“A strange new climate era is beginning to take hold”, Evan Halper and Chico Harlan contributed to this report.

“Now, in a year expected to be hottest on record, the aspiration of that era appears dead. Instead, the world has entered a new one, where clean energy is rapidly growing — but not fast enough…”

A strange new climate era is beginning to take hol

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The next 10 years will look very different for the story of climate change.

The Eskom's Komati power station is converting into a renewable generation site with the development of the Komati Training Facility to facilitate the retraining of employees. Clean energy is growing, but not at a rate needed to keep global warming in check. (Paul Botes/AFP/Getty Images)

By Shannon Osaka, Maxine Joselow and Sarah Kaplan

November 27, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. CT

For almost a decade, climate scientists and environmental leaders have coalesced around a rallying cry: “Keep 1.5 alive.” It’s a reference to the historic pact nations reached in Paris in 2015 to try to limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Now, in a year expected to be the hottest on record, the aspiration of that era appears dead. Instead, the world has entered a new one, where clean energy is rapidly growing — but not fast enough to keep temperatures in check.

Planet-warming emissions — which need to go to zero to stop the rising temperatures on the planet — are instead plateauing at historically high levels, thanks to increasing global energy demands and political resistance to phasing out oil and gas. Earth’s average temperature will breach the 1.5 C limit this calendar year, according to recent estimates. Although formally crossing the goal will require temperatures to remain above that level for multiple years in a row, most scientists believe that the planet will hit that mark sometime in the coming decade.

Other momentum behind policies to curb climate change is slowing, too. Under President-elect Donald Trump, the United States is poised to leave the Paris agreement and roll back a wide range of environmental policies. And negotiators at a global climate summit that concluded this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, opted to remain silent on a previous promise to be “transitioning away” from the fossil fuels driving global warming.

Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, said in an email that hurtling toward the globe’s key target is sobering.

“I never expected the world to blow past the 1.5 °C threshold so casually, as we’re doing today,” he said. “Two decades ago, no one believed that could happen.”

Employees work on an electric vehicle production line at the Leapmotor factory in Jinhua, China on Sept. 18. The popularity of electric vehicles has grown around the world. (Adek Berry/AFP/Getty Images)

But even as old aspirations fall, changes are underway that cannot be easily undone. Solar and wind energy have become so cheap that it often makes more economic sense to build renewable projects than coal or gas-fired power plants. Costs of solar panels and batteries have plummeted 90 percent in the past decade; electric vehicles have skyrocketed in popularity around the world.

As those trends continue, the world has hit a strange point in the climate story — veering away from catastrophe, but not fast enough to avoid some dangerous climate impacts. Many experts say it will be the economics of clean energy that defines the future of the planet — and how developing countries choose to meet their growing electricity demands.

“What happens in emerging and developing economies in the next decade in some sense is the whole ballgame,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

Global greenhouse gas emissions could peak as soon as next year, according to the International Energy Agency, but are not on course to drop sharply enough to contain warming. The world would have to cut its emissions roughly in half by 2035 to meet the 1.5 C target, scientists warn, in part because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries.

Instead, the U.N. projects that nations’ current policies will lead to 3.1 C of warming by 2100, or as little as 2.6 C if the strongest pledges are kept.

This would represent substantial progress from when the Paris agreement was adopted, when scientists expected a 4 C (7.2 F) rise in temperatures by century’s end. That outcome was associated with crossing most if not all global tipping points, including the disintegration of the Antarctic ice sheet and the collapse of a crucial system of ocean currents.

Still, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts “dangerous and widespread disruption” on the current path. The Greenland ice sheet might tip into irreversible collapse, according to the IPCC, threatening cities from New York to Shanghai, while extreme heat and humidity could make ever large swaths of the world effectively inhabitable. Scientists also expect a growing toll of disease, crop failures and weather disasters. It would likely take thousands of years for Greenland’s ice to completely vanish, but other impacts — like the death of coral reefs worldwide and month-long heat waves — could come in a matter of decades.

If countries wish to avoid these consequences, they will have to spend vast sums on adaptation. From now through 2030, poor nations will need up to $387 billion per year to adapt to mounting climate disasters, according to a recent U.N. report. Wealthy nations will also need hundreds of billions of dollars to build sea walls and other engineering projects that protect cities from mass flooding.

“If I step back and think about this process over a longer term, it yields enormous change,” said Jonathan Pershing, who helped negotiate the accord under President Barack Obama and now directs the environment program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “But at any given meeting,” he added, “it always feels inadequate.”

Much of that progress has come from the United States’ switch from coal to natural gas and renewables, and the European Union’s rapid embrace of wind and solar power. In just the past three years, the European Union expanded its renewable electricity generation from 37 percent to 50 percent, part of a broader effort to wean the continent off Russian gas supplies.

Rotor blades for the ongoing construction of the 'Revolution Wind,' offshore wind turbine farm on the State Pier in New London, Connecticut. Revolution Wind is a joint venture between residential energy provider Eversource and Danish multinational energy company Orsted, located in federal waters, that will provide 704 megawatts to homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut. (Cj Gunther/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

But the demand for power is also rising, complicating these efforts. According to a recent report from the International Energy Agency, countries are expected to add electricity demand equivalent to the entire nation of Japan every year — thanks to the growth of EVs, the rapid build-out of AI data centers, and a surge in a need for air conditioning in developing countries.

That growth in demand means that even as clean energy is added to the grid, fossil fuel use hasn’t decreased. And unless countries close coal and gas plants and shut down oil drilling, emissions won’t start to come down.

“Two things can both be true: Clean energy is breaking almost every record you can imagine,” Bordoff said. “And oil use is going up, and gas use is going up, and coal use is going up.”

Though developing countries have contributed only a fraction to historic fossil fuel-related emissions, their populations are growing — and so is their capacity to pollute.

With the onset of power cuts across Zambia, owners of the Café De Paris Investment restaurant switch between solar and a diesel generator in an attempt to reduce costs. Zambia is turning toward coal as drought has made the hydropower that the country relies on scarce. (Ilan Godfrey/for The Washington Post)

More than 40 percent of Africans don’t have electricity access. If those countries expand their power sector the way wealthy nations have done — with oil, gas and coal — the goals of the Paris agreement “will be in the bin,” Francesco La Camera, the director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, said in an interview.

“We have to intercept that,” he said. “The renewable process is unstoppable. But what is at stake is the speed and the scale.”

Bordoff pointed out that there are around 20 developing countries in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa that, altogether, could contribute an emissions surge similar to China’s increase since the early 2000s. “That puts achieving our climate goals completely out of reach,” he said.

A new Trump administration may not move the needle dramatically on U.S. emissions, but could have a big impact overseas, experts said. In a recent Morgan Stanley report, analysts said they expect “no significant changes” in the outlook for U.S. oil and gas markets. While the last Trump administration opened up more lands to oil and gas drilling, the amount of lease sales didn’t change dramatically — fossil fuel companies were responding to larger global shifts in price, not access to land.

And while a Republican trifecta could push to repeal Biden’s clean energy tax credits, experts expect continued growth in solar panels and battery manufacturing. Around 75 percent of the clean energy investment so far has gone to red states and congressional districts — representatives of those districts may be hesitant to repeal programs that have spurred jobs and development in their regions.

“These programs were strategically designed to benefit Republican states and garner support from fossil fuel industries,” Jim Kapsis, a former Energy Department official under President Barack Obama who now advises clean energy start-ups, said in an email to clients. “And manufacturing stateside — even clean technologies — is after all putting America first.”

But the real impact of a Trump administration could be in how his foreign policy affects the developing world. Trump has proposed steep tariffs on imported goods, including a 10 percent tax on products from China — where the vast majority of clean energy technologies are produced. Trump has said the tariffs are in retaliation for the flow of immigrants and drugs into the United States; many economists fear that other countries will retaliate with tariffs of their own.

“My expectation is that the harm done by the Trump administration to American climate policy will come more from international trade policies than actual administrative law and legislative changes,” David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California at San Diego, said in a phone interview. These changes wouldn’t only make goods such as solar cells and batteries more expensive, he argued — they could also inhibit the kind of international collaboration and investment that helps lower costs.

Skeptical leaders could also stall climate action by curbing the kinds of support that are necessary to bring new technologies to market. This is especially important for hard-to-decarbonize industries, like clean aviation fuels or low-carbon concrete, where cleaner options are largely untested and companies fear pouring money into experiments that may never bear fruit.

It will be those investments — and the energy choices of up-and-coming developing nations — that will determine the future of the planet.

“What we have so far is shallow decarbonization … cutting emissions 10, 20, 30 percent,” Victor said.

But to actually stop the world from warming further — what Victor refers to as “deep decarbonization” requires “something a lot more transformative,” he said.

Evan Halper and Chico Harlan contributed to this report.