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For more than a century, the world has run on coal.

When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.

Then last year, it lost the lead. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. It was the first time those two lines had crossed since 1919, when the global grid was still small enough to run mostly on hydropower.

As coal has declined — at least on a relative basis — the sun has risen. When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, solar produced just 256 terawatt hours of electricity globally. Nuclear power plants, at the time, were pumping out about 10 times that, while wind was responsible for three times as much electricity as solar. 

A decade later, solar is producing 10 times more power: 2,778 TWh, roughly what the entire European Union consumes in a year. Its production has doubled in the past three years alone. For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.

While the world still burns a huge amount of coal — some 8.8 billion tonnes in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — solar alone covered 75 percent of the rise in global electricity demand. Put wind and solar together, and you’ve met 99 percent of it. Fossil fuel power generation — coal, oil, and gas combined — fell 0.2 percent in 2025, the first decline since the pandemic and only the fifth year this century that fossil generation didn’t rise. 

Clean sources are now growing fast enough, on their own, to absorb just about everything the world is adding to its grid. And there’s a decent chance that, thanks in part to what’s happening right now in the Middle East, that transition may speed up.

Why solar is no fluke

It all starts with cost.

Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles. This rule has held through supply gluts, trade wars, and pandemics. In the mid-1970s, a solar module cost more than $100 per watt. In late 2025, one panel cost about 10 cents per watt. No other major energy source in modern history has gotten that cheaper, that fast.

The oldest objection to solar — that it goes dark when the sun goes down — is becoming obsolete because we can increasingly store the daytime electricity solar units generate. Battery costs dropped 20 percent in 2024 and another 45 percent in 2025. Global battery deployment grew 46 percent last year, to 250 gigawatt-hours. Solar plants built with enough batteries to deliver power round the clock now sell electricity in the US for around $76 per megawatt hour, cheaper than building new natural gas capacity.

The China story

The world’s long-time manufacturing powerhouse — China — has made this shift possible. Chinese factories now make around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and an even larger share of the polysilicon, wafers, and cells that feed into them, a dominance built over two decades of state-backed investment, enormous scale, and ferocious price competition. The result is the cheapest energy technology in human history, produced at a pace the rest of the world has not matched. 

Chinese dominance has also made clean power a geopolitical story: tariffs, trade disputes, arguments in Washington and Brussels about whether to build parallel supply chains. For the climate, though, the math is simple. Cheap panels built anywhere cut emissions everywhere.

The demand side has moved too. For most of the last two decades, the global coal story has been a Chinese story. When China’s electricity demand surged, so did coal. When it slackened, so did coal. That relationship cracked in 2025: China’s fossil generation fell 0.9 percent, its first decline since 2015, even as the country’s electricity demand rose 5 percent. India’s fossil fuel generation fell as well, by 3.3 percent, while its renewables grew 24 percent year over year. In both cases, new clean energy capacity outran new demand. Ember found that renewables in China now produce more electricity than every household and service-sector business in the country, combined.

Don’t get carried away — yet

A flat year for coal is not the same as a falling one. Power-sector emissions in 2025 were still close — within a rounding error — of 2024’s levels, which set a record high. In its report, Ember calls this moment “the era of clean growth,” which should be understood as the start of real decarbonization, rather than a final state of decarbonization.

Coal’s share is shrinking — from a peak of 41 percent of global generation in 2013 to 33 percent today — but the fleet itself isn’t going away. China approved more than 40 gigawatts of new coal capacity in just the first three quarters of 2025. Thanks to growth in renewables, these plants are increasingly becoming a backup source, rather than a primary one. But those plants exist, they burn coal when they run, and they’ll burn coal for years.

Then there is the US. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the residential solar tax credit in December and tightened eligibility for commercial projects. Rhodium Group, a research institute, projects the law will cut US clean-capacity additions through 2035 by more than half. America is in danger of getting left behind.

That sounds bad, and in the short run it is. But policy can slow a market; it has a harder time stopping one when the economics have already shifted. BloombergNEF reported that global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8 percent from 2024. China alone put roughly $800 billion into clean energy last year; India’s clean-energy spending climbed 15 percent to about $68 billion; the EU has been accelerating renewables spending ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut its pipeline gas. Even if Washington slows down, the rest of the world is building solar farms and battery plants as fast as the supply chains allow. The US is trying to run against a market it no longer controls.

There is, however, the AI wild card. The IEA estimates global data-center electricity use rose 17 percent in 2025, with AI-specific demand growing faster. In the US, gas is currently the biggest single source of new data-center supply. Artificial intelligence is the one uncontrolled variable that could swamp clean-power gains in the back half of this decade.

Strait talk

The last big oil shock rewrote the global energy system. After the 1973 OPEC embargo, President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, founded the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, and signed the country’s first appliance efficiency standards into law. Ronald Reagan undid much of that work, but the seed technologies — photovoltaic R&D, efficiency standards, CAFE rules for cars — kept developing in the background for decades.

This time, the shock is being felt by a system where clean alternatives are already the cheapest option in most places. The US-Iran war has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of global LNG normally flow. The IEA called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The response has been exactly what cheap clean power makes possible. In March, global solar generation grew 14 percent year over year and wind grew 8 percent; solar alone saved European buyers some $3.5 billion in gas costs for the month. Countries that might have responded to an oil crisis in 2006 by drilling faster are instead moving up construction for solar farms, offshore wind, and grid-scale storage. Where the 1970s planted seeds that took 40 years to sprout, 2026’s shock is meeting an industry already at commercial scale.

The climate case for clean power has always rested on a simple bet: that the technologies would keep getting cheaper faster than the politics got worse. Today, solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the history of electricity, while coal looks to be on a terminal decline. Batteries are starting to make it a 24-hour fuel. What comes next is a question of speed — and speed, mostly, is a question of choice.

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In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.” 

What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”

Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing more than 50,000 Americans a year, among them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The cancer has a five-year survival rate in the low teens. 

Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the world-class Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died in like three months. It’s not supposed to happen here, right? You’re supposed to have figured this out.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths continued to mount and medical progress on many cancers remained all too limited. 

But a change is well underway. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34 percent from its 1991 peak through 2023, and the five-year relative survival for all cancers combined reached 70 percent for people diagnosed between 2015 tto 2021, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. And while daraxonrasib got the standing ovation, it was only the loudest moment in a week — and a decade — of steady, compounding victories over cancer.

The immune system, turned up

One major driver of the shift is immunotherapy. Rather than attacking a tumor directly as conventional chemotherapy does, these treatments use a patient’s own immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells. You can see immunotherapy’s powerful effects through the story of former President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 at age 90 with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. That should have been a sign for newspaper editors to update their planned obituaries immediately; yet after being treated with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, as well as surgery and radiation, Carter watched his tumors vanish and managed to live another decade. 

And scientists keep pushing the frontier further. Moderna and Merck reported that the combination of a personalized mRNA vaccine — the technology behind the Covid shots, retrained on each patient’s own tumor — and an immuontherapy drug (pembrolizumab) reduced the risk of recurrence or death for high-risk melanoma by 49 percent after five years. In a small, early Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine appeared to help some pancreatic cancer patients stay cancer-free longer after surgery. Seven of the eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive four to six years later, with a larger trial now underway.

A Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine in 2024 kept pancreatic cancer at bay in patients whose immune systems responded to it. And for blood cancers, a single infusion of reengineered immune cells — called CAR T-cell therapy — has begun producing something that looks close to a cure: Emily Whitehead, the first child with cancer ever treated with CAR T, is now more than a decade cancer-free and attending college. (I wrote in more detail about immunotherapy and CAR T last year.) 

From treatment to prevention

And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Last week, a team led by the Francis Crick Institute’s Charles Swanton reported that a blood test measuring 14 proteins, combined with basic risk factors like age, smoking, and lung disease, could help identify people likely to develop lung cancer years before diagnosis. They also found an intriguing clue from an older drug trial: An anti-inflammatory drug seemed to cut lung cancer risk nearly in half among people with the highest inflammation levels. 

This is still early evidence — not yet a blood test and prevention treatment doctors can offer patients — but Swanton compared it to how statins work for heart disease. Just as cholesterol tests can predict a person’s risk of heart disease, and then statins can be given to lower cholesterol, the protein test identifies lung cancer risk and the anti-inflammatory drug reduces it. 

And no story on modern medical miracles would be complete without an appearance from GLP-1 drugs, which truly do seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic was associated with about 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence.

Both findings are early, so we shouldn’t expect major changes overnight. It took decades between the development of a test for LDL cholesterol levels, the introduction of statins, and the undeniable proof of heart disease prevention. But oncology is clearly moving toward catching cancer before it takes hold, just as we have with heart attacks. 

Beyond the numbers

Medical advances come with a literal cost. The new medicines are brutally expensive, with the average monthly price of a new cancer drug more than doubling between 2009 and 2019, while about half of surveyed American cancer patients and survivors have to take on debt to pay for treatment. 

Many of those high prices will eventually fall, once patents run out and generic versions emerge. But a greater worry is that the scientific engine driving these advances is being throttled. Almost every advance I’ve mentioned can be traced back to federally funded basic research, which the Trump administration has been attacking relentlessly.

In 2025, the administration froze or canceled thousands of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, while new NIH awards fell by billions of dollars. Congress later rejected the deepest proposed NIH cuts, but the damage was already real: Hundreds of NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted, and early-career scientists became much less likely to win major grants. In saving dollars with those cuts, we risk losing discoveries that would save lives, at the very moment when cancer research is paying off.

The cost of those lives was made visceral at the ASCO meeting. In the opening address, ASCO’s outgoing president Eric Small spoke about his partner, Amy Lin, a University of San Francisco San Francisco oncologist. Lin had died in December of metastatic clear cell ovarian cancer, a deadly disease that still has few treatment options. He brought on the grief expert and author David Kessler to give a talk on compassionate end-of-life care.   

Perhaps more than any other medical specialty, grief and loss have always been an inseparable, if rarely discussed, part of oncology. Brian Wolpin started his career watching pancreatic patients die within months and feeling certain it wasn’t supposed to happen at a place like Dana-Farber. The ovation he got was the sound of a room realizing he might be right — that the disease that once seemed untreatable is starting to lose its terrible power.

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There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech. 

You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of Vermont. You can even, like my graduation speaker in 2001, admonish the graduating class for depending too much on their parents and generally being an ungrateful lot, before later being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and undergoing a dramatic fall from grace. (Yes, that was none other than Bill Cosby, whose convictions were later overturned.) 

But the surest way to turn your graduate audience hostile in 2026 is to refer positively to AI, as speakers ranging from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida to record label honcho Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University discovered. And that’s because AI has — not unreasonably — become the symbol of growing fears that a college degree is no longer as valuable as it once was, and that today’s college grads are uniquely screwed. (The only speaker I could find whose comments on AI were well received was The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng at Harvard, probably because they included the line: “fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI.”)

In a late-2025 NBC News poll, 63 percent of voters said a college degree isn’t worth it, against just 33 percent who said it was. A Gallup poll found that the share of Americans who say college is “very important” had fallen to 35 percent in 2025, a huge drop from 75 percent in 2010. And that pessimism has real grounding. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7 percent in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3 percent. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35 percent over the past 18 months. 

So there’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time even in recent memory to graduate into the workforce. The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment.

The vibes out there for college grads are not good. But when the bad vibes are outpacing the actual reality, that qualifies as qualified good news. 

One of the best investments you can make

Let’s start with the number the college panic ignores. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the question “Is college still worth it?” and came back with a very specific answer: Yes — to the tune of 12.5 percent. 

That was the median return on investment in a college degree, after accounting for the cost of tuition and the amount lost by not spending those years working. College graduates in recent years have earned a median of around $80,000 a year, compared to around $47,000 a year for high school graduates. Government data in 2024 put median weekly earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree at $1,543, compared with $930 for workers with only a high school diploma — about 66 percent more. And while it’s true that the growth of this premium has largely flattened over the past two decades, after roughly doubling between 1980 and 2000, it hasn’t disappeared. Graduating from college, even in 2026, still puts you on a better path than skipping it.

It’s telling that when you shift from the abstract idea of college to the value of individual degrees, the vibes change. Asked about their own degree, according to a 2026 Gallup poll, about 80 percent of bachelor’s graduates call it critical or important to their careers, while 71 percent say they landed a good job within six months. It’s a bit like the perennial attitude toward Congress: People hate the institution and yet tend to rate their own representatives highly. Abstract views are influenced by the deluge of content about the crisis of college, while individual views are influenced by what is actually happening to people. 

It’s the timing, not the degree

Speaking as a proud member of the college class of 2001, I can tell you that 2026 is far from the first year when it was tough to graduate into the workforce. My friends one year above me in college entered an economy that had an astoundingly low unemployment rate of 1.4 to 1.7 percent for college grads ages 25 to 34, while real hourly wages for young college graduates had grown at 3 percent a year between 1995 and 2000. My classmates assumed we were headed for the same golden outcome.

“Psych!”, as we used to say back then. By the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash was in full effect, wiping out startups and jobs. More than a few people I knew had lined up lucrative starting jobs at investment banks and consulting businesses, only to have those gigs rescinded as they were preparing to receive their diplomas. (I cleverly avoided this by never getting those offers in the first place and instead entering the thriving field of journalism.) By December 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, the unemployment rate for college grads ages 25 to 34 had jumped to 4 percent.

The class of 2010 had it even worse — recent college grads had a 7 percent unemployment rate. But though both the classes of 2001 and 2010 experienced what economists call “recession scarring” that had lasting effects on their income, those scars largely, though not completely, faded as time passed and the economy improved. The lesson? You can’t control when you graduate college, but you can largely control whether you graduate college at all — and finishing school is likely to still benefit you over the long term.

It’s true that the class of 2026 is facing an extra layer of uncertainty: the fear that AI is eating away at the bottom rung of the career ladder before graduates can reach it. Goldman Sachs finds unemployment among 20- to 30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles is up nearly 3 percentage points since early 2025, while research from Stanford has counted a roughly 20 percent drop in employment for young software developers in highly automatable jobs. 

But every time you think the case has been made that AI is causing a jobpocalypse, new data complicates the picture. Vanguard reports that employment in highly AI-exposed occupations rose 1.7 percent between 2023 and 2025, while a Federal Reserve study this year of more than a million firms found no clear connection between adopting AI and posting fewer jobs so far. At the moment, hiring problems have more to do with a cautious, high-interest-rate economy. And employer hiring plans for the class of 2026 are actually being revised upward — not the move you make while deleting the entry level.  

“To you, the class of 2026, I say…”

None of this data means that college bet is a sure thing for everyone. Tracking by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada finds that 52 percent of graduates are underemployed a year out, and 45 percent are underemployed a decade later. A college grad who takes a first job that doesn’t require a degree is 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed 10 years on. For that group, the earnings premium over a high school grad shrinks to about 25 percent — roughly the same as a college dropout.

Outcomes are also influenced by what a graduate chooses to study: Underemployment runs under 10 percent for nursing graduates and above 65 percent for criminal justice majors. (I realize telling someone who just claimed their diploma that maybe they should have picked a different major is not exactly actionable advice.) And the financing has gotten tougher — for Gen Z, it cost 32 percent of the typical American family’s annual income to pay for one year at a state university in 2021, compared to mid-20s for Gen X in the 1990s and 15 percent for Boomers in 1975. 

But generational comparisons obscure as well. When people say college doesn’t pay like it used to, they may not realize they’re comparing against a past when a far smaller and more homogenous slice of Americans got their degree: Among 25- to 29-year-olds, the share holding a bachelor’s has roughly doubled between 1980 and 2021, from about a fifth to nearly two in five. That much larger and more varied pool of graduates skews the individual outcomes, even if the average largely holds up. 

So what would I tell the class of 2026 if someone were misguided enough to put me on the dais? Mustering my best commencement-grade metaphors, I’d tell them that, yes, they are graduating into a sea of troubles, but that they are far from the first academic sailors to make such a voyage, and that the diploma they hold is still the most oceanworthy raft they can find. (Can you tell I was an English major?) And if I were so bold as to mention AI, I’d lean more Ronny Chieng than Eric Schmidt.

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You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

I can understand if your eyes began glazing over as soon as you read “seventh assessment report,” but this shift represents real progress and hope. It means that the apocalyptic climate change future that we’ve been describing for 15 years is officially no longer on the table. Instead, a merely bad climate future — about 2.8°C by 2100 — is now the central scientific estimate. Given how hopeless our climate future has appeared at times, that really does qualify as good news.  

Counting to 8.5

Climate models can’t tell you the future on their own, because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do. So scientists build scenarios: structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth, and climate policy.

Four such scenarios were introduced in 2011 as the standard set for the IPCC, the international body of scientists that periodically takes stock of global climate research and translates it into reports for governments worldwide. Three of the four were called “mitigation” pathways — futures where the world worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One, the infamous and now obsolete RCP 8.5, was the “no-policy” baseline, a future with continued fossil fuel expansion, coal use roughly five times higher by 2100, and a global population pushing 12 billion. Think of it like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a vision of just how bad things could get if we did nothing to change our ways. 

And just like any dystopia, RCP 8.5 guaranteed attention. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 2,000 climate impact studies used RCP 8.5 as their default future. Almost every dramatic projection of crop failure, mass displacement, killing heat, and coastline retreat that any general reader ever encountered in climate change coverage depended on it.

All of those projections were plausible enough under the numbers set by RCP 8.5, but by the mid-2010s, researchers, journalists, and even official government reports were routinely calling the scenario “business as usual,” a phrase that transformed a stress test into something that sounded like a forecast. It wasn’t, and it was never meant to be. Somewhere along the way, though, that distinction got lost.

How the worst case got walked back

The world that RCP 8.5 assumed will never arrive. Global coal use isn’t on a path to quintuple; consumption has largely plateaued after decades of growth. Instead of the global population ballooning to 12 billion people, the UN’s current median forecast projects about 10.2 billion by 2100, with other reputable forecasts putting the number even lower. (All things being equal, fewer people means less emissions.)  

At the same time, the clean energy transition moved faster than almost anyone in 2011 anticipated. The cost of solar power has fallen by about 85 percent since the RCPs were published, and annual global investment in the energy transition is now over $2 trillion. Actual global emissions have tracked far more closely to what you’d expect from a world trying to reduce them than from one doing nothing at all. By 2026, Climate Action Tracker estimated that current policies put the world on course for about 2.6 degrees of warming by 2100 — still serious, but a long way from 4 or 5.

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100. 

RCP 8.5 was as much a climate journalism story as it was a climate science one. In 2017, the writer David Wallace-Wells published “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. It was probably the most widely read piece of climate journalism of the last decade, and it was built almost entirely on RCP 8.5 projections. 

Wallace-Wells revised his view in 2022, though there has been relatively little coverage of this year’s retirement of RCP 8.5. And researchers need to catch up: Pielke Jr. estimated that as late as early 2026, 30 new RCP 8.5 studies were coming out each day on average, generating more grist for the climate ultra-doom narrative. We’ll see whether last month’s announcement finally puts it to rest.

The future is in our hands 

But even if we’ve averted doom, there is a lot of work to do to secure a safer future.

The new “medium” climate pathway — the one that reflects current policies — estimates 2.8°C of warming on average by 2100, with the likely range running from 2.1°C to 3.7°C. That would still mean drastic declines in coral reefs and accelerated species extinction, worsening water scarcity, and further sea level rise. And while we’ve taken the worst of the worst-case scenarios off the table, we’ve run out of time to keep warming below 1.5°C, and 2°C — the upper limit that the 2015 Paris Accords sought to prevent. 

And as with anything to do with climate change, this scientific shift was quickly politicized. The day before Hausfather and his co-authors published their analysis of RCP 8.5’s retirement, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “GOOD RIDDANCE!”, and described the change as proof that climate science was “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!.” Not surprisingly, Trump is the one who is wrong here, as Carbon Brief explained in detail, but his mistake shows how easy it is to take the wrong lesson from the end of RCP 8.5. We shouldn’t fall for it.

The entire point of climate scenarios like RCP 8.5 was that there was no one certain future for climate change — only multiple possible futures. Whether or not RCP 8.5 was ever possible, the enormous advances in clean energy over the past 15 years are what made its retirement certain. Now we have new futures before us, waiting for what we do next.  

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