Despite a hot year, clean energy progress offers a positive outlook for 2024
“The past year broke a plethora of climate and energy records — some bad, but some good,” says CCL Research Coordinator Dana Nuccitelli. For CCL’s last newsletter of 2023, Dana broke down a few of those records for us in a Nerd Corner post. First, 2023 easily became the hottest year on record, and climate pollution from burning fossil fuels also set a record in 2023, pushing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels up to an annual average of nearly 420 parts per million. “Despite all of that bad news, many countries are making progress towards reducing their climate pollution, and the outlook for 2024 is encouraging,” Dana says. “America’s climate pollution fell by about 2–3% compared to the previous year and is now 18–19% below 2005 levels. Emissions in the European Union fared even better, declining by about 6–7% in 2023 as the member nations accelerated their clean energy deployments.” Progress on clean technology is expected to continue — and ramp up even further — in 2024 and beyond. Even China too is deploying solar panels and wind turbines at such a pace that they “could begin to displace the country’s fossil fuel consumption and start a structural decline in Chinese carbon emissions in 2024.” The takeaway? “It’s possible that 2023 will become the year in which global climate pollution peaked,” Dana says. Let’s do everything we can to make that possibility a reality 💪 Have a safe and restful end of the year, and we’ll see you in 2024!
In other news this week: • CCL’s 2023 highlights: What a year! In 2023, we held hundreds of in-person and virtual lobby meetings, cheered bipartisan climate bills and other efforts, and conducted nonstop grassroots outreach all across the country. Watch our 2023 highlights from our December meeting, starting around the 30 minute mark. • Americans are alarmed: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released its latest public opinion numbers on global warming, finding that 56% of Americans are “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warming. That number has risen 16 percentage points over the last decade. |
