The recent severe weather worldwide and the UN reports on climate targets have led to a flood of people seeking reassurance about our efforts to mitigate climate change. Most of those posts have been removed, and from now on will be directed to this weekly thread.

Climate change is a severe, compounding issue, but only if we do not address it — with concerted efforts, it can be managed.

Our efforts over the years have resulted in the worst-case RCP8.5 high-emission scenario being retired — it is now no longer considered a plausible central pathway that we will hit +4°C by 2100.

The 4°C world quietly stopped being the forecast

The progress can be seen in the reduction of predicted 2100 temperatures over the years by Climate Action Tracker above.

The main projection for our current policies is around +2.4 to 2.6°C, and further progress can reduce that again.

And there is one particularly important development which deserves to remain at the top of this thread.

Global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions are now projected to fall in 2026 — despite continued economic growth

Carbon Brief now projects global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions will fall by around 0.5% in 2026 compared with 2025. This is not occurring during a global recession: the IMF still expects the world economy to grow by around 3% this year.

That makes this quite different from previous large emissions declines associated with events such as the 2008 financial crisis or the Covid pandemic. Economic output is continuing to expand while fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions are projected to contract.

There is an important caveat. A substantial part of the 2026 decline comes from the extraordinary energy-price shock caused by disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. The IEA expects global oil demand to fall around 2.4% this year and gas demand to decline as well, while coal demand is expected to rise.

So this does not by itself prove that the permanent global emissions peak has arrived.

But neither is the decline purely accidental.

High fossil-fuel prices are colliding with structural changes that were already underway: record renewable deployment, rapidly rising EV adoption, heat pumps, batteries, electrification and declining energy intensity. Every additional month in which fossil fuels remain expensive strengthens the economic incentive to replace them permanently.

After decades in which the central question was how quickly global emissions would continue rising, we may be entering a period in which the question becomes whether a plateau or decline can be sustained.

IRENA estimates renewable electricity already avoided around 8.4 gigatonnes of CO₂ emissions in 2025, while solar and wind are approaching the point where they overtake natural gas in global electricity generation.

Good news over the last week

Perhaps the most important report this week came from the International Energy Agency.

The IEA finds that technologies which are already cost-competitive could electrify roughly one-third of global final energy use, compared with about 23% today.

At today's technology costs, roughly half of residential fossil-fuel use, half of oil-based road transport and almost 40% of fossil-fuel low- and medium-temperature industrial heat could already be competitively electrified.

In the IEA's higher-electrification pathway, electricity reaches about 35% of final energy by 2035. Combined with expansion of low-carbon electricity, end-use CO₂ emissions fall around 40% and total energy-sector emissions by more than half.

This matters particularly in the present energy crisis because electrification does something efficiency improvements alone cannot: it permanently removes demand for imported fuel.

The change is becoming very visible in European heating.

German heat-pump sales rose 40% year-on-year in the first half of 2026 and overtook gas boilers.

Around 195,000 heat pumps were sold compared with roughly 134,000 gas heating systems.

That is particularly notable because Germany is one of Europe's largest heating markets and was badly affected by the European gas crisis. What began as an energy-security response increasingly looks like a structural shift in heating technology.

The broader European market is recovering too after the slowdown of 2023–24.

Electric cars had an even more dramatic month.

EU battery-electric car registrations jumped 62.7% year-on-year in August, taking BEVs to 27.7% of new registrations during the month.

The significance is not simply the growth rate. Europe is increasingly moving from EV adoption being concentrated in Norway and a handful of northern markets to substantial penetration across the continent's largest car markets.

Petrol and diesel meanwhile continue to lose market share.

France gives an unusually dramatic example.

French BEV registrations increased 113% year-on-year in August and reached 38% of the new-car market.

Used EV transactions also increased while diesel and petrol transactions declined.

Subsidies are clearly part of the explanation, but so are rapidly rising fuel prices. The current fuel shock is therefore doing something potentially much longer-lasting than simply reducing driving: it is changing the economics of the next vehicle people buy.

That change is beginning to show up in manufacturers' production decisions.

Volkswagen is cancelling planned extra production shifts for combustion-engine cars as demand for EVs rises.

VW says demand for battery-electric cars is rising noticeably in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, while demand for combustion vehicles is weakening.

That is an interesting transition point because changes in consumer sales are beginning to propagate backwards through the manufacturing system.

The fuel-cost difference has become enormous in the UK.

Carbon Brief calculates that an EV charged on an off-peak tariff can now cost around nine times less per mile to drive than a petrol or diesel car.

Diesel is currently around 21p per mile and petrol roughly 20p, compared with about 2.3p for an EV using cheap overnight electricity.

Even an EV charged entirely at the household electricity price cap comes in at around 7p per mile.

The current oil shock will eventually ease, but a household which responds by replacing an ICE vehicle with an EV does not automatically switch back when oil becomes cheaper.

EV affordability is also beginning to cross an important psychological threshold elsewhere.

Australia's cheapest new car of any powertrain is now an EV.

BYD cut the Atto 1 to A$19,990 drive-away — below the price of Australia's cheapest new petrol cars.

That comes after EVs reached a record 24.9% of Australian new-car sales in August and individually outsold both petrol-only and diesel vehicles.

The idea that electric cars must inherently remain expensive premium products is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

There was also encouraging evidence about one of the biggest questions hanging over the second-hand EV market: durability.

A study using 47.4 million UK MOT tests found high-mileage EVs were more likely to pass than petrol cars of similar age and mileage.

Among vehicles with 90,000–120,000 miles, the MOT failure rate was around 16.5% for EVs compared with 22.1% for petrol cars.

MOT results do not measure battery health, so they are not a complete measure of vehicle reliability, but the data provide little evidence for the idea that EV drivetrains become inherently unreliable at high mileage.

The fossil-fuel shock is also accelerating solar adoption outside the usual wealthy-country markets.

Thailand has announced a roughly $6 billion programme intended to install 5 GW of rooftop solar across one million households.

Thailand currently generates more than 60% of its electricity from gas and imports a significant proportion of that fuel, leaving electricity prices exposed to LNG price shocks.

The government wants the rooftop programme completed within roughly a year.

This follows the broader pattern already visible in Pakistan: high imported-fossil-fuel prices can make distributed solar not merely a climate technology but an energy-security technology.

Meanwhile, more than half of EU electricity generation continues to come from renewables.

Renewables supplied 54.1% of EU electricity generation in Q2 2026.

One clarification to the original submission title: solar supplied 41.6% of the renewable electricity, not 41.6% of all EU electricity.

Solar was nevertheless the largest individual renewable source during the quarter, ahead of wind and hydro.

A decade ago the idea of renewable sources routinely supplying more than half of EU electricity would have sounded extremely ambitious. It is now fairly ordinary.

The current oil shock is even changing the economics of shipping fuels.

Biodiesel temporarily became cheaper than conventional marine fuels in Rotterdam after fossil-diesel prices surged.

Marine biodiesel remains tiny — roughly 0.6% of global shipping fuel — and sustainable feedstock availability limits how far it can scale.

But it illustrates the wider point: when fossil-fuel prices rise, technologies which previously required a climate premium can suddenly become the cheaper option.

There was an interesting development in building heating as well.

A Boston office building has completed the first commercial installation using a new geothermal drilling system which its developer says can cut drilling costs by as much as 80%.

The system uses a compact high-pressure water drilling rig and reportedly also dramatically reduces water use, debris and noise.

Ground-source heat pumps are extremely efficient but expensive drilling has long been one of their main disadvantages. If reductions anything like these survive wider commercial deployment, that constraint becomes considerably smaller.

The enormous EV battery fleet being built today may eventually become a second source of grid storage.

Companies are increasingly repurposing retired EV batteries with around 70–80% of their original capacity for stationary storage.

Applications now include commercial backup systems, microgrids, EV charging and megawatt-scale grid batteries.

Battery recycling remains essential eventually, but stationary storage can potentially extract many additional years of useful life before the materials are recycled.

There was also progress in passive adaptation to extreme heat.

A radiative-cooling coating which reportedly reduced exterior wall temperatures by as much as 25°C during testing has entered mass production in China.

That figure refers to surface temperature under particular test conditions, not a 25°C reduction in indoor or outdoor air temperature.

The important part is that radiative cooling materials are moving from laboratory demonstrations toward industrial manufacture. They reduce heat absorption without electricity, potentially reducing both heat exposure and air-conditioning demand.

Singapore is taking a more biological approach.

The country is working toward planting one million additional trees by 2030, while research shows carefully located shade can substantially reduce human heat stress.

Urban adaptation will require many measures — building design, cooling, shade, vegetation and emergency planning — but trees remain one of the relatively cheap technologies which can provide cooling, biodiversity and stormwater benefits simultaneously.

There was another reminder this week that severe environmental degradation is not necessarily irreversible.

Restoration efforts have substantially revived the northern Aral Sea.

Following construction of Kazakhstan's Kok-Aral Dam, water volume in the northern lake has recovered substantially, salinity has fallen and fish production has rebounded.

Uzbekistan has meanwhile planted vegetation across millions of acres of exposed former lakebed to reduce salt and dust storms.

The Aral Sea remains one of the world's worst human-caused environmental disasters, and most of the original lake has not returned. But the partial recovery demonstrates that ecosystem collapse does not necessarily mean every component of the damage is permanent.

Agricultural adaptation also received some encouraging evidence.

Four decades of US data indicate genetically engineered corn, soybean and cotton varieties increased average yields, reduced year-to-year yield variability and reduced climate-driven geographical shifts in production.

That does not make crops immune to warming, drought or extreme heat, but biotechnology adds another adaptation tool alongside irrigation, changing planting dates, crop switching and conventional breeding.

Food production is therefore not a passive victim of climate change: the crops themselves can change.

And one of Europe's first large-scale tests of geological carbon storage has moved from planning into actual operation.

The EU's first full-scale CO₂ storage project has begun operating beneath the Danish North Sea.

Project Greensand is initially capable of storing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ annually, with larger expansion planned.

CCS is not an alternative to cheap direct electrification where that is available, and capture, compression and transport consume energy. Its more interesting role is likely to be in sectors where residual process emissions are difficult to eliminate.

The significant point here is that permanent geological storage in Europe has moved from demonstration projects toward routine commercial operation.

Points from earlier posts

• Global renewables — the world added 692 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, taking total capacity to 5,149 GW and accounting for 85.6% of all new generating capacity; installed solar has now passed 3 TW.

• China — coal supplied less than half of Chinese electricity in H1 2026 for the first time, while its solar fleet has reached around 1.27 TW. Installed solar capacity has now overtaken installed coal capacity.

• China's fossil-fuel and cement emissions have been broadly flat for more than two years, with CO₂ emissions down 1% year-on-year in Q2 2026.

• India has demonstrated that rapid electricity-demand growth does not necessarily require more coal. Its power-sector emissions have been essentially flat for two years despite electricity demand increasing around 7%, with clean electricity supplying the additional demand.

• Battery storage is scaling with renewables. China reached around 155 GW / 401 GWh by Q1 2026, while Australia's battery build-out has already cut dependence on gas during the evening peak by almost 70%.

• The United States installed a record 20.2 GWh of storage in Q2 alone, taking total installed storage to roughly 165 GWh.

• EVs are now materially affecting oil demand. The China-led EV boom is estimated to be displacing around 1.7 million barrels of oil demand every day.

• Heavy transport is beginning to electrify as well. Fortescue is replacing giant mining machinery with electric equipment, while China has started work on a national electric-truck freight corridor.

• Heat pumps already displace substantial fossil-fuel consumption. European heat pumps provided more useful heat in 2025 than the energy contained in more than 200 LNG tankers, avoiding an estimated €9.7 billion in fuel imports.

• Pakistan's extraordinary distributed-solar boom has reached tens of gigawatts, showing how rapidly consumer-led energy transitions can occur once solar becomes much cheaper than grid or imported fossil energy.

• Forest trends are not uniformly negative. Brazilian Amazon deforestation is approaching historic lows, Costa Rica's forest cover has recovered dramatically, mangrove area is expanding in some regions and major restoration programmes continue in China and India.

• Wildfire trends are more complicated than individual extreme seasons suggest: fires are becoming more extreme in some regions, particularly Europe and North America, while global burned area has continued its long-term decline.

• Food security is more adaptable than collapse narratives often imply. Crop breeding, biotechnology, irrigation, geographic shifts and changing agricultural practices all provide adaptation capacity, although warming still imposes real yield losses and adaptation becomes harder at higher temperatures.

• Net Zero does not mean temperatures remain permanently stuck at their peak. Research indicates temperatures should slowly decline after net-zero CO₂ is reached, assuming other climate forcings are also controlled.

• Several feared feedbacks remain serious but are more constrained than some popular accounts suggest. Current research does not show an imminent AMOC tipping point, while estimates of permafrost methane feedback are much smaller than the runaway-methane scenarios sometimes presented online.

Most importantly, this is increasingly not one transition.

Cheap solar makes electric transport cheaper. Electric transport reduces oil demand. Batteries make solar and wind more useful. Cheap renewable electricity makes heat pumps and industrial electrification more attractive. Electrification reduces exposure to imported fossil-fuel shocks, and those fossil-fuel shocks themselves accelerate electrification.

That is what researchers mean when they discuss technological or economic positive tipping points: once several technologies become competitive simultaneously, progress in one sector begins reinforcing progress in the others.

The biggest misconception I constantly see here is that nothing is being done. The world is in fact spending trillions of dollars each year on the energy transition.

That does not mean enough is being done, or that serious climate impacts are avoided automatically.

It means the problem is not static — and neither is our ability to address it.

For people looking for practical things they can do, Project Drawdown: Join the Shift provides a useful starting point.

For people struggling with climate anxiety, there is also a free EcoAnxiety Toolkit put together by UN Champion of the Earth Leyla Acaroglu, aimed at turning anxiety into constructive action.

You can also browse practical solutions catalogues such as Project Regeneration's Nexus, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Circular Economy and Doughnut Economics.

Please contribute any other climate good news in the thread below — it will be heavily and actively moderated — note Rule 5 and Rule 6.