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coral reefs
The Renewable Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable
By every measure, shifting from fossil fuels to electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency and conservation is far more beneficial to most people than following the same fossil-fueled road.
Jan 04, 2026
There’s good news and bad news on the climate front. Unfortunately, the bad news is horrific, as accelerating extreme weather-related events and other unfolding climate catastrophes show. But there are signs of hope. We just have to stop dragging our feet.
“We are already facing danger,” a scientists’ statement from the November COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil warned, adding, “COP30 has a choice—to protect people and life or the fossil fuel industry.”
Too many governments, including Canada’s, appear to be leaning toward the latter.
“We need to start, now, to reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, by at least 5% per year,” the scientists wrote. “This must happen in order to have a chance to avoid unmanageable and extremely costly climate impacts affecting all people in the world.”
The only ones who benefit from continuing to exploit polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels are greedy industry profiteers and short-sighted politicians who would trade human health, economic resilience, and survivability for a handful of short-term jobs and limited economic boosts.
Studies show that “rising heat is killing roughly one person per minute, and air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels claims an estimated 2.5 million lives every year,” DW news reports. It was also “costing as much as $304 billion in global economic losses last year.”
We’ve already passed one climate “tipping point,” with warming oceans causing irreversible mass coral reef die-offs, and we’re nearing others, including Amazon rainforest devastation and collapse of crucial ocean currents.
Coral reefs support one-quarter of all marine life, and the Amazon rainforest has more animal and plant species than any other terrestrial ecosystem. It also regulates global climate and weather and holds one-quarter of the planet’s available freshwater. Ocean currents also regulate global climate and weather.
Even though emissions continue to rise as the world refuses to halt fossil fuel development and forest and wetland destruction, investments in and growth of renewable energy technology are exceeding expectations, now outpacing fossil fuel investments.
DW reports that “in 2024, the world experienced its largest-ever increase in renewable energy generation, which now provides 40% of global electricity. In the first half of this year solar and wind exceeded all demand growth for electricity, surpassing coal for the first time.” Solar capacity is doubling every three years. Wind power has tripled since 2015. The International Energy Agency reports that global renewable energy investments exceeded US$2 trillion last year, double the amounts committed to coal, oil, and gas.
To increase energy security in the face of a growing global energy crisis and reduce their reliance on increasingly expensive, inefficient fossil fuels, countries that import oil, gas, and coal are rapidly advancing electrification and renewables.
Analysis from COP30 also shows that “sticking to three key climate promises—on renewables, energy efficiency, and methane—would avoid nearly 1°C of global heating and give the world hope of avoiding climate breakdown,” the Guardian reports.
But the world continues to burn dirty, polluting coal, gas, and oil at deadly rates and has increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry—the most profitable enterprise in history!
Canada has failed to live up to its promise to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The federal and provincial governments are supporting expanded development of methane gas exploitation and liquefaction, and are proposing pipelines to ship more dirty bitumen from the Alberta oil sands to British Columbia ports for export, where it will be burned in other countries and not counted in our emissions reporting.
Canada’s expansion of liquefied “natural” gas production is not only economically suspect, it also makes methane-reduction pledges more difficult to meet, as LNG is almost entirely methane, and leaks and emissions occur at every step of the process, from fracked extraction and transport to liquefaction and burning.
Although 160 countries, including Canada, have signed a Global Methane Pledge, promising to cut methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030, emissions continue to rise and countries, including Canada, continue to underreport them.
By every measure, shifting from fossil fuels to electrification, renewables, and energy efficiency and conservation is far more beneficial to most people than following the same fossil-fueled road. The only ones who benefit from continuing to exploit polluting, climate-altering fossil fuels are greedy industry profiteers and short-sighted politicians who would trade human health, economic resilience, and survivability for a handful of short-term jobs and limited economic boosts.
Regardless of what roadblocks fossil-fuelled governments throw in the way, the renewable energy revolution is unstoppable.
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Giving Thanks on an Endangered Earth
So many of us are now searching for a bridge to the world we need. I’m thankful that we’re searching together and for the possibilities we may find.
Nov 27, 2025
The days grow dark here in the North as the year winds down. Friends slowly return from COP30 in Brazil, the frontline of the fight for our climate future, with far too little won. There’s a weight to the air. It’s an age of global polycrisis, an era of authoritarian upsurge, a time of anger, grief, and overwhelm, nesting dolls of troubled times, from the planetary to the personal. And in the US, it’s Thanksgiving, a time when we are meant to gather to show gratitude for the things we’ve been given.
It’s a complicated proposition, giving thanks; it has always looked very different depending on who and where you are in this country. Because what have we been given and by whom? What have we taken and from whom? What is being taken today and who are the takers?
And it grows more complicated each year, giving thanks, as so many of us whose lives are materially abundant increasingly see that abundance less as a blessing and more as our birthright and a legacy to maintain. When in reality, modern materialist lifestyles were always the brittle pretense of an era of extraction that is hollowing out the Earth and our space to be safe upon it—and is starting to crack.
And this year, with cracks appearing everywhere—in our climate, our politics, our communities, our bodies and minds, our very sense of reality—it is profoundly complicated, giving thanks. This era of capitalist extraction and detached materialism has belched up such historic, geopolitical hairballs as Donald Trump presiding over the world’s richest nation for a second time and promptly pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement; such inexcusable own goals as global carbon emissions hitting a new record high in 2025; and such multigenerational tragedies as the vital, life-supporting 1.5°C climate target being all but certified dead. (We can overshoot and return to 1.5°C but we’re making this task harder.)
No one knows where this is going—why can’t it be somewhere beautiful?
This follows a decade of urgent talk about the all-important “2030 deadline” for deeply reducing emissions to achieve this target—“we have just 10 years to avoid catastrophic climate change”, wait, “just 5 years”, wait… This was a message that children around the world picked up and shouted, demanding to be heard. But this year, the adults have gone quiet. The deadline will be missed.
So, it’s a complicated thanks. If I consider what really matters to me, each of those things is under some kind of assault. And my thanks is suffused with grief and anger.
But gratitude is powerful. It’s both something we offer up and, when we mean it, it’s a gift we give ourselves that can help us to hold grief, move anger, and bring us into right relation with what is.
So here are things I’m thankful for.
I’m thankful for the food that will be on the table. I’m thankful for the hands that harvested it. I’m thankful for everyday people in cities across the nation, defending our immigrant friends and neighbors from this administration’s inhumanity.
I’m thankful for the defenders of science, justice, and truth, the people who work tirelessly to ensure these pillars of a free and fair society outlast this authoritarian spasm.
I’m thankful for the creators—the ones making the music, writing the words, conjuring the new and unexpected art forms, and drawing forth visions of the possible that can see us through this dark time.
I’m thankful for the elders. Not the arrested-development adolescents wandering the halls of power in old people’s bodies. True elders, people with the wisdom the world so badly needs. May we listen; may we become one ourselves.
I’m thankful for the dreams of young people that spring eternal, with each new generation, and renew the world’s purpose: to let them thrive.
I’m thankful for the beauty of nature. I’ll grieve coral reefs the rest of my days, but I saw them; I witnessed that wonder of creation and I’m grateful. And though I long for a time when witnessing nature’s beauty was simply about awe, not grief, I wasn’t born then. Learning to hold grief and wonder together not only spares us from emotionally shutting down but can open a deep well of strength and equanimity.
I’m thankful for the resilient living Earth. I’m thankful for all that she has absorbed of our foolishness: the consumption, the fossil-fuel pollution, the bottomless corporate greed—she has spared us the true cost of it all. But now the atmosphere is trapping ever more heat; the oceans break out in fevers; the land endures the drought, floods, and fires of its more violent climate. Ecosystems collapse, people suffer, animals are made extinct. This is the Earth seeking new equilibrium; this is the future; we will be less shielded from the consequences of our choices. And yet… the Earth adapts and, if given a chance, life will always seek to thrive.
I’m thankful for the people who, their lifeways tied to the Earth, continue to stand against the madness and for right relations with nature and each other. Around the world, Indigenous people who have suffered immeasurably in these centuries of colonial extraction, but endured, are raising voices and showing ways forward, including at COP30 in Brazil. They’ve been offering wisdom we should have heeded, just as the Mayflower colonists should have heeded, but it’s not too late.
I’m thankful for those cracks, the ones that seem to be appearing everywhere. Bayo Akomolafe says, “The crack is the monster’s gift,” a weakness in the wall, an opening on which to pry. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites us to use these openings to “hospice modernity,” to gently deconstruct the sources of destruction, and to grow in their place the world the world needs. More than I can ever recall, so many people seem to sense that world, waiting to be grown; are planting seeds and tending; are questioning what we as humans really need to live rich lives and creating community that can meet those needs. So many of us are now searching for a bridge to the world we need. I’m thankful that we’re searching together and for the possibilities we may find. No one knows where this is going—why can’t it be somewhere beautiful?
And I’m thankful for our capable, willing hands, yours and mine. We’re going to need to pry at the cracks and plant for tomorrow, together. We’re going to need to raise defiant fists and hold out compassionate palms. And we’re all going to need to hold hands as we meet what comes. I wish I had simpler things to tell my children about this moment, I wish giving thanks was simpler. But they are teens and young adults now and their time here will not be simple, so I tell them the truth: Some things are lost. A lot can be saved. I won’t see the world we’re trying to reach. I hope you will. All we can do today is build a bridge to that world. All we can do is hold hands tightly and be the bridge.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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'Our New Reality': Planet Reaches First Climate Tipping Point With Coral Reef Dieback
“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said one researcher. “This is our new reality.”
Oct 13, 2025
Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such "point of no return" has already been reached, with warm-water coral reefs "experiencing unprecedented dieback."
Surging global temperatures, especially in recent years, have pushed the world's coral reefs into a state of widespread decline, with the worst bleaching event on record taking place since 2023. More than 84% of the world's reefs have been impacted.
In the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 released Monday, the researchers warned that "the central estimate" of coral reefs' "tipping point of 1.2°C global warming has been crossed," with planetary heating now at about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels.
The warming waters have caused widespread bleaching of coral reefs, which impacts the nearly a million species of marine animals and organisms that rely on them to support some of the planet's most diverse ecosystems.
“Unless we return to global mean surface temperatures of 1.2°C (and eventually to at least 1°C) as fast as possible, we will not retain warm-water reefs on our planet at any meaningful scale,” the report says. Minimizing non-climatic stressors, particularly improved reef management, can give reefs the best chance of surviving under what must be a minimal exceedance of their thermal tipping point."
The decline of coral reefs also leaves coastal communities without natural barriers against storm surge, compounds the overfishing crisis by depriving fish of a habitat in which to reproduce, and impacts thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in reef tourism each year.
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation."
"We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter and a lead author of the report, told Nature. “This is our new reality.”
The arrival of the tipping point necessitates immediate, significant reductions in fossil fuel emissions that are driving planetary heating in order to return to a global mean surface temperature of 1.2°C over preindustrial temperatures, but climate scientist Bill McGuire did not mince words Monday regarding the likelihood of mitigating the damage already done to coral reefs.
"We won't reduce temps to 1.2°C as soon as possible, so this is the death knell for most of the world's stupendous reef communities," said McGuire. "Other tipping points will follow."
The report notes that the world is still headed toward other climate tipping points, namely the "large-scale" degradation of the Amazon rainforest, which is projected to "weaken global climate regulation" and accelerate biodiversity loss; the melting of mountain glaciers like Áakʼw Tá Hít in Alaska; and for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which regulates the climate by transporting warmer waters from the tropics to the northern Atlantic Ocean, whose likelihood of reaching a tipping point "increases with global temperature" rise.
Without rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, the Global Tipping Points report says, the upper threshold of global temperature rise for coral reefs of 1.5°C is likely to be reached within 10 years.
“We are going to overshoot 1.5°C of global warming probably around 2030 on current projections,” Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute told The Guardian.
Manjana Milkoreit, a co-author of the report and political scientist at the University of Oslo, told Nature that "we have the knowledge regarding how to stop the Earth from reaching more tipping points."gr
“What we need is a kind of governance that matches the nature of this challenge," she said.
The report also acknowledges "positive tipping points" that could have runaway impacts on the ability to rapidly draw down greenhouse gas emissions, such as the widespread adoption of regenerative agricultural practices and an acceleration in the transition toward electric vehicle and solar power use.
"Solar PV panels have dropped in price by a quarter for each doubling of their installed capacity. Batteries have improved in quality and plummeted in price the more that are deployed," reads the report. "This encourages further adoption. The spread of climate litigation cases and nature positive initiatives is also self-amplifying. The more people undertaking them the more they influence others to act."
Lenton told The Guardian that "the race is on to bring forward these positive tipping points to avoid what we are now sure will be the unmanageable consequences of further tipping points in the Earth system."
As Common Dreams reported last week, global progress toward transitioning away from fossil fuels and expanding the use of renewable energy is surging worldwide—but the US has been left out this year under President Donald Trump, with a major spending bill imposing new fees on solar and wind development and boosting drilling on public lands while the US Department of Energy is investing $625 million in coal.
The Global Tipping Points report was released four weeks before global leaders are set to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30), where policymakers will be asked to contribute to a Granary of Solutions: "a reservoir of concrete tools and initiatives—scalable, replicable, and aligned with the Paris Agreement—that connect ambition with implementation" in order to trigger "positive tipping points of transformation leveraging solutions that already exist."
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation,” Mike Barrett, chief scientific adviser at the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK and a co-author of the report, told Yale Environment 360. “Countries must show the political bravery and leadership to work together and achieve them.”
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