7 reasons to feel actually hopeful about the clean energy transition

It’s been a rough year if you care about climate change policy in the United States. 7 reasons to feel actually hopeful about the clean energy transition 2025 has felt brutal for climate policy in the US - but the bigger picture is surprisingly promising. Paige Vega is the senior editor of climate and Future Perfect Vox. She steers the newsroom’s coverage of climate and biodiversity, health, and science. Her work has appeared in outlets including High Country News, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Capital B News, among others. In Washington, the second Trump administration has moved quickly to dismantle the scaffolding of federal climate action: pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement ( again ), freezing or clawing back clean energy funding, fast-tracking fossil fuel projects, and even threatening the legal foundation of federal climate regulation itself . With the help of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whole climate, science, and conservation programs have been gutted, public servants fired, and climate language scrubbed from federal websites . And just last week, the administration moved to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research - arguably the world’s most crucial climate-science research institution that touches nearly every corner of US weather and climate forecasting, from wildfire modeling to the computational backbone universities rely on. So when we published Escape Velocity back in April - a project arguing that the clean energy transition had gathered enough economic and technological momentum to become effectively unstoppable - it was fair to wonder whether that thesis could survive this onslaught. The past eight months suggest it can. Looking back at the period since we published the project, what’s surprised me most isn’t how much went wrong - it’s how much progress kept happening anyway. Here are seven developments from 2025 that have me feeling hopeful for our future. Key takeaways • Even with the Trump-era rollbacks, clean energy continued to expand because it’s now cheaper, faster, and structurally difficult to stop. • Around the world, solar, wind, batteries, and EVs are winning on cost - which means adoption no longer depends on climate virtue or friendly governments. • The world isn’t waiting for the US. China, Europe, and emerging markets are driving the transition forward, whether Washington participates or not. • But even in the US, red and blue states alike have kept expanding clean power - often for purely economic reasons. • This shift is sticky. Projects breaking ground now will shape the grid for decades, locking in progress that future administrations can’t easily undo. 1) Renewables officially eclipsed fossil fuels globally In 2025, the clean energy transition crossed a line that will be hard to uncross. For the first time, renewables overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity. In the first half of the year, solar, wind, and hydropower generated 34.3 percent of global electricity, edging past coal’s 33.1 percent - a quiet but historic turning point. Just as striking, solar and wind didn’t merely grow alongside rising...

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