The honest answer is: we are not currently on track to prevent serious climate damage, but we are also not standing still. Global CO2 emissions hit a record high of over 40 billion tons in 2023, up 1.1% from the year before. At the same time, renewable energy is expanding faster than almost anyone predicted a decade ago, electric vehicles now make up more than one in four new car sales worldwide, and 159 countries have pledged to slash methane emissions by 30% this decade. The picture is one of a race between accelerating solutions and accelerating consequences, and right now, the consequences are winning.
Where Emissions Actually Stand
Despite decades of climate negotiations, global fossil fuel emissions reached nearly 37 billion tons of CO2 in 2023. Total emissions, including land use changes like deforestation, exceeded 40 billion tons. That 1.1% year-over-year increase continues what researchers describe as a “10-year plateau”: emissions have essentially flatlined at record-high levels rather than declining. As climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré of the University of East Anglia put it, current efforts are “insufficient to put global emissions on a downward trajectory towards net zero.”
The gap between what countries have promised and what physics requires is stark. Even if every nation fully delivers on its climate pledges, including conditional commitments that depend on funding and support, the world would still emit roughly 19 billion tons of CO2 equivalent more per year than what’s needed to limit warming to 1.5°C. That gap shrinks to about 11 billion tons for a 2°C target, but that’s still an enormous shortfall. To put it simply: the plans on paper don’t add up to a safe outcome, and actual policy implementation lags behind even those insufficient plans.
The Clean Energy Boom Is Real
The most encouraging part of the picture is how quickly clean energy is scaling. Renewables supplied 30% of global electricity in 2023 and are forecast to reach 46% by 2030. Solar and wind account for nearly all of that growth. Solar’s share of global power is expected to triple over the forecast period, while wind nearly doubles. These aren’t aspirational targets; they reflect projects already under construction or financed.
Electric vehicles are following a similar curve. In 2024, more than 20% of all new cars sold globally were electric. Sales are expected to top 20 million vehicles in 2025, representing one-quarter of total car sales, with growth of about 25% year over year. A decade ago, EVs were a niche product. Now they’re reshaping the auto industry across China, Europe, and increasingly North America. The transportation sector accounts for roughly a quarter of global CO2 emissions, so electrifying it matters enormously, though the full climate benefit depends on how the electricity powering those cars is generated.
The challenge is that building new clean energy capacity is not the same as retiring old fossil fuel infrastructure. Coal and gas plants continue operating, sometimes for decades after construction. Emissions can plateau even as renewables surge, because growing energy demand in developing economies absorbs much of the new clean supply rather than displacing existing dirty supply.
Carbon Removal Is Nowhere Near Scale
One technology often cited as a backstop is direct air capture: machines that pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere. The gap between where this technology is and where it needs to be is sobering. Today, 27 direct air capture plants worldwide capture roughly 0.01 million tons of CO2 per year. Net zero scenarios require around 65 to 80 million tons of capture capacity by 2030.
Even if every planned project in the pipeline advances on schedule and operates at full capacity, deployment would reach about 3 million tons by 2030. That’s 500 times today’s rate, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s still less than 5% of what’s needed. Direct air capture will likely play a role eventually, but counting on it to close the emissions gap this decade is not realistic. The math demands that most of the work happen through cutting emissions at the source rather than cleaning them up afterward.
Tipping Points Are Closer Than Expected
What makes the timeline so urgent is that the climate system doesn’t respond smoothly to rising temperatures. It contains tipping points: thresholds beyond which changes become self-reinforcing and essentially irreversible on human timescales. A landmark 2022 analysis published in Science identified multiple tipping points that become likely between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, die-off of tropical coral reefs, and widespread abrupt thawing of permafrost.
The world has already warmed roughly 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, and that temperature already falls within the lower uncertainty range for five tipping points. Observations suggest parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet may have already crossed their threshold. Each triggered tipping point carries consequences that compound the problem: ice sheet collapse means meters of sea level rise over centuries, permafrost thaw releases stored carbon that drives further warming, and Amazon dieback could convert one of the planet’s largest carbon sinks into a carbon source. These aren’t distant hypothetical risks. They’re processes that may already be underway.
Adaptation Funding Falls Far Short
Even the most optimistic emissions scenario locks in decades of worsening impacts from the warming already baked into the system. That makes adaptation, preparing communities for floods, heat waves, droughts, and rising seas, as necessary as cutting emissions. And here, the funding gap is staggering.
International adaptation finance flowing to developing countries reached $28 billion in 2022, up from $22 billion the year before. That’s genuine progress, and it moves toward a pledge made at the Glasgow climate summit for developed nations to double adaptation funding from 2019 levels by 2025. But the estimated need is $187 to $359 billion per year. Meeting the Glasgow target would close roughly 5% of that gap. The countries most vulnerable to climate impacts, largely in the tropics and global south, are the ones least equipped financially to protect their populations.
So Will We “Fix” It?
Climate change isn’t a binary problem with a single fix. It’s a spectrum of outcomes ranging from manageable to catastrophic, and every fraction of a degree matters. Holding warming to 1.5°C, the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement, is slipping out of reach. Staying below 2°C is still physically possible but requires a pace of transformation that no major economy has yet demonstrated. Current policies put the world on track for roughly 2.6°C of warming, which would trigger additional tipping points and lock in severe consequences for billions of people.
What’s genuinely different now compared to even five years ago is that the economic case for clean energy has tipped. Solar is the cheapest source of new electricity in most of the world. EVs are reaching price parity with gasoline cars. These transitions have their own momentum and will continue regardless of political shifts. The question is whether they happen fast enough, and whether they’re accompanied by the policy decisions, financial flows, and infrastructure changes needed to retire fossil fuels rather than just supplement them.
The most accurate answer to “will we fix climate change” is that we will partially fix it. We will avoid the worst-case scenarios that haunted projections a decade ago, when 4°C or higher seemed plausible. But we are very unlikely to avoid significant, painful consequences: more extreme weather, coastal flooding, ecosystem loss, and displacement of vulnerable populations. The degree of damage depends almost entirely on decisions made in the next 10 to 15 years, and those decisions are still being contested in every major economy on Earth.