….So for a moment, allow me to play, if not climate optimist then transition optimist, at least. It’s a pretty straightforward job, since the numbers somewhat speak for themselves. Globally, sales of gas-powered cars have declined by more than 20 percent since their peak, which we already passed a decade ago. Since then, sales of electric vehicles have grown almost 30-fold. In 2019, only 3 percent of car sales globally were electric; in 2025, a quarter were. In the European Union, full E.V.s and hybrids were more than half of all sales. In China, the world’s largest car market, it’s more than half. And the global pattern pops up in some unexpected places. In Nepal, for instance, 76 percent of new cars sold in 2024 were E.V.s. In Ethiopia — where the government was so desperate to stop importing so much foreign oil, it took a heavy-handed policy intervention in 2024, banning the importation of gas-powered cars — E.V. sales grew from close to zero to more than half of all new registrations that year.

By global standards, the United States is a relative laggard — enough so that the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather recently suggested the country could end up, 30 years from now, looking like Cuba does today, with roads crowded with gas-guzzling clunkers. But even here sales of gas-powered cars between 2016 and 2024 were down more than 2.5 million per year. Over the same period, American E.V. sales are up 10-fold.

You see a similar pattern when looking at solar power installations across the developing world, where decarbonization was long assumed to require significant subsidy and support from places like the United States and Europe. But in Algeria solar installations recently grew 33-fold in a 12-month period, with many other countries across the African continent tripling or more over the same period (even though oil imports still exceed solar panels in most of Africa’s biggest markets). As the Global Energy Monitor put it earlier this month, “the center of gravity for new clean power has shifted decisively toward emerging and developing economies.”

“We’re moving fast, but we’re nowhere near moving fast enough,” says Stern, whose new book describes a world poised at the crossroads, not yet taking full advantage of what he calls the growth opportunity of the century. “Every time you look at the technology, it looks better,” he says. But every time you look at the science, it gets worse.”

In China, by far the world’s largest emitter, emissions have been falling slowly now for about two years, marking what is likely to be an emissions peak. Simply put, this has never happened anywhere else before. Many rich countries of the world are well past their emissions peak — another fact about the green transition few outside of energy and climate circles appreciate. But those encouraging downward emissions slopes all depict periods of deindustrialization. Not China’s.

As for India, long viewed as China’s natural carbon successor? Its power sector emissions are falling for just the second time in 50 years. And more than that: India is moving away from fossil fuels faster than China did, according to a new analysis by Ember — transitioning at an earlier stage of economic development, that is, having produced less than a quarter as much carbon, cumulatively, as China has to this point.

This is especially remarkable given that for all that talk about its staggering emissions, China actually began moving away from fossil fuels much faster than the rich countries of the West ever did. India’s economic mix is different, less dependent on manufacturing and heavy industry, but at comparable levels of G.D.P., Ember found, India is both generating far more solar and using far less coal than China, which did it much faster than Europe or the United States. At a comparable level of electrification, India is using just one-sixth as much coal as China did. And there are those who believe that the transition in sub-Saharan Africa will be even faster — which could be a great blessing, given that barely half of the region has access to electricity today, with some estimates of the number lacking it floating around 600 million for 15 years now.

Where does this all leave us? Still far from a global power system dominated by low carbon sources. In the United States, we are stumbling forward, driving emissions slightly up in the short term but still heading for slow declines in the years ahead. Overall, we are still so far north of recent climate targets, there is now a robust debate among climate advocates about what new goals or measures to use, since the old ones are so obviously irrelevant. And an awful lot of talk from the more climate complacent that the world has moved on to other concerns, tacitly accepting a future of much more climate disruption. But if the political mood has darkened, one last data point shines out to me like a beacon: In 2026, the world may well spend more on green energy in total than it devotes to military spending. And if not this year, it seems safe to say, it will probably happen soon.

An orphan revolution

by David Wallace-Wells/New York Times

February 25, 2026

This is an excerpt of this article which can be read in full here. The first paragraph sets the context, and the rest is David’s response.

In the fall, Christiana Figueres, the former head of the U.N.’s climate change body, told me that climate politics didn’t matter nearly as much as “climate economy”— the combination of cheap solar and battery power, the price volatility of fossil fuels, domestic energy crises and geopolitics pushing countries toward energy autonomy and the relative ease of installing new renewables are all powering the global transition even under conditions of policy uncertainty….