A solar farm abutting a coal-burning power plant in Weifang, China, last year. Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times
Depending on how you look at it, the climate story is one that can inspire genuine optimism or a fair bit of doomerism.
On any given day, there are news stories, academic studies and memes that support two dueling narratives:
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This week brought yet another slew of data that provides an opportunity to hold these two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.
There are elements of truth to both perspectives, of course. It’s a disorienting dynamic that we grapple with as reporters covering climate change. Our work involves reporting on the world as it is. Sometimes that means staring down hard facts about the mess we’ve made, and sometimes that means highlighting the real progress that is underway.
Yes, planet-warming emissions are still on the rise, and the effects of climate change are growing worse. And also, yes, renewable energy is coming online at record rates, and there is a huge global effort to deal with an overheating planet.
On Wednesday, a new report highlighted the stunning, record-breaking gains in wind and solar power around the world. A full 30 percent of global electricity was generated by renewables last year, according to Ember, an energy think tank.
On the very same day, however, the latest figures from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory revealed record levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This was the largest 12-month increase ever recorded on the so-called Keeling Curve, which has been used to measure the concentration of CO2 since 1958.
To help make sense of this split-screen moment, I turned to Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Leiserowitz, who tracks public perceptions of global warming, is finely attuned to the often jarring work of reconciling conflicting story lines.
“More than one thing can be true at the same time,” he wrote in an email. “We are witnessing astonishing growth in clean energy. Meanwhile, the hourglass of time we have left to limit global warming at ‘safe’ levels is running out.”
‘Take heart in this news’
Gains in clean energy generation is a theme we’ve been tracking for years now.
Solar power has gotten exponentially cheaper over the past decade, thanks largely to low-cost Chinese manufacturing. And in recent years, it has become more affordable to install wind turbines.
The result, according to Ember, was a 23 percent jump in solar power generation last year, and a 10 percent jump in wind generation. Much of the growth came in China. The country accounted for 51 percent of new solar generation and 60 percent of new wind generation.
Global fossil fuel production grew less than 1 percent last year.
“We should take heart in this news,” said Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia state representative who is now senior counsel at Rewiring America, a nonprofit group working to promote clean power. “We now have more evidence that our shift to clean energy sources is the only viable path to healthier, more resilient communities and a safer climate, here and around the globe.”
And it’s not just power generation that is changing for the better. As my colleagues Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich report, giant batteries are beginning to play a meaningful role in keeping the lights on and stabilizing the grid.
But Abrams cautioned that good news about renewables shouldn’t lead to complacency. “We can’t for a moment slow down,” she said. “These twin reports demonstrate the urgency of action to ratchet down reliance on fossil fuels while speeding delivery of investment in clean generation.”
‘We sadly continue to break records’
The Keeling Curve data offers another reminder, as if one were needed, that planet-warming emissions, driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels, are continuing to transform our planet.
For more than 65 years now, scientific instruments atop volcanoes in Hawaii have monitored how much carbon dioxide is present in the atmosphere. The data “reveals a saw-toothed line that ticks continually upward over time,” my colleague Elena Shao wrote in 2022. “That pattern is considered by many scientists to be the most important evidence that the climate is changing because of human activity.”
This week’s update was a doozy.
Not only did the concentration of CO2 reach an all-time high, but the trend is accelerating: This was biggest year-over-year jump ever seen. The NOAA report also said CO2 concentration tends to rise quickly toward the end of El Niño cycles like the one we’re currently experiencing.
Which leads us back to the Ember study. The world is making steady progress in ramping up renewables. And that’s a real cause for optimism.
“The notion of a ‘doomer camp’ is overstated,” Leiserowitz said. “The larger majority of Americans reject a fatalistic view of climate change. In fact, the far larger and more important problem is that most Americans are not worried enough.”
