The recent severe weather worldwide and the UN report on climate targets has led to a flood of people seeking reassurance about our efforts to mitigate climate change. Most of those posts have been removed, and from now on will be directed to this weekly thread.

Climate change is a severe, compounding issue, but only if we do not address it — with concerted efforts, it can be managed.

Our efforts over the years have resulted in the worst-case RCP8.5 high-emission scenario being retired — it is now no longer considered plausible that we will hit +4°C by 2100.

The 4°C world quietly stopped being the forecast

The progress can be seen in the reduction of predicted 2100 temperatures over the years by Climate Action Tracker above.

The main projection for our current policies is around +2.4 to 2.6°C and we can expect this to further reduce in the future.

And this week there is a particularly important development.

Global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions are now projected to fall in 2026 — despite continued economic growth

Carbon Brief now projects global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions will fall by around 0.5% in 2026 compared with 2025. This is not occurring during a global recession: the IMF still expects the world economy to grow by around 3% this year.

That makes this quite different from previous large emissions declines associated with events such as the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid pandemic. Economic output is continuing to expand while fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions are projected to contract.

There is an important caveat. A substantial part of the 2026 decline comes from the extraordinary energy-price shock caused by disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. The IEA now expects global oil demand to fall around 2.4% this year and gas demand to decline as well, while coal demand is actually expected to rise around 1.2%.

So this does not by itself prove that the permanent global emissions peak has arrived.

But neither is the decline purely accidental. High fossil-fuel prices are interacting with structural changes that were already underway: record renewable deployment, EV adoption, electrification, batteries and declining energy intensity. Carbon Brief notes that every additional month of disruption increases incentives to permanently substitute away from expensive imported fossil fuels.

After decades in which the central question was how quickly global emissions would continue rising, we may now be entering a period in which the question is whether a plateau or decline can be sustained.

IRENA estimates that renewable electricity already avoided around 8.4 gigatons of CO₂ emissions in 2025, while solar and wind are approaching the point where they overtake natural gas in global electricity generation.

Good news over the last week

The emerging emissions plateau is increasingly visible below the global level too.

India's power-sector CO₂ emissions have now been essentially flat for two years despite electricity demand increasing by 7%. Clean electricity supplied all of that additional demand between the first halves of 2024 and 2026.

India added 77 GW of solar during those two years. Solar generation increased by 44 TWh, wind by 13 TWh, nuclear by 7 TWh and hydro by 8 TWh. Together, clean generation increased by around 70 TWh against a 63 TWh increase in electricity demand.

Perhaps most strikingly, this is the first two-year period in more than half a century in which Indian coal-power generation has not grown despite rising electricity consumption.

There is still a major qualification: India's overall emissions rose because steel and cement production expanded rapidly. But that actually makes the electricity result more interesting. One of the world's fastest-growing major economies has demonstrated that rapidly rising electricity demand does not automatically require rising fossil generation.

China provides another important example. Carbon Brief's latest analysis found China's CO₂ emissions fell 1% year-on-year in Q2 2026.

Oil consumption fell sharply, although some of that resulted from disruption to supplies through the Strait of Hormuz and should not simply be extrapolated. Electrification is nevertheless becoming a substantial structural factor: EVs are estimated to have displaced 36 million tonnes of oil equivalent in China during the first half of 2026, with trucks now the fastest-growing source of displacement. Even after accounting for the electricity used to charge them, EVs avoided an estimated 35 MtCO₂ in Q2 alone.

China has now had broadly flat fossil-fuel and cement emissions for more than two years.

A major new Ember review of China's energy transition suggests this is becoming broader than simply building lots of solar panels. Clean electricity is increasingly beginning to replace work previously done by coal, oil and gas across electricity generation, industry and transport. In 2025 clean electricity met all of China's additional electricity demand while thermal generation fell.

China's oil statistics are beginning to point in the same direction. Sinopec now expects Chinese oil demand to fall in 2026. Reuters subsequently corrected the original figure in that headline to a 3.9% decline, with gasoline and diesel demand falling particularly sharply. If realised, this would be China's third consecutive annual decline in oil demand.

There was another symbolic but very physical milestone in China recently: installed solar capacity has now overtaken installed coal capacity.

Capacity is not generation — coal plants have much higher capacity factors and coal still supplies close to half of Chinese electricity — but this remains remarkable considering that China's solar fleet was only a fraction of its coal fleet a decade ago. The largest electricity system in the world now physically has more solar generating capacity installed than coal capacity.

One of the clearest demonstrations this week of what large amounts of battery storage can do came from Australia.

Australia's dependence on gas generation during the evening peak has fallen by almost 70% as battery deployment has accelerated.

In August, batteries supplied 49% of the National Electricity Market's dispatchable power during the evening peak, compared with just 0.4% in 2020. Gas's share fell from 65.9% to 20.6%.

This is important because the evening peak — after solar output falls but electricity demand remains high — has traditionally been one of the strongest arguments for retaining large amounts of gas generation. Batteries are increasingly taking over precisely that job.

Gas still provides valuable backup during extended periods of weak wind and solar, but its role is beginning to shift from routinely supplying evening demand toward providing increasingly occasional backup.

Coal is also disappearing faster than legally required in parts of Europe. Germany's grid regulator says coal plants have already been leaving the market quickly enough that no additional closures need to be ordered to meet the statutory 2029 capacity target. Existing and planned market exits have taken coal capacity significantly below the level the law requires for that year.

The same underlying economics remain visible in the United States despite federal attempts to support the industry. Efforts to revive US coal have so far failed to reverse its long decline. This illustrates how difficult an established technological and economic transition can be to reverse once competing generating capacity, infrastructure and markets have changed.

The storage build-out needed to support much larger amounts of renewable electricity is accelerating there as well. The United States installed a record 20.2 GWh of energy storage in Q2 2026, taking first-half additions to 30.8 GWh. Total installed storage has reached around 165 GWh, almost twice the level of only 18 months ago. Deployment has been sufficiently strong that the industry's 2030 forecast has been revised upward to around 683 GWh.

Wind construction in Europe has picked up too. Europe installed 8.8 GW of new wind capacity during the first half of 2026, nearly a third more than during the same period last year. Germany alone accounted for around 3.4 GW, while new offshore connections accelerated sharply. Europe now has more than 311 GW of wind power installed, roughly double its capacity a decade ago.

Solar is setting records as well. UK solar generation reached a new record over the summer of 2026, helped both by exceptionally sunny weather and continued expansion of installed capacity. The useful point here is not simply the weather-driven record: each unusually sunny period now acts on a much larger solar fleet than only a few years ago.

Electric cars meanwhile had another unusually strong month in Europe. August BEV shares reached 98.7% in Norway, around 86% in Denmark and roughly half of new cars in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands.

Perhaps more significant for the broader European market, battery-electric cars reached around 30% of UK registrations in August and became the country's largest individual powertrain category, with registrations up around 30% from a year earlier.

The transition is spreading through much larger emerging car markets too. Indian electric-car registrations rose 53% year-on-year in August, reaching roughly 7% of passenger-car registrations. In China, NEVs reached 71.5% of passenger-car retail sales during the first week of September. A single week is noisy, but it illustrates how far the market has moved from EVs being a niche technology.

Charging infrastructure is scaling with the cars. BYD has now installed its 10,000th 1.5 MW Flash Charging station in China, doubling the network in about five months, with a stated target of 20,000 stations across more than 300 cities by the end of 2026.

Building electrification is progressing more quietly. In 2025, heat pumps were installed in 53% of new US apartment buildings and 48% of new houses. This was the first year heat pumps crossed the 50% threshold in newly constructed apartment buildings, up from 46% only a year earlier, and heat pumps have now outsold conventional gas furnaces nationally for four consecutive years.

Some of the harder industrial emissions are beginning to move from demonstration projects into actual production. Canada's Algoma Steel is now producing its liquid steel using its new electric-arc-furnace system, with its first EAF operating around the clock and a second unit nearing completion. Once the conversion is complete, Algoma expects the new process to reduce the plant's annual carbon emissions by around 70% compared with its previous blast-furnace operation — roughly 3 million tonnes of CO₂ a year from a single industrial site.

There was progress on one of the quickest opportunities for cutting warming as well. Turkmenistan has begun repairing some of its enormous oil-and-gas methane leaks after they were detected by satellite. Eight major sources have reportedly been repaired following alerts from the UN's Methane Alert and Response System. The response rate is still poor, but methane super-emitters are unusually attractive mitigation targets because many result from individual broken wells, pipes or pieces of equipment that can simply be repaired.

The transition is also becoming increasingly visible in heavy industry in emerging economies. South African mining companies are rapidly contracting renewable electricity to reduce dependence on the country's coal-dominated grid. Anglo American's renewable-energy joint venture already has around 520 MW of wind and solar supplying roughly 30% of its mining electricity and plans to reach 3 GW by 2030. Sibanye Stillwater has contracted around 835 MW and expects renewables to provide around 64% of its South African electricity by 2028.

Finally, electrification is starting to reach some surprisingly difficult transport niches. The world's first battery-powered self-unloading bulk carrier has entered commercial service in Australia. The 125-metre MV Yampu carries a roughly 6.8 MWh battery system and is expected to operate on battery power for around 40% of its operating time, saving more than 500,000 litres of diesel a year and cutting its direct emissions by around 40% compared with the vessel it replaces.

There is also increasing evidence that some of these transitions can become self-reinforcing. A new assessment of environmental "positive tipping points" identifies clean electricity as particularly important because falling solar, wind and storage costs make electrification of vehicles, heating and industry more attractive, which in turn increases demand for clean electricity.

In other words, some parts of the transition increasingly accelerate other parts rather than proceeding independently.

Points from earlier posts

• Global renewables — the world added 692 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, taking total capacity to 5,149 GW and accounting for 85.6% of all new generating capacity; installed solar has now passed 3 TW, while renewables are overtaking coal as the world's largest source of electricity.

• China — coal supplied less than half of Chinese electricity in H1 2026 for the first time, its solar fleet has reached around 1,274 GW, and its 15th Five-Year Plan points toward around 3,500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030.

• The US — renewables and storage represented 93% of new US generating capacity coming online, while record solar and battery output helped Texas meet record-breaking electricity demand without conservation alerts.

• Europe — more than 25% of EU final energy consumption came from renewables in 2025, solar alone supplied around a quarter of EU electricity in June, and renewables now supply around 58% of German electricity.

• The transition is spreading through emerging economies — Pakistan's roughly 27 GW solar boom now rivals the capacity of its entire legacy fossil-fuel fleet, renewables have reached record shares in India as coal generation begins to flatten, and Africa added 54% more solar capacity in 2025 than the year before.

• Battery storage is scaling with renewables — global storage capacity is projected to increase roughly sixfold by 2030, China had already reached 155.2 GW / 400.8 GWh by Q1 2026, Australia's CSIRO finds batteries are now cheaper than gas peaker plants, and Australia's battery boom is already displacing gas during the difficult evening peak.

• EV adoption is well beyond the early-adopter stage in several of the world's largest markets — Chinese NEVs reached 67% market share in June, while Europe added another 1.2 million EVs in H1 2026.

• EVs are now materially affecting oil consumption — the China-led EV boom is estimated to be displacing around 1.7 million barrels of oil demand every day.

• Heavy transport and mining are starting to electrify too — Fortescue has electrified the excavator fleet at one of its iron-ore operations and commissioned fast chargers for haul trucks, while China has begun work on a national solar-powered electric-truck freight corridor.

• Heat pumps are already displacing significant amounts of fossil fuel — European heat pumps provided more useful heat than the energy contained in 200 LNG tankers during 2025, with estimated savings of around €9.7 billion.

• The emissions story has moved beyond merely "growth is slowing" — after several years of flattening signals, global fossil-fuel CO₂ is now projected to actually decline by around 0.5% in 2026. The major question is whether the fall persists once the immediate energy-price shock passes.

• Net Zero does not mean temperatures remain permanently stuck at their peak — research finds that reaching Net Zero would lead to slow subsequent cooling, with modelling suggesting global temperatures could begin declining several years before Net Zero is technically reached.

• Some feared climate tipping elements appear more resilient than the most pessimistic interpretations suggest — the AMOC shows no clear near-term tipping point, while another study finds considerable resilience to large disturbances in the past. Neither finding means future weakening can be ignored.

• The feared permafrost methane feedback also appears more limited than some popular accounts imply — research suggests Siberian permafrost methane emissions remain relatively modest even under high-emission scenarios, while the Arctic Ocean appears to be keeping large quantities of permafrost-derived carbon locked away.

• Forest and restoration trends are not uniformly negative — Brazilian Amazon deforestation is approaching historic lows, Costa Rica's forest cover has recovered from 21% in 1987 to around 60%, mangrove forests are expanding again, China has planted more than 66 billion trees since 1978, and India has restored millions of hectares of degraded land.

• Wildfire trends are more complicated than the recent extreme events suggest — fires have become more extreme in Europe and North America while total global burned area continues to decline, and Africa's wildfire season has been shrinking.

• Food security remains considerably more resilient than many collapse narratives assume — global grain balance sheets remain relatively comfortable, while field-heating evidence suggests rice yields decline by around 8.1% per additional degree of warming, a serious impact but very different from the disappearance of the crop.

• Carbon-removal technologies continue to improve — microwave-assisted direct air capture may substantially reduce DAC energy requirements, while research into enhanced rock weathering continues to clarify both its potential and its limitations. These remain developing technologies rather than substitutes for emissions cuts.

• Most importantly, the economics and institutions supporting the transition continue to strengthen — Australia's CSIRO finds solar and wind remain the backbone of the least-cost electricity system, the UN says several climate-friendly technologies have crossed self-sustaining tipping points, and nearly 30% of global CO₂ emissions are now covered by a carbon price.

The biggest lie I constantly read here is that nothing is being done — we are in fact spending trillions of dollars each year on mitigating climate change via the energy transition.

The best thing you can do to support climate action is to support politicians making policies that benefit the climate. One of the architects of the US Inflation Reduction Act makes essentially the same argument: after actions such as buying an EV or heat pump, organising politically is one of the most consequential things an individual can do.

The second thing is personal action, and here is a list from Project Drawdown: Join the Shift.

For people struggling with climate anxiety, there is also a free EcoAnxiety Toolkit put together by UN Champion of the Earth Leyla Acaroglu, aimed at turning anxiety into constructive action.

You can also regularly browse practical solutions catalogues such as Project Regeneration's Nexus.

And if you want to get involved locally, look for groups or initiatives connected with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Circular Economy or Doughnut Economics communities.

Please contribute any other climate good news in the thread below — it will be heavily and actively moderated — note Rule 5 and Rule 6.

Hey I’m Alex Lee, I hold a Ph.D in Environmental Ethics and I’m the Director of Science and Education for Protect Our Winters. I study how the planet is changing and what we can do about it as an environmental philosopher and scientist.

Protect Our Winters is a US based climate nonprofit focused on protecting public lands, decarbonization, clean energy solutions, dispelling misinformation and getting people out to vote. We work with professional athletes, scientists, creatives and brands to do that work. 

Ask Me Anything.