Adaptation solves now---we’ve already hit peak emissions.

Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change.

Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline.

Climate Analytics, a think tank, published a report last November that raised the intriguing possibility that the worst of our impact on the climate might be behind us.

“We find there is a 70% chance that emissions start falling in 2024 if current clean technology growth trends continue and some progress is made to cut non-CO2 emissions,” authors wrote. “This would make 2023 the year of peak emissions.”

“It was actually a result that surprised us as well,” said Neil Grant, a climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics and a co-author of the report. “It’s rare in the climate space that you get good news like this.”

The inertia behind this trend toward lower emissions is so immense that even politics can only slow it down, not stop it. Many of the worst-case climate scenarios imagined in past decades are now much less likely.

The United States, the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter, has already climbed down from its peak in 2005 and is descending further. In March, Carbon Brief conducted an analysis of how US greenhouse gas emissions would fare under a second Trump or a second Biden administration.

They found that Trump’s stated goals of boosting fossil fuel development and scrapping climate policies would increase US emissions by 4 billion metric tons by 2030. But even under Trump, US emissions are likely to slide downward.

This is a clear sign that efforts to limit climate change are having a durable impact.

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However, four months into 2024, it seems unlikely that the world has reached the top of the mountain just yet. Fossil fuel demand is still poised to rise further in part because of more economic growth in developing countries. Technologies like artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are raising overall energy demand as well.

Still, that it’s possible at all to conceive of bending the curve in the near term after more than a century of relentless growth shows that there’s a radical change underway in the relationship between energy, prosperity, and pollution — that standards of living can go up even as emissions from coal, oil, and gas go down.