How to (still) be a climate optimist |
Being optimistic about the trajectory of climate change, and the pace of our response to it, has never been easy. In 2025, it might have become more difficult than ever here in Canada: with the federal government retreating from some of its key climate policy commitments and the American government openly describing renewable energy as some sort of nefarious socialist plot, it probably feels like the energy transition that was promised will never actually arrive.
I’m still an optimist. That’s partly a reflection of my natural inclination, but it’s mostly a reaction to an increasingly obvious reality that continues to unfold around the world: the clean technology revolution that is being increasingly powered by China will not, and cannot, be stopped. As my friend Chris Turner argued in his 2022 book How To Be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World, the growing array of low-carbon technologies like solar, battery storage and electric vehicles are going to replace both the guts of our global economy and the gears of their day-to-day lives. More importantly, they are going to do it whether our elected officials want them to or not. That is even truer now than when he wrote the book — even, or maybe especially as our politics have shifted towards fossil fuel revanchism.
That’s because electric vehicles, solar power and batteries keep getting better and cheaper with each passing year. None of them are subject to the whims of a cartel. Their price doesn’t explode in the face of military aggression by global despots. And they don’t require constant investments in additional fuel, which in turn require expenditures of foreign currency. For developing nations around the world, who will largely determine the pace of the energy transition, this is an irresistible combination.
Yes, our climate ambitions here in North America have either been reoriented or removed entirely. But in countries like Indonesia, South Africa and yes, China, the growing economic appeal of low-cost technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, battery storage and heat pumps is well beyond the reach of things like politics or punditry. A recent New York Times story about solar energy’s surge in South Africa lays that out in impressive detail, including the incumbent utility company’s surrender to the inevitable. “Now, unable to beat solar, Eskom is joining solar. The utility has removed onerous licensing requirements on private installations. It has allowed people to sell power to the grid. And it has tweaked its rates so that customers pay a fixed charge in addition to the cost of any power they consume.”
This pattern is being repeated all over the world. Countries that were expected to support growing demand for fossil fuels are instead trading them for domestic renewable energy production. It mirrors the pattern in the automobile market, where electric vehicles are rapidly replacing gasoline powered ones in countries that were expected to support long-term global gasoline demand. Yes, North American car makers may have turtled in the face of overt pressure from the Trump administration, either walking back their timelines and targets or scrapping them entirely. But China’s biggest EV makers continue to expand their exporting and manufacturing footprints around the world, pushing aggressively into some of the fastest-growing markets in Latin America, Africa and southeast Asia.
The results speak for themselves: Vietnam, for example, now has a higher share of EV sales (nearly 40 per cent) than the United Kingdom and the European Union, while Thailand’s share went from 1 per cent in 2019 to more than 20 per cent in 2025. India, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia now all have higher shares of EV sales than the United States. Perhaps the most striking data points come from Ethiopia and Nepal, two low-income countries with abundant hydroelectric resources and a clear incentive to reduce fossil fuel imports as quickly as possible. They’re succeeding beyond almost anyone’s expectations, too: according to a new report from Ember, EVs now make up 60 per cent of new car sales in Ethiopia and 76 per cent in Nepal.
Russ Conser, a 30-year veteran at the global oil giant Shell, thinks North America’s oil and gas companies are at risk of getting “Kodaked.” As he wrote on social media, “Kodak didn’t fail because they missed digital photography. They invented it. They failed because film was still wildly profitable, digital cameras felt additive, and the real disruption — smartphones — didn’t look dangerous until it was too late.” Sound familiar? It should. “That smartphone-like energy system,” Conser wrote, “is now arriving fast: solar, batteries, EVs, heat pumps, software — from Texas to Portugal to China.”
The Trump administration will probably continue blocking wind and solar projects, much to the detriment of the states that will lose the ensuing economic activity and the households and businesses that will have to pay higher electricity prices in the future. Elections do have consequences, after all. But here’s the thing: for the first time in a very long time, it doesn’t matter what the United States does. The energy transition does not depend on America’s endorsement or support, and it will not slow down in the rest of the world just because the current American government would like it to. It will simply leave America and its automotive, energy and banking industries in the past, where it seems increasingly determined to live.
Let them. Canada, though, needs to choose a different path.
We should embrace the economic and technological future that is so clearly emerging in the rest of the world, and participate in it as fully as possible. That doesn’t mean shutting in our oil and gas production today, tomorrow, or any time in the near future. But it does mean preparing for the moment where the volumes of oil and gas we ship will start to decline, and continue declining in perpetuity. More than anything, it means preparing the public for that moment, and insulating the policies that will help us compete in that new economic order from the inevitable rearguard attack.
I’m not sure how Mark Carney feels about New Year’s resolutions. But if he’s taking suggestions, that one is at the top of my list.