The climate scorecard is looking bleak in 2025

WE’RE now almost halfway through a decade where the world needs to drastically cut carbon emissions if we’re to avoid damaging global warming. The outlook isn’t good. Far from declining, greenhouse pollution is barely slowing from the pace it’s been growing at for the past two decades. Despite a blistering build-out of solar power and electric vehicles, coal consumption has blown past previous records and looks set to increase for several years to come.

Political goodwill towards clean energy is probably weaker now in global terms than at any time since the 2015 Paris Agreement finally brought all United Nations (UN) members to the table. There’s still a slim hope that this is just a cyclical low rather than the moment when the world gave up on the energy transition it needs. Here’s five waypoints to judge whether the picture will look better by the end of 2025 than it does now.

China power demand forecast

We’ll get a glimpse at probably the most important number for the direction of global emissions in a few weeks, when the China Electricity Council, a trade group, typically provides an annual forecast of grid demand growth. It’s hard to be optimistic. Unusually, among relatively developed countries, China’s electricity consumption is growing faster than its economy, for which the government looks likely to set a 5 per cent gross domestic product target for 2025.