The ‘Age of Electricity’ Brings Good Climate Change News for Once

The future can feel pretty hopeless these days, as our dual collapsing empire and ecosystem feed into each other’s seemingly bottomless wells of despair. I live in a part of the world that is typically associated with winter that didn’t experience a winter, and bracing for this summer’s wildfires does make us feel a tad apocalyptic out here around the Rocky Mountains. Things certainly are not good, but the doomers are not batting 1.000. They’re not even batting .500 in the political realm, as last night’s special elections in Virginia are yet another mile marker demonstrating how we are going to win, and even studies show you should have hope in a more small-d democratic future.

But climate change has been a tough subject to find much good news around as global temperature charts resemble the up-only S&P500. Former Splinter Deputy Editor Dave Levitan did yeoman’s work documenting the myriad impacts that make climate change a daily major news story that our corporate media actively refuses to treat as such, and most of what he wrote was about some bleak stuff. He was not all negative however, and his year-end round-up of good climate news from 2024 highlighted serious developments with real meat on the bone.

Which brings us to this week’s big news from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that builds on a lot of trends Levitan highlighted in that hopeful piece. This intergovernmental organization whose 32 member countries comprise roughly three-quarters of global energy demand released Global Energy Review 2026, and it is filled with some of the most encouraging climate developments of our lives. While the Trump administration is lighting a billion dollars on fire to kill a million-dollar wind project, the rest of the world is electrifying itself. So much so that the IEA declared that “the world has entered the Age of Electricity.”

Photovoltaic (PV) solar (which is different from solar that generates energy from the sun’s heat) was “the largest single source of growth” in 2025 across the world. It “met more than 25% of higher demand, followed by natural gas, which contributed 17%,” and last year was “the first time on record that a modern renewable source contributed the largest share of global energy demand growth.” It’s popular for people who believe in climate change but think the left is icky to talk up nuclear power as the solution to all our problems (Dave did a great job of detailing why it’s not the panacea these folks think it is), but on a cost and ease of implementation basis, solar is a far better option for most of the world than nuclear, and every year it becomes a more attractive option than it was the year before. Proponents of going all in on nuclear power are dinosaurs pushing old arguments from the 1990s. This is not just the future, it’s the present.

And solar PV is not just growing at the expense of other renewables, as the IEA found that “Oil demand growth slowed further in 2025.” It is still growing, but at a slower annual pace (0.7%) than in 2024 and a much slower pace than past average annual rises. Oil demand grew by 0.65 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2025, which is less than half of the average annual rise of 1.4mb/d between 2010 and 2019. Electric car sales comprised “around one quarter of new car sales in 2025,” growing over 20%. The shift from oil to electricity is happening as we speak. This is no longer theoretical, the question now is how long will it take for the Age of Electricity to ascend to true dominance over the age of burning dead dinosaurs for heat. 

Another one of the central narratives in the climate cynics’ argument took a hit in this new report too. The story has typically gone that developing economies can’t afford the fancy renewables the rich world is building, so why bother doing anything because they’re going to use coal and other cheap fossil fuels to develop their economies anyway. The problem is that is not true, as “emissions from advanced economies grew faster (+0.5%) than those from emerging market and developing economies (+0.3%) for the first time since the 1990s.”

China is the big story here, as their aggressive shift to electrification is the primary engine driving all these trends. They still accounted for the largest share of global energy demand growth, but as the IEA notes, “at 1.7% its growth rate slowed sharply due to the rapid growth of renewables and efficiency improvements.” The cold winter and higher natural gas prices are responsible for the increased emissions in advanced economies, but the IEA singles out India as another driving force behind these trends. India has long been a lynchpin of the do-nothing caucus’ argument that we must choose between a livable planet and more countries developing advanced economies, but “India’s energy-related CO2 emissions were flat for the first time since the 1970s,” writes the IEA. “Largely due to cyclical effects from a strong monsoon combined with structural growth in renewables.”

Lest you think that this hard pivot to renewables in China is due to the goodness of the heart of a ruling regime doing ethnic cleansing and operating concentration camps, this is a geopolitical shift. What Trump is doing right now in Iran is why China pivoted so hard to electrification in recent years. Renewable energy makes your domestic economy more self-sufficient and less dependent on whether inflation will rise because Jared Kushner wants to try to extort another Gulf state or because a Florida man with a rapidly deteriorating brain decides to blockade a blockade. There is a case to be made that Trump has done more to pivot the world toward renewables than any other U.S. president in history. These electrification trends are only going to be accelerated by him proving that what oil traders long considered worst case scenario around a major oil chokepoint is possible. 

In 1973 after the OPEC embargo, the U.S. invested heavily in alternative nuclear, solar, wind and geothermal energy sources (before Ronald Reagan famously took the solar panels off the White House after oil prices came down). Jimmy Carter helped establish very successful new fuel standards that raised car efficiency by 7.6 miles per gallon from 1977 to 1985. In 1973, oil comprised 69% of France’s primary energy, and in response to this massive oil shock, France began implementing the Messmer Plan to rapidly build out their nuclear capacity (this is the basis of the nuclear boosters’ case). By 1986, nuclear energy had risen to 29% of France’s total energy consumption, while oil fell to 42%. When Russia invaded Ukraine and created another oil shock, the European Union accelerated their €300 billion plan to end dependence on Russian fossil fuels by 2030. Four years into this effort, the EU notes that it “has successfully reduced the share of Russian gas imports from 45% in 2022 to 12% in 2025.”

Like every other major energy shock in history, this war will push countries away from the affected energy source and towards something that makes them less reliant on other countries, and solar PV is proving to be a real attractive option across the world. It is a pretty robust silver lining to something that has the potential to be a world historic calamity. No matter how or when this mess gets resolved, this war has permanently shifted the risk calculus around the Strait of Hormuz, and insurance companies are definitely not going to make it practically free to transit through it anymore. Trump has added a permanent tax to the transit of oil around one of the world’s major oil chokepoints. This will change the math for many countries to pivot towards cheaper renewable sources that carry less risk beyond their control. 

While global growth in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions grew again in 2025, the pace it grows at continued to slow, rising by just 0.4%. “The rollout of clean energy technologies since 2019 avoided more than 35 exajoules of annual fossil fuel demand in 2025, equivalent to around 7% of global fossil fuel use annually,” wrote the IEA. “Deployment of solar PV, wind, nuclear, electric cars and heat pumps since 2019 also prevents 3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, or around 8% of global emissions.” Those are already sizeable figures, and they will only continue to grow every year.

Politics can make you feel powerless, and the scale of the climate crisis makes it feel even more so, but the evidence simply does not bear that kind of doomerism out. American politics is going through a multi-decade period of upheaval where the only consistency is inconsistency and the future is still anyone’s game for the taking; while thanks to an aggressive renewables buildout across the world over the last several years, we are finally beginning to see serious CO2 savings from it. This is the Age of Electricity, and Trump and Israel’s rampage across the globe’s most oil-rich region will only accelerate the inevitable trends towards energy sources that countries control, like harnessing the free energy emanating from the giant thermonuclear reactor in the sky. We really do live in a new world that contains serious hope for the future, you just have to squint through the destruction of the old one to see it.