Climate effort needs to be more proactive

Start with China, the world’s biggest emitter by far of greenhouse gases: 27% of the entire world’s emissions, and more than twice that of the second-biggest emitter, the United States.

- Gwynne Dyer

In fact, it's more than all the emissions of all the other developed countries combined. Bad China.

But wait! China is now installing wind and solar power at an unprecedented rate. It has just reached one thousand gigawatts of solar power, and the pace is still picking up: 93 gigawatts went online in May alone. Beijing's official target was to reach peak emissions before 2030 and then start heading back down, but it may actually have peaked last year.

Not only that, but it’s making a profit from it. Volume production and technical innovations have brought the price of solar panels down so low that it’s exporting them in huge quantities even to developing countries. They simply beat all forms of fossil fuel on price: 90% of all new power capacity installed worldwide last year was renewable.

Some countries are ahead of the game. Brazil for example, already gets 88% of its energy from renewables (mostly hydro), but increasingly from solar as well. England, the first country to burn coal for industry and transport, closed down its last coal-fired plant last year. But for most countries, the great shift to clean energy only began in the past two years.