The World's Never Been Hotter. It's A Good Time To Go Green, Yes Really.

Climate optimism for a dark time.

Hey, that’s a Kia EV6 like the one Dok leased and won’t shut up about! (With a furrin license plate.) Photo by Hyundai Motor Group on Unsplash

When I finish writing this roundup of climate news in 2024, I’m going to go put my Idaho plates ( “DR ZAPP”) on my recently leased Kia EV6 and talk with my landlord about installing a charger in the garage. I’ve been wanting to make the switch from a hybrid to a full EV for years, and things came together earlier this month that made now a good time to plug in and turn on. And with the country about to be handed over from the first president to actually do something about climate to … that person, I’ve been thinking about climate change and the energy transition even more than I usually do.

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I Finally Got An Electric Car So Good Luck EVER Getting Me To Shut Up About EVs

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As ever, there’s plenty to worry about. The UN announced yesterday that 2024 is set to be the warmest in human history, as 2023 was before it, though the official finding from the World Meteorological Organization will wait until a report coming in January. UN Secretary General António Guterres said in his New Year’s message,

“Today I can officially report that we have just endured a decade of deadly heat. The top ten hottest years on record have happened in the last ten years, including 2024. This is climate breakdown — in real time. We must exit this road to ruin — and we have no time to lose.”

In a science fiction movie, that would be a signal for the heroes to suit up and board a spaceship to go blow up the threat to the planet. The thing is, we’re the heroes who have to do the job, all of us, and the planet we’re already on is the only vessel we have. There’s no other place to go.

It’s a lot easier in the movies, where the naysayer is usually a craven coward (who may or may not be rescued after seeing the error of their ways), not an entire economic and political system that’s frustratingly inert. The square-jawed hero spaceman can’t stuff the entire oil industry in a closet and keep it there until the crisis passes. (Besides, a lot of our best hopes are coming from women in clean energy and climate activism.)

But the other thing is that we’ve already started the job of moving our economy, and the world’s, away from total reliance on the fossil fuels that have been heating the atmosphere and making the weather crazy. Yes, long after we should have, and never aggressively enough, but as we keep saying, the energy transition is happening, and it’s not likely to be reversed. The insane fossil guy can certainly foul things up a lot and slow progress considerably, and we’re in a much better place in the fight against global warming when the government actually acknowledges that science is real.

Jimmy Carter, who put solar panels on the White House, was the sort of tough-minded optimist we could use more of. In 1977, Carter was briefed on the threat of global warming caused by burning fossil fuels, and he laid the ground for research and policies that could have become the first stage of mobilization to decarbonize the economy. That was cut short when a simple-minded idiot and corporate tool got elected because gas prices were high and a lot of Americans resented being asked to wear a sweater.

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Jimmy Carter's Solar Panels And The Mellow Allman Brothers Climate Paradise That Could've Been

China Killing It (Complimentary) In Clean Energy Transition

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But that’s how the climate fight has gone at every step: There’ll be an Al Gore or a Greta Thunberg to ring the alarm bell, but then a George W. Bush or a … that man … to slow things down again. But this time around, there’s a lot more momentum, and honest-to-Crom capital on the side of the energy transition. In 2024, for the first time, wind and solar energy generated more electricity in America than coal, and coal use is slowing worldwide. As of this year, the US now has enough solar manufacturing capacity to meet all of our domestic solar demand.

Even China, long the world’s climate pariah for its dependence on coal, is deploying clean energy resources so broadly and quickly that its CO2 emissions are likely to peak in the next year, or may have already done so — we won’t know until they stay at a plateau and then start declining.

And for all the worries about the supposedly vast hunger for electricity from new data centers, we’re nearing the point where future energy needs can be met by carbon-free power (even if that includes nukes). Next-generation geothermal energy is moving rapidly from the pilot-plant phase to getting some serious gigawatts on the grid — and even better, Republicans don’t seem to hate it, because it uses some of the same drilling technology as fracking, but without the oil and gas extraction. And grid-scale battery storage just keeps getting better.

2025 is going to be fucking nuts. Let’s get our spacesuits on and get to work. No, you in the back there, it’s a metaphor.

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