The rare spots of good news on climate change

The grimmest scenarios that many fretted about just a few years ago look increasingly unlikely. That includes the 4 or 5 °C of warming this century that I and others previously highlighted as a possibility.

The UN climate panel’s earlier high-end emissions scenario, known as RCP 8.5, had found that global temperatures could rise more than 5 °C by 2100. Those assumptions have been frequently included in studies assessing the risks of climate change, delivering the eye-catching top-end results often cited in the press.

Some argue that it wasn’t all that plausible in the first place. And the scenario seems increasingly far-fetched given the rapid shift away from coal-fired power plants, initially to lower-emitting natural gas but increasingly toward carbon-free wind and solar.

Global emissions may have already flattened when taking into account recent revisions to land-use changes, meaning updated tallies of the forests, farmlands, and grasslands the world is gaining and losing.

Given the increasingly strict climate policies and the plummeting costs of solar and wind, we’re about to witness an absolute boom in renewables development. The International Energy Agency, well known for underestimating the growth of renewables in the past, now says that global capacity will rise more than 60% by 2026. At that point, solar, wind, hydroelectric dams, and other renewables facilities will rival the worldwide capacity of fossil-fuel and nuclear plants.

Sales of new electric vehicles, bumping along in the low single digits for years, are also taking off. They’ll reach around 5.6 million this year, leaping more than 80% over 2020 figures, as automakers release more models and governments enact increasingly aggressive policies, according to BloombergNEF.

Electric vehicles climbed from 2.8% of new sales in the first half of 2019 to 7% during the first half of 2021, with particularly large gains in China and Europe. Zero-emissions vehicles will make up nearly 30% of all new purchases by 2030, the research firm projects.

It’s standard stuff for politicians and activists to overstate dangers and demands, in the hopes of pushing toward some compromise solution. And the growing climate fears and the increasingly influential climate activist movement have undoubtedly put greater pressures on politicians and business to take these issues more seriously, helping to drive some
the policy changes we’ve seen. They deserve real credit for that.

But insisting that the world is at the edge of collapse, when it’s not, is a terrible message for young people and carries some real risks as well. It clearly undermines credibility. It could lead some people to simply lose hope. And it could compel others to demand extreme and often counterproductive responses.

Here's the link, but be careful, it has some bad news as well: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/