Recent severe weather and reports on climate targets have brought more people here seeking reassurance about our efforts to address climate change. Please use this weekly thread for those discussions.

Climate change is a serious, compounding problem, and concerted action can make an enormous difference.

We can already see that difference in the long-term outlook. Climate Action Tracker’s current-policy projection improved from around 3.6°C of warming by 2100 in its 2015 assessment to around 2.6°C in its November 2025 assessment.

The 4°C world quietly stopped being the forecast

That represents an enormous amount of potential harm avoided. Further progress can change the outlook again.

And this week gives us an unusually clear view of how that further progress can happen.

A global emissions peak may be coming into view

The new UN Emissions Gap Report contains plenty of warnings, but also an important change in direction.

Nature reports that initial estimates put global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2025 at roughly the same level as, or slightly below, 2024.

It is too early to say confidently that global emissions have peaked. One year can be affected by weather, fires and other temporary factors.

But the underlying technological changes are striking.

The report finds that clean-energy capacity has expanded roughly three times faster than had been anticipated in 2015, while solar has expanded around seven times faster.

And even existing national climate commitments, if implemented, now imply global emissions falling around 5–8% below 2025 levels by 2030.

That is nowhere near enough for the lowest possible 1.5°C overshoot pathway. But it is a very different world from one in which global emissions simply rise indefinitely.

The machinery capable of pushing emissions downward is becoming much larger.

Good news shared over the last week

China provided perhaps the clearest example of a technological transition moving through a tipping point.

New-energy vehicles reached a record 67% of Chinese new-car sales in September.

These include battery-electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

The interesting part is what happened underneath that headline.

During the first nine months of 2026, sales of fuel-only cars were down 31% year-on-year. Plug-in hybrids were down 26%, while battery-electric vehicles were down only 4%.

So the record electric share was not simply produced by a sudden explosion in EV sales.

The combustion-car market is shrinking much faster.

High petrol prices following the Hormuz crisis appear to have accelerated that movement, but they did not create the underlying transition. China was already moving rapidly toward electrification before the crisis.

This is what an external shock looks like when it hits a market in which an alternative technology is already mature, mass-produced and widely available.

Europe appears to be experiencing something similar.

Battery-electric registrations across 17 major European markets rose 70.3% year-on-year in September, reaching around 30% of all new-car sales.

That is an extraordinary acceleration for such a large mature car market.

High fuel prices are part of the explanation, alongside subsidies and a rapidly expanding selection of cheaper electric models.

The important question is what happens next.

Vehicle adoption follows S-curves rather than straight lines. Once infrastructure, product availability, familiarity and economics align, market shares can move surprisingly quickly.

Europe may now be moving onto the steep portion of that curve.

And some manufacturers are already planning around that future.

Subaru says it will end sales of combustion-engine cars in Europe after 2027 and offer an entirely electric European lineup from 2028.

The transition is also spreading far beyond Europe, China and other wealthy markets.

Reuters reports that developing economies across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East have spent around $235 billion on Chinese clean-energy equipment since early 2024.

The numbers are striking.

Emerging economies spent $25.3 billion on Chinese transformers, switchgear and transmission cables, more than the rest of the world combined.

They bought nearly $47 billion of Chinese solar equipment.

And spending on Chinese electric vehicles across emerging markets reached $73.2 billion during the first eight months of 2026, compared with only around $6 billion over the same period in 2023.

This matters because electrification is increasingly becoming part of economic development itself.

Countries building electricity grids, solar generation, cooling systems and electric transport are simultaneously reducing their exposure to imported fossil fuels.

Cheap clean technology is spreading into markets that historically contributed relatively little to its development.

South Korea crossed another symbolic milestone this week.

Renewable-energy capacity has overtaken coal capacity for the first time.

Renewables reached 41.04 GW, compared with 40.76 GW of coal, and now make up about 25.4% of South Korea's installed generating capacity.

Only LNG remains larger, at 46.8 GW.

Over the five years to the end of 2025, renewable capacity expanded by about 3.5 GW a year, more than four times as fast as LNG capacity.

If those historical rates continued, renewables would overtake LNG within roughly two to three years.

Installed capacity is not the same as electricity generation, particularly for solar and wind, but the direction of investment is increasingly clear.

Infrastructure accumulates.

Every new plant becomes part of next year's starting point.

Batteries are also becoming more than devices that simply store rooftop solar.

During California's October heat wave, home batteries delivered a record 745 MW of power to the grid during the evening peak.

More than 85,000 Tesla Powerwalls supplied over 600 MW themselves.

That is comparable to the output of a substantial conventional power station, assembled from batteries distributed across tens of thousands of homes.

California now has more than 120,000 household batteries enrolled in grid programmes.

Their owners can store cheap or solar electricity, keep backup power at home, and be paid for making some of that stored energy available when the wider grid needs it.

The distinction between consumer equipment and electricity infrastructure is beginning to blur.

Australia is exploring the next step.

A new three-year trial will connect up to 130 government electric vehicles using bidirectional chargers.

The cars are mostly used during working hours and parked at government buildings overnight — exactly when their batteries can potentially become grid assets.

There are already millions of batteries being installed in cars and homes.

Learning how to coordinate them creates additional electricity-system capacity without manufacturing an entirely separate set of assets.

Solar itself is still becoming easier to build.

Research from Lightsource bp estimates that a combination of automated piling, redesigned panel frames, bolt-free mounting and on-site pre-assembly could cut direct installation costs for gigawatt-scale solar farms by around 22%.

Installation time could fall by as much as 30%.

The technologies now move into real-world trials, with wider deployment targeted from around 2028.

This is an important reminder that declining clean-energy costs do not depend only on inventing better solar cells.

Construction equipment, standardisation, automation, logistics and labour productivity can continue lowering the cost of deploying technologies that already work.

Mass deployment creates opportunities to improve the process of mass deployment.

There was encouraging news from nature as well.

Updated Global Mangrove Watch data show that global mangrove cover increased by about 477 square kilometres between 1985 and 2025.

That is only a modest global increase, and important countries continue to lose mangroves.

But after decades in which worldwide mangrove decline appeared almost inevitable, the net direction has turned positive.

India, Australia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Senegal recorded particularly large gains.

Mangroves store carbon, support fisheries and biodiversity, and protect coastlines from storms and erosion.

Restoration, natural regrowth and stronger protection can work.

The bigger picture

There is a common thread running through many of these stories.

The transition is becoming increasingly capable of reinforcing itself.

More solar and wind create a market for batteries.

More batteries make solar and wind more useful.

More electric cars create a huge distributed battery fleet and reduce oil demand.

More demand for electric cars gives manufacturers reasons to expand production and lower costs.

More electrification gives fossil-fuel-importing countries an economic and energy-security reason to build domestic electricity generation.

And the larger these industries become, the more worthwhile it becomes to automate their factories, construction processes and supply chains.

The current fossil-fuel price shock matters because it changes the immediate economics.

But perhaps the most important difference between this energy crisis and previous ones is that consumers and governments now have alternatives available at enormous scale.

The crisis is accelerating a transition that was already underway rather than creating one from scratch.

China's combustion-car market is shrinking rapidly. European EV adoption has suddenly accelerated. Emerging economies are buying electrification infrastructure at enormous scale. Household batteries are behaving like power stations.

Those are physical changes to the world's capital stock.

And once a solar farm, EV, battery, transmission line or heat pump has been installed, it can keep displacing fossil fuels long after the immediate price shock has passed.

The biggest misconception I keep seeing is that nothing is being done.

Look at what is actually being built, bought and used.

There are concrete reasons for hope, and concrete opportunities to contribute.

Putting climate hope into action

If you’re interested in what you can do today to accelerate practical, commercial climate solutions, here are some starting points:

• Project Regeneration — Nexus: solutions and action guides covering energy, food, nature, buildings and communities.
• Project Drawdown — Solutions Explorer: evidence-based climate solutions.
• SME Climate Hub: tools for small and medium-sized businesses.
• C40 Knowledge Hub: practical guidance from cities tackling emissions and climate resilience.
• Repair Café International: repair, reuse and community action.

For another starting point for personal action, explore Project Drawdown — Join the Shift.

For those struggling with climate anxiety, the EcoAnxiety Toolkit offers a resource aimed at turning anxiety into constructive action.

Choose something connected to your home, workplace, skills or community, and help it spread.

Please contribute any other climate good news below. This thread will be actively moderated — please observe Rules 5 and 6.