Energy & Decarbonization
The cause and the cure behind Earth Now: global CO₂ emissions, per-capita emissions, the shift to low-carbon electricity, and the collapsing price of solar.
Earth Now shows the symptoms — CO₂ in the atmosphere, the temperature rising. This dashboard shows the cause and the cure, and the two are in a race.
The cause is still winning on the headline number: global CO₂ emissions hit an all-time high of about 38.6 billion tonnes in 2024, with no peak yet in sight. But underneath, the picture is more hopeful than it was a decade ago. Per-person emissions plateaued around 2012. The price of solar power has fallen more than 99% since the 1970s — one of the fastest sustained cost declines of any technology ever measured — and low-carbon sources now supply over 40% of the world's electricity. The open question is whether the cure can outrun the cause fast enough.
Data: Our World in Data (CC BY).
CO₂ per person
yearly4.7 tonnes per person in 2024 — and unlike the total, this has stopped climbing. Per-capita emissions peaked around 4.85 tonnes in 2012 and have drifted slightly lower since, as efficiency and cleaner energy offset rising living standards. The gap between this flat line and the still-rising total is the arithmetic of development: more people, living better, but each emitting a little less than the 2012 peak.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Low-carbon electricity share
yearlyOver 42% of the world's electricity came from low-carbon sources (renewables plus nuclear) in 2025 — but the climb is slower than it looks. The share was already ~36% in 1985, carried by hydro and a then-growing nuclear fleet, and it actually *dipped* through the 2000s as coal raced ahead in Asia. The recent rise is almost entirely wind and solar. And note this is *electricity* — the easiest sector to decarbonize; transport, heat, and heavy industry lag well behind.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Solar PV price
yearly$0.26 per watt in 2024, down from around $128 in 1975 — a decline of more than 99%, and one of the steepest, longest-sustained cost curves of any technology ever measured. Every doubling of cumulative installed solar has cut the price by roughly a fifth, a 'learning rate' that has held for decades. This single curve is why decarbonization looks more plausible now than it did in 2010: in most of the world the cheapest electricity is now sunlight — and the price is still falling.
@admin · 27 May 2026
Discussion of this dashboard
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38.6 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024 — an all-time high, and still rising. The total was a small fraction of that for all of history before the mid-20th century; it was around 22.7 Gt in 1990 and has grown by roughly 70% since. There is no peak in the global total yet: efficiency and clean energy in rich countries keep being outpaced by growth in the developing world. This is the number that has to bend *down*, not just grow more slowly, for the lines in Earth Now to stop climbing.
@admin · 27 May 2026