Confronting Our New Reality
The Amazon River, the world’s largest by volume, has reached record low levels in recent years.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York Times
Solutions to the problem of climate change have never been more clear. But the scale of the problem keeps getting bigger.
by David Gelles
For a hot minute, it looked like the Doomers might be proved wrong.
In recent years, the rapid deployment of renewable energy and a shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuels has given even grizzled climate activists cause for some measure of hope.
The most extreme projections about temperature rise on planet Earth were replaced by less apocalyptic forecasts, and while the world wasn’t shifting away from fossil fuels nearly fast enough, there appeared to be a realistic pathway to significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the decades ahead.
Yet now, at the very moment the world seems to be making real progress in the fight against global warming, the scale of the problem seems to be getting even bigger.
Electricity demand is spiking, thanks to artificial intelligence and a new generation of energy-hungry data centers. Overall energy consumption keeps climbing as a new middle class rises in the developing world. And a large-scale phaseout of planet-warming emissions is being hampered by short-term politics, global conflict and ossified financial markets.
These are just some of the themes being discussed Wednesday at the Climate Forward conference hosted by The New York Times. Interviewees will include the primatologist Jane Goodall, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan and more.
By 2050, global demand for electricity is expected to rise by as much as 75 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Much of that demand will come from rapidly developing nations in Africa and Southeast Asia. But even in the United States, energy consumption is soaring after remaining relatively flat for 15 years.
“Everyone is assuming that wealthy countries will taper their energy demand on a certain timeline,” said Raj Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, a nonprofit group that is working on expanding clean energy access in poor countries. “But that assumption will be blown out of the water by whatever the next new waves of technology are.”
Fishing near the Ford River Rouge plant in Michigan. The state, long recognized as the heart of the American auto industry, has been struggling with climate change issues connected to its industries.Credit...Emily Elconin for The New York Times
The fact that energy use is skyrocketing should come as no surprise. Since before the industrial revolution, human progress has meant using more energy. Global transportation, heavy industry, mass production, and the computing revolution have all raised living standards around the world, but also required huge amounts of power. The next waves of technological progress — including A.I. and even more global travel — will only compound the need for energy.
It’s true that a growing share of the world’s power will come from clean sources, including solar panels and wind turbines. Last year alone, nearly 86 percent of the new power generation built worldwide came from clean sources, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
But with the global population expected to rise by as much as 1.7 billion in the next 25 years and overall energy demand rising in tandem, the gains in solar and wind may not be enough to rapidly displace dirty forms of power such as oil, gas and coal. Rather than taking the place of fossil fuels, renewable energy sources are simply helping meet the additional demand.
Indeed, both the production and the use of oil and gas are still booming worldwide, and planet-warming emissions are still on the rise.
Major economies such as India and China continue to build new coal plants. The United States is currently the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas and is constructing new gas power plants; the U.S. is also producing record amounts of oil. And countries in the Middle East are proceeding with plans to pump oil for many decades to come.
What’s more, while there are promising emissions-free alternatives to electricity generation, progress is slower in identifying viable replacements for things like aviation fuel, shipping fuel, concrete, plastics and more.
“Despite all the noble efforts, emissions set new records every year,” said Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, itself a major polluter. “The amount of coal burned on the planet, probably the dirtiest form of emissions, goes up every year.”
Energy Transition
The perils of these choices and a warming planet are already clear. Global average temperatures have been 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial levels for most of the past year, exceeding a threshold that scientists had long warned of crossing. The result: last year was the hottest year on record, with withering heat waves, deadly droughts and extreme weather around the globe.
“The catastrophic effects of climate change are visiting us,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. “They’re killing people. It’s a grave situation.”
Gracia Rojas, a restoration associate with the Coral Restoration Foundation, surveys the extent of coral bleaching at the organization’s coral nursery on Looe Key Reef in Florida in 2023. All of the coral in the nursery died as a persistent marine heat wave made the ocean too warm for coral to survive.Credit...Jason Gulley for The New York Times
As long as fossil fuel emissions persist at scale, temperatures will keep rising, and the heat and violent weather will keep getting worse. On the flip side, the faster the world builds more clean power to replace fossil fuels, the sooner the planet will stop heating up.
Those simple truths make plain the global stakes of the energy transition. And with most of the new energy demand expected to come from the developing world, it is in some of the poorest countries on Earth that the battle to keep global warming at bay will be won or lost.