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Amid all the climate gloom, let’s not ignore the good news

 Faith Birol: It’s important also to pay attention to the good news —
the areas where real progress is being made that can still enable us to
avoid the most severe effects of climate change.

Nowhere is this clearer
than in clean energy, where technologies like solar, wind and electric cars
are increasingly replacing the need for fossil fuels and reining in
emissions. Clean energy technologies are already competitive in many key
areas and are getting more so as production scales up. It’s now cheaper
to build onshore wind and solar power projects than new fossil fuel plants
almost everywhere worldwide.

The country leading the growth of clean energy
is China, which installed as much solar capacity in 2023 as the entire
world did in 2022. China is also comfortably the biggest player in global
supply chains for solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and other
major technologies, and is investing in manufacturing capacity in other
regions, as well. Regardless of where they stand on climate policy, if
countries want to compete with China in the industries of the future, they
need to double down on clean energy plans, not dial back on them.

 FT 21st March 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/9ea0566b-ba34-4bd6-be92-a191bad85aa5

March 23, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change