This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.

Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Global health authorities say air pollution has reduced the average life expectancy by 2.3 years, and contributes to almost 7 million deaths annually.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors—delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers—the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before.”

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this last week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”

IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.

Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.

Schroeder noted, however, that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources—like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions—then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances—between neighborhoods or even street by street—and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.

Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.

Motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution.

The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.

Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution—and could also be the key to solving it.

When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, India was asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.

Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Global health authorities say air pollution has reduced the average life expectancy by 2.3 years, and contributes to almost 7 million deaths annually.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors—delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers—the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before.”

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this last week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”

IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.

Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.

Schroeder noted, however, that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources—like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions—then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances—between neighborhoods or even street by street—and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.

Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.

Motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution.

The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.

Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution—and could also be the key to solving it.

When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, India was asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every day, the sun’s rays send 173,000 terawatts of energy to Earth, 10,000 times the amount used by all of humanity. Which is to say, the potential for solar energy is immense, and we’re nowhere near the limit.

That’s why solar energy is such an appealing prospect, particularly as an alternative to the fossil fuels that cause climate change. And over the past decade, solar energy technology has vastly improved in performance and plummeted in cost.

As a result, photovoltaic panels have cropped up like dandelions across fields and rooftops at a stunning pace. Yet even the people most plugged-in to the energy industry and most optimistic about solar power continue to underestimate it. In fact, it’s a long-running joke among energy nerds that forecasters keep predicting solar will level off as it continues to rocket up to the sun.

“In fact, it’s a long-running joke among energy nerds that forecasters keep predicting solar will level off as it continues to rocket up to the sun.”

“Solar does continue to surprise us,” said Gregory Nemet, who wrote How Solar Energy Became Cheap, in an email. “It seems like it shouldn’t at this point. It’s been roughly 30 percent growth each year for 30 years. And costs continue to fall so new users—and new uses—continue to emerge.”

In the past year, solar power has experienced Brobdingnagian growth, even by solar standards. According to a new report from Ember, an energy think tank, the world is on track to install 29 percent more solar energy capacity this year—a total of 593 gigawatts—compared to last year, which was already a record year. This is more than one-quarter of the electricity produced by every operating coal plant in the world combined. In 2020, the whole world had installed just 760 GW of solar in total. Yes, this deserves all the italics I’m using.

That solar power installations are going up as the technology improves and prices come down isn’t too surprising, but the sustained surge is still stunning.

“When you look at the absolute numbers that we’re on track for this year and that we installed last year, it is completely sort of mind-blowing,” said Euan Graham, lead author of the report and an electricity data analyst at Ember.

Several factors have aligned to push solar power installations so high in recent years, like better hardware, economies of scale, and new, ripe, energy-hungry markets. Right now, solar still just provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, so there’s enormous room to expand. But solar energy still poses some technical challenges to the power grid, and the world’s ravenous appetite for electrons means that countries are looking for energy wherever they can get it.

So if you’re concerned about climate change, it’s not enough that solar wins; greenhouse gasses must lose.

Why’s everything so sunny for solar?

Solar energy has a lot going for it, particularly photovoltaic panels. They’re modular and they scale up and down easily—there isn’t much difference between a panel that’s one of a dozen on a suburban rooftop and a panel that’s one of thousands in a megawatt-scale power plant spanning acres. They’re mass-produced in factories using well-established processes, namely semiconductor fabrication. That means tiny improvements in cost and performance in individual panels add up to massive advantages in aggregate.

And for solar, gains have been anything but tiny: Solar electricity prices have dropped 89 percent since 2010 while silicon solar panels have surged in efficiency from 15 percent to more than 26 percent over the last 40 years.

Solar’s scalability means that curious developers can try it out with less upfront investment before ramping up. Most solar installations use off-the-shelf components, so when a homeowner or a utility does decide to step into the sunlight, they can start making power quickly. “That development time is absolutely minimal compared to something like building a nuclear power station, but also even just a wind farm, which can take five to seven years or so from the initial permitting to first power coming out,” Graham said.

Even if you don’t care about climate change, solar energy has become one of the cheapest, fastest ways to sate your appetite for electrons. Texas, the biggest oil and gas producer in the country, is also the national leader in adding solar power to its grid, surpassing California.

But what happens when the sun sets?

Solar does have some drawbacks. The sun does sink below the horizon every day, and solar energy’s output varies with weather and the seasons—dipping when it’s cloudy and when the days get shorter. Banking electricity when it’s abundant to use when it’s scarce would resolve this problem, and, well, there’s good news on that front too.

Energy storage technologies like batteries are also getting way better and cheaper. The price of batteries has tanked 97 percent since 1991. Because of better technology, falling costs, and more markets for saving power, the US is on track to double its grid energy storage capacity compared to last year. More than 10 gigawatts of solar and storage came online in 2023 across the country and that’s likely to double this year. “Energy storage is at an earlier stage [than solar] but we are likely to see rapid expansion in that segment, especially in regions where solar and wind penetration are high already such as California and Texas,” said Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights, in an email.

​Combined solar-plus-storage energy projects are already cheaper than new fossil fuel power plants in many parts of the world, and costs are poised to fall further.
Even knowing all this, energy experts keep underestimating the potential of solar. “Forecasters recognize that with regard to solar PV we are in a phase of rapid expansion and adoption,” Piper said. “In a period like this, being off about the rate of expansion by even a little bit will still result in a large forecast error.”

The details of solar’s expansion are even more surprising

Not every country is riding the solar power rocket to the sun just yet. Individual countries have seen peaks and dips in solar installations based on how well their economies are doing and how strong their policy incentives are, like feed-in tariffs, net metering, and tax credits.

In the past couple of years, the global story has really been about China. Add up every solar panel installed in the US in history and you get how much China installed last year alone, almost 60 percent of all new solar installed in the world. The sheer scale of this deployment broke a lot of forecasters’ models.

“No research shop necessarily predicted the pace at which China was going to grow their solar capacity over the last year or so,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at Wood Mackenzie, an energy market analysis firm. “Everyone’s been revising them upward in order to correct for the data that’s been coming out of China.”

Photovoltaics are also a key part of China’s export strategy, and last year, China cut wholesale panel prices in half. That in turn has led to a huge surge in exports and knock-on solar power booms in other countries. Pakistan, the fifth-most populous country in the world, imported 13 gigawatts of Chinese solar modules in the first half of this year alone. That’s almost one-third of Pakistan’s total installed electricity to date.

Davis cautioned that imports of solar panels don’t necessarily mean they’ll all be installed, but it’s definitely a sign that solar is growing and its impact may be greater there than in larger or wealthier countries. While the solar energy additions in developing countries may be smaller in absolute numbers, they’re proportionately a larger share of the grid.

“Those developing parts of the world are growing at a more rapid rate on a smaller base,” Davis said. “The big Kahunas in the solar world are China, Europe, and the United States. Those markets are maturing, though, and they’re not growing as fast.”

There are some clouds in the sky

This can’t keep going on forever, right? Well, again, solar is still in the single digits in the global electricity supply, and it’s often the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to generate power. That momentum isn’t going to dissipate anytime soon. In the US, the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate cut means it will likely be even cheaper to get a loan to finance solar power, giving it another boost.

Some challenges have also emerged. If you want to add more solar to the US power grid right now, you need to take a number and get in line. There are hardware limits to how much intermittent power you can add to the aging electricity network, and making the necessary upgrades to accommodate it costs money and takes time. Delays are getting longer: In 2015, a typical energy project waited about three years in an interconnection queue. In 2023, that wait time was almost five years. Getting the permits to build more large-scale solar is also a tedious process. Many countries are facing similar hurdles.

In addition, the US is bolstering its domestic clean energy sector with trade barriers, including tariffs on Chinese solar panels. That may give an advantage to US producers but it raises overall costs and imposes supply chain constraints. The US is also investing $40 million to bring more of the solar energy supply chain within its borders.

And solar power didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree; it exists in the context of a global economy that’s still 80 percent powered by coal, oil, and natural gas. Overall global energy consumption is growing, and not everyone is discerning about where they get their heat and electricity. As a result, fossil fuel demand is also rising, though it may peak before the end of the decade. To meet international climate change targets of limiting warming to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit this century, greenhouse gas emissions have to fall at a much faster clip and effectively zero out by 2050.

Analysts are anticipating that solar energy will help bend that curve. According to Wood Mackenzie, total global solar capacity is going to almost quadruple in the next decade. It’s not certain whether the world will reach its climate goals, but solar will continue to spread as sure as the sun will rise.