World surpasses 40% clean power as renewables see record rise
This is from the Global Electricity Review 2025 by Ember. Although this isn't something you are going to see in newspaper headlines, the progress we made with renewables in 2024 is a pretty big deal and if you're someone who likes a lot of data and graphs it's really worth reading.
I'm going to leave this video here because Hank Green does a better job of covering it than I am going to.
"This to me feels like news. It feels like a big deal. It feels like things are changing, like we are hitting a moment with electricity generation that really does matter. And over the next five years we will hit the point where we are generating less and less energy with fossil fuels every year. That's great. And that's not news. I didn't see anyone covering this [...]. It's not news because it's not bad and it's also not news because it's not like 'we did it, we hit the moment!'."
I think this quote from Hank's video does a good job of encapsulating how the slow, gradual progress that is happening often doesn't make it into the news--because it's not a dramatic emergency or a "we did it, we fully solved climate change!" kind of moment that makes for good headlines.
But that then gives people the idea that we're hardly making any progress on addressing climate change, which is not true at all. The fact that we need to continue to double-down on this progress to do it more and faster does not negate that so much progress has already been made.
