Don’t let Donald Trump distract you. The rest of the world is finally making real progress on climate change

Canadians can be forgiven for thinking the fight against climate change has stalled, or is even backsliding. 

After all, U.S. President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” renewable energy a “scam,” and has seemingly done everything within his power to encourage the production and combustion of planet-warming fossil fuels.

The first year of the second Trump presidency has put an end to the promising progress on climate change in the United States, with work on offshore wind farms shut down, money-losing coal plants ordered to remain open, and billions of dollars of subsidies for green energy projects frozen.

Even in Canada, despite his record of taking the climate seriously, Prime Minister Mark Carney has ended many of his predecessor’s climate policies. The cancellation of the consumer carbon tax made polluting cheaper, while the lengthy “pause” of the electric vehicle rebate made EVs more expensive. There is no more federal government money for green home renovations, but there are billions of dollars for new pipelines and liquid natural gas (LNG) export projects. Decades of fossil fuel production are being locked in, while renewable energy construction has sputtered.

If you read the news with an eye for the climate, 2025 was a bad year.

But all this denial and neglect risks drowning out a different story, one of marked progress in efforts to deal with climate change virtually everywhere else in the world. Key indicators show the increasing deployment of renewable energy and clean technology that presage a peak to global emissions.

While it may be hard for some to believe, last year was actually a good year on the climate front, experts say. And we’d be able to see it, if we’d only look past our immediate surroundings.

“North America is uniquely decelerating in a world where everything else is accelerating,” said Daan Walter, principal at the U.K.-based energy think-tank Ember. “If you would look at the world and hold your hand over the United States, you would see the acceleration very clearly.”

Renewable energy and clean tech is taking off

Despite the fact that global emissions continued to tick up, 2025 was a record year for many of the things that are needed to bend that curve down.

Wind and solar power are on a worldwide tear. While the final numbers aren’t in yet, in all likelihood, more renewable energy was brought online last year than ever before. Thanks to a dramatic drop in the cost of solar panels and batteries, countries on every continent are installing record amounts of renewables, which overtook coal to become the top source of electricity worldwide in 2025.

A record number of EVs were also sold last year, the total jumping 20 per cent over 2024. They now account for one out of every four cars sold worldwide — a level Bloomberg called “unthinkable … just a few years ago.” Again, inexpensive Chinese technology is supercharging the trend, driving sales up in developing nations such as Vietnam and Ethiopia as well as big economies such as Brazil, Mexico and India. 

The only two countries in the world where EV sales didn’t rise? Canada and the United States.

“There’s a sense we’re operating in a bubble in North America. We don’t see what’s happening in other countries,” said Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based clean energy think tank. “There’s definitely reason to be hopeful, when you look at broad trends around the world.”

China goes from climate villain to climate hero

Trends in renewable energy and clean technology are important, but emissions are what really count — and there’s progress being made there as well.

While it’s not official, China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, has likely already hit peak emissions and is set to send them dropping. Again, this is largely thanks to the incredible amount of wind and solar generation being built.

China has installed more renewables than the rest of the world combined, three years running.

In the past 12 months, China installed so much renewable power that it has stopped the rise in its use of coal and burned less than it did the previous year — for the first time in more than 50 years (outside of the recessionary year of 2015).

With all that clean electricity, China has been electrifying road transport at an astonishing rate. More than half of all car sales in the country were EVs or plug-in hybrids, accounting for an incredible 12.7 million vehicles in 2025. That’s more than half of all EV sales worldwide, or more than the ¾ of all vehicles sold in the U.S, gas and electric combined. 

The one-two punch of generating tons of clean electricity then putting it to work displacing things that used to run on fossil fuels is a technique that knocks out emissions, says Walter — and it’s already being copied outside China.

“China is leading, and other countries are following,” he said. “Look at India, coal generation also fell and solar is dominating. We’re seeing the start of that in Indonesia, too.”

Climate action is now market-driven, not policy driven

This wave of reduction emissions is fundamentally different from the reductions of the past two decades in Europe and North America. It’s not being driven by climate policy, but by economic and geopolitical forces, Walter said.

In other words, renewables and EVs are taking over not because the world has woken up to the threat of a warming planet, but because such options are cheaper and are allowing governments to wean themselves off oil imports.

People’s bank accounts benefit, countries’ economies become more resilient and the planet warms a little less rapidly, all while the world blows past estimates of what was thought possible when it comes to both clean energy and EVs. 

It’s a welcome change from blowing past emissions reductions targets, as Canada has done for decades, and reframes the way we can think about climate solutions.

“We overestimate how impactful policy can be, and we underestimate how fast markets and innovation can move,” said Walter.

The green energy and clean tech revolution takes different forms in different countries, but a sampling of headlines shows that previously unimaginable things are happening all over the world.

• Australia will give away free electricity for three hours a day this year because of the huge amount of solar that floods energy onto the grid in the middle of the day, now that one-third of houses nationwide have panels on their roofs.

• A similar phenomenon is happening in Pakistan, but with opposite results. So many people have installed rooftop solar over the past two years that demand for electricity from the grid has actually fallen, putting electricity utilities in dire financial straits.

• Nearly 90 per cent of India’s EVs have two or three wheels. Electric motorcycles and rickshaws are flooding into the world’s most populous country, with smaller batteries than electric cars, and a lower environmental impact.

• In the U.K., where the Industrial Revolution kickstarted the use of fossil fuels, carbon emissions fell to their lowest level since 1872. 

This doesn’t mean the market is a panacea, said Will Atkinson, an energy researcher with RMI, a global clean energy think-tank. 

“Early uptake needs to be supported by policy incentives to speed up adoption,” he said. That’s because people are more sensitive to upfront costs, which tend to be higher with clean technologies such as EVs and heat pumps, and they don’t take into account how much cheaper these things are to operate in the long run. 

Ultimately, policy should just “make the dang thing cheaper,” because once people have the economic incentive, mass adoption ensues, and this “pushes out dirty technologies faster,” he said.

According to RMI’s research, solar power and EVs are already there, while heat pumps and batteries are on the cusp of taking off globally.

Where does that leave Canada?

Canada is stuck on an island with the only country in the world that doesn’t want to electrify, said Rachel Doran, the executive director of Clean Energy Canada, a climate think-tank based at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

“Canada has been trying to find a balance — the federal government articulates it as a conventional and clean energy superpower — but I think the stats are showing globally that electricity is winning because of its efficiency and affordability,” she said.

“Sacrificing everything to follow the U.S. is not even a choice we have anymore and probably not one that will position us for success in 10 or 15 years, when the world has gone that much further ahead in these new technologies and these new supply chains.”

Doran said Canada should “plug into those global supply chains, and keep its eyes on where the rest of the world is going if we want to reap those benefits domestically.”

An example of this is what Carney did last month, when he signed a deal with China to reduce tariffs on EVs, while capping their number to ensure they won’t flood into Canada and destroy the domestic auto industry. This hasn’t stopped automobile advocates from claiming the deal is a bad one and that local industry needs to be protected from Chinese competition — a tacit admission that they cannot produce an EV that competes on price.

Beyond the threat to local manufacturing, Canada faces several unique challenges to joining the world in electrifying. As a massive, cold and sparsely populated country, it is more difficult to build an EV charging network and to provide enough renewable energy to heat homes through winter.

This narrative is something that Phil McKay, senior director at the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, pushes back on, saying there’s nothing holding us back from doubling or tripling the amount of wind and solar we currently have.

“The Prairies get so much sun, they’re on par with equatorial countries,” he said. “It’s so clear and the sky is cloud-free for much of the year. And in Windsor, we’re hitting similar latitudes to Barcelona. It’s not well understood, but solar is a huge opportunity for Canada,” he said.

While Alberta’s 2023 moratorium on new wind and solar stopped much of the country’s renewable momentum in its tracks, McKay says there’s now a healthy number of announced projects set to come online in the coming years, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

“It’s sometimes frustrating to hear the argument that when you get up into the Arctic, there’s no sun during the winter. Yeah, but there’s 23 hours of daylight during the summer, so that’s a lot of energy that could displace diesel.”

Still, Canada will not be able to achieve the same amount of solar as Australia or Spain, and it’s not because of the climate, said Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta. Historically cheap natural gas does more to erode the economic incentive to switch to clean power.

“For a long time, we have had this great comparative advantage here in have cheap energy (from fossil fuels). But now the cheapest source of energy in the world (solar) is something that actually doesn’t work that well here,” he said.

This should worry us, not only because it slows the domestic climate transition, but because it will inevitably lead to a competitive disadvantage as other countries install massive amounts of cheaper power for AI and data centres. 

“Cheap solar will eat our lunch,” he said.

Focused as we are on the disruption to our economy wrought by the mercurial decision-making of the U.S. president, Canadians have largely missed out on the incredible climate action accelerating around the world.

If we worked a little less on maintaining our existing industries that extract, transport and combust fossil fuels, and a little more on harvesting energy from the sun and the wind, experts say, we might avoid finding ourselves left behind, alongside a neighbour that wants to turn back time and return to the way things were.