Bluesky

The biggest news during last week’s Climate Week NYC came not from the US but from Germany, where the government of the world’s third-largest economy committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. It was the first time Germany has explicitly made such a promise, Fiona Harvey noted in The Guardian. Germany’s previous pledges, Harvey added, “were only for ‘carbon neutrality.’” Carbon neutrality allows continued fossil fuel use if the emissions are offset—for example, by additional clean energy or tree planting. But only a complete phaseout of fossil fuels can halt global temperature rise.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California—the world’s fourth-largest economy—hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.”

An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press recently noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP.

Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 UN climate summit after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on Earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in UN Secretary General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account.

France and the Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian.

As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions, and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented…across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one size fits all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol.

A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the US midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change? 

“We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”