2024 charts and graphs

Welcome to our annual charts and graphs email. We started this little tradition at the end of 2017, the end of the first year of Trump’s first term in office. The idea, then and now, is two-fold:

1. To give an honest and candid assessment of where we’re at with US and international climate action, where we need to go, and how we might get there.
2. To visually tell the story of why we need radical, digitally supported, non-violent direct action to save the climate and our common home in the hopes that it will inspire a few of you to make a year end gift.

Here’s all the charts and graphs as a slide deck. Here’s a link to the book “Panic Now” which I recommend and reference towards the end. And here’s a quick video explainer if you’re more into that than reading. Scroll down for links to sources on all the charts and graphs.

So, without further ado – here’s the charts and graphs:

Where we’re at – progress, but not enough or fast enough

Ok we’ll start right off with two charts that tell the same story in slightly different formats. These are both from the annual climate tracker report which evaluates each nation who is a signatory to the Paris climate Agreement. The Paris agreement committed all signatories to reduce emissions so that we keep global warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celcius and (2-5 degrees Farenheit) by 2100. And as we mentioned in an earlier action alert, each country puts out a plan every few years, called a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), that shows how much they plan to reduce emissions. Biden just put out a new NDC in December and it’s pretty good.

It’s not everything we asked for as part of a “fair share” NDC – which requires the US to cut emissions more and faster because we’re responsible for more of the global warming produced since the industrial revolution than most other countries – but definitely enough to get us into the “Almost Sufficient” range in those charts and graphs above and put the world on track for total global warming of around 2.1C by 2100. We could even make it below 2C if we count all of the national “net zero” pledges where big institutions like Banks, Investment managers and Government Agencies have promised to eliminate all global warming pollution by 2050 (yeah right, but that’s the “optimistic scenario” in the charts above).

Overall the story from the charts above is similar to the one we’ve been telling since the start of the Biden Administration: good effort and solid goals —we’re saying the right things — but insufficient action and follow through to actually achieve the goals —we’re not doing enough, yet. One encouraging sign is that emissions in the US are trending down again for the first time since the pandemic. And thanks to all the pro-renewable policies Biden put into place through the Inflation Reduction Act, some of those reductions are probably permanent. Meaning that even when Trump takes power again an pulls us out of the Paris Climate Agreement again, there’s enough momentum behind solar panels, electric cars and the like that US emissions will keep declining in the years ahead. That’s why the blue “policies and actions” bars show declining emissions over the next few years.

But, two big caveats remain: 1) even if we follow through on all the policies and actions Biden put in place, we’re still on track for 2.5-3C of global heating, which is well into the danger zone of climate tipping points and catastrophes (we’re at 1.3C of warming so far, and it’s already causing climate chaos, destruction and collapse all over the world). And 2) that’s all assuming that Trump & Co can’t break or unwind those “policies and actions” we’ve been able to put in place over the last few years — and we know fossil fueled fascists just won a huge electoral victory, and are likely to press their advantage. Which bring us to our next set of charts

What comes next – Trump, rollbacks and fossil fueled fascism run amok

Let’s be clear – some things even Trump and his fossil fueled fascist movement can’t undo: If you’ve bought an electric car, installed a solar panel, or switched to an electric heat pump in the last few years, you’ve locked in some climate progress that can’t be un-done. And the charts and graphs clearly show that millions of Americans have made those kind of investments and changes over the last few years, and millions more will continue to do so regardless of what comes next.

Recent events and our work in the first Trump Administration have also made clear that Trump isn’t all powerful – and that especially “regular” government functions like collecting taxes, passing budgets, and allocating the budgeted funds of the US government are hard. Just like last time, Trump will probably fail to pass a lot of new laws. And he may find repealing some of the things he doesn’t like – like tax credits for electric cars, or investments in new US solar and heat pump manufacturing – are hard or impossible for him to do.

That’s why the chart above from the Rhodium Group, who’s been producing optimistic but oft-cited predictions of Biden’s climate goals for years now, shows that even if Trump succeeds in rolling back (the yellow bars) or repealing (the red bars) parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden-era policies, US emissions will still go down over the next 5-10 years.

But they wont go down as fast or as much as if he left all the climate policies and pledges intact (the blue bars), of course. And, of course, remember that even with those Biden policies and goals in the blue bars we were still on track for 2.5-3C of global heating, which will kill and displace millions of people in untold numbers of fires, floods, and other climate catastrophes. The number one reason is still and always fossil fuels:

Fossil fuels are still the problem

Last year at this time we talked a lot about how the problem with Biden’s climate legacy was that he was pro-renewable, but he wasn’t anti-fossil fuel or anti-fascist enough. That’s still basically correct but a few encouraging things happened in the last year of Biden’s term: One is that renewable energy dropped in cost, and surged in installation, use, and market-share. A lot of those emissions reductions that will happen no matter what Trump does in the section above are about new renewable energy that’s been installed, especially to replace coal fired electricity, in the last 5 years. As shown in the chart above (again Rhodium data) from the New York Times: Those are coal plants that are not coming back, and those solar and wind farms and battery back ups are not going away.

But the weak part of US energy policy hasn’t been coal for a while, it’s about the gas – Fracked gas, methane gas, fossil gas, LNG, whatever you or the fossil fuel want to call it. Our other big victory right at the end of the Biden Administration has been a change in policy and approach to gas. It started early this year with the pause on new LNG export facilities, and ended strong with the release of a new US DOE report, which found that “Unfettered” LNG exports are “neither sustainable nor advisable.” If Biden follows through on that report’s findings and actually denies some permits (as we’ve been asking Biden, FERC, DOE & others to do all year) then we might finally get a little of the anti-fossil fuel action we’ve always called for at the last possible moment. And we’ve already gotten encouraging action from some state and local elected officials — like Hochul signing the Climate Superfund law in New York, or a tiny North Carolina town suing Duke energy for climate damages — stepping up to take on the fossil fuel industry.

Those are outcomes worth fighting for, as is every half a degree in warming we can avoid or every climate-smart action we can get investors, divestors, and policy makers to chose – be they at the local, state, or national levels. It’s our mission and intention to keep taking action and telling you about opportunities for you to take action every week, month, and day of the next few years. Because so much of what can be saved depends on disrupting, delaying, and denying Trump and the fossil fueled fascists’ goals, expect to hear a lot more of that kind of action from us – starting with this week’s call for anti-fossil-fuel-fascist art to be curated and pasted all over DC in the run up to the inauguration.

But since part of the point of presenting this annual charts and graphs emails is to be honest and clear:

We’re still pretty much fucked, and Trump will make it worse.

As has been said by scientists and experts many times this year: there is essentially no hope of hitting the “well below” 2C warming goal of the Paris Climate agreement. Doing so would have required every nation on earth to adopt a whole of government approach to reducing emissions between now and 2030, and for the US to lead that transition we would have needed to scale up, roughly to double, the actions and investments of Biden’s first term. That is not going to happen now that Trump has been elected again.

That’s why the last and most disheartening chart is still the election results:

We have failed to defeat climate change, fossil fuels, and fascism. That doesn’t mean life or the work are over, of course. But there’s no point in pretending that our progress, however limited so far, is sustainable. We spent a lot of time in 2024 connecting the dots between fascism, fossil fuels, and Trump – but we lost campaigns to deny Trump access to the ballot or to paint him and his movement as illegitimate. We also lost campaigns to connect fossil fuels and war – in Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond. We made a lot of noise and raised a lot of attention, but ultimately genocide and war continue, with fossil fuels (and fossil gas especially) as both the drivers of conflict and the beneficiaries of war and warming. We also failed to move a lot of money out of fossil fuels, again despite making a lot of noise and calling a lot of attention to it. The price gouging, war profiteering, and general capitalist gluttony is why fossil fueled fascists were able to spend so lavishly on the election and influence the outcome so much.

If we fight like hell, break the rules, and defy orders – we might be able to preserve and extend some of the progress we’ve ground out over the last few years, and keep global heating to ~2-3C by the end of the century. But let’s be clear, none of this is going to be pleasant: even 1.5C of warming means that every year for the next 75 years will be like 2024, but a little bit worse: Record setting heat. Record setting fires, floods, and superstorms. Trillions of dollars in damages. Homes and businesses lost forever. Thousands killed and tens of thousands displaced – their lives as they knew them ended even if they escape the worst. Every year, again, and again – forever, or at least as long as anyone old enough to read this will be alive.

Early in the first Trump Administration, a friend chided me for being hyperbolic with a subject line/headline that read “Rise, burn, or drown” in the context of a California climate march that came on the heels of a massive wildfire and hurricane season. Back then, there was still time to rise up and change the course of events – to enact bolder and bolder policies that change everything, if we united everyone in action.

Now, that time is past. We didn’t cut emissions enough or take action fast enough to get us on track to avoid the worst. And even if we fight hard and stop the worst of Trump’s rollbacks and repeals, we’re still in for a century of suffering and climate chaos.

At the end of 2024, I’m not asking you to stay calm, rise up, or commit to positive action in the new year. I’m asking you to panic now – to paraphrase a new book I’m reading. And I’m hoping that if enough of us panic now, and act like this is, in fact, a crisis worthy of panic and radical action we can finally break the systems that enable all this: Capitalism, Climate Change, Colonialism, all of it. And, by taking radical action in defiance of the authorities and authoritarianism, we might just build the solutions and societies we need: locally controlled, built in love and trust, where art and music and basic humanity are valued over profit and technology.

I know this isn’t the future most of us want, struggled for, and why we signed up and took action over and over last year. But that’s where we’re at, in charts and graphs, at the end of 2024, I think. The old world is ending, climate and all. New worlds are possible, but building them will be hard. And we’ll have to build our new worlds using the ashes and remains of the old one that many of us still love and cherish.

If you think so too, we’d be grateful for a donation to support our work. We’d be even more grateful for you just to stay engaged – read the emails we send you and take action where you can. We’ll see you in the new year for a whole new fight and a whole new kind of good trouble.