While the world may be nearing peak emissions, climate challenges are intensifying. This issue tracks where the fight is being won and where work still needs to be done.

THE PRAGMATIC CLIMATE RESET: In a July 28 essay, Michael Liebreich, the founder of BNEF, challenged what he called “the pragmatism of defeat” among climate “realists.” In brief, these self-proclaimed realists argue that net zero is impossible in any foreseeable future because heavy demand for fossil fuels will persist indefinitely. Liebreich concedes that it may take longer to see dramatic cuts in emissions than many climate advocates had hoped. He acknowledges that “the consensus behind climate action…has fractured completely in the U.S.” and is shaky in Europe. Even so, he says, the math shows that the transition is unstoppable on the electrical grid.

Assuming a net two percent annual growth in global energy demand (including efficiency gains) and a conservative five percent growth rate for renewables, Liebreich calculates that clean energy will exceed all new demand by 2035 or so—what we might term the “clean energy crossover.” By 2045, according to his projections, fossil fuel consumption will drop by 8 percent from 2025 levels; by 2055, it will plunge by 40 percent. By 2065, he says, gas, oil, and coal will have been “squeezed entirely out of the system.”

With countries in Africa and other emerging economies buying Chinese solar panels by the gigawatt and leapfrogging into a post-combustion era, Leibreich sees a bright future for the planet: “We are at or near peak emissions. We have seen coal use plummeting across the developed world and starting to drop in China. We have seen the cost of wind and solar decimated, so they now make up 93 percent of new capacity added to the grid worldwide. We have seen EVs accelerate from a standing start to make up one car in every five sold worldwide, and one in two in China.”

At Speed & Scale, we strive to balance our urgency on climate with patience for the long haul—call it pragmatic optimism. The fight for a habitable Earth won’t be won tomorrow or the next day. But if we stay the course and continue innovating, investing, deploying, and building, it will be won.

OKRs in the News

🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation

• EVs Everywhere: Electric vehicles accounted for almost 90 percent of new cars sold in Norway in 2024 and 93 percent in 2025 so far. Due in part to a durable mix of “polluter pays” policies, such as purchase-tax exemptions for BEVs and a build-out of more than 10,000 fast chargers, EVs are the default choice in Norway (CNBC).

• Cleaning Up the Grid: Driven by Formula 1’s investments in renewable power at team sites, remote broadcast operations, and sustainable transportation, the elite auto racing competition has cut its carbon footprint by 26 percent since 2018. With next year’s new hybrid engines set to be powered entirely by advanced sustainable fuel, “the pinnacle of motorsport” is advancing toward its “net zero by 2030” commitment (Bloomberg).

OKR Highlight

Actor Samuel L. Jackson joined a campaign to promote offshore wind farms by Swedish energy company Vattenfall AB. Standing on the beach and pointing to turbines in the distance, Jackson exclaims, “These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels—rising up out of the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”

In an interview with Vattenfall, Jackson said that he hopes his involvement in the campaign will help people “start seeing wind farms in a new light” and understand how offshore wind farms can benefit society. Beyond providing fossil-free electricity, wind farms can act as artificial reefs to support the marine environment.

🐄 3.0 – Fix Food

• Meat Back on the Menu: Starting in October, Michelin three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park will no longer have a wholly plant-based menu. It will retain the full vegan tasting menu that it’s offered since 2021, but will reintroduce fish and meat as optional substitutions. Chef Daniel Humm said the decision was motivated by “inclusivity” and financial considerations (New York Times).

• Ammonia, Revamped: Nikolay Kornienko, a chemistry professor at the University of Bonn, has created a clean way to produce ammonia, an energy-intensive and high-emissions ingredient of modern fertilizers. Kornienko’s alternative approach pulls hydrogen straight from water through a palladium membrane. While getting the method to market will demand ~1,000x higher yields, it’s a promising step toward a low-carbon nitrogen fertilizer (Universitat Bonn).

💡Local progress spotlight!

Every May and June, U.S. college campuses generate a staggering 230 tons of waste from students during moveout, most of it reusable or recyclable. At NYU, students are flipping that script with a new initiative to turn these castoff items into a free “Swap Shop” for students looking to furnish their apartments. The initiative aims both to save students money and to keep reusable items out of the waste cycle.

🎥 Watch this reel from @nyuniversity to see how students are encouraging circularity on their city campus!

🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature

• Forests on Fire: As temperatures keep rising around the globe, the odds of “extreme fire weather” have doubled. Hot, dry weather dramatically escalates the destruction of forest fires. The result: more than 78 million acres of burnt forest in 2023 and 2024. In those two years, boreal forests lost more than twice the canopy area than they did in the prior two decades (New York Times).

🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry

• Back to Black: Under pressure from the Department of Energy, an Ohio steel plant that once employed Vice President J.D. Vance’s grandfather is abandoning a $500 million hydrogen and natural gas-powered “green steel” retrofit to return to coal. Besides increasing emissions, Cleveland-Cliffs’ about-face threatens hundreds of new jobs (E&E News).

• Cleaner Is Cheaper: Hertha Metals, a green steel startup backed by Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla, says it can beat conventional steel on price. Hertha uses a single-step process, which drastically lowers costs, to melt ore in a 2,900°F furnace. Although production is now limited to one ton of steel per day, construction is set to begin next year on a plant with an annual capacity of more than 9,000 tons (Bloomberg).

🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon

• Carbon Gets a Credit Boost: JPMorgan led a $210 million project-finance-style loan for Chestnut Carbon, the first of its kind in the U.S. carbon credit market, to scale forestry-based carbon removal and supply credits to Microsoft. The deal lowers capital costs, brings in institutional investors, and creates a model for scaling forestry-based carbon removal (Bloomberg).

• Fire Feedback Loop: Wildfires have overtaken logging and agriculture as the top threat to our forest carbon sinks. Since the early 2000s, fires have slashed forests’ carbon removal capacity by 75 percent. As whole regions devolve from carbon sinks into sources of added emissions, scientists warn of a worsening climate-fire feedback loop (New York Times).

🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy

• China’s Fusion Power Play: China launched a $2 billion national fusion energy initiative to centralize state, academic, and industrial power to lead the global race for commercialization. Experts warn that without bold federal action, the U.S. risks ceding the future of energy to Beijing (The Hill).

• Deregul-AI-tion Nation: President Trump’s newly released “AI Action Plan” aims to accelerate U.S. leadership in AI by cutting regulatory barriers and fast-tracking AI infrastructure. It also raises environmental concerns by weakening permitting rules for data centers, including proposed exclusions from the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (The White House).

🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action

• Power to the Possible: The Economist argues that while the technical path to net zero is clearer than ever, political resistance is making progress harder. Rather than clinging to rigid targets, governments should focus on pragmatic policies that ease the transition and keep climate action politically sustainable (The Economist).

• Winds of Change: On Scotland’s Isle of Lewis, a decades-long push for wind power is finally paying off. The breakthrough has been forged by community equity, local leadership, and new grid investments that could unlock $269 million (£200 million) in benefits over 30 years. Lewis is an emerging model for overcoming “Not In My Backyard” resistance and scaling rural renewables at speed (Bloomberg).

⚡ 9.0 – Innovate!

• Ironing Out the Grid: Netherlands-based Ore Energy has unveiled the world’s first grid-connected iron-air battery in Delft, a major milestone for long-duration energy storage and EU-made clean tech. Designed to use abundant, low-cost materials to store energy for up to 100 hours, the system offers a scalable, fossil-free alternative to lithium-ion (Tech.eu).

💰 10.0 – Invest!

• Nuclear Returns: While nuclear construction costs have surged tenfold in the U.S., they’ve been halved in China thanks to standardized reactor designs, stable regulations, and a strategic push to localize supply chains. China’s model offers a playbook for making nuclear investment viable: Leverage domestic manufacturing, predictable policy, and rapid build times to contain risk and unlock long-term value (Nature).

• Money On The Sidelines: Only 8 percent of applicants received grants from the EPA’s $4.6 billion Climate Pollution Reduction program. Those passed over represent over 860 shovel-ready clean energy projects seeking a total of $28 billion in funding. Newly compiled by RMI, this inventory offers vetted, community-backed initiatives that are ripe for financing and capable of driving scalable emissions reductions nationwide (RMI).

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