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THE PARIS CLIMATE TREATY CHANGED THE WORLD. HERE’S HOW  
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Rebecca Solnit
December 12, 2025
The Guardian
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_ What we’ve done to rescue the climate is far from good enough,
but we are “bending the curve.” Landmarks like the Paris treaty
and the Vanuatu victory matter, as do renewable energy milestones, and
there’s plenty left to fight for. _

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Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of
the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference
as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194
countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before
they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured
me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the
story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it
needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of
latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat.

I had been dreading the treaty anniversary as an occasion to note that
we have not done nearly enough, but in July I thought we might be able
celebrate it. Because, on 23 July, the international court of justice
handed down an epochal ruling that gives that treaty enforceable
consequences it never had before. It declares that all nations have a
legal obligation to act in response to the climate crisis, and, as
Greenpeace International put
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it, “obligates states to regulate businesses on the harm caused by
their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place.
Significantly, the court found that the right to a clean, healthy and
sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and
that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all
climate obligations.” The Paris treaty was cited
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this decision.

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate, said of the
decision: “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well
be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.” Costa
Rica’s Christiana Figueres, who presided over the negotiations that
created that Paris climate treaty declared
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with jubilation, on her podcast: “The reason why I am truly tearful
is this is without a doubt, the most far-reaching, the most
comprehensive and the most consequential legal opinion we’ve ever
had.”

This case that ended in the world’s highest court began with 27 law
students in the University of the South Pacific who in 2019, asked
themselves what they could do about climate – and it’s not hard to
imagine a “what can we do, we’re only students” or “what can
we do, we’re from tiny remote nations” stance. Instead, they set
out to take a case all the way to the international court of justice
in The Hague, unimpeded by the conventional wisdom that they were
nobody from nowhere. They needed a law firm, and they chose Blue Ocean
Law
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firm, sticking with the Pacific island nations, with indigenous
leadership, with the impacted global south. And they needed a country
to be plaintiff and the island nation of Vanuatu stepped up. The
unanimous court decision in favor of the litigants matters most of all
in how it is implemented, either through direct cases or through its
impact on nations that take notice and reduce their climate
devastation before they’re brought to court.

It’s not widely known that most countries and negotiators went into
the conference expecting to set a “reasonable” two-degree
threshold global temperature rise we should not cross. As my friend
Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate organizer in the Philippines,
wrote:“The powerful exerted tremendous effort to keep a tiny number,
1.5, out of United Nations documents. 1.5 degrees centigrade
represents what science advises as the maximum allowable rise in
average global temperature relative to preindustrial temperature
levels. It was the representatives of the mostly global-south nations
of the Climate Vulnerable Forum who fought to change the threshold
from 2 degrees to 1.5.”

I remember them chanting “1.5 to stay alive”, because two degrees
was a death sentence for too many places and people. The officially
powerless swayed the officially powerful, and 1.5 degrees was written
into the treaty and has became a familiar number in climate
conversations ever since. Even though we’ve crashed into that 1.5
threshold, far better that it be set there than at 2 degrees, in which
case we might well be complacent in the face of even more destructive
temperature rise.

It takes far more than storytelling to get where we need to go, but
how we tell the stories is crucial. I asked the climate policy expert
Leah Stokes of UC Santa Barbara about the impact of Paris and she told
me: “When small island nations pushed for 1.5 degrees as the target,
they also requested the IPCC [intergovernmental panel on climate
change] write a special report on what policy would be required to get
there. That report came out in October 2018, and rocked around the
world with headlines like ‘we have 12 years’. It changed the
entire policy conversation to be focused on cutting pollution in half
by 2030. Then, when it came time to design a climate package, Biden
made it clear that his plan was to try to meet that target. You can
draw a line between small islands’ fierce advocacy through to the
passage of the largest climate law in American history.”

That’s how change often works, how an achievement ripples outward,
how the indirect consequences matter as well as the direct ones. The
Biden administration tried to meet the 1.5 degree target with the most
ambitious US climate legislation ever, the Build Back Better Act that
passed Congress after much pressure and conflict as the Inflation
Reduction Act. Rumors of the Inflation Reduction Act’s death are
exaggerated; some pieces of its funding and implementation are still
in effect, and it prompted other nations to pursue more ambitious
legislation. In the US, state and local climate efforts, have not been
stopped by the Trump administration. Globally not nearly enough has
been done to stop deforestation, slash fossil-fuel subsidies, and
redesign how we live, move, and consume.

The renewables revolution is a bright spot. It’s often overlooked
because it’s incremental, technical, economic, and dispersed, and
even its major milestones don’t receive nearly the recognition they
should. When the Paris treaty was signed, renewables were overall more
expensive than fossil fuel, and were not widely implemented. But the
drop in cost and spread of solar has outstripped virtually all
predictions. The energy-policy group Ember reports
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“Record solar power growth and stagnating fossil fuels in 2025 show
how clean power has become the driving force in the power sector.
Historically a growth segment, fossil power now appears to be entering
a period of stagnation and managed decline.” The International
Energy Agency notes
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another 2025 landmark: “The electricity sector is now the largest
energy employer, surpassing fuel supply for the first time, as the age
of electricity gathers pace.”

Anyone who in 2015 accurately prophesied what the energy landscape
would look like in 2025 would have been thought to be ridiculous,
delusional, or crazy (just like anyone who said in, say, 1995 that the
UK would close its last coal-fired plant in 2024 would have been).
2025 is the year that renewables outstripped
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coal as an energy source. Ancillary developments like battery storage
technology and design improvements and innovations have led to
widespread renewables adoption from Denmark (which gets only 10% of
its electricity from fossil fuels) to Texas to Pakistan (where
small-scale solar panels from China have led something of an energy
revolution). Solar power is now so cheap and abundant
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in Australia that electricity is going to be free for three hours in
the middle of the day.

Problems that the enemies of climate action liked to cite, such as the
intermittency of sun and wind, have been addressed with battery
storage. California now often produces more than 100% of its
electricity needs through renewables, led by solar, in the daytime.
The excess goes into the batteries so that the state literally runs on
sunshine at night. California uses 44% less natural gas to produce
electricity than it did two years ago. China is reducing its emissions
because it’s speedily transitioning to renewables; earlier this
fall, in the United Nations, for the first time it made an actual
commitment to reduction targets; and for the last eighteen months its
CO2 emissions have been flat or falling.

Is this good enough? Far from it, but we are, as they say, “bending
the curve”: before Paris the world was headed for 4 degrees of
warming; it’s now headed for 2.5 degrees, which should only be
acceptable as a sign that we have bent it and must bend more and
faster. In the best-case scenario, the world’s leaders and powers
would have taken the early warnings about climate change seriously and
we’d be on the far side of a global energy transition, redesign of
how we live, and protection of oceans, rainforests, and other crucial
climate ecosystems. But thanks to valiant efforts by the climate
movement and individual leaders and nations, we’re not in the
worst-case scenario either. Landmarks like the Paris treaty and the
Vanuatu victory matter, as do the energy milestones, and there’s
plenty left to fight for. For decades and maybe centuries it has has
been too late to save everything, but it will never be too late to
save anything.

_Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of
Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the
climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from
Despair to Possibility._

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* Paris Agreement
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* Climate Change
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* Global warming
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