Nice to see real progress, solar and wind booms are not a fluke and 18 months of flat or falling CO2 is worth celebrating. China adding hundreds of GW of solar in a year is the kind of scale we need worldwide.

That said, I’m not popping champagne. A single-year dip or flatline can hide big problems: rising plastics and chemical output, carbon intensity targets probably missed, and the last quarter could erase the gains. And please, let’s not pretend exported emissions or fossil infrastructure lock-in don’t matter. China underpromises and sometimes overdelivers, sure, but global warming doesn’t care about political optics.

Bottom line, cautiously optimistic. This is progress, not victory. Keep pushing for deeper, faster cuts, transparency, and real phaseouts of coal and petrochemical expansion, and stop pretending rich countries skipping COPs helps anyone.