Where things stand on climate change in 2026 » Yale Climate Connections

The year that just ended saw numerous records broken on climate and clean energy. 

It was the second-hottest year on record at Earth’s surface, behind only 2024. The high temperatures were shocking for a year with a La Niña event. La Niñas draw cold water up to the surface of the Pacific Ocean, and hence are relatively cool years at Earth’s surface, while El Niño events have the opposite effect. 2025 was by far the hottest year with a La Niña event.

For perspective, 1998 was a record-shattering hot year at the time because it experienced the strongest El Niño event on record, but it was more than half a degree Celsius colder than 2025. Global warming has made 1998 look so unremarkable that La Niña years today dwarf the temperature record set during the biggest El Niño event in modern history.

In fact, the past dozen years have been the 12 warmest on record, especially the past three, which were all more than 1.4°C hotter than preindustrial temperatures.

The vast majority of the heat trapped by climate pollution is absorbed by Earth’s oceans, which have warmed even more than the planet’s surface. Nearly every year sets a new record for ocean and global heat content, and 2025 was no exception. A new study estimated that the oceans absorbed energy equivalent to detonating nearly 10 Hiroshima atomic bombs in the oceans every second of every minute in 2025. 

Despite learning this year that climate change is accelerating, the U.S. government took numerous regulatory and legislative steps that will increase the country’s climate-warming pollution. And U.S. emissions reversed their long-term downward trend to instead increase in 2025. 

But despite the bleak domestic picture, the rest of the world made significant climate and clean energy progress. China continued to emerge as a clean technology leader, positioning itself to overtake the U.S. as the next global economic superpower.

While these trends seem likely to continue in 2026, the U.S. Congress has the opportunity to pass major climate and clean energy legislation in the coming year – unless the Trump administration derails it.

China and the U.S. moved in opposite directions in 2025

Global carbon pollution increased by about 1% in 2025, according to independent researchers at Carbon Monitor and the Global Carbon Project. It increased by about 2% in the U.S. as a result of a combination of factors, including a cold winter (requiring more fossil-fueled heating) and high natural gas prices that led to a rare increase in the country’s coal consumption. 

The Trump administration and Congress together also took actions in 2025 to undo all federal climate regulations and gut many of the clean energy tax credits passed in the Inflation Reduction Act three years prior. And despite having declared an energy emergency on his first day in office, Trump’s administration blocked many wind and solar energy projects across the country. 

The administration also undermined federal climate science research, for example, by moving to dismantle a world-leading climate and research center, deleting climate change from federal websites, and considering putting a handful of fringe contrarians in charge of the country’s most comprehensive climate science report that normally requires contributions from hundreds of America’s best scientists.

But while the U.S. is the second-highest climate polluting country, responsible for around 12% of global emissions, China is responsible for about one-third of the world’s climate-warming pollution due to its much larger population. And China took climate change and the clean energy transition much more seriously than the U.S. in 2025.

In fact, China’s climate pollution has plateaued over the past year and a half. More than half the country’s new vehicle sales last year were electric, compared to less than one-tenth in the United States. Chinese automakers also exported 1.7 million EVs to regions like Southeast Asia, allowing the electric share of new car sales in many developing countries to surpass that of the U.S.

And China built more solar and wind power in 2025 (well over 300 gigawatts of capacity – equivalent to about 300 nuclear power plants) than the U.S. has in its entire history. China built so much new clean energy that it exceeded its power demand growth. As a result, the country burned less fossil fuel for electricity this year than in 2024. And China exported over $200 billion in clean energy technologies to other countries in 2025, increasing their adoption around the world.

Congress could pass major clean energy legislation in 2026

Despite falling behind China on climate leadership and clean energy deployment, the coming year presents one opportunity for the U.S. to regain some of that lost ground. Although the current session of Congress has been historically unproductive, a significant amount of its focus has been on energy policy. And many of the most headline-inducing recent efforts from lawmakers have centered around the prospect of permitting reform.

Numerous energy systems experts have identified slow permitting processes – especially for electrical transmission lines, which can take close to two decades to permit – as a key bottleneck slowing the clean energy transition. Transmission lines are the highways of the power grid, allowing electrons to travel long distances from power plants to population centers. The U.S. has built few new transmission lines over the past several decades, but that wasn’t a problem because power demand also barely grew during that period.

That situation is changing. Power demand is suddenly rising fast, thanks largely to the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers. New power plants, most of which are solar farms with battery storage facilities, are working to meet that rising demand but are limited by an old and inadequate power grid. In other words, more electrons are trying to enter the transmission highway from new solar farms and exit to reach new data centers, but a lack of new transmission lines is causing traffic jams.

American lawmakers have been engaging in bipartisan negotiations to speed up energy infrastructure permitting processes for over three years. They narrowly failed to pass such a bill in late 2024, called the Energy Permitting Reform Act. An analysis by energy systems experts at the nonpartisan think tank RMI estimated that the transmission permitting reform provisions in that bill could have allowed enough clean energy to connect to the U.S. grid to reduce the country’s climate pollution by around 6.5 billion tons between 2030 and 2050. That’s roughly equivalent to recovering the estimated emissions reductions lost over the next decade through the Republican rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits.

Although there is bipartisan recognition of the need to build energy infrastructure faster in order to meet growing power demand, there remains one big obstacle standing in the way of these negotiations: President Donald Trump. 

Democratic lawmakers have warned that they will not vote for a bill that will only expedite fossil fuel projects. They have been working to craft legislation that will prevent the executive branch from selectively obstructing permits for certain types of energy infrastructure, but after the Trump administration once again halted work on all under-construction offshore wind projects, Democrats declared that they will stop permitting reform negotiations until those obstructions are lifted. 

Relatedly, a recent national survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (the publisher of this site) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 59% of registered voters would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports action on global warming.

The clean energy transition will continue in 2026

All signs indicate that clean technologies will continue to dominate new energy deployments in 2026, both in the U.S. and globally. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, clean energy sources deployed predominantly on private lands (where the federal government usually can’t block their permits) accounted for over 90% of the country’s new power capacity additions in 2025. That trend is expected to continue due to simple economics (solar panels and batteries have become relatively cheap) and supply chain constraints (they’re much faster to deploy than gas turbines, whose production additionally faces years-long backlogs).

The International Energy Agency also forecasts that global electric vehicle adoption will continue to accelerate, even as it lags in the U.S. In addition to being cheaper to fuel and maintain, EVs in China are also already cheaper to buy than fossil-fueled cars.

And as the Trump administration places its chips on the continued burning of fossil fuels, China is betting on dominating the technologies of the clean energy transition. In what will be yet another of the hottest years on record, with most governments around the world rapidly adopting affordable low-carbon solutions in an effort to curb climate change, it seems likely that China’s clean technology dominance will help its economy continue to rapidly gain on America’s in 2026.