The World Moves On
The big news in climate change in the United States recently is the action by Trump’s EPA to erase the endangerment finding that CO2 is a pollutant. This means that federal regulations for climate change can be essentially null and void. It will be challenged in the courts of course, at great expense and causing delays in action the world can’t afford.
And while this is happening the world moves on. We have handed power and leadership and ethical behavior to others.
Carbon Brief reports that China’s CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for almost 2 years
Akshat Rathi reported for Bloomberg Green Daily:
“China’s rapid electrification has been hailed as a miracle. By some measures, India is even further ahead.
“The nation is electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development, according to a new report from the think tank Ember. It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.
“That flies against “the orthodox narrative that emerging markets must follow the same path the West and China took: go from biomass to fossil fuels,” said Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at Ember and one of the authors of the report.”
Alexander C Kaufman at Heatmap reported on January 29, 2026 that “Sales of electric vehicles in Europe surged 30% to a record high last year, with battery-powered models outselling gas-burning cars for the first time last month, the Financial Times reported. The increase came despite a 38% drop in Tesla’s annual sales on the continent as Chinese rival BYD zoomed past Elon Musk’s automaker. Electric vehicles now account for 17% of EU car sales, up from 14% in 2024.”
That is not to say that we have not made any progress despite the Trump administration and its enablers favoring coal (“clean” coal; what an Orwellian oxymoron!) and having an irrational hatred of solar and wind power (well, irrational until you follow the money and power). For example, Alexander C Kaufman at Heatmap reported today, February 23, 2026, that this year the US will get 93% of its new generating capacity from solar, batteries and wind (and only 7% from natural gas). Half will be from utility scale solar projects. Now, the article points out capacity is not generation of power but “Surging electricity demand from data centers has left gas turbines backordered; geothermal plants are still at an early stage; and new nuclear reactors are still years away. That makes solar and wind, already some of the cheapest sources to build, the only obvious options to bring new generation online as quickly as possible.”
A new book about climate change solutions I recommend is Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing the Air; a hopeful guide for solving climate change in 50 questions and answers. Hannah Ritchie is Senior Researcher for Global Development at the University of Oxford, and deputy editor of Our World in Data .
One of the things she writes about in the book is how even groups that one might think would be environmentally minded can fail to do the math. Yes, alternative/“clean” energy is not totally clean (some people will lose their jobs while others gain employment; mining, land use, CO2 generated in production of EVs and solar and wind power hardware and installation). But when you do the math, look at the data (as the rest of the world does). Clean energy and EVs are much better for the environment and economy than fossil fuel-based technologies. The lower cost and eventual saving of CO2 outweigh the initial CO2 production by far.
We do not have a perfect answer, but we need to discern what approaches are less destructive and contribute less overall over time to the existential threats of climate change and other environmental degradation.
Sometimes it is the lesser of two evils and that matters. The greater evil is, well, the greater evil. That means more death and suffering, and the risk of reaching thresholds we cannot easily step back from as we try to adapt and create better technologies.
Let’s also remember that climate change isn’t the only planetary health issue; soil and fresh water depletion, air and water pollution, plastic pollution and other waste disposal problems are major threats.
The Trump/Robert F Kennedy (RFK) Jr. version of Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) has gone off the rails in its embrace of an anti-vaccine agenda and other non-science-based, influencer influenced approaches that favors what sounds and feels good rather than is established by evidence-based approaches, but it does have some values I can get behind. In particular, it seems to favor a healthy diet (despite RFK Jr’s embrace of a perverted inverted food pyramid that seems to have more to do with corporate interests than any sound nutrition science) and doing away when possible with polluting toxic substances that threaten health. Recently MAHA supporters were appropriately upset and more consistent than their leader in Trump’s embrace of glyphosphate pesticide production . Good for them!
Power and autocracy over science and planetary health as well as over compassion and democracy is not a good road for us to go down.
Although i am focusing more on political action, I will stay involved with environmental issues and support groups fighting the good fight, and I hope you do too.
The world is moving on, as are groups and local governments in the US. The US is no longer leading; first we have to catch up!