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Here’s where things stand now, according to the International Energy Agency.
Two years ago, the International Energy Agency sent shockwaves through the climate community when it published its first net-zero by 2050 roadmap. The report made a declaration that proved to be a sort of energy transition Rorschach test: “There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net-zero pathway,” it said.
Climate advocates quickly began talking up the fact that the authoritative IEA was calling for an end to fossil fuels. But from another perspective, the statement highlighted the scale of the challenge ahead. In order to forego more fossil fuel supplies, there would have to be an unprecedented deployment of clean energy, efficiency improvements, behavioral changes, and technological advancements. The world was not on track for that net-zero pathway in 2021. And while a lot has changed in two years — much of it in the right direction — that’s still the case.
On Tuesday, the IEA published an update to its blueprint for hitting net-zero and halting warming by mid-century. The research group insists that it’s still possible to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, with a brief period where temperatures tip above that benchmark, but “the path has narrowed.”
Here are seven charts from the report that show the good, the bad, and the ugly of where we’re at and where we need to be.
One of the most hopeful takeaways from the report is that two key clean technologies — solar installations and electric vehicle adoptions — are already being deployed at a pace in line with achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Not only are they on track today, but companies’ plans to expand their manufacturing capacity for EVs and solar would enable us to deploy about 30% more than the IEA’s roadmap requires.
This is huge, since those two technologies alone are responsible for about 30% of emission reductions between now and 2030 in the roadmap.
The report also highlights rapid growth in two other key, mass-manufactured technologies — heat pumps and energy storage for the electric grid.
IEA
Though solar has seen steady growth since 2015, there was a significant uptick between 2021 and 2022, when about a third of all installations took place. Similarly, about 60% of total electric car sales took place in that one-year period.
Much of this growth has taken place in advanced economies like the European Union and the United States, but the vast majority has taken place in China. In 2022, the nation was responsible for more than 40% of the global deployment of solar panels and nearly 60% of electric vehicles.
Another chart from the report that I find particularly hopeful shows how much less energy the world will need, overall, if we electrify everything that we possibly can. That’s because solutions like electric vehicles and heat pumps are inherently much more efficient than the fossil fuel-burning boilers and engines they replace. The world would use 15 exajoules less energy annually simply by switching fully to electric cars and heat pumps alone. That’s about the amount that the entire nation of Japan uses in a year.
IEA
Despite significant clean energy progress in the last two years, emissions remain “stubbornly high,” the IEA notes. Global carbon emissions reached a new high of 37 gigatons in 2022, with most of that growth driven by China and other developing economies.
IEA
The report also warns that current planned investments in fossil fuel supplies, power plants, and other end uses are estimated to be about $3.6 trillion higher by 2035 than they are in the net-zero roadmap.
Getting on track for net-zero already requires shutting many existing fossil fuel plants before they are fully paid off. The challenge will only get harder if we build more. “Further delaying the hard choices necessary to reach global net zero emissions by 2050 would make the problems substantially worse, and much harder to solve,” the report says.
In 2022, scientists estimated that the world’s carbon “budget,” the amount we could emit before surpassing 1.5 degrees C, was around 380 gigatons of CO2. The figure below shows we might emit nearly double that amount by 2050 if we don’t make the tough decision to shut down existing fossil fuel power plants early. This is especially an issue that China will need to confront, the report notes, as it has a large fleet of young coal plants and accounts for nearly half of the emissions in the chart below.
IEA
One of the gravest charts in the report pertains to a topic that doesn’t get enough daylight in western discussions of the energy transition. A tenth of the global population still lacks access to electricity, and a third use polluting open fires or stoves that threaten their health.
IEA
The electricity chart’s downward slope, which is due to major electrification efforts in India and Indonesia, shows it’s possible to turn this trend around. But access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa has decreased. Throughout the report, the IEA emphasizes that success in reaching net-zero hinges on stronger international cooperation and support for developing economies. The roadmap requires clean energy investment to increase sevenfold in developing economies other than China by 2030.
There has been a long-running debate among energy experts and climate advocates about how to improve energy access in the developing world. Should countries be allowed to exploit their fossil fuel reserves, the way wealthy countries have? Or should they “leap-frog” fossil fuels and go straight to renewables? The chart below, which shows the energy mix the IEA has modeled, has solar providing more than half of modern electricity access by 2030.
IEA
Okay, I cheated — there’s one more chart worthy of your time, and it doesn’t fall neatly within my good, bad, and ugly rubric. It’s about individual action.
The IEA’s net-zero roadmap illustrates just one potential pathway out of many to keeping climate change in check. It’s based on all kinds of assumptions about energy demand, policies, and costs. But it also makes assumptions about something that’s incredibly hard to model — human behavior.
The authors put about 1 gigaton of emissions mitigation into the hands of the people. I don’t want to put this entirely on you and me — policy support can go a long way to helping us make these changes. But if we don’t start flying less, driving less, and taking steps to make our buildings more efficient, this monumental project of unprecedented technological advancement and clean energy deployment will be much, much harder.
IEA
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.