Where the Hope Comes From

This article originally appeared in the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement’s July 2026 newsletter.

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Global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels reached a record 38.4 billion tonnes in 2025, roughly 5 percent above pre-pandemic levels. That’s coal, oil, and gas burned for electricity, heat, and transportation. The rate of increase has slowed to its weakest pace since 2021, which is real progress. But a slower rise is still a rise, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations hit another all-time high. A global sustainability index published in July found that almost no country is on track for net zero by 2050, not even the ones ranked highest for environmental performance.

That’s the backdrop for this year’s policy decisions. In the U.S., most of them moved in the wrong direction.

Two weeks ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries rescinded the fifty-year-old definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. That definition used to mean destroying a species’ habitat, not just killing it outright. Once the change takes effect in September, a law written to prevent extinction will no longer address the leading cause of it.

In February, the EPA repealed the 2009 endangerment finding, the finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the legal basis for nearly every federal climate rule. The agency also closed its environmental justice office, eliminating $1.5 billion in Community Change Grants that had funded pollution cleanup and climate resilience work in low-income neighborhoods. The U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, announced last year, took effect in January.

It isn’t only a U.S. story. Roughly 84 percent of the world’s coral reefs are caught in the fourth, and largest, global bleaching event ever recorded. Marine scientists still can’t say when it will end. The global treaty meant to address plastic pollution stalled again this year, the latest breakdown after years of deadlock. And this June’s heat wave alone is estimated to have killed roughly ten thousand people across Europe, most of them over sixty-five.

If all of that leaves you discouraged, or simply drained of the energy to keep going, that’s understandable. I have days like that too.

But don’t let it take your hope. The good news this year was at least as extensive. Most of it just didn’t make the same headlines.

What Didn’t Make the News

Clean energy stopped depending on anyone’s goodwill this year. For decades, fossil fuels stayed the default because everything else cost more. That’s flipped: across much of the world, solar and wind are now the cheapest way to add new electricity to the grid, so the transition increasingly follows economics rather than politics.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed in March, history implied countries would revert to coal. Instead, fossil fuel power generation fell, and two records were broken within weeks. In April, wind and solar out-generated natural gas worldwide for the first month on record. In May, solar out-generated coal in the United States for the first time in history, while the federal government was actively working against it. The European Environment Agency put a number on the shift: gas price fluctuations cost the EU €13 billion in the first sixteen weeks of the year, while renewables saved consumers €29 billion over that same period.

The law kept moving too. Last July, the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that states have binding duties to prevent climate harm and repair the damage they cause. That case began not with governments but with twenty-seven law students from Pacific Island nations, who started campaigning for it back in 2019.

In January, after nearly two decades of talks, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, the first binding protection for the two-thirds of the ocean that belongs to no country. In April, fifty-seven countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and left with national roadmaps and a mandate to begin formal negotiations toward a phase-out agreement within a year. And in May, the UN General Assembly voted 141 to 8 to formally endorse the ICJ’s ruling and press countries to treat it as binding, over U.S. objection.

And the U.S. rollbacks aren’t going unanswered. Twenty-four states, the District of Columbia, and ten cities and counties sued the EPA over the endangerment repeal in March, following an earlier suit from seventeen health and environmental organizations.

Amazon deforestation fell 38 percent in the first half of the year, the lowest first-half total in a decade. In February, giant tortoises returned to Floreana Island in the Galápagos, roughly 150 years after the last one was taken off it. Most Pacific salmon and steelhead populations listed under the Endangered Species Act have grown over the past twenty-five years, and none went extinct. This month, after an eighteen-year search that started with one blurry photo, researchers confirmed a monkey species new to science in the Congo rainforest. And in January, new research out of Canada found that conservation programs designed and run by Indigenous nations deliver climate and biodiversity outcomes that match or exceed conventional government-run protected areas.

Pollution control got cheaper and more effective too. France’s ban on PFAS “forever chemicals” took effect January 1, after 140,000 citizens wrote to their representatives. European air pollution continued its long-term decline. And a study this spring found that seeds from the moringa tree remove 98 percent of aged PVC microplastics from drinking water, beating the standard chemical treatment.

People kept building where government pulled back, too. When climate.gov, the federal government’s public climate-data site, came down, former federal employees rebuilt it as climate.us. Maryland, New Hampshire, and Connecticut became the fifth, sixth, and seventh states to legalize plug-in solar, letting renters generate their own power without installing rooftop systems. And in Yancey County, North Carolina, flooded by Hurricane Helene, a volunteer fire department built a solar microgrid so neighbors have somewhere to go when the power fails.

Why It Matters

I understand if none of this is enough to make you feel hopeful. The Amazon is still burning even as deforestation slows. Coral reefs are still bleaching. Heat is killing people right now. Every win mentioned above sits next to a loss.

But look at the timeline behind these wins, not just the headline. The Pacific law students started organizing for climate accountability in 2019; the ICJ didn’t rule until 2025. The High Seas Treaty took nearly twenty years of negotiation before it entered into force this January. France’s PFAS ban followed years of citizens writing letters that, for most of that time, changed nothing. Nobody working on any of these could see the ending from where they stood, and yet here we are: a ruling, a treaty, a ban, each one further along than it has ever been.

That’s the actual shape of this kind of work. Long stretches where nothing visible is happening, and then a result that looks sudden to everyone who wasn’t paying attention. Whatever quiet work is happening right now, including yours, is very likely on the same track. Someone’s good news a few years from now is being built today, by people who can’t yet see it landing.

Stay in it. Not because progress is guaranteed, but because most of what eventually works was, for years, indistinguishable from failure, right up until it wasn’t.

“Let us not be weary in doing good, for we will reap in due season, if we don’t give up.” — Galatians 6:9