Climate Change 2024: The Year In Progress

Disasters that are increasingly deadly and expensive, Big Oil’s continued nose-thumbing dominance, science that shows the problem continues to spiral — the climate change year in review has not been pretty. So we will end here on an uplifting note: though the problem remains dire, truly massive amounts of progress are being made around the world — progress toward renewable energy, away from (some) fossil fuels, toward some degree of accountability for climate denial and delay, and more.

The fossil fuel industry may still be exercising its profound influence to slow it down, but the economics of renewable energy along with some levers of government support are pushing it into the stratosphere. A report in September found that the world will install close to 600 gigawatts of solar power in 2024, shattering expectations and blowing past 2023’s record by almost 30 percent. Solar and battery storage are having real moments in the U.S. and in many countries around the globe; the International Energy Agency projects that overall renewable capacity will come close to tripling by the end of the decade, surpassing current national ambitions by 25 percent.

“Climate and energy security policies in nearly 140 countries have played a crucial role in making renewables cost-competitive with fossil-fired power plants,” that IEA report notes. Here in the U.S., one such policy lever has been a clear success: the Inflation Reduction Act, which turned two years old this summer and has already ushered in hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investments. The Biden administration has also been attempting to grease the skids for the still-somehow-nascent offshore wind industry here, even as Europe and China continue to build out an already-massive collection of offshore farms; there are turbines in U.S. waters now, and more supposedly on the way, but there is still ample astroturfed opposition standing in the way.

Aside from solar and wind, another potentially game-changing renewable resource, geothermal energy, was also ascendant in 2024. A huge project in Utah got permission to move forward in October, and an IEA report later in the year offered some truly rosy geothermal projections: the industry could meet as much as 15 percent of new power demand between now and mid-century.

What’s more, at least some of the alternatives to building out renewables are, finally, fading away. Coal power has been on its way out in the U.S. and Europe for a long time, but a Biden administration rule issued in April regarding power plant emissions would effectively kill it off entirely. In September, the United Kingdom’s last coal plant stopped operating, officially closing the door on coal in the place where the industrial revolution began. Overall, some parts of the world really are making emissions progress — most notably the European Union, collectively on par with India in third place on the emissions chart but now 37 percent lower than 1990 levels.

The courts are also contributing to climate progress, at least in some ways. Again in the U.K., a Supreme Court decision in June said that downstream emissions of fossil fuel extraction projects must be considered — a ruling that, taking to its logical end, could usher the fossil fuel era out of that country entirely. One of the dozens of youth-led climate change lawsuits in the U.S. was settled in Hawai’i that same month, allowing that the plaintiffs are in fact entitled to a clean environment; many others are still out there. Other attempts at legal accountability keep coming in, from Maine’s suit against Big Oil to a small North Carolina town’s attempt to make utility giant Duke Energy pay for its damage.

The multilateral landscape is admittedly rocky at the end of 2024, with a decidedly tepid — at best — result out of the Azerbaijan-hosted COP29. But countries are now on the clock to submit updated Nationally Determined Contributions, the Paris Agreement pledges that will hopefully show a globally increased ambition toward a net-zero world. The U.S. is actually among the first to countries to do so, perhaps aiming to get it out there well in advance of Donald Trump’s inauguration in January — the new target is set at a 61 to 66 percent reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2035, and some environmental NGOs praised the new ambition.

Regardless of whether Trump repeats his 2017 move and pulls the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, that and other global targets are going to be hard to meet. Trump’s election absolutely throws a wrench in domestic and global climate progress; Biden’s Department of Energy has been shoving billions of dollars out the door to electric vehicle projects largely in red states, hoping to get the money spent before the GOP can reel it back in. Whether that sort of momentum continues is, obviously, in doubt.

There’s no point in sugarcoating the overall picture here — writ large, climate change is bad and getting worse, and global progress to slow it is not moving anywhere near fast enough. But there is progress — a lot of it, and the glass-half-full view is that much of the momentum can snowball, with price reductions for renewables further pushing fossil fuels to the side, technological advances in areas like geothermal energy helping open new avenues for emissions reductions, and, maybe, a global appetite for a cleaner, safer world acting as an exponential catalyst. One can hope.