Good News From India & Australia On Emissions

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While the US government is trying to convince everybody we would all be in better health if we spent more time breathing in the exhaust from a 1958 Buick Roadmaster, the rest of the world is quietly getting on with the task of reducing carbon emissions. Maybe it is not happening as quickly as we hoped it would when the world joined hands in Paris and agreed to do something about global heating, but it is happening nonetheless.

India Lowers Its Emissions

Carbon Brief today has published a new report that carbon emissions in India declined ever so slightly in the first 6 months of this year, reversing an upward trend that had been quite consistent for the past decade or more. India is now the world’s most populous nation and, like its neighbor — China — has leaned heavily on thermal generation powered by coal to propel its economy forward. In fact, according to Carbon Brief, India has been responsible for 40% of the world’s increase in carbon emissions since 2019.

“India’s carbon dioxide emissions from its power sector fell by 1 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2025 and by 0.2 percent over the past 12 months — only the second drop in almost half a century,” the report says. “As a result, India’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement grew at their slowest rate in the first half of the year since 2001 — excluding Covid.”

Other key findings from the Carbon Brief report on India that focuses on the first six months of 2025 include:

• The growth in clean energy capacity reached a record 25.1 gigawatts, up 69% year-on-year from what had, itself, been a record figure.
• This new clean energy capacity is expected to generate nearly 50 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, nearly sufficient to meet the average increase in demand overall.
• Slower economic expansion meant there was zero growth in demand for oil products, a marked fall from annual rates of 6% in 2023 and 4% in 2024.
• Government infrastructure spending helped accelerate CO2 emissions growth from steel and cement production by 7 and 10%, respectively.

While an increase in renewables is something to celebrate, the reduction in emissions in the utility sector has a lot to do with cooler, rainier weather in India this summer compared to last year, which lowered the demand for cooling.

Nevertheless, solar continues to dominate new installations with 14.3 GW of capacity added in the first half of the year coming from large-scale solar projects and 3.2GW from solar rooftops. Another 16 GW of solar and wind are expected to come online in the second half of 2025. Carbon Brief says strong continued growth in clean energy is expected as India moves forward with its target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030.

Australia Announces New Emissions Goals

Ten years after the Paris climate accords, the nations of the world are preparing to share their latest emissions data and climate action plans for the future at the UN next week. This week, the Australian government announced a national plan to cut its emissions by 62 to 70% by 2035, a plan that infuriated environmental groups, who are clamoring for bolder action. Business and commercial interests were also infuriated because they think the plan is much too stringent. In politics, if no one is happy, that suggests leaders have gotten things just about right.

According to Australian News, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government had listened to the Climate Change Authority’s advice in settling its target. The CCA said reaching even 62% reductions would require quadrupling wind capacity, tripling of large-scale solar, and doubling rooftop solar in Australia.

“It’s the right target to protect our environment, to protect and advance our economy and jobs, and to ensure that we act in our national interest and in the interest of this and future generations,” he said. “It’s based upon the science, and it is independent advice to the government.”

Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government had modeled the economic impacts of a 65% target by 2035 and found it would lead to a larger economy and higher wages than if the country failed to act. That modeling suggested real wages would be 2.5% higher in 2050 and real GDP per person $2,100 higher than if there was no target to reduce emissions. “Under a disorderly transition, there would be lower wages and higher electricity prices,” Chalmers said.

Albanese on Thursday committed an additional $2 billion to boost the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and a new $5 billion “Net Zero Fund” under the government’s National Reconstruction Fund to assist industrial facilities to decarbonize and scale up renewables.

Environmental groups said they were disappointed because they expected the reduction target to be at least 70%. The Australian Conservation Foundation called the target “timid” and the Smart Energy Council agreed that 70% should be considered the minimum goal.

Business groups, on the other hand, warned against a target of more than 70%, saying it would threaten hundreds of billions of dollars in export value. Innes Willox, the CEO of the Australian Industry Group said reaching a 62 to 70% target would be challenging.

“While it is not straight forward to achieve, it is also in the realm of the feasible — with hard work and a tight focus on making Australia a place where it is easy to invest and to build,” he said. “We should not spend the next ten years arguing about this target range. We should get on with sensible measures that make it ever more achievable.”

Ten Years Since Paris

With the 10-year anniversary of the Paris climate accords rapidly approaching, New York Times contributor David Wallace-Wells tried to provide some perspective about that agreement and its aftermath. On September 16, he wrote:

“Progressives long believed that climate politics was a kind of tug of war, in which tugging harder would pull many on the other side over the line into grudging support. To some degree, that is what happened after Paris, with advocates shifting the Overton window pretty dramatically and winning meaningful gains along the way.

“But it also looks a bit as if they pulled so hard they collapsed in disarray. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act was hailed as an unprecedented investment in the country’s green-energy future. Today, just three years after passage, Biden’s signature legislative achievement has been stripped bare, and while the bill didn’t produce a large scale backlash, as long feared, it also failed to inspire a broad political coalition to defend it.

“And yet, there is good news — global leaders may be talking less about the risks of warming and the necessity of limiting it, these days, but on the ground, decarbonization is nevertheless racing ahead. “It’s not about climate politics anymore,” says Christiana Figueres, former head of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and one of the architects of Paris. “It’s about climate economy.””

What does that mean? Simply this. We can talk until we are blue in the face about polar ice caps, sea level rise, and extreme heat, but unless the tools to address those conditions are cheaper than the business as usual approach, human civilization will continue sailing toward the abyss. Only the cold, clinical operation of Adam Smith’s “unseen hand” can save us. Fortunately, that is exactly what is happening.

Although the guardians of the Holy Grail of fossil fuels are doing everything in their power to distort the process, in the end clean energy will win not because it is better but because it is cheaper. Will that be enough to same humans from an unimaginable calamity? “We’ll see,” said the Zen master.