jilihot Confronting Our New Reality

This article is part of a special section on the Climate Forward conference hosted by The New York Times.

For a hot minute, it looked like the Doomers might be proved wrong.

In recent years, the rapid deployment of renewable energy and a shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuels has given even grizzled climate activists cause for some measure of hope.

The most extreme projections about temperature rise on planet Earth were replaced by less apocalyptic forecasts, and while the world wasn’t shifting away from fossil fuels nearly fast enough, there appeared to be a realistic pathway to significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the decades ahead.

Yet now, at the very moment the world seems to be making real progress in the fight against global warming, the scale of the problem seems to be getting even bigger.

Electricity demand is spiking, thanks to artificial intelligence and a new generation of energy-hungry data centers. Overall energy consumption keeps climbing as a new middle class rises in the developing world. And a large-scale phaseout of planet-warming emissions is being hampered by short-term politics, global conflict and ossified financial markets.

These are just some of the themes being discussed Wednesday at the Climate Forward conference hosted by The New York Times. Interviewees will include the primatologist Jane Goodall, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan and more.

By 2050, global demand for electricity is expected to rise by as much as 75 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Much of that demand will come from rapidly developing nations in Africa and Southeast Asia. But even in the United States, energy consumption is soaring after remaining relatively flat for 15 years.

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