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On a crucial — and underappreciated — phrase in the Global Stocktake.
Now it is over. Early on Wednesday morning, negotiators in Dubai reached an agreement at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the global meeting otherwise known as COP28.
Their final text for the Global Stocktake — a kind of report card on humanity’s progress on its Paris Agreement goals — is contradictory and half-hearted. Instead of blunt language instructing countries to “phase out fossil fuels,” it instead provides a range of options that could let countries achieve “deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” One of these possibilities is the tripling of global renewable capacity; another is a call for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”
So far, this language — this call for leaving fossil fuels — has attracted the most attention by far. Simon Stiell, the UN’s top climate official, said that it marked “the beginning of the end” of the fossil-fuel era, while the climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben has argued that the phrase can become a useful tool for activists, who can now beat it across the head of the Biden administration.
But a separate phrase in the agreement caught my attention. Immediately after calling for transitioning away from fossil fuels, the text makes a different point: that the world must accelerate the development of “zero- and low-emission technologies, including, inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, and low-carbon hydrogen production.”
This language may rankle some readers because it seems to give pride of place to carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, which would allow fossil fuel-burning plants to catch emissions before they enter the atmosphere. (It also seems to conflate CCS with carbon removal technology, even though they are different.) But I believe that the overarching demand — the call for accelerating climate-friendly technologies — represents a crucial insight, one that I could not stop thinking about at the COP itself, and one that is linked to any realistic demand to phase out fossil fuels. Here is that insight: The world will only be able to decarbonize when it develops abundant energy technologies that emit little carbon and that are price-competitive if not cheaper than their fossil-fueled alternatives.
Just as COP28 began, the Rhodium Group, an energy research firm, published a new study looking at how carbon pollution will rise and fall through the end of the century. Unlike other such studies — which ask either how the planet will fare if no new climate policy passes, or what the world must do to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — this new study tried to look at what was likely to happen. Given what we know about how countries’ emissions rise and fall with their economies, and when and how they tend to pass climate policy, how much warming can we expect by the end of the century?
As the report’s authors put it, the study was aimed not at policymakers, but at policy takers — the officials, executives, engineers, and local leaders who are starting to plan for the world of 2100.
Here’s the good news: Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to peak this decade, the report found. Sometime during the 2020s, humanity’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate pollution will reach an all-time high and begin to fall. (Right now, we emit the equivalent of 50.6 billion tons of the stuff every year.) This will represent a world-historic turning point in our species’ effort to govern the global climate system, and it will probably happen before Morocco, Portugal, and Spain host the 2030 World Cup.
And that is roughly where the good news ends. Because unlike in rosy net-zero studies where humanity’s carbon emissions peak and then rapidly fall to zero, the report does not project any near-term pollution plunge. Instead, global emissions waver and plateau through the 2030s and 2040s, falling in some years, rising slightly in others, cutting an unmistakably downward trend while failing to get anywhere close to zero. By 2060, annual emissions will have fallen to 39 gigatons, only 22% below today’s levels.
And — worse news, now — that is as low as emissions will ever get this century, the report projects. Driven by explosive economic growth in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, global emissions begin to rise — slowly but inexorably — starting in the 2060s. They keep rising in the 2070s, 2080s, and 2090s. By the year 2090, emissions will have reached 44 gigatons, only 13% below today’s levels and roughly where emissions stood in 2003.
How Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Fall — Then Rise — in the 21st Century
Rhodium Group
In other words, after a century of work to fight climate change, humanity will find itself roughly where it began. But now, with several thousand additional gigatons of emissions in the atmosphere, the planet will be about 2.8 degrees Celsius warmer (or about 5 degrees Fahrenheit). At its high end estimate, temperatures could rise as much as 4 degrees Celsius, or more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
This temperature rise will be caused by legacy emissions from polluters like the United States and China, but as the century goes on, it will increasingly come from Asian and African countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, and others. Why? It’s not like these countries, say, reject renewables or electric vehicles: In fact, Rhodium anticipates that renewables will have grown up to 22-fold by the end of the century.
Instead, emissions rise because fossil fuels are cheap and globally abundant — they remain one of the easiest ways to power an explosively growing society — and because of the growth of the so-called hard-to-abate sectors in these countries are slated to grow just as quickly as the economies themselves. Indonesia, Nigeria, and Vietnam will demand many megatons of new steel, cement, and chemicals to furnish their growing societies; right now, the only economical way to make those materials requires releasing immense amounts of carbon pollution into the atmosphere.
Let’s be clear: Rhodium’s report is a projection, not a prophecy. It should not provoke despair, I think, but determination. Many of the so-called hard-to-abate activities, such as steel or petrochemical making, should more aptly be called activities-that-we-haven’t-tried-very-hard-to-abate yet; people will likely find a way to do them by the middle of the century. (When I asked Bill Gates what he thought about the Rhodium Group’s findings, he replied that predicting the carbon intensity of certain activities in 2060 was all but impossible: We might have safe, cheap, and abundant nuclear fission by then, or even nuclear fusion.)
Yet it heralds a shift in climate geopolitics that, while it has not yet happened, is not so far away. Since the modern era of global climate politics began in 1990, most carbon emissions have come from just a handful of countries: China, the United States, and the 37 other rich, developed democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. These countries have emitted 55% of climate pollution since 1990, while the rest of the world — the remaining low- and middle-income countries — have emitted only 45%.
But from now to 2100, that relationship is set to reverse. Through the end of the century, China and the OECD countries emit only 40% of total global emissions, according to Rhodium’s projections. The rest of the world, meanwhile, will emit 60% of global emissions.
In other words, decarbonization will soon become a challenge for middle-income countries. These countries will not be able to spend extra to buy climate-friendly technologies, but they are simply too populous for rich countries to subsidize. At the same time, these countries lack an existing fleet of fossil-fuel-consuming equipment, so they will not need to transition away from fossil fuels in the first place. Unlike in the United States, where we will have to shut down our oil-and-gas economy as we build a new one to replace it, Kenya or Indonesia can more or less build a climate-friendly middle-class economy de novo, much in the same way that in the 2000s countries “leapfrogged” landline telephones and adopted cell phones. Yet countries will only be able to leapfrog the fossil-fuel era if the climate equivalent of cell phones exist: if climate-friendly technologies are plentiful, useful, and price-competitive.
That’s not all it will take, of course. The world will have to phase down the production and consumption of fossil fuels, because the existence of climate-friendly technologies will not guarantee their use. Humanity may also have to create and enforce a strong moral taboo around burning fossil fuels, much in the same way that it has created a taboo around, say, child labor. But none of that can happen unless climate-friendly alternatives exist: Otherwise countries will ensure that they gain access to the energy that their development requires.
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When Congress rescinded unobligated funds from the historic climate law, it inadvertently answered a question climate advocates have been asking for months.
The Biden administration left office without ever disclosing how much of the historic climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act it had spent.
Politico reached out to every federal agency in November in an attempt to answer that question and could only conclude that it was a “big mystery.” The administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants created by the IRA, the outlet found, but the amount that had been obligated — meaning legally committed and therefore, at least in theory, protected — remained largely unknown.
That continued to be true right up until the legislative process for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In addition to overhauling the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, Republicans in Congress rescinded the unobligated funds from 47 of the law’s more than 80 climate and environmental programs. According to scores from the Congressional Budget Office, $31.7 billion of the $93.4 billion for those programs, or about 34%, was left.
That means the Biden administration spent or contracted out about two-thirds of the funding from these programs. The data puts into focus what the ultimate effects and outcomes of the Inflation Reduction Act will be over the coming decades — or rather, what they could be, if the Trump administration upholds existing contracts. Whether the administration must honor these agreements is the subject of several ongoing lawsuits.
But we can see, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the largest appropriation from the IRA of any agency, obligated the vast majority of that money to states, tribes, nonprofits, and other beneficiaries. Billions of dollars to monitor and address air pollution in low-income communities and at schools, to phase down planet-warming refrigerants and transition to next-generation technologies, and to help states build out and implement their climate action plans should theoretically be flowing into the economy, so long as the contracts are ultimately honored. The entirety of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was obligated, and while the EPA has attempted to claw back roughly $20 billion of that — a process that has been held up in the courts — the $7 billion set aside for a low-income solar program called Solar For All is actively funding new projects around the country.
The agency under Biden was less successful in standing up a series of programs designed to advance greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Initiatives to improve the labeling systems for low-carbon construction materials and to standardize corporate emissions reporting never really got off the ground.
The Department of Agriculture was also an efficient spender. While the data shows it had obligated only about $7 billion of the more than $18 billion allocated for climate-focused conservation programs, only $10 billion of the funding was actually available for the department to use by the time Biden left office. On the one hand, that means it awarded 70% of the available funds. On the other, that means Congress has now evaporated a whopping $11 billion that could have been disbursed.
The Forest Service, which is under the USDA, also deployed more than $2 billion, or about 93% of its funding for National Forest restoration, urban forestry, and climate mitigation grants for private forest owners.
There are limitations to the data. It shows that the Department of Energy only spent about 39% of its funding, but because the Budget Office did not break out the rescissions by program, we can’t see how far along the agency got with each one, or how much of each was clawed back. The data can also be somewhat misleading, as several of the programs provide loans and loan guarantees, while the OBBB only rescinded “credit subsidies,” i.e. money to cover the costs of this lending service. In other words, this doesn’t tell us much about how much Biden’s Loan Programs Office accomplished. But in this case the office’s website helps fill out the picture: It lists 23 active loans that were made after the IRA passed, worth nearly $58 billion. (The IRA appropriated about $11.7 billion in credit subsidies to the Loan Programs Office.)
I also put together a list of programs that Congress did not rescind, as they show which IRA creations the GOP either deemed worthwhile or too depleted, a.k.a. obligated, to be worth the effort. Several big-ticket items jump out. As I’ve previously written, two rebate programs for home efficiency improvements remain intact, although most of the $8.8 billion in funding is currently paused. Drought mitigation, water access, and tribal electrification and climate resilience grants were also untouched. A $3 billion EPA program to reduce air pollution at ports made it through the gambit after an initial House draft of the OBBB had proposed killing it.
Republicans in Congress also preserved a nearly $10 billion program to help rural electric cooperatives invest in clean energy and energy efficiency. Rural coops disproportionately rely on coal-fired power plants, burdening their members with higher energy prices and dirtier air. While the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a major advocate for coal power and has applauded Trump’s moves to boost it, the group also championed the rural clean energy program, with its CEO telling E&E News last fall that the program was oversubscribed and that “there is an appetite for investing in clean energy.”
To be sure, the question of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will disburse previously obligated funds or continue to spend down the remaining programs is a big one. But the supposition that the OBBB “killed” the IRA is also not really accurate. Between obligated funds and the programs that weren’t rescinded, more than $105 billion could still flow into the economy to fight climate change.
Unlike just about every other car sales event, this one has a real — congressionally mandated — end date.
Car salespeople, like all salespeople, love to project a sense of urgency. You know the familiar seasonal rhythm of the TV commercial: Toyotathon is on now — but hurry in, because these deals won’t last. The end of the discount is, of course, an arbitrary deadline invented to juice that month’s sales figures; there’ll be another sale soon.
But in the electric vehicle market there’s about to be a fire sale, and this time it really is a race against the clock.
Federal incentives for EVs and EV equipment were critically endangered the moment Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now, with the passage of the omnibus budget reconciliation bill on the Fourth of July, they have a hard expiration date. Most importantly, the $7,500 federal tax credit for an EV purchase is dead after September 30. Drivers who might want to go electric and dealerships and car companies eager to unload EVs are suddenly in a furor to get deals done before the calendar turns to October.
The impending end of the tax credit has already become a sales pitch. Tesla, faced with sagging sales numbers thanks in part to Elon Musk’s misadventures in the Trump administration, has been sending a steady slog of emails trying to convince me to replace my just-paid-off Model 3 with another one. The brand didn’t take long to turn the impending EV gloom into a short-term sales opportunity. “Order soon to get your $7,500,” declared an email blast sent just days after Trump signed the bill.
On Reddit, the general manager of a Mississippi dealership posted to the community devoted to the Ioniq 9, Hyundai’s new three-row all-electric SUV, to appeal to anyone who might be interested in one of the three models that just appeared on their lot. It’s an unusual strategy, a local dealer seeking out a nationwide group of enthusiasts just to move a trio of vehicles. But it’s not hard to see the economic writing on the wall.
The Ioniq 9 is a cool and capable vehicle, but one that starts at $59,000 in its most basic form and quickly rises into the $60,000s and $70,000s with fancier versions. Even with the discount, the Ioniq 9 costs far more than many of the more affordable gas-powered three-row crossovers. And now the vehicle has come down with a serious case of unlucky timing, with deliveries beginning this summer just ahead of the incentive’s disappearance. As of October 1, the EV could become an albatross that nobody in suburban Memphis wants to drive off the lot.
Over the past year, Ford has offered the Ford Power Promise, an excellent deal that throws in a free home charger plus the cost of installation to anyone who buys a new EV. That deal was supposed to expire this summer. But the Detroit giant has extended its offer until — surprise — Sept. 30, in the hopes of enticing a wave of buyers while the getting is good.
This isn’t the first time EV-makers have been through such a deadline crunch. When the $7,500 federal tax credit for EV purchases first started in 2010, the law was written so that the benefit phased out over time once a car company passed a particular sales threshold. By the time I bought my EV in the spring of 2019, for example, Tesla had already sold so many vehicles that its tax credit was halved from $7,500 to $3,750. We had to rush to take delivery in the last few days of June as the benefit was slated to fall again, to $1,875, on July 1, before it disappeared completely in 2020.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed under President Biden not only reinstated the $7,500 credit but also took away the gradual decline of the benefit; it was supposed to stick around, in full, until 2032. But despite Trump’s on-again, off-again bromance with Elon Musk, the president followed through on his long-term antagonistic rhetoric against EVs by repealing the benefit as part of this month’s disastrous big bill.
Trump, despite his best efforts, won’t kill the EV. The electric horse has simply left the barn — the world has come too far and seen too much of what electrification has to offer to turn back just because the current U.S. president wants it to. But the end of the EV tax credit (until a different regime comes into power, at least) seriously imperils the economic math that allowed EV sales to rise steadily over the past few years.
As a result, now might be the best time for a long time to buy or lease an electric vehicle, with remarkably low lease payments to be found on great EVs like the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Chevy Equinox. Once the tax breaks are gone, lease deals (which got lots of drivers into EVs without them having to worry about long-term ownership questions) are likely to grow less enticing. EVs that would have been cost-competitive with gasoline counterparts when the tax credits taken into account suddenly aren’t.
Plenty of drivers will continue to choose electric even at a premium price because it’s a better product, sure. But hopes of reaching many more budget-first buyers have taken a serious hit. It could be a dream summer to buy an EV, but we’re all going to wake up when September ends.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.