Like every year, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Ecmwf), an independent European intergovernmental organisation, presented data relating to the Copernicus space programme, the European Union’s flagship program for Earth observation, the monitoring of the atmosphere and climate change. The situation, in the almost generalized indifference, is increasingly dramatic. 2024 has been confirmed as the warmest year on record since 1850, with a global average temperature of 15.1°C, beating the previous warmest year 2023 by 0.12°C. This places it at 1.6°C above an estimate of the pre-industrial level, making it the first calendar year to exceed the 1.5°C threshold.

Since July 2023, with the exception of July 2024, every month has exceeded the 1.5°C threshold, and the years 2015-2024 have been the ten warmest years on record. 2024 was the year with the highest atmospheric water vapor content ever recorded fact that is making intense precipitation events more frequent and violent. Finally, greenhouse gases reached the highest annual levels ever recorded in the atmosphere. The data on global warming become more robust and refined year by year. The anthropogenic cause of warming is also an observational fact resulting from the stringent correlation between the increase in concentration of fossil-derived greenhouse gases (as can be inferred from isotope analysis) and the increase in temperature and the fact that, in contrast, there is no correlation between the latter and solar activity. The goal of those who question whether the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is the cause of warming is not to present an alternative scientific explanation but rather to confuse the public by making scientific certainties appear to be issues that are still under discussion and thus inducing a delay in the implementation of measures to protect public health and the environment. Typically, these are campaigns designed to protect the economic interests of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, namely oil companies.

The largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases is China, but the U.S. annual per capita emission is about twice that of China. Moreover, the historical total emission of the U.S. is more than twice that of China at 1/5 the population. Thus, the problem is not the size of a country’s population but its degree of industrialization. This is why the crucial policy problem is the fact that the more GDP per capita grows, the more greenhouse gas emissions per capita increase: this too is an inescapable correlation observed in the data. This means that unless other factors in the economic and production structure intervene, i.e., without an exit from fossil fuel with a shift to other energy sources, the economic growth of emerging countries such as China, India and Indonesia will lead to further increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the only positive signs is the fact that China has become by far the largest investor on the planet in clean energy, with nearly $700 billion invested in 2024, 3.7 times what it invested in fossil fuels. In doing so, it is leading the race toward solar and its solar panel production capacity reached about 1,000 giga-watts in 2023, nearly five times that of the rest of the world combined and three times that produced in 2021. In addition, China is now able to produce more than twice as many solar modules as the rest of the world installs each year. The cost of clean technologies has fallen by up to 80 percent, while investment has increased almost tenfold and solar energy production has increased twelvefold. For example, since 2010 the cost of batteries for electric cars has dropped by 90%. This gigantic effort toward solar has happened thanks to an economic system in which industrial policy is driven by the state: the green transition is not declined as a set of regulations, bans and obligations but as a real and gigantic technological and scientific effort that can only happen thanks to industrial policy planning.