For decades now, there's one fact that's a buzzkill for anyone who cares about climate change: despite all the talk and action, global emissions have not stopped increasing.
But, the world is on the cusp of reversing that trend, finally.
Two major international climate agencies predict global emissions have reached a critical inflection point and 2024 could be the beginning of the decline.
"It's really hard to wrap your head around, how quickly and how big this change is," says Bloomberg NEF's head of Australian research, Leonard Quong.
This critical gear change couldn't come soon enough as emissions must peak before 2025 to avoid dangerous warming, according to the UN's leading climate science reports.
Several exciting trends are driving this transformation. Fossil fuels are being replaced with renewable energy sources at a growing rate, and the uptake of electric cars is accelerating.
And China, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, is leading the way.
It's all in the air
Despite all the talk and action on climate change, emissions have kept rising. (Supplied: Artinun)
It's worth remembering why this is so momentous. Carbon dioxide, the warming gas we can't seem to stop spewing into the atmosphere, stays there for a long time. Like, a really long time.
It means that all the additional carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution will continue to warm the planet and haunt humankind for centuries to come.
We've been aware of this problem for decades, but despite all the talk about climate change, emissions kept rising.
In fact, the world has added more emissions knowingly to the atmosphere since the first UN COP meeting than all of human history until that point.
Put another way — we've made the problem twice as bad since we knew it was bad.
It's critical the world stops adding to that problem. But it's not just enough to plateau in a high-emitting world, emissions need to drop, and they need to drop fast.
The peak predictions
As we go about our daily lives, we often miss the bigger picture as the world changes around us.
Bloomberg NEF's head of Australian research, Leonard Quong says people often struggle to understand the magnitude of the current transition.
"The simplest way we can put it is that global energy systems are facing the biggest, most rapid change since the Industrial Revolution and it's happening right now, Quong said.
Both independent research firm Bloomberg NEF and the international Climate Analytics institute say it is possible we will see global emissions fall in 2024 and 2023 will have been the peak of global emissions. We will know if these predictions have come true at the end of the year.
"Although it's hard to say exactly when emissions have peaked, the data so far in 2024 seems that that was the right call," Quong said.
You might notice the dip in the chart below in global emissions in 2020 from the COVID-19 pandemic. That doesn't count, according to Neil Grant, a senior climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics.
"With the COVID pandemic, emissions fell for one year but that wasn't due to this sort of structural underlying shifts in the energy system," Grant explained.
"To really define a peak, we need to see emissions fall and continue to fall, driven by long-term structural change such as the rollout of renewables and the decline of fossil fuels."
Climate Analytics's research came to the same conclusion, saying it is possible 2024 will be the start of a sustained decline in emissions.
"Our analysis from last year found that if wind and solar continue to accelerate at the pace that they have been, consistent with historical trends, then there's a 70 per cent chance that emissions would fall in 2024," Grant said.
But, he said, the past few months had created some bumps in the road to peak emissions, due to growing electricity demand for AI, robust growth in China — and, ironically — climate change, with India suffering sustained heatwaves.
"This reduces the likelihood of emissions peaking in 2024. But it's still possible that they could fall, and if not this year, then next," said Grant.
"Whether emissions fall or rise this year, we're really approaching a sort of inflection point at the moment."
Most of the heavy lifting in emissions cuts between now and 2030 is done by the world's electricity sector.
Simple economics fuel renewables uptake
Last year, 30 per cent of the world's electricity came from renewables, pushing out more and more fossil fuels.
Even if climate change and emissions weren't a problem, it's predicted the world would still be switching to solar and wind energy because it makes economic sense.
"For over three-quarters of the world's population, they now live in a country where it's cheaper to build new wind and solar generation than any other form of new carbon-intensive electricity supply, that is coal and gas," Bloomberg NEF's Leonard Quong said.
"So if you live in a market where you need new electricity supply, you're likely to build wind and solar, even without considering the carbon or climate impacts of that type of technology."
Quong says the energy sector is the most rational and affordable place to begin to reduce carbon emissions.
"That's simply because we have the technologies today that are both commercially available, scaling, and in many instances, cheaper than carbon-intensive alternatives."
The Bloomberg NEF report is blunt about the future of fossil fuels saying "the era of fossil fuels' dominance is coming to an end."
"Even if the transition is propelled by economics alone, with no further policy drivers to help, renewables could still cross a 50 per cent share of electricity generation at the end of this decade," it stated.
Bloomberg NEF isn't predicting renewables to slow anytime soon.
"The more we produce of these technologies, the more efficient we get. It doesn't take a big single project to understand how to do it better next time, you can make slow gradual improvements that drive down cost and increase efficiency."
"It also doesn't hurt that the world is in a very competitive market right now, for the supply of these technologies," Quong said.
It's worth also breaking out the trends around solar energy and the cost of solar.
The solar revolution
A large solar plant in Beijing, China. (Getty Images: Xinzheng)
At this point in history, solar is unstoppable, a powerhouse. It's extremely cheap, for starters.
"Over the past decade, we've seen over a 90 per cent reduction in the cost of buying solar modules. That's an incredible cost trajectory for any technology in any sector of any system," Bloomberg NEF's Leonard Quong said.
It's now cheaper to build new solar energy than run existing coal-fired power stations.
The steep drop in solar costs is helping developing countries to speed up their transition to cleaner energy sources. Until now, economic growth had a Faustian connection with higher emissions. More growth, more climate damage.
The International Energy Agency said international investment in solar will grow to $500 billion this year, higher than all other forms of energy generation.
Nowhere is the pace of the transition and solar uptake more astonishing than in China.
China leads the way
It would be hard to bend the emissions curve without a shift from the world's biggest emitter, China.
The argument that's often trotted out — why should we do anything if China's still emitting so much — no longer hits like it used to.
The latest research by climate science publisher Carbon Brief shows China's CO2 emissions fell by 1 per cent in the second quarter of 2024, the first quarterly fall since the country re-opened from COVID-19.
In fact, China is leading the world in renewables deployment and investment, installing more solar last year than the rest of the world combined.
"What is clear is within the next few years, that China's emissions from its electricity sector, as well as its transport sector, and industry, will begin to fall quite materially."
"China installed more solar power in one year than the US has installed in its entire history. It's just a really insane rate of change at the moment," said Neil Grant from Climate Analytics.
"China has been breaking records every year for wind and solar deployment.
"The pace of acceleration, particularly last year, did catch quite a lot of people by surprise and the signs are that China is on track to beat that again this year," Grant told the ABC.
China has also invested heavily in renewables manufacturing and now provides around 90 per cent of the world's solar components.
It also has a strong wind industry and has invested heavily in electric cars.
This isn't just helping with China's carbon emissions issue, it's also improving air pollution.
Electric cars start overtaking
In 2023, more than half of the EVs on the world's roads were in China, pushing China to be the world's largest EV market and producer. (Supplied: Yan)
The other technology driving cuts in emissions — literally — is electric vehicles.
"Electric car sales in 2023 were 3.5 million higher than in 2022, a 35 per cent year-on-year increase. This is more than six times higher than in 2018, just five years earlier," according to data from the International Energy Agency.
The trend looks set to continue: as many electric cars were sold in the first quarter of this year as all of 2020.
Bloomberg NEF anticipates EV growth to continue and therefore global demand for oil could start to fall within a few years, that is, peak oil is reached.
Once again, China is dominating this space. Over half of the electric cars on the planet are driving around on Chinese roads.
Chinese industry data obtained by Carbon Brief shows "new energy vehicles" (NEVs) accounted for around 51 per cent of all cars sold in China in July 2024.
Electric cars are now cheaper than fuel-powered ones in China.
Like other renewable tech, China tipped considerable government support and policy towards electric automakers and manufacturing companies upstream in the supply chain, as well as giving out subsidies for drivers to go electric.
China also leads in battery production, allowing the industry to integrate smoothly with the local EV production line.
If anything, the IEA warns that China has a high level of overcapacity when it comes to batteries.
As the world's biggest emitter, China's emissions are crucial, but there are promising signposts in other parts of the world.
The UK, the birthplace of coal power, has just shut down its last coal-fired power plant. The European Union is now getting more of its electricity from renewables than from coal and gas.
In California, large storage batteries have grown so much they've on occasion taken over as the number one energy source to supply evening power demand.
Increasingly, we're seeing glimpses of what a post-fossil fuel future looks like.
"I've been in this space, looking at these markets looking at these technologies for over a decade now and sometimes I've struggled to wrap my head around the size, the scale, the speed, that this transition is happening," Quong says.
"The question really is now, how fast will emissions from energy use power consumption and production around the world begin to fall?"
Time is of the essence
While it's critical to stop emissions from rising, we can't sit around and celebrate.
Bloomberg NEF shows different scenarios for what might happen after global emissions peak this year, if they do.
The "economic transition scenario" is similar to business-as-usual. It assumes that the existing climate policies stay in place but aren't strengthened, and the price trends for technologies continue in the same direction.
Under this scenario, emissions still peaked in 2023, but the trajectory is not worth celebrating: emissions will plateau and the world will warm by 2.6 degrees.
This goes to show that peaking isn't enough, and the pace of the transition is also critical, according to ClimateWork's acting CEO Wei Sue.
"We have only a finite amount of emissions that we can put into the atmosphere before we reach a certain tipping point, or exceed certain temperature thresholds, such as 1.5 degrees, or even two degrees," Sue said.
Neil Grant from Climate Analytics, which suggested a 70 per cent chance that emissions peaked last year, also warns that the work is far from over.
"And peaking is only the start of the journey — the speed at which we reduce emissions really matters. So the shape of the curve, in other words, really matters.
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, in their last assessment report, found there were no scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 degrees that don't peak emissions before 2025."