Emissions budgets are calculated using accounting best practice, which are not designed for full transparency (ref: the creative accounting used to obscure every financial scandal and economic bubble). THIS is the curve that matters:
These two views are not necessarily in conflict: atmospheric CO2 concentration is (vagely/roughly) the integral of emissions. So if emissions are basically flat (-0.4%) you'd still see atmospheric levels rise.
One of the things that COVID make crystal clear to me is that radical changes for the better are much more straightforward than people think, and the only reason they don't happen is the people in charge couldn't be bothered.
There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar. China is losing money on panels at the moment they have such production capacity. Its free money for anyone country who wants to do it.
it's not that the people in charge can't be bothered. the people really in charge see the status quo as a profitable situation. it'a "good" for them and bad for everyone else.
To be fair. The government tried in my country, and it completely backfired. Because the power grid cannot handle the current load anymore. We've had more frequent blackouts because of it.
Because of this issue, starting next year I will be paying my power company money for surplus solar energy that I give back. Unfortunately, batteries are expensive and impractical to install in our houses.
So now, it's not that popular to buy solar panels unless you can also immediately finance the batteries.
I very much think nobody can be bothered, not just the people in charge. We're all the same people and if there was an actual want by the regular person, the ones in charge in most of the world would be influenced enough to either want it too or have to do something
I, along with many other people, have fitted solar panels on my roof, installed a battery in my loft and replaced my gas boiler with a heat pump. Lots of people are bothered.
Not the person your replied to, but I'm in the same position.
No? Unless you consider an HOA the government. Why would the make this hard? I now quite a few that will subsidize it. Fill in some paperwork, submit it along with the invoice and wait a few weeks/months for some free money back.
Romantic model of people being heard. 500M speaks more than a single vote. Its a shame. This already disproves your model - however, we should move towards it!
It was only for the better if you were in an industry like ours, which even benefited and also allows remote work.
For a huge number of people it ruined their lives. Which is why it’s sensitive to this day. Like the financial bailouts there was a sense that some people benefited while others got ruined.
Bad example to invoke for “beneficial change.” If that’s the answer then it can’t be done in a democracy.
The event after which dozens of governments were destabilized and incumbents were ousted from power all over the world… convinced you that radical change is easy…?
The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
Leaving aside whether they were, and whether all countries are necessarily equally unstable.
Would that not have been different? I certainly haven't heard of a suspected coup by disgruntled democrats and/or minorities.
I suspect the coup you allude to would have amounted to a coup of the people in power to stay in power. Not a popular, armed uprising. So I don't see how it's relevant to the point you are trying to make.
Sure, if you’re willing to trample on civil rights & use extraordinary social pressure to deride previously mundane activities as equivalent to murder!
I'm surely not and still I think it's overestimated, just like the climate crisis is downplayed, like the health effects of tobbaco, lead and asbestos were hidden, because it hurts quarterly reports to focus effort and thus money on things other than making more money.
The pandemic was easy for me to live through because I'm just like that; and it was easy for the disease to evolve in a wet market*…
… but that whole "flatten the curve" thing was because it came within a hair's breadth of overwhelming national healthcare systems and this was obviously a risk to be mitigated before the event.
* this happened in wet markets many times, not just COVID; and this will happen again if steps aren't taken to mitigate that, no matter what you may think about lab leaks which do also happen sometimes because humans are fallible and do make mistakes on occasion.
Given how the much-vaunted "checks and balances" seem to be, well, rather unbalanced ... and how the country is so, so, partisan over "their own side" that politics is mainly theatre... It seems like the US doesn't really need any italics in that statement. From an outside perspective, it seems fairly vulnerable to fascism actually.
In any event, over here in the UK there's a real wind-power push (with the surrounding water being so shallow that off-shore wind-farms are very possible), but even in these extended latitudes, solar power is viable and the government currently make them VAT-free for installs, with no planning requirements because they fall under 'permitted development'. Renewable energy was at ~56% Q2 2026.
The UK government set up 'Great British Energy' with £8.3B of funding for coinvestment with private firms in various clean energy generation. I think the UK is definitely doing its part.
First past the posts for a nationwide position (president) ensures two party polarization even without any external influences (and there are many). In the UK (and Canada) you use fptp for the lower house but due to regional differences that can still create multiple parties and more viewpoints within parties. Regional differences get obliterated with a nationwide fptp position, making every act of compromise a betrayal.
Watching the last decade of American politics has led me to absolutely despise the culture of learned helplessness and attitude of "everything is someone else's fault."
You're absolutely right about the first part. Radical change is much more straightforward. At the individual level there are absolutely things that can be done that are pretty easy Consuming less and recycling more is a huge one. But if the attitude is, "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave," then that's a losing culture. The last American election reassured me that indeed, even if the elite class wants something, no amount of money will override the will of the people. The people just don't want this badly enough.
Which people are you talking about? The ones that voted? The problem with American politics (and Australia provides an easy point to compare against) is that the young do not vote. Consequently, they have no power, and no one in charge is inclined to do anything that will have long-term impact.
> There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar.
is it intentional hyperbole and you mean something else, or are you making exactly this kind of claim?
because there are many many caveats to add here (even if we go with plan that specifically governments should be doing it)
For start: land with legitimate environmental protection, land where connecting power would be ruinously expensive, area likely to be destroyed by floods and landslides or scheduled to be overbuilt and so on...
It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”
The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology
deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in
global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”
> but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.
Oh, but it is. The two most recent major conflicts resulted in fossil fuel related infrastructure to be destroyed - particularly Qatar had a huge chunk of its natural gas infrastructure irrecoverably damaged.
It's going to take close to two years to rebuild it, but that can only really start after the hostilities cease.
On a different front datacentre buildout created a huge backlog for natural gas turbines, making them for the first time everunattractive for peak shaving compared to batteries.
> If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away
Unfortunately the opposite might happen in the next years. It seems this year China is starting to export less solar panels: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-18/china-sol... . Despite the low prices, some countries are investing less in solar panels and wind turbines for many different reasons. Other technologies might come but are slower to develop.
We don’t need to invest an ever increasing amount in solar panels to transition because existing panels degrade slowly. Scale things out another 20 years and at current rates solar will have squeezed out just about everything else.
Sure, we can always move faster but hydro and wind limit how much solar we actually need. Batteries have cycle limits so even if wind is unreliable producing power at 2AM just to increase battery lifetimes makes sense.
20TW is roughly current world marketed energy consumption. But, on Earth, solar power plants have a capacity factor around 20%, so you need 100TW of solar panels to produce those 20TW. Moreover, we should expect human energy consumption to continue to grow, not suddenly become constant, especially since solar energy is so much cheaper than older sources of energy; 20 years from now we might need four times that much, depending on how AI works out. In that case you'd need to produce about 400TW÷20 years = 20TW/year.
Hydropower is already scaled nearly to its limits, and wind energy is useful and important, but is dropping in cost much more slowly than solar, and it's tapping a much smaller resource.
So, at the current production rate, we can produce solar cells that deliver 20TW/year in about 15 years. Eventually, we’ll have to replace lots of them, but given that the rapid growth of installed panels makes the majority of panels new, I think we can mostly ignore that in this calculation.
> 20TW is roughly current world marketed energy consumption. But, on Earth, solar power plants have a capacity factor around 20%, so you need 100TW of solar panels to produce those 20TW.
This confuses primary energy with work. 1 TWh of solar can displace multiple TWh of primary energy. This depends on details, of course; in some cases it makes sense to directly convert solar output resistively to heat even if that takes a second law loss.
This is a good point; in particular, electrification of transport will reduce the figure substantially, especially because car engines are usually less than 30% efficient. But electrical power is already about a third of the total, isn't it?
CO2 emissions will decrease in the next decades but mostly because of demographics. People get older and tend to pollute less, growth is slower. It happened to Europe and it'll happen to China sooner than we think when we look at their pyramid of age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.
(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.
The world population is still increasing in 2027. And the total population is pretty much irrelevant anyways. Rich people emit so much more CO2 than poor people that they number of poor people is just a rounding error. The rich are getting richer and poor people are continuing to join the middle class. Carbon intensive activities such as flying are increasing at a rapid rate. People are flying more in 2026 despite the cost of fuel going up.
There are other reasons. Solar and batteries now have become so cheap that there is financial incentive to use them. The war on Iran has shown the volatility of fossil fuels, adding political and strategic incentive. More and more energy use is electrified (transportation, heating), which further reduces primary energy usage.
All that builds a momentum that actually makes me somewhat optimistic that we have at least reached peak emissions.
China is doing real things to move their transportation to battery electric too, including big trucks. They have infrastructure to swap several hundred kwh battery packs, the truck can be back on the road in about 5 minutes.
It’s not coordinated action, it’s primarily massive renewable and nuclear buildouts in China, which will hopefully be followed by similar buildouts all throughout Asia.
If we are just leveling off that’s a cause for celebration.
I realize anything other than doom wallowing is verboten on the Internet but it is a massive achievement, especially since global economic growth continues which means we are actually switching (renewables, nuclear, EVs) and decoupling (less energy per $ gdp).
It's not always directly counted, but we count CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to check CO2 emissions and we're able to attribute a large part of these emissions to countries. It's why it takes a long time to have accurate data on CO2 emissions. I'm not sure we even have the data for 2025 yet, they're usually released at the end of the next year. So obviously for 2026 it's only a vague estimate, we'll know at the end of 2027.
Burning a refinery likely reduces emissions, because the fuel this refinery produced would be burned anyway, and the destroyed refinery will cease producing fossil fuels. So it wouldn't be a surprise if all the refineries destroyed this year in Russia and in the Middle East contributed to a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Nitpick, some of the refineries products (~10-20%) are not burned but used to make plastics and other chemicals. I agree though, the effect of destroying the refinery, pushing up prices thus reducing demand dominates.
Ultimately most of those products get burned too. Waste-to-energy burns trash to make heat and electricity. It's an improvement over just straight up burning the oil but not by much.
Pushing up prices on new plastic does make recycling more economic but most of those products still get burned. If you're lucky on average they make it round the loop once, maybe your mountain dew bottle makes a plastic trash bag and then we burn the bag.
Do you think the oil that Russia was producing was going to be stored underground, or ...burned in combustion engines therefore releasing the Co2 anyway?
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html
The Iran blip is clearly seen, but it's just that - a blip. Levels continue to steadily rise.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar. China is losing money on panels at the moment they have such production capacity. Its free money for anyone country who wants to do it.
Because of this issue, starting next year I will be paying my power company money for surplus solar energy that I give back. Unfortunately, batteries are expensive and impractical to install in our houses.
So now, it's not that popular to buy solar panels unless you can also immediately finance the batteries.
No? Unless you consider an HOA the government. Why would the make this hard? I now quite a few that will subsidize it. Fill in some paperwork, submit it along with the invoice and wait a few weeks/months for some free money back.
For a huge number of people it ruined their lives. Which is why it’s sensitive to this day. Like the financial bailouts there was a sense that some people benefited while others got ruined.
Bad example to invoke for “beneficial change.” If that’s the answer then it can’t be done in a democracy.
The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
Would that not have been different? I certainly haven't heard of a suspected coup by disgruntled democrats and/or minorities.
I suspect the coup you allude to would have amounted to a coup of the people in power to stay in power. Not a popular, armed uprising. So I don't see how it's relevant to the point you are trying to make.
The pandemic was easy for me to live through because I'm just like that; and it was easy for the disease to evolve in a wet market*…
… but that whole "flatten the curve" thing was because it came within a hair's breadth of overwhelming national healthcare systems and this was obviously a risk to be mitigated before the event.
* this happened in wet markets many times, not just COVID; and this will happen again if steps aren't taken to mitigate that, no matter what you may think about lab leaks which do also happen sometimes because humans are fallible and do make mistakes on occasion.
In any event, over here in the UK there's a real wind-power push (with the surrounding water being so shallow that off-shore wind-farms are very possible), but even in these extended latitudes, solar power is viable and the government currently make them VAT-free for installs, with no planning requirements because they fall under 'permitted development'. Renewable energy was at ~56% Q2 2026.
The UK government set up 'Great British Energy' with £8.3B of funding for coinvestment with private firms in various clean energy generation. I think the UK is definitely doing its part.
Watching the last decade of American politics has led me to absolutely despise the culture of learned helplessness and attitude of "everything is someone else's fault."
You're absolutely right about the first part. Radical change is much more straightforward. At the individual level there are absolutely things that can be done that are pretty easy Consuming less and recycling more is a huge one. But if the attitude is, "we can't or won't do it individually. We need someone to make us behave," then that's a losing culture. The last American election reassured me that indeed, even if the elite class wants something, no amount of money will override the will of the people. The people just don't want this badly enough.
is it intentional hyperbole and you mean something else, or are you making exactly this kind of claim?
because there are many many caveats to add here (even if we go with plan that specifically governments should be doing it)
For start: land with legitimate environmental protection, land where connecting power would be ruinously expensive, area likely to be destroyed by floods and landslides or scheduled to be overbuilt and so on...
It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”
The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”
Oh, but it is. The two most recent major conflicts resulted in fossil fuel related infrastructure to be destroyed - particularly Qatar had a huge chunk of its natural gas infrastructure irrecoverably damaged.
It's going to take close to two years to rebuild it, but that can only really start after the hostilities cease.
On a different front datacentre buildout created a huge backlog for natural gas turbines, making them for the first time everunattractive for peak shaving compared to batteries.
Unfortunately the opposite might happen in the next years. It seems this year China is starting to export less solar panels: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-18/china-sol... . Despite the low prices, some countries are investing less in solar panels and wind turbines for many different reasons. Other technologies might come but are slower to develop.
Sure, we can always move faster but hydro and wind limit how much solar we actually need. Batteries have cycle limits so even if wind is unreliable producing power at 2AM just to increase battery lifetimes makes sense.
According to the IEA, we currently have only about 1.5TW/year of manufacturing capacity: https://www.solarplaza.com/resource/13581/article-global-sol...
Hydropower is already scaled nearly to its limits, and wind energy is useful and important, but is dropping in cost much more slowly than solar, and it's tapping a much smaller resource.
So, at the current production rate, we can produce solar cells that deliver 20TW/year in about 15 years. Eventually, we’ll have to replace lots of them, but given that the rapid growth of installed panels makes the majority of panels new, I think we can mostly ignore that in this calculation.
This confuses primary energy with work. 1 TWh of solar can displace multiple TWh of primary energy. This depends on details, of course; in some cases it makes sense to directly convert solar output resistively to heat even if that takes a second law loss.
I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.
(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.
All that builds a momentum that actually makes me somewhat optimistic that we have at least reached peak emissions.
I realize anything other than doom wallowing is verboten on the Internet but it is a massive achievement, especially since global economic growth continues which means we are actually switching (renewables, nuclear, EVs) and decoupling (less energy per $ gdp).
Now for the other side of the curve!
Same with burning tankers in Iran...
Burning a refinery likely reduces emissions, because the fuel this refinery produced would be burned anyway, and the destroyed refinery will cease producing fossil fuels. So it wouldn't be a surprise if all the refineries destroyed this year in Russia and in the Middle East contributed to a reduction in CO2 emissions.
Pushing up prices on new plastic does make recycling more economic but most of those products still get burned. If you're lucky on average they make it round the loop once, maybe your mountain dew bottle makes a plastic trash bag and then we burn the bag.