rare cause of death, with 16 deaths in 2023.5

click on the graphic to enlarge

Of course, news media are all about news --- and engagement. We're not interested in routine stuff. But an earthquake is news. A murder in your town is news. And so on. But we would do well to remember that the obsessions of the media do not really show what matters,

Have China's emissions peaked?

 From Carbon Brief

China’s CO2 emissions have now been flat or falling for 18 months, starting in March 2024. This trend continued in the third quarter of 2025, when emissions were unchanged year-on-year.

This picture is finely balanced, however, with contrasting trends in different sectors of the economy underlying the ongoing plateau in CO2 emissions, shown in the figure below.

China’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement, million tonnes of CO2, rolling 12-month totals until September 2025. Source: Emissions are estimated from National Bureau of Statistics data on production of different fuels and cement, China Customs data on imports and exports and WIND Information data on changes in inventories, applying emissions factors from China’s latest national greenhouse gas emissions inventory and annual emissions factors per tonne of cement production until 2024. Sector breakdown of coal consumption is estimated using coal consumption data from WIND Information and electricity data from the National Energy Administration. The consumption of petrol, diesel and jet fuel is adjusted to match quarterly totals estimated by Sinopec.

Reminder: There were covid lockdowns in 2020 and again in 2022 and 2023

Emissions from the production of cement and other building materials fell by 7% in the third quarter of 2025, while emissions from the metals industry fell 1%. This is due to the ongoing real-estate contraction, as the construction sector uses most of the country’s steel and cement output.

Emission reductions from steel production continued to lag the reductions in output, which fell 3%. This is because the fall in demand was absorbed by the lower-carbon electric-arc steelmakers, whereas carbon-intensive coal-based steel production was less affected.

China has struggled to increase the share of electric-arc steelmaking despite targets, due to the large capacity base and entrenched position of coal-based steelmaking crowding out the lower-emission producers.

Power-sector emissions were unchanged year-on-year in the third quarter, as strong growth from solar and wind generation, along with small increases from nuclear and hydro, nearly matched a rapid rise in demand.

Emissions from transport fell by 5% over the period, but oil consumption in other sectors grew by 10%, driven by chemical industry expansion. This resulted in a 2% rise in oil consumption overall.

Gas demand and emissions grew by 3% overall in the three-month period, with consumption in the power sector up by 9% and by 2% in other sectors.

In the power sector, China’s dominant source of CO2, emissions remained flat in the third quarter even as electricity demand grew strongly.

Electricity generation from solar and wind grew by 30%, with solar up 46% and wind power generation increasing 11%. With small increases from nuclear and hydropower, non-fossil power sources covered almost 90% of the increase in demand, even as demand growth accelerated to 6.1% in the third quarter, up from 3.7% in the first half of the year.

This is illustrated in the figure below, where the columns show the change in generation by each source of non-fossil power every quarter and the line shows the increase in electricity demand.

 

Columns: Year-on-year change in quarterly electricity generation from clean energy excluding hydro, terawatt hours. Solid and dashed line: Quarterly and average change in total electricity generation, TWh. Sources: China Electricity Council; Ember; analysis for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta.

The steady rise in renewables (bars) shown in the last chart contrasts with the big fluctuations in demand (grey line).  Part of the rise in demand in the latest quarter was due to electricity needed for air conditioning, because of near-record summer heat.  It's possible that demand growth will outpace the growth in supply from renewables next year.  But that will probably be the last time this happens, as the rise in output from renewables continues to increase.  

China's CO2 emissions won't drop fast for now.  But the fact that they have stabilised, or perhaps even peaked, means that world emissions have prolly peaked too, because China is responsible for 1/3rd of global emissions.  

Source: Our World in Data

As developing countries embrace EVs and solar, because they are cheap and getting cheaper, emissions will decline.  What about the USA and Trump?  Yes, de-carbonisation there is likely coming to a juddering halt.  But the country is only responsible for 13% of global emissions.  Everywhere else, driven by economics, renewables are winning the race.

Don't get too excited.  We have to cut CO2 emissions to near zero to stop temperatures rising.  We're a long way from that, though we have at least started down that road.  We need to speed it up if we are to avoid 3 degrees of temperature rise by 2100.  Cutting emissions by at least 5% a year should be our target.  If we did that, we'd cut emissions by 75% by 2050, which would be where they were in 1960.

Solar doubling every 3 years

 From EV Curve Futurist

We’re about to hit the phase of the S-curve where the world goes from “fast” to “holy shit.” Solar’s doubling on a 24-month cycle — but the real elephant in the room is #BESS. As storage scales, the grid stops being a bottleneck and starts becoming a battery-backed solar engine.

Solar is by far the cheapest source of electricity. And the plunge in battery costs means that it can now provide what used to be called baseload power, cheap and carbon-free. It's doubling every 3 years (the chart says 2 years but the text says 3, and Our World in Data also says 3, so I'll go with 3). In 2024 solar provided 7% of the world's electricity, Total electricity demand rose by 2582 TWh over the last 3 years, while solar alone rose by 1077 TWh. With solar doubling every 3 years, solar should rise by ~2100 TWh over the next 3. Wind rose by 640 TWh over 3 years. If demand grows by 10% over the next 3 years, the rise in supply from wind and solar will meet 96% of the rise in total electricity demand. And when solar doubles again, over the subsequent 3 years, demand for electricity from coal power stations will plunge. Emissions from electricity generation will have peaked.

China's ICEV sales peaked in 2017

 (ICEV = internal combustion engined vehicle)

From Our World in Data

Electric cars have become incredibly popular in China. In 2020, one in eighteen new cars sold was electric. By 2024, this had increased to one in two.

This growth has pushed down sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, which run mostly on petrol. As you can see in the chart, sales of ICE cars peaked in 2017 and have declined since.

The world reached peak ICE car sales just one year later.

The displacement of petrol cars with electric ones is vital in decarbonizing transport. The rise of electric vehicles in China means the IEA expects oil demand to peak earlier than previously projected.

Here, “electric cars” include fully battery-electric ones and plug-in hybrids. In China, 56% of them were fully battery-electric.

Track data on the evolution of electric cars across the world

 My forecast:  EVs and PHEVs will reach 90% market share in China by end 2029.

Solar overtakes gas in Hungary

 From Our World in Data

A decade ago, solar power was almost non-existent in Hungary. It generated just 0.2% of the country’s electricity. Nuclear, coal, and gas dominated the grid.

But in the last ten years, things have changed a lot. You can see this in the chart: solar power has boomed, and now supplies one-quarter of Hungary’s electrical power. In 2024, it overtook gas to become the second-largest source of electricity, after nuclear.

Coal power has been largely displaced, first by gas and now by solar. This has helped cut the country’s CO2 emissions by 45% since 1990.

I discuss some of the issues with increasing solar in Hungary here.   Hungary is at latitude 47 N, which means the swing between insolation in summer and winter is significant, which in turn means that Hungary requires alternative energy sources in winter.  

As part of the pan-Europe electric grid, it can buy electricity from the European grid, which has plenty of wind.  Wind tends to be negatively correlated with solar, so there is more wind in winter, when solar is low, and less wind in summer when solar is strong.  However, although solar is going to get much cheaper, the share of solar may be limited by European generation capacity between November and March.  Hungary is also installing more nuclear, but there are limits to what extent nuclear can be ramped down in summer, when there is a surplus of solar.

Emissions have peaked

Two recent graphs, from different articles, have given me hope that we might yet avoid catastrophic global warming.  The first chart come from Carbon Brief, which I referenced here.

Let's dig deeper into the chart.  

It shows the smoothed year-on-year change in electricity demand in China, and the year-on-year change in the supply of electricity, broken down into fossil fuels (mostly coal, but some gas) and clean energy.  Over the last 20 years, there have been 5 times when production of electricity from fossil fuels has fallen: in 2009 (the GFC); in 2012/13 (the Euro crisis); in 2016 (a global mid-cycle correction which was quite severe in China); in 2022 (Covid lock-downs); and this year.

This year is the first time that fossil fuel production has fallen when electricity demand growth is strong.   Notice how the size of the pale blue bars (renewables) has got bigger and bigger, as China has installed exponetially increasing quantities of wind, solar and batteries.  Second, notice how electricity demand has grown, as (a) the economy grew, and (b) EV sales exploded, with each peak tending to be higher than the previous one.

Right now, an annual expansion in clean energy production of +-600 terawatt-hours (TWh) is enough to more than satisfy demand, causing fossil fuel generation to decline.   The 20-year average annual increase in demand is 400 TWh, while over the last 8 years or so, it looks about 500 TWh.  Obviously, if China's growth accelerates back to the heady rates on the early 2000s (10% a year), given how much richer China is now than then, the increase in demand could easily exceed 800 TWh.  However, growth is unlikely to accelerate back to those levels  The recent GDP trend growth rate is about 7%, and, in my judgment, slowing, as China deals with its property crisis.  (Also, China overstates its GDP growth data, so the real growth rate is lower.  The data for growth in electricity demand and supply are better quality.)  

The second chart came from an article by the ABC,  which I  commented on here.

The projected increase in new clean energy generation capacity for the next 2 years is about 600 TWh.  In other words, it's now more than the average rise in electricity demand.  

Of course, there is an economic cycle, with demand rising at 800 TWh in boom years, and reducing to 200 to 400 TWh in slower years.  So we may have a pattern of  falling emissions during low-growth years, followed by modest rises when the economy is stronger.  Yet this doesn't take into account the exponential growth in new wind and solar output over the last 7 years.   It's risen from 200 TWh to 600 TWh in just five years.  And although the forecast for the next two years is for only limited growth, the costs of solar and batteries contimue to decline rapidly.  The exponential growth will continue.  By 2028, new clean energy output will be increasing by 800 TWh a year, or more, so that even in high growth years, Chinese emissions from electricity generation will be falling.  

China is by far the world's largest emitter of CO2, causing over 25% of global emissions, compared with the US at 18%, and the EU at 17%.   Europe's and the USA's emissions peaked years ago:

Source: Our World in Data

What this means is this: if China's emissions have peaked, global emissions have probably peaked too.

It's true that the Trump administration has embarked on an utterly demented attempt to return the USA to the 1950s,  but cheap Chinese solar panels, batteries and EVs, are persuading the rest of the world (for example, Pakistan)---the other 80% of emissions---to switch to clean energy.  Plus, Trump's high-handed trashing of tariff and trade agreements means that the USA's opposition to carbon border taxes will not be effective.  If the USA can arbitrarily raise tariffs, then so can the rest of the world.  And they will.  Moreover, renewables are much cheaper than fossil fuels.  As electricity prices soar in the USA, cooler heads might prevail.

The peak in global emissions doesn't mean global temperatures will stop rising.  Emissions will have to fall by 90% for that to happen.  But what these devlopments do mean is that emissions are now in secular decline.  And the sustained fall in the costs of clean energy means that the decline will accelerate as renewables and EVs get ever cheaper.  As the impacts of catastrophic global heating worsen, the world will take stronger and stronger measures to slash emissions.

Temperatures will go on rising, but for the first time, it looks as if, by the 2040s, the decade-by-decade increases will start falling.

China's oil demand to fall

In this piece, I talked about how it had taken 15 years for plug-ins to reach 10 million total sales in China, and about how this year, another 10 million would be sold.   The S-Curve in action. The chart below, from Our World in Data, shows the percentage of plug-in (EV and PHEV) cars on the road in China, but it only goes to the end of 2023.  Let's assume, conservatively, that the percentage rose again by 3% during 2024.  This means that plug-in share of the car fleet reached 11% at the end of 2024, and will rise to 22% at the end of 2025.  That means that the demand for oil in China to fuel cars will fall by 11% this year.  That is not the only end-use of China's local and imported oil, because oil is used in petro-chemical manufacture, for heavy-duty vehicles, and for shipping, domestic and foreign.   I don't know how much these are, but at the very least, Chinese oil demand has probably stopped growing.  China contributed much of the growth in global oil demand in the previous 20 years.

This is the impact just in China.  But plug-ins outside the USA have reached price parity with ICEVs.  As they fall in price, their sales will grow faster and faster.   For the world as a whole, plug-ins reached 3% of the car fleet at the end of 2023, so perhaps it reached 4 or 4.5% by end 2024.  It's an S-curve, and will continue to rise exponentially.   

Global oil demand has peaked.  Initially, the decline will be small--1% a year for vehicle fuel, which is about 40% of total oil demand -- but it is likely to accelerate every year thereafter.

Last 12 months hottest ever

The last 12 months have been the hottest ever recorded.  

This chart is from Our World in Data.  Look how the temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere have been rising almost twice as fast as in the Southern Hemisphere.   In fact, they are now more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  We have passed the 2 degrees "guideline" in the Northern Hemisphere.  

This is a terrifying chart.  After the last El Niño, temperatures were supposed to level off or even drop.  But they haven't.   

You would expect our leaders, political and corporate, to be concerned, to be panicking, even.  Yet they are not.  And a supine populace just accepts this.  

It's no good expecting anything to change unless we do it.  We can change our personal consumption to reduce emissions.  For example, we can become vegetarian.  We can buy an EV or a hybrid.  We can replace our gas/oil heating with heat pumps.   We can buy our electricity from green suppliers.  We can put solar panels on our roofs.   We can fly less.  Take public transport instead of driving everywhere.  

Of course, we might not be able to do all these things.  Solar panels have an upfront cost, even if you'll save by reducing how much electricity you'll buy later on.  Or there might not be green electricity supplies in your area.  But you can eat less meat and drink less cow's milk.  That won't add to your costs.  

And we can vote.   We can agitate and write letters to our local councils.  We can support parties which make climate change their priority.

It's up to us.  Don't shrug and say, "it's too hard."  Because if we don't act, we face imminent catastrophe. 

These anomalies are not relative to the period 1850 to 1899, which usually what is defined as being pre-industrial, but to the period 1861-1890.   The shape of the chart won't change, but the Y-scale will shift a bit.

The world is better

 From Our World in Data

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time. Understanding this is key to solving big global problems. We believe data & research can help us understand both the problems we face & the progress that’s possible.

 

Solar is king

From Our World in Data

 

In 2004, it took the world a year to add one gigawatt of solar capacity.  Now it takes a day.  By 2030, it will take 2 hours.

Note log scale.  With a log scale, constant rates of change show as a straight line.

Cherry blossoms

 Hat tip to Ryan Katz-Rosene

It's not just temperature records which show that global warming is occurring.  In the chart above, you can clearly see how cherry blossom season is coming (on average)  earlier and earlier each year, after a thousand years where the average moved up and down around a straight line.