Chris Turner\u2019s latest book, How to Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World, won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.<\/p>\n
Ten years after its signing, the Paris Agreement represents a historic pivot point. It does so even \u2013 maybe especially \u2013 as the world\u2019s climate leaders will soon converge on a city in the Brazilian Amazon<\/a> under a dark cloud of gloom to negotiate its next phase.<\/p>\n Global greenhouse gas emissions are at best flattening<\/a>. The world\u2019s second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter<\/a>, the United States, led by a political party that is among other things the world\u2019s largest and most influential climate denial group, is not even sending<\/a> an official delegation to the meeting. Even some supposed proponents of strong climate action are surveying the chaotic political landscape and talking about managing expectations downward<\/a>.<\/p>\n Paris, nonetheless, was a landmark. The world has been grappling with its response to the existential challenge of climate change since the late 1980s, and that sporadic, uneven battle \u2013 or the first 40 years of it, at least \u2013 will forever be divided into two chapters: \u201cbefore Paris\u201d and \u201cafter Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n The gathering in Paris of the 195 eventual signatories<\/a> to the agreement \u2013 delegates from 194 nation-states, plus the European Union, which is to say pretty much the entire world \u2013 in the final weeks of 2015 seemed, at the time, as much an act of desperation as a statement of great purpose. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n A melting planet in an ice cream cone is held up during the Global Climate March in Berlin in 2015.JOHN MACDOUGALL\/AFP<\/p>\n The United Nations climate-treaty process, launched in 1992 with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and adopted in 1997 as the Kyoto Protocol, appeared to be hopelessly stalled. Kyoto\u2019s signatories had nearly all failed to meet their legally binding reduction targets on greenhouse gas emissions \u2013 and had not been punished in any meaningful way for doing so. The attempt to reboot Kyoto\u2019s ambitions at the 2009 climate summit had ended in sufficient shambles that the press coverage seemed to indicate that the resulting agreement\u2019s official name was the Weak Copenhagen Accord. <\/p>\n Even a relatively optimistic preview at the time (from the Union of Concerned Scientists) sized up COP21 in Paris \u2013 the 21st Conference of the Parties, as these confabs are officially and somewhat clunkily known \u2013 as the \u201clast, best chance to save the planet<\/a>.\u201d The Paris summit seemed at least as likely to be the end of a failing project as the dawn of a new age.<\/p>\n And then, miraculously, a real deal emerged. Not only did the Paris Agreement<\/a> unite the world in pursuit of a legitimately ambitious climate goal \u2013 cutting emissions sufficiently to limit planetary warming to \u201cwell below 2\u00b0C\u201d by 2100, with an ultimate goal of stabilizing at 1.5 C \u2013 but it ushered in a decade of unprecedented commitment to action.<\/p>\n Before Paris, \u201cnet zero\u201d didn\u2019t even exist as a concept. Net-zero emissions pledges now cover more than 80 per cent of the global economy<\/a>. Before Paris, renewable energy was a marginal industry still shrouded in doubt. After Paris, it has become the primary source of new electricity on the planet. Before Paris, electric vehicles were a luxury, possibly never to become mainstream transport. After Paris, they would come to account for one out of every five<\/a> new private vehicles sold worldwide inside a decade.<\/p>\n There are countless data points like these to affix to the Paris signpost 10 years on. How about this one to summarize them all: In the first six months of 2025, for the first time ever, emissions-free power generated more of the world\u2019s electricity<\/a> than climate-wrecking coal.<\/p>\n Even the grim bottom line \u2013 the Earth\u2019s warming trajectory \u2013 has seen measurable progress. When delegates landed in Paris, the business-as-usual scenario for the planet was racing toward an increase in average global temperatures of more than 4 C by 2100<\/a>. That was in the truly apocalyptic range of outcomes. Today, the warming curve with current climate pledges in place worldwide has already been bent to around 2.5 C<\/a> \u2013 still very bad news, but not an on-ramp to Fury Road.<\/p>\n Did the diligent pursuit of the NDCs adopted in Paris \u2013 Nationally Determined Contributions, more clunky UN jargon to describe the emissions cuts pledged by the agreement\u2019s signatories \u2013 generate all that progress? Of course not. But the genius of the Paris Agreement is that it implicitly acknowledged that it could never do so. <\/p>\n As one of its main architects, the French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana, explained on the occasion of its fifth anniversary<\/a>, the agreement was designed to be capable of adapting to technological changes, shifting economic tides, uneven levels of income and development among the countries it bound together. <\/p>\n And more than anything, the Paris Agreement acknowledged that the core mechanism driving climate action would not be a sanctions regime enforced by carefully grading 195 emissions levels year by year and issuing climate traffic tickets, but rather the creation of a sense of indomitable momentum behind the global shift from dirty to clean energy. \u201cThe belief that the transition is inevitable is the mechanism itself,\u201d Dr. Tubiana said.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Oxfam activists protesting in Belem, Brazil, on Wednesday wear oversized masks representing Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Argentina’s President Javier Milei, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa and Prime Minister Mark Carney.MAURO PIMENTEL\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n That mechanism is working better than ever as the world\u2019s climate negotiators gather in Brazil. This remains not nearly as widely understood as it should be by political and business leaders and the general public alike: The transition is now inevitable. The clean economy is winning. And assessing this state of play clearly will be absolutely vital for navigating the next 10 years and beyond on a course that leads to lasting stability and prosperity.<\/p>\n Supercharged natural disasters make more headlines and the oil and gas industry and its political allies often make more noise, but the biggest climate story of the past 10 years is the simply staggering speed at which the global energy transition has zoomed from margin to mainstream. The data points are again many, but the blinding pace of growth in solar power worldwide makes the case most emphatically. When climate-treaty delegates gathered in Paris in 2015, there were roughly 225 gigawatts<\/a> of solar electricity capacity installed globally. In 2024 alone, nearly triple that amount \u2013 about 600 GW <\/a>\u2013 was added to the world\u2019s grids. Put another way, the first 1,000 GW of solar power took 40 years to come online; the second thousand was installed in the past two years. <\/p>\n There are myriad other ways to illustrate the energy transition\u2019s growth since Paris. Sales of electric vehicles, for example, have increased 3,300 per cent in the past decade<\/a>. They are expected to make up more than 40 per cent of all new private vehicle sales by 2030<\/a>. Renewable energy accounted for 92 per cent<\/a> of the world\u2019s new power installed in 2024. Battery storage \u2013 crucial for balancing the intermittent availability of sun and wind \u2013 nearly doubled in capacity worldwide in 2024<\/a>. This is a statistical cross-section of a new global energy economy.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a common caveat, sometimes phrased in the form of a categorical rebuttal. For all its undeniable momentum, the world continues to run mostly on fossil fuels \u2013 about 80 per cent<\/a> of the world\u2019s primary energy is still derived from oil, gas and coal. This is undeniable. But it masks the pace and scale of change now under way.<\/p>\n \u201cPrimary energy\u201d is an energy wonk\u2019s term, referring to all the energy inputs in a recklessly wasteful system built mostly to the specifications of its fossil fuel incumbents. But clean power is intrinsically much more efficient than fossil fuel. <\/p>\n Consider, for example, the conversion of energy input into useful output as conducted by a 75-watt incandescent light bulb and a 10-watt LED bulb. Both provide the same service, but the LED bulb demands 95 per cent less primary energy to do the job.<\/p>\n Similar efficiency factors govern electric motors vs. internal combustion engines and heat pumps vs. gas furnaces. Factor in these built-in efficiency improvements, and fossil fuel\u2019s share of primary energy drops to 68 per cent. After little more than a single decade of concerted effort, emissions-free sources already meet one-third of the world\u2019s energy needs. And that share has never been growing faster.<\/p>\n These calculations (and the light-bulb example) came to me from energy analyst Michael Liebriech<\/a>, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance<\/a> \u2013 among the only energy analysis firms that has come close to accurately predicting the energy transition\u2019s swift pace of growth in recent years. Mr. Liebriech refers to the assumption that clean power must replace each and every last watt of dirty power, rather than finding smarter and more efficient ways of using energy, as the \u201cprimary energy fallacy.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Liebriech has been attempting to correct this fallacy for a few years now. His most recent effort came in response to an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs this spring titled \u201cThe Troubled Energy Transition<\/a>.\u201d One of the writers of the piece was Daniel Yergin, the author of a definitive history of the oil business and co-founder of the energy consultancy that has long overseen CERAWeek<\/a>, one of the industry\u2019s most influential international conferences.<\/p>\n In the essay, Mr. Yergin and his colleagues mount several angles of attack on the idea that the clean economy will supplant fossil fuels in any meaningful way, with primary energy demand at the centre of their argument. As impressive as the renewable energy industry\u2019s recent expansion might be, they note that the share of primary energy contributed by fossil fuels has only declined from 85 to 80 per cent. Mr. Yergin and his colleagues take this as definitive evidence that renewables will never significantly erode demand for fossil fuels but will only ever be \u201cadditive,\u201d bringing a share of clean energy to the global mix sufficient to meet the continued growth in energy demand but no more.<\/p>\n This is a somewhat fair assessment of the energy transition\u2019s efforts \u2013 so far. The growth in renewable electricity generating capacity worldwide is now roughly equal to the increase in global electricity demand<\/a>. The growth rate of renewables, however, is not static but steadily increasing. It will soon overtake the growth in demand. \u201cIn any scenario in which clean energy grows faster than energy demand over a number of decades,\u201d Mr. Liebreich writes<\/a>, \u201cfossil fuels are squeezed out of the system.\u201d (This has begun to happen already \u2013 Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that nearly two million barrels of oil per day in demand have already been eliminated by EV use<\/a> and forecasts that this will expand to more than five million by 2030<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Mr. Yergin\u2019s offhand dismissal of clean power earned an even sharper rebuttal from the analysts at Ember, a prominent energy think tank focused on tracking the growth of the energy transition. In a blog post, Ember analysts Kingsmill Bond, Sam Butler-Sloss and Daan Walter dismissed Mr. Yergin\u2019s primary energy argument as backward-looking, noting that his suggestion that renewables can only be additive had already been disproven by the decline of coal power in much of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main mistake,\u201d they wrote<\/a>, \u201cis a failure to understand what is happening outside the fossil fuel system and beyond the United States.\u201d By which they mainly meant China. And this point is worth unpacking, because it explains the much deeper divide in fundamental world view that has emerged since Paris.<\/p>\n Ember\u2019s response to Mr. Yergin was posted at The Electrotech Revolution<\/a>, a blog where several of the organization\u2019s analysts have been assembling a comprehensive argument about the full import of the energy transition. I\u2019ll confess my bias: I\u2019ve been tracking the transition\u2019s emergence myself for 20 years, and the Ember crew\u2019s blog is the best sustained analysis I\u2019ve yet encountered for capturing the full scale of what I\u2019ve been witnessing. <\/p>\n From the first time I set foot on a Danish island that had entirely eliminated its carbon footprint in 2005, I have watched the energy transition\u2019s growth blow past skeptics and overwhelm doubters, turning in one record-breaking year of growth after another as the supposed experts in the incumbent energy business continually underestimated its potential. (The IEA\u2019s World Energy Outlook for 2022<\/a> \u2013 a mere three years ago! \u2013 foresaw new solar capacity exceeding 400 GW per year some time after 2030, a growth milestone the solar business zipped past in 2024.)<\/p>\n The cumulative analysis at The Electrotech Revolution can definitely not be accused of underestimation. In a series of posts over the past several months \u2013 as well as an expansive, data-laden slide deck, the preferred method of argumentation for the serious energy wonk \u2013 the Ember analysts have laid out a thorough case to justify their blog\u2019s title.<\/p>\n The energy transition, they argue<\/a>, involves not just the substitution of dirty fuel for clean fuel but rather the construction of \u201ca fundamentally better and more efficient energy system organized around electricity.\u201d The transformative power of this new energy system \u2013 which they call \u201celectrotech\u201d \u2013 is emerging from the integration of renewable energy production, electrification (particularly of transportation and heating and cooling), and energy demand management through storage and smart grids. The technologies involved range much wider than this, but you could shorthand it as solar panels plus EVs plus batteries. <\/p>\n Electricity, they explain, is already a larger source of \u201cuseful energy\u201d than oil. Because the fuels themselves \u2013 the wind and sun \u2013 are distributed across the entire planet, \u201calmost every country can become its own Saudi Arabia.\u201d And because this revolution swaps out the \u201cfiery molecules\u201d of fossil fuels \u2013 whose use involves burning off two-thirds of all energy inputs as waste heat \u2013 for the \u201cobedient electrons\u201d of clean electricity, this new energy paradigm is supercharged by its efficiency. \u201cElectrotech,\u201d they write, \u201cmakes a thermodynamic mockery of burning fossil fuels.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n The solar and wind power systems at the Arctic Research Foundation’s greenhouse project in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, in 2023.Amber Bracken<\/p>\n According to the Ember crew, electrotech is poised to upend the two-century rule of fossil fuels. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a marginal climate substitution,\u201d they argue<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s an energy revolution.\u201d And the epicentre of the revolution \u2013 the place where its tools are manufactured and employed in the greatest numbers by a wide margin \u2013 is China, which they have named as the first \u201celectrostate.\u201d<\/p>\n China\u2019s place in the energy transition is undoubtedly peerless. The country\u2019s grids added more wind and solar power in 2024 than the rest of the world combined. China manufactures more than 80 per cent<\/a> of the world\u2019s solar panels and 70 per cent<\/a> of its new EVs. It\u2019s the source of more than half<\/a> of the world\u2019s new clean energy patents. It leads the world in battery manufacture, rare earth mineral mining and nuclear power plant construction.<\/p>\n China\u2019s dominance of the energy transition extends far beyond its borders. The vast majority of the solar, wind and battery technology used in the rest of the world is imported from China. Chinese firms have also invested more than US$200-billion <\/a>in clean technology manufacturing overseas since 2022 \u2013 including a manufacturing hub for Chinese EVs in Brazil<\/a> that has been built literally on the site of shuttered North American auto and wind turbine manufacturing plants. And the flood of dirt-cheap Chinese-made solar panels into international markets in particular is triggering explosive clean-power growth worldwide. <\/p>\n In 2024, Pakistan emerged basically all at once to become the world\u2019s third-largest solar installer by importing 17 GW of Chinese solar panels<\/a>. And from mid-2024 to mid-2025, 20 African countries smashed records for solar growth<\/a> using Chinese imports. <\/p>\n This all goes far beyond meeting climate targets. Pakistan\u2019s boom is being driven by skyrocketing domestic electricity prices and unreliable grids. Governments integrated with China in the BRICS Group \u2013 South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia among them \u2013 are embracing the energy transition for national security reasons<\/a>. The European Union\u2019s clean energy push was similarly boosted by concerns about overreliance on Russian natural gas imports. And this is all feeding a growing divide between predominantly oil-producing countries \u2013 most prominently the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia \u2013 and countries pursuing electrostate goals, in particular China itself and the European Union. A recent essay<\/a> in Foreign Policy called it an emerging \u201cecological cold war.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Indigenous activists stage a protest and mock funeral for fossil fuels in Coca, Ecuador, last month.Karen Toro\/Reuters<\/p>\n Does that all sound a little breathless? Perhaps. But the energy transition is moving at breathtaking speed now. It is creating new centres of power (in both the literal and figurative senses). Its promise \u2013 clean and increasingly cheap power and mobility, untethered from the absolute control of a small number of mostly autocratic states \u2013 is proving more enticing than another century of runaway climate change and the roller coaster ride of oil and gas prices. <\/p>\n As the world\u2019s political leaders descend on Brazil for COP30, they would do well to keep top of mind the idea that the strongest legacy of Paris is a climate solution tool kit that has become, as Ember\u2019s electrotech revolutionaries put it, \u201ctoo cheap to contain and too big to ignore.\u201d<\/p>\n Canada stands in a particularly awkward spot, seemingly trying to straddle the widening gap between the fossil-fuelled status quo and the climate-fighting forces of the energy transition. There is money to be made for a while from Canada\u2019s oil and gas reserves, but not much of a long-term future in it. Canada has abundant clean energy resources \u2013 including grids that are already more than 80 per cent emissions-free nationally \u2013 and substantial deposits of the critical minerals required in great volume to build the transition\u2019s infrastructure.<\/p>\n The federal government\u2019s \u201cclimate competitiveness\u201d strategy and Major Projects Office appear to recognize the value of these assets, but also embrace investments in gas pipelines and \u201cdecarbonized\u201d oil. There might be a moment, nearer at hand than many expect, when the gap can no longer be straddled \u2013 when a revolution too cheap to contain and too big to ignore forces Canada to choose more conclusively which side of the divide will best fuel its future.<\/p>\n More on climate change<\/p>\n