One of the things that COVID make crystal clear to me is that radical changes for the better are much more straightforward than people think, and the only reason they don't happen is the people in charge couldn't be bothered.
There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar. China is losing money on panels at the moment they have such production capacity. Its free money for anyone country who wants to do it.
The event after which dozens of governments were destabilized and incumbents were ousted from power all over the world… convinced you that radical change is easy…?
The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
Leaving aside whether they were, and whether all countries are necessarily equally unstable.
Would that not have been different? I certainly haven't heard of a suspected coup by disgruntled democrats and/or minorities.
I suspect the coup you allude to would have amounted to a coup of the people in power to stay in power. Not a popular, armed uprising. So I don't see how it's relevant to the point you are trying to make.
CO2 emissions will decrease in the next decades but mostly because of demographics. People get older and tend to pollute less, growth is slower. It happened to Europe and it'll happen to China sooner than we think when we look at their pyramid of age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.
(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.
It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”
The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology
deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in
global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”
> If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away
Unfortunately the opposite might happen in the next years. It seems this year China is starting to export less solar panels: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-18/china-sol... . Despite the low prices, some countries are investing less in solar panels and wind turbines for many different reasons. Other technologies might come but are slower to develop.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...
There is no excuse for every government in the world to not be covering every bit of rooftop or scrap land with solar. China is losing money on panels at the moment they have such production capacity. Its free money for anyone country who wants to do it.
The United States was a couple feet from an actual coup dude.
Would that not have been different? I certainly haven't heard of a suspected coup by disgruntled democrats and/or minorities.
I suspect the coup you allude to would have amounted to a coup of the people in power to stay in power. Not a popular, armed uprising. So I don't see how it's relevant to the point you are trying to make.
I think we shouldn't mix (1) negative events in the world which impact CO2 emissions (covid, Ukraine war, Iran war etc.), (2) with "normal" events such as population decline in polluting countries, (3) with an actual coordinated and effective action against global warming.
(1) and (2) can have a large impact on CO2 emissions. (3) is more difficult to notice.
It says the report "finds that clean energy growth is not yet fast enough for a durable decline in global fossil CO2 emissions" and quotes the report's lead as “A decline in fossil CO2 emissions is encouraging, but a reduction driven partly by geopolitical shocks is not a sustainable climate solution.”
The most optimistic note was “If further acceleration of clean technology deployment can be supported through time, a sustained peak and decline in global CO2 emissions could be a few years away.”
Unfortunately the opposite might happen in the next years. It seems this year China is starting to export less solar panels: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-18/china-sol... . Despite the low prices, some countries are investing less in solar panels and wind turbines for many different reasons. Other technologies might come but are slower to develop.
Same with burning tankers in Iran...