Holiday gatherings bring together family and wildly diverse viewpoints. For every person scrupulously supporting net zero emissions and worried about rapidly retreating glaciers, there’s a “drill-baby-drill” climate-science doubter who sees wind and solar power as a “scam.” 

Yet the transition toward cleaner energy is happening, whatever the skeptics may say. In many cases, it’s flourishing not because of subsidy and environmental do-gooding but because of economic sense. Hard data provides talking points to redirect the haters and skeptics. BloombergNEF has collected five facts illustrating how humanity is shifting away from climate-damaging pollution and toward a more renewable and sustainable future.  

Electric vehicles rapidly penetrating the auto market. Today, one in five new cars sold worldwide is an EV, according to BNEF’s Long-Term Electric Vehicle Outlook. While the pace of growth is slipping in the US, it’s rapidly advancing elsewhere, notably China, Brazil and across Europe.  

In China, almost half the new cars on the road this year will have a plug. To put that into perspective, EV sales in China now outpace all types of car sales in the US, where about one in 10 new cars is electric. EVs are gaining in most of the biggest western markets as well, albeit at a slower pace than in China. In Europe, about one in four new cars are EVs.  

What’s behind the dramatic shift? Money, mostly. EVs in China are on average cheaper to buy than traditional combustion-engine models, because of generous discounts, economics of scale and technology advancements, according to BNEF research. Around the world, manufacturers are delivering more affordable models, and the economics of recharging are starting to rival fueling with gasoline or diesel. By 2030, BNEF estimates, 40% of new cars will be electric, more than double the current level. 

The second remarkable success story is that renewables like wind and solar have caught on and are being installed at an industrial scale almost everywhere. Investment in renewables hit another record in the first half of 2025, despite efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to fight clean energy in the US.  

Renewable energy projects attracted a record $386 billion in investment during the first half of 2025, up 10% from the same time last year. Solar rose 5% to $252 billion and wind 24% to $126 billion, according to BNEF data. Part of that is driven by costs. Wind and solar now rival fossil-fuel generation on cost – and clean energy is quicker to build and start running than a coal plant. 

Some of the biggest energy-consuming companies are supporting the boom in renewables, paying up to lock in supplies of green electricity far into the future. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are among the biggest buyers of power purchase agreements, where companies arrange to take electricity directly from an independent generator instead of a utility. 

They’re trying to feed rapidly growing power needs from data centers with clean-energy plants instead of coal, another positive sign that emissions can come down. Data center operators in the RE100 group that pledges to use clean energy were powered by 84% clean electricity in 2024. Of the 118 terawatt-hours (TWh) of renewable energy they bought last year, 79% (94TWh), came from offsite solar and wind PPAs, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. 

BNEF estimates that data center companies in the RE100 will see their renewable electricity demand rise 57% over 2024- 2030, to 182TWh, exceeding the annual power output of Poland.  

Historians will recognize 2025 as the year when the total capacity of solar farms installed worldwide surpassed that of coal generation plants for the first time.  

For now, coal still delivers more gigawatt-hours of power to the grid over the course of a year, but that rank is also likely to tumble in the coming decades. 

The story of solar’s ascent disproves one of the longstanding arguments against the energy transition: that renewables are expensive. In fact, solar has taken off because it has become so cheap, leading to a revolution in rooftop units installed on the top of homes and warehouses around the globe. BNEF estimates that the global benchmark cost for photovoltaic modules is now about 9 cents a watt, down 88% since 2012. At the same time, the efficiency of those cells — their ability to generate power — has soared, meaning even more bang for the proverbial buck. 

The real costs of climate change are rising, potentially faster than we’re spending money on solutions. Insurers shelled out $1.4 trillion last year for climate-related damages, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence. That is more than double the level of just a decade ago.  

The figures highlight the need to spend on solutions and adapting to climate change, a major subject of the annual United Nations climate talks that concluded last week in Brazil. BNEF estimates $2.1 trillion was invested in transitioning the global energy industry away from fossil fuels last year. A little less than $1 trillion went into wind, solar, energy storage, nuclear and carbon-capture technology last year worldwide – a significant sum, to be sure. But the numbers for climate damages are getting bigger.