2025 Breaks with the Traditional Climate Agenda

By late 2025, negotiators at COP30 in Belém confronted a world battered by near-record temperatures, devastating heat waves and unprecedented flooding. The conference, meant to recalibrate the global climate effort, produced a text that shied away from a universal fossil-fuel phaseout after harsh opposition from oil and gas interests. The result underscored a climate agenda fractured by national interests and short-term politics, even as the economics of energy drift toward cleaner sources.

At COP30, negotiators faced the political reality that the final text did not include the term fossil fuels, reflecting stiff pushback from oil and gas producers. The United States, previously expected to shape a global push, largely pursued action on its own terms. Back home, President Trump’s administration halted offshore wind projects approved earlier, cut federal support for electric vehicles and wind and solar, and worked with Congress to roll back clean-energy subsidies; it also pursued a Department of Energy review that questioned climate science and the scope of federal authority to address it. Yet demand for power kept rising in the United States, fueled in large part by data centers supporting a rapidly expanding digital economy, and renewables remained the cheapest and fastest way to deploy new power capacity in much of the country, while the administration kept some incentives for nuclear power and energy storage. This mix of decisions suggested American influence on climate policy would be uneven and, in some respects, diminished on the global stage, even as U.S. emissions were not forecast to fall sharply.

China, meanwhile, has emerged as a clean-tech powerhouse, keen to export its products as developing economies expand their energy infrastructures. Chinese solar-cell exports rose sharply—about 73% in the first half of the year—while prices hit record lows, according to Ember, an energy think tank. The economics of wind, solar and storage have made clean energy a practical choice for utilities and governments seeking affordable resilience. The result: for many countries, renewable energy and climate adaptation are becoming the default path, driven as much by investment signals and grid needs as by climate rhetoric.

Adaptation has moved to the foreground as disasters intensify. Climate experts have long debated how much emphasis to place on adaptation relative to cutting emissions. This year, the balance tilted toward preparedness: building climate-proof infrastructure and planning for heat, flood and drought events. 'Even in the best-case scenario, we need to adapt,' said Dave Sivaprasad, a climate-focused managing director at global consulting firm BCG. 'But the effectiveness of adaptation dramatically reduces once we get into more severe climate scenarios.' The cost of inaction grows as climate impacts accumulate, stretching budgets and testing political will in all regions.

Economists and policymakers acknowledge that decarbonization will continue, but its contours will vary by place as governments weigh economic and political realities. The era of a unified, rapid transition tied to a single blueprint may have passed; instead, a mosaic of national strategies—accelerated in some places by cheap renewables and storage, slower or stalled in others—will define progress through the remainder of the decade. The clock is ticking, and adaptation and mitigation are increasingly inseparable components of a practical climate policy.