By SAM GAUNTT
Capital News Service
The world is making progress against climate change even though the U.S. government has left the fight.
Renewable energy usage has surged over the past decade, accounting for more than $2 trillion in global investment and totalling about 90% of all new energy capacity installed worldwide in 2024.
There’s also a big increase in public and private spending aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change or helping communities adapt, which reached almost $2 trillion as of 2023.
Global per capita carbon emissions remain mostly steady, showing a slow shift away from fossil fuels. In large part due to China’s growing investments in renewable energy, total global emissions could soon start to flatten for the first time in decades, according to the International Energy Agency’s annual global energy outlook report.
Adding it all up, it’s clear the global efforts to prevent the worst possible effects of climate change, which started in earnest in the mid-1990s, are finally making headway. Despite that progress, global temperatures continue to reach record highs, and total carbon emissions continue to increase — just as President Donald Trump’s administration ends federal policy to combat climate change.
The question remains whether what’s being done will ever be enough to stop climate change’s worst predicted effect: making parts of the world uninhabitable.
Baylor Fox-Kemper, a professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University, said he sees both encouraging and discouraging signs.
“The transition toward a clean energy economy is well underway, and that’s happening all around the world,” Fox-Kemper said. “We’re heading toward more and more of our energy being produced by renewables, which is the most direct way to reduce the worst aspects of climate change.”
Still, he said it’s clear the planet is getting hotter, with devastating consequences.
“It’s a sign that things are going in the direction where the wildfires, heat waves, flooding, droughts get more and more intense the higher that [temperature] number goes,” Fox-Kemper said.
The progress
The Paris Climate Agreement, the landmark international treaty adopted in 2015, aims to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, with an ultimate goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Fox-Kemper said by some measures, we’ve already crossed 1.5 degrees of warming.
But htere are some signs of progress.
While total global carbon emissions are still increasing, they’re not increasing as fast as they once were. During the past decade, total global carbon dioxide emissions grew by about 0.3% per year. In the decade before, emissions grew by about 1.9% per year.
Before the Paris Climate Agreement, projections showed global temperatures were on track to increase by about 3.6 degrees Celsius, according to the Climate Action Tracker. Now, a decade later, that number has dropped to about 2.6 degrees Celsius.
Most importantly, experts say we are already capable of making much of the move away from fossil fuels toward a carbon-free energy system. That’s the key to combating climate change, as the carbon released through burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of warmer temperatures.
“The technology is there. We have the knowledge of the skills to do it,” said Greg Jones, deputy director of the science, solutions and policy team at the Climate Reality Project. “It’s just a matter of getting policies in place and getting finance distributed fairly and equitably to places that need it the most.”
To fully take part as the world shifts away from fossil fuels, the U.S. needs to deploy new clean energy sources, such as solar and wind, to replace aging electricity infrastructure, Jones said.
He added that large-scale battery storage needs to keep pace with new clean energy infrastructure — but it can.
Some industries, however, have proven more challenging to address than others.
Emissions from sources such as air travel or cement production are harder to decarbonize and could take longer to solve, said Charles Harvey, a climate and environment professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“But those are all actually kind of a small part of overall carbon emissions,” Harvey said. “It’s kind of counterproductive to stress out about cutting something that’s 5% or even 10% of emissions, when 80% of it could be solved right now.”
In addition to making current methods of travel more efficient, changes in the transportation sector could include providing the public with better options, said Anne Criss, director of climate and sustainability initiatives at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering.
“So better and safer bike lanes, pedestrian options, trains, metro systems and the like,” Criss said. “All of those things help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. There’s a lot that governments can do, both at federal, state and local levels, to facilitate that.”
The politics
For climate advocates, though, the U.S. government is doing exactly the opposite of what it should. Abandoning President Joe Biden’s aggressive climate efforts, Trump returned to office a year ago and took aim at regulations and initiatives addressing climate change.
Trump ended tax incentives for electric vehicles and renewable energy, once again removed the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, sought to slash funding and headcounts at federal scientific agencies, and rolled back dozens of regulations on carbon emissions and pollution.
The Trump administration is also proposing to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding, a key environmental ruling that determined six major greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health and welfare.
But according to The Washington Post, the administration’s efforts to overturn the endangerment finding have stalled out. Fearing that the decision would not be strong enough to withstand a challenge in court, officials are delaying its repeal, The Post reported in January.
Climate scientists and policy experts warn if the ruling is revoked — and if environmentalists lose a likely court battle to try to save the measure — the move would prevent them from carrying out work to address climate change at the federal level.
“The endangerment finding is the cornerstone of regulating greenhouse gases,” Jones said. “So, without that in place, that sort of ability nationally wouldn’t exist. You’d be reliant on policies and laws that exist at the state or local level.”
In an August interview with CNN, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin argued the EPA “didn’t have the science” in 2009 to justify the endangerment finding.
In a similar move, the EPA recently announced it will limit regulations on air pollutants for new power plants. Going forward, the agency said it would no longer consider the health and economic benefits from reducing pollution when setting new rules.
On top of that, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced in December that the National Science Foundation would shutter the 65-year-old National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, one of the world’s premier climate research facilities.
“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said on X.
The administration’s reversal of course could be devastating to climate science, said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the National Resources Defense Council.
“There is going to be, potentially, a loss in some of the innovation, the pace at which we’re able to build out and commercialize some of these important technological solutions,” Levin said.
Jones said the Trump administration’s changes create the potential for increased air, water and land-based pollution and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
“Now, the other side of that is there’s a lot of progress that’s happening that can’t really be stopped,” he said. “The economics of renewable energy are really undeniable, even despite the federal subsidies. And this is not just a U.S. thing — this is a global reality as well.”
Then again, Levin said there could still be a ripple effect from the U.S.’ shift on climate.
“The fact that the U.S. was committing to go faster on cutting emissions helped push other countries that were maybe more laggards on climate to also make big commitments,” Levin said. “We are going to see that, as the U.S. moves away from its climate commitments, that might give space to other countries to weaken their own commitments.”
The path forward
Though the U.S. federal government is reversing course on climate policy, Levin said other nations are continuing their efforts to transform the electric grid and shift to renewable sources of energy — although not fast enough.
Worldwide investment in solar and other renewable energies is rapidly increasing, as they’ve become the best options.
According to a 2025 report from the International Renewable Energy Agency, more than 91% of new renewable energy projects are cheaper than alternatives powered by fossil fuels.
Wind and solar power projects are moving forward in America, too, despite Trump’s opposition to them. For example, lawsuits have stymied the administration’s attempts to block offshore wind projects.
Besides, Levin noted state and local policies account for about 40% of new solar and wind capacity since 2000, proving those governments can continue to push climate-friendly energy development even if the federal government won’t.
“The federal picture can be very depressing. We have seen significant losses in the last few months that have torn and destroyed some of the biggest climate wins in U.S. history,” Levin said. “But it is not just a story about the federal government. States have been and will continue to be, a really important piece of the clean energy story in the United States, and they have the ability to continue to drive investment in cleaner solutions, in transportation, in buildings, in the power sector.”
However, Harvey said some highly touted climate solutions aren’t worth the investment.
Nuclear power, he said, is “very low carbon, so it’s good that way, but it’s just crazy expensive and takes forever to build.”
Developing technologies such as carbon capture, he said, don’t make sense to invest in while there are still active carbon emissions.
“We’re never going to build anything that is even within an order of magnitude” of capturing all the carbon that’s still being emitted, Harvey said.
That leaves tried-and-true solutions like wind and solar at the center of climate efforts worldwide. Despite their increasing popularity, experts say governments still aren’t spending enough to quickly transition away from fossil fuels.
Estimates vary, but recent reports, including from the International Energy Agency and global consulting firm McKinsey, state the cost of reaching net-zero emissions could be upward of several trillion dollars per year in additional spending.
But taking no further action carries its own cost. Climate change could cost more than $3 trillion per year by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum.
For Levin, the current level of funding devoted to addressing climate change shows it can be hard for governments and the private sector to focus on a challenge that still seems far away.
“There are so many things that somebody has to worry about every day, and often, the costs of climate change feel more remote, further away than the everyday struggles that we’re having to contend with,” she said.
But Jones said governments need to invest more to prevent further warming and all the disasters that would accompany it.
“It is just a matter of deploying the resources, whether they’re financial or technological resources, to the places that need it the most, and to deploy them at scale,” he said. “So in many ways, this is just a matter of willpower.”
