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The United Nations has published its first report card on the world’s progress meeting the climate goals under the Paris Agreement.
Although the agency doesn’t give a letter grade, the overwhelming message is clear: The world is not a pleasure to have in class. Countries are still failing to hit the goals that they set for themselves under the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Despite recent climate initiatives and new laws in the United States, China, and Europe, the world is not on track to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And it is nowhere close to keeping average temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees, which has become a threshold for near-term climate danger.
The new assessment captures something important but often overlooked about the Paris Agreement. The treaty is largely nonbinding: It imposes no pollution-related restrictions on its members. But what it prescribes, instead, is a process. For the first time ever, that process is about to enter a new stage.
Here is how the Paris process works: Every five years, each country must submit a detailed pledge saying how much it will cut its greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come. (These are called “Nationally Determined Contributions,” or NDCs.) A few years after that, the world engages in a “global stocktaking,” a review of how much progress has been made toward those goals and how far off humanity is from its climate goals. Then two years later, each country submits a new, more ambitious plan.
The 2023 UN climate conference, which will happen in Dubai, will see the first of these “global stocktakes.” It is meant to set the stage for 2025, when countries will formally update their Paris Agreement plans.
Last week’s report is written largely in UN-ese, a somewhat bland series of pledges and phrases that leave one with the impression that somebody should do something about all the emissions. It emphasizes that “radical decarbonization” is now needed, which will involve a rapid scale-up of renewable energy, the broad electrification of transport, and a phase-out of all “unabated” fossil fuels.
But perhaps most importantly, the report contains a helpful graph that dramatizes just how far the world remains from its most ambitious climate goals.
Courtesy of the United Nations
There are a few lessons in this chart:
Meeting the Paris Agreement goals will be extremely difficult. Since 1850, the world has steadily put more and more carbon pollution into the air every year. Decade after decade, that trend line has only ever gone up. In 2023, roughly 50 gigatons of carbon dioxide — or about 110 trillion pounds — will stream into the atmosphere from human-related activities.
Yet to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that two-century mega-trend must not only end, but almost immediately reverse itself. To have the best chance of hitting the Paris targets, global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak by the end of 2025 — scarcely more than two years away.
As soon as emissions peak, they must fall precipitously. In order to hit the 1.5 degree goal, for instance, annual global carbon pollution must fall by 48% by 2030, compared to its 2019 level.
Even the world’s most ambitious climate pledges still won’t meet the Paris Agreement goals. The world has made tremendous progress since 2010, when climate change looked likely to cause 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius, equal to about 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming by the end of the century. That would have been catastrophic.
Today, scientists project temperatures to rise to something like 2.5 degrees Celsius, or about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, above their pre-industrial levels.
But that still won’t be enough to hit the Paris goals. Look at the red range in the chart labeled “NDCs,” the plans that countries must submit under the Paris Agreement. Although it’s not in the chart, the text of the report provides details about how much these NDCs will actually reduce emissions.
When you take these NDCs together, they suggest that the world could keep global warming to 2.1 degrees Celsius. And if countries’ long-term targets are taken into account, and the most optimistic assumptions are applied, then global temperatures may rise as little as 1.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
But those long-term plans remain speculative, and an “implementation gap” remains between what the world has promised to do and what its policies actually say will happen. And in any case, even those ambitious plans won’t bring the world to the 1.5-degree goal.
Reducing emissions, on a year-over-year basis, will be even harder. Fossil fuels remain the primary industrial energy input to the global economy. As you can see from the chart, global emissions have never seriously plateaued for any length of time, and they remain largely coupled to the global economy. (The most recent big dip in annual emissions was caused by the Covid recession.)
That’s because almost all energy development is additive: Although we think of types of energy as displacing each other — so that renewables replace natural gas, say, or coal replaced wood fires — humanity has largely added energy capacity since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The world burned more coal last year than it ever has before. Although statistics are more scarce, biomass consumption — wood-burning — is said to also be at an all-time high.
There are positive signs. As the report notes, 10- and in some cases 100-fold declines in the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries have seen new renewable technologies get rapidly deployed over the past decade. But the world is not moving fast enough.
And perhaps that’s the most upbeat way to see the report card: The age of planning and innovation has ended, the UN is saying. The world of scaling and deployment is about to begin.
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It was a curious alliance from the start. On the one hand, Donald Trump, who made antipathy toward electric vehicles a core part of his meandering rants. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the man behind the world’s largest EV company, who nonetheless put all his weight, his millions of dollars, and the power of his social network behind the Trump campaign.
With Musk standing by his side on Election Day, Trump has once again secured the presidency. His reascendance sent shock waves through the automotive world, where companies that had been lurching toward electrification with varying levels of enthusiasm were left to wonder what happens now — and what benefits Tesla may reap from having hitched itself to the winning horse.
Certainly the federal government’s stated target of 50% of U.S. new car sales being electric by 2030 is toast, and many of the actions it took in pursuit of that goal are endangered. Although Trump has softened his rhetoric against EVs since becoming buddies with Musk, it’s hard to imagine a Trump administration with any kind of ambitious electrification goal.
During his first go-round as president, Trump attacked the state of California’s ability to set its own ambitious climate-focused rules for cars. No surprise there: Because of the size of the California car market, its regulations helped to drag the entire industry toward lower-emitting vehicles and, almost inevitably, EVs. If Trump changes course and doesn’t do the same thing this time, it’ll be because his new friend at Tesla supports those rules.
The biggest question hanging over electric vehicles, however, is the fate of the Biden administration’s signature achievements in climate and EV policy, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 federal consumer tax credit for electric vehicles. A Trump administration looks poised to tear down whatever it can of its predecessor’s policy. Some analysts predict it’s unlikely the entire IRA will disappear, but concede Trump would try to kill off the incentives for electric vehicles however he can.
There’s no sugar-coating it: Without the federal incentives, the state of EVs looks somewhat bleak. Knocking $7,500 off the starting price is essential to negate the cost of manufacturing expensive lithium-ion batteries and making EVs cost-competitive with ordinary combustion cars. Consider a crucial model like the new Chevy Equinox EV: Counting the federal incentive, the most basic $35,000 model could come in under the starting price of a gasoline crossover like the Toyota RAV4. Without that benefit, buyers who want to go electric will have to pay a premium to do so — the thing that’s been holding back mass electrification all along.
Musk, during his honeymoon with Trump, boasted that Tesla doesn’t need the tax credits, as if daring the president-elect to kill off the incentives. On the one hand, this is obviously false. Visit Tesla’s website and you’ll see the simplest Model 3 listed for $29,990, but this is a mirage. Take away the $7,500 in incentives and $5,000 in claimed savings versus buying gasoline, and the car actually starts at about $43,000, much further out of reach for non-wealthy buyers.
What Musk really means is that his company doesn’t need the incentives nearly as bad as other automakers do. Ford is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as it struggles to make EVs profitably. GM’s big plan to go entirely electric depended heavily on federal support. As InsideEVsnotes, the likely outcome of a Trump offensive against EVs is that the legacy car brands, faced with an unpredictable electrification roadmap as America oscillates between presidents, scale back their plans and lean back into the easy profitably of big, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Such an about-face could hand Tesla the kind of EV market dominance it enjoyed four or five years ago when it sold around 75% of all electric vehicles in America.
That’s tough news for the climate-conscious Americans who want an electric vehicle built by someone not named Elon Musk. Hundreds of thousands of people, myself included, bought a Tesla during the past five or six years because it was the most practical EV for their lifestyle, only to see the company’s figurehead shift his public persona from goofy troll to Trump acolyte. It’s not uncommon now, as Democrats distance themselves from Tesla, to see Model 3s adorned with bumper stickers like the “Anti-Elon Tesla Club,” as one on a car I followed last month proclaimed. Musk’s newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, is a rolling embodiment of the man’s brand, a vehicle purpose-built to repel anyone not part of his cult of personality.
In a world where this version of Tesla retakes control of the electric car market, it becomes harder to ditch gasoline without indirectly supporting Donald Trump, by either buying a Tesla or topping off at its Superchargers. Blue voters will have some options outside of Tesla — the industry has come too far to simply evaporate because of one election. But it’s also easy to see dispirited progressives throwing up their hands and buying another carbon-spewing Subaru.
Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.