Chart: Carbon emissions are on a better — but not good — trajectory

The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.

It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.

The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.

Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.

These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.