\n Somehow, it doesn\u2019t feel like 10 years and some 300 gigatons of carbon have floated by since then.\n <\/p>\n
\n Paris was not the end of fossil fuels, of course. From the perspective of the atmosphere, the last decade could accurately be described as a slow-moving fever dream \u2014 one in which pollution from fossil fuels has continued to rise year after year. All those emissions drive global heating and make the planet more dangerous.\n <\/p>\n
\n And in this dangerous decade climate disasters have continued to intensify \u2014 from the massive hurricane that walloped Puerto Rico in 2017<\/a>, to Jamaica this October where the most powerful Atlantic storm<\/a> on record came aground.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s a decade in which new fossil fuel projects continued to be approved<\/a> by the very governments that had promised to slash emissions; and one in which the United States twice elected a climate-denier to the nation\u2019s highest office. This fall, US President Donald Trump, after cancelling billions toward clean energy projects<\/a> and moving to open a swath of the Arctic for oil extraction<\/a>, bucked the scientific consensus on global warming again by falsely stating that climate change is the \u201cgreatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.<\/a>\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Ironic, then, that this has also been a decade during which scientists realized that, if anything, they underestimated some of the threats of climate change<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Just last month, for example, researchers reported that Earth had crossed one of its first climate tipping points<\/a>, with such a massive percentage of coral reefs struggling amid warning that we\u2019re entering a \u201cnew reality\u201d in which those reefs won\u2019t be able to recover.\n <\/p>\n \n One key goal of the Paris Agreement was to prevent this sort of thing, by limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. A group of especially climate-vulnerable countries, calling themselves the High Ambition Coalition<\/a>, banded together to push for that target. In Paris, delegates carried the rhyming theme over to wearing buttons that said, \u201c1.5 to stay alive,\u201d a reference to the existential threat warming poses, especially to low-lying areas that are flooding as ice melts and oceans rise.\n <\/p>\n \n That \u201c1.5 to stay alive\u201d target, we now know, is almost certainly out of reach. Either we\u2019ve crossed that line already<\/a> or we\u2019re well on the way<\/a>. Does that mean we\u2019re \u201cdead\u201d? That we\u2019ve failed to \u201cstay alive\u201d?\n <\/p>\n \n No \u2014 thankfully, the world doesn\u2019t burst into flames at 1.51 degrees of warming.\n <\/p>\n \n We do know that every ton of heat-trapping pollution makes the world more dangerous. But, conversely, every ton of it we save makes the world safer for future generations. Yes, by many metrics, we\u2019ve backslid in the years since Paris. Jamie Henn, co-founder of 350.org and director of Fossil Free Media, told me that if climate action is Star Wars then \u201cI think we\u2019re in the Empire Strikes Back episode of the trilogy\u201d \u2014 where it all falls apart.\n <\/p>\n \n But it\u2019s still possible to adjust the lens and bring other storylines into focus.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe\u2019ve come an incredibly long way since Paris,\u201d said Jean Su, energy justice director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Of note, Su told me, is the fact that world leaders in 2023, at the COP meeting in Dubai, added language to the Paris Agreement<\/a> that calls for moving away from fossil fuels. At that meeting, \u201cwe really reached a pinnacle in terms of addressing the root causes of the climate emergency,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n Just because Trump thinks climate change is a scam, doesn\u2019t mean the rest of the world agrees.\n <\/p>\n \n Henn, the climate activist, pointed to renewable energy as a bright spot. In the first half of 2025, renewables overtook coal<\/a> as the world\u2019s top energy source for the first time. Wind and solar power \u2014 which don\u2019t produce the heat-trapping pollution of coal and gas \u2014 are expected to meet 90% of new electricity demand<\/a> this year.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe transition is moving even faster than people predicted back in 2015<\/a>,\u201d Henn said. Fifteen times faster<\/a>, in fact, if you\u2019re looking at solar power installations, according to the non-profit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.\n <\/p>\n \n Likewise, it continues to be crystal clear how the public feels about this issue: 89% of the global public surveyed in a 2024 study<\/a> favored stronger political action on climate change.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThat is a supermajority,\u201d said Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now, the group behind a media collaboration called the 89 Percent Project<\/a>. \u201cAnd it\u2019s a [super]majority that doesn\u2019t know that it\u2019s a majority. People in that majority think that they\u2019re 29% of the population. They think they\u2019re a minority.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But even in the United States, positive trends hold: 79% of registered voters surveyed in May 2025<\/a> said they support the US being part of the Paris Agreement and 75% support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.\n <\/p>\n \n Climate advocates are planning new efforts to make use of this supermajority. Among them is a push for a Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty<\/a>. Alex Rafalowicz, executive director of that initiative, told me the idea for a treaty builds on an International Court of Justice decision earlier this year<\/a> that held nations legally responsible for curbing climate-heating pollution.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe economics do demonstrate that the transition [to clean energy sources] has an inevitability about it,\u201d Rafalowicz said. \u201cBut the question is whether it is fast enough, and whether it is fair enough. That is part of the problem we\u2019re trying to solve.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n A meeting about that treaty is likely to happen next spring in Colombia, he said. Meanwhile, the UN is prepping for COP30, in Brazil, which begins November 10. Plenty of the delegates there will remember that green gavel moment from Paris. I\u2019ll be thinking of it as I watch news from the summit, too.\n <\/p>\n \n On the day the Paris Agreement was adopted, I spent hours with the delegation from the Marshall Islands, a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific that fears being subsumed by rising seas. I\u2019d visited the country earlier in 2015 for a CNN article. I\u2019ll never forget a woman telling me that the sound of the ocean, which used to lull her to sleep, had become threatening after waves crashed through her home and flooded it. Her family had decided to move to Arkansas to get far away from the water and that sound.\n <\/p>\n \n The Marshallese delegation in Paris gave me a palm frond ribbon to remember them by. I kept it in my pocket as I relayed news of the agreement to viewers around the world.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s sitting on my desk as I type this, 10 years later.\n <\/p>\n \n It reminds me that the optimism and the urgency of that moment have not been forgotten.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decade ago, the world got together and decided to fix the climate crisis by adopting the Paris…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-281479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Residents](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/c-ap25303755842768.jpg\")
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