Three seemingly contradictory statements can be true at the same time.
People can fall into the trap of framing climate as a binary: catastrophe or complacency, despair or denial. Reality is messier. As Our World in Data founder Max Roser argues, understanding the world means holding multiple truths in your head at once. That’s as true for climate as it is for poverty and violence, where demonstrable progress coexists with immense suffering.
1. Climate impacts are worsening
Start with the bad. Global CO2 emissions remain stubbornly high, still above 40 billion tonnes a year – nowhere near the IPCC’s recent conclusion that emissions should halve to around 20 billion tonnes by the early 2030s. Climate impacts are intensifying, risks are compounding and much of the remaining carbon budget for both 1.5°C and 2°C has been consumed already. Meanwhile, political discourse is becoming increasingly hostile, polarised and polluted with online misinformation.
2. The world has made real progress
The good news. Climate policy and the clean energy revolution have already shifted the world's trajectory. The most extreme emissions scenarios once considered plausible are no longer credible. The global emissions curve has not yet turned downward, but it has bent. Global emissions growth has slowed sharply, most advanced economies are well past peak emissions and economic growth is increasingly decoupled from emissions. China – by far the world's largest emitter – may have reached peak emissions, while there are promising signs India is leapfrogging to clean energy: the ‘electrotech fast-track’. Investment in clean energy is now roughly double that flowing into fossil fuels. And the Iran crisis has reinforced the new energy calculus: nations would rather rely on domestic sun and wind than fuel imports from unstable regions. Energy importers are investing massively in clean energy.
3. Clean energy's rise makes faster progress probable
The future is impossible to predict, but the direction of travel is clear. Unlike fossil fuel systems, which waste most of their energy as heat before it reaches end users, renewables and electrification deliver the same services far more efficiently. Renewables now account for the overwhelming majority of new power capacity built worldwide and clean energy is keeping fossil generation flat. In April 2026, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas globally for the first month on record. Batteries are becoming cheap enough to shift solar generation into the evening peak, making clean electricity available when it is most needed. Wind and solar are the fastest-growing electricity sources in history and become cheaper as they scale.
No guarantees
A sustained decline in global emissions has proved elusive for years. For clean energy to displace fossil fuel supply, it has to outrun rising demand from data centres, air conditioning and economic growth. That requires massive investment in grids, storage and transmission. In a hotter world, demand for cooling can create its own feedback loop, with more air conditioners driving more electricity demand.
If clean energy scales faster than energy demand, electrification accelerates and progress on deforestation improves, emissions will eventually fall.
As author F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’
