Published

2 months ago

November 12, 2025

Alice Rush

The world’s fossil-fuel use is still on track to peak before 2030, despite a surge in political support for coal, oil and gas, according to data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook 2025, published during the opening days of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, shows coal at or close to a peak, with oil set to follow around 2030 and gas by 2035, based on the stated policy intentions of the world’s governments.

Under the same assumptions, the IEA says that clean-energy use will surge, as nuclear power rises 39% by 2035, solar by 344% and wind by 178%.

Still, the outlook has some notable shifts since last year, with coal use revised up by around 6% in the near term, oil seeing a shallower post-peak decline and gas plateauing at higher levels.

This means that the IEA expects global warming to reach 2.5C this century if “stated policies” are implemented as planned, up marginally from 2.4C in last year’s outlook.

In addition, after pressure from the Trump administration in the US, the IEA has resurrected its “current policies scenario”, which – effectively – assumes that governments around the world abandon their stated intentions and only policies already set in legislation are continued.

If this were to happen, the IEA warns, global warming would reach 2.9C by 2100, as oil and gas demand would continue to rise and the decline in coal use would proceed at a slower rate.

This year’s outlook also includes a pathway that limits warming to 1.5C in 2100, but says that this would only be possible after a period of “overshoot”, where temperature rise peaks at 1.65C.

The IEA will publish its “announced pledges scenario” at a later date, to illustrate the impact of new national climate pledges being implemented on time and in full.

(See Carbon Brief’s coverage of previous IEA world energy outlooks from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016 and 2015.)

World energy outlook

The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is published every autumn. It is regarded as one of the most influential annual contributions to the understanding of energy and emissions trends.

The outlook explores a range of scenarios, representing different possible futures for the global energy system. These are developed using the IEA’s “global energy and climate model”.

The latest report stresses that “none of [these scenarios] should be regarded as a forecast”.

However, this year’s outlook marks a major shift in emphasis between the scenarios – and it reintroduces a pathway where oil and gas demand continues to rise for many decades.

This pathway is named the “current policies scenario” (CPS), which assumes that governments abandon their planned policies, leaving only those that are already set in legislation.

If the world followed this path, then global temperatures would reach 2.9C above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and would be “set to keep rising from there”, the IEA says.

The CPS was part of the annual outlook until 2020, when the IEA said that it was “difficult to imagine” such a pathway “prevailing in today’s circumstances”.

It has been resurrected following heavy pressure from the US, which is a major funder of the IEA that accounts for 14% of the agency’s budget.

For example, in July Politico reported “a ratcheted-up US pressure campaign” and “months of public frustrations with the IEA from top Trump administration officials”. It noted:

“Some Republicans say the IEA has discouraged investment in fossil fuels by publishing analyses that show near-term peaks in global demand for oil and gas.”

The CPS is the first scenario to be discussed in detail in the report, appearing in chapter three. The CPS similarly appears first in Annex A, the data tables for the report.

The second scenario is the “stated policies scenario” (STEPS), featured in chapter four of this year’s outlook. Here, the outlook also includes policies that governments say they intend to bring forward and that the IEA judges as likely to be implemented in practice.

In this world, global warming would reach 2.5C by 2100 – up marginally from the 2.4C expected in the 2024 edition of the outlook.

Beyond the STEPS and the CPS, the outlook includes two further scenarios.

One is the “net-zero emissions by 2050” (NZE) scenario, which illustrates how the world’s energy system would need to change in order to limit warming in 2100 to 1.5C.

The NZE was first floated in the 2020 edition of the report and was then formally featured in 2021.

The report notes that, unlike in previous editions, this scenario would see warming peak at more than 1.6C above pre-industrial temperatures, before returning to 1.5C by the end of the century.

This means it would include a high level of temporary “overshoot” of the 1.5C target. The IEA explains that this results from the “reality of persistently high emissions in recent years”. It adds:

“In addition to very rapid progress with the transformation of the energy sector, bringing the temperature rise back down below 1.5C by 2100 also requires widespread deployment of CO2 removal technologies that are currently unproven at large scale.”

Finally, the outlook includes a new scenario where everyone in the world is able to gain access to electricity by 2035 and to clean cooking by 2040, named “ACCESS”.

While the STEPS appears second in the running order of the report, it is mentioned slightly more frequently than the CPS, as shown in the figure below. The CPS is a close second, however, whereas the IEA’s 1.5C pathway (NZE) receives a declining level of attention.

Number of mentions of each scenario per 100 pages of text. Source: Carbon Brief analysis.

US critics of the IEA have presented its stated policies scenario as “disconnected from reality”, in contrast to what they describe as the “likely scenario” of “business as usual”.

Yet the current policies scenario is far from a “business-as-usual” pathway. The IEA says this explicitly in an article published ahead of the outlook:

“The CPS might seem like a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario, but this terminology can be misleading in an energy system where new technologies are already being deployed at scale, underpinned by robust economics and mature, existing policy frameworks. In these areas, ‘business as usual’ would imply continuing the current process of change and, in some cases, accelerating it.”

In order to create the current policies scenario, where oil and gas use continues to surge into the future, the IEA therefore has to make more pessimistic assumptions about barriers to the uptake of new technologies and about the willingness of governments to row back on their plans. It says:

“The CPS…builds on a narrow reading of today’s policy settings…assuming no change, even where governments have indicated their intention to do so.”

This is not a scenario of “business as usual”. Instead, it is a scenario where countries around the world follow US president Donald Trump in dismantling their plans to shift away from fossil fuels.

More specifically, the current policies scenario assumes that countries around the world renege on their policy commitments and fail to honour their climate pledges.

For example, it assumes that Japan and South Korea fail to implement their latest national electricity plans, that China fails to continue its power-market reforms and abandons its provincial targets for clean power, that EU countries fail to meet their coal phase-out pledges and that US states such as California fail to extend their clean-energy targets.

Similarly, it assumes that Brazil, Turkey and India fail to implement their greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (ETS) as planned and that China fails to expand its ETS to other industries.

The scenario also assumes that the EU, China, India, Australia, Japan and many others fail to extend or continue strengthening regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances, as well as those relating to the fuel-economy standards for new vehicles.

In contrast to the portrayal of the stated policies scenario as blindly assuming that all pledges will be met, the IEA notes that it does not give a free pass to aspirational targets. It says:

“[T]argets are not automatically assumed to be met; the prospects and timing for their realisation are subject to an assessment of relevant market, infrastructure and financial constraints…[L]ike the CPS, the STEPS does not assume that aspirational goals, such as those included in the Paris Agreement, are achieved.”

Only in the “announced pledges scenario” (APS) does the IEA assume that countries meet all of their climate pledges on time and full – regardless of how credible they are.

The APS does not appear in this year’s report, presumably because many countries missed the deadlines to publish new climate pledges ahead of COP30.

The IEA says it will publish its APS, assessing the impact of the new pledges, “once there is a more complete picture of these commitments”.

Fossil-fuel peak

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in the IEA’s outlook for fossil fuels under the stated policies scenario, which it has described as “a mirror to the plans of today’s policymakers”.

In 2020, the agency said that prevailing policy conditions pointed towards a “structural” decline in global coal demand, but that it was too soon to declare a peak in oil or gas demand.

By 2021, it said global fossil-fuel use could peak as soon as 2025, but only if all countries got on track to meet their climate goals. Under stated policies, it expected fossil-fuel use to hit a plateau from the late 2020s onwards, declining only marginally by 2050.

There was a dramatic change in 2022, when it said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting global energy crisis had “turbo-charged” the shift away from fossil fuels.

As a result, it said at the time that it expected a peak in demand for each of the fossil fuels. Coal “within a few years”, oil “in the mid-2030s” and gas ”by the end of the decade”.

This outlook sharpened further in 2023 and, by 2024, it was saying that each of the fossil fuels would see a peak in global demand before 2030.

This year’s report notes that “some formal country-level [climate] commitments have waned”, pointing to the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement.

The report says the “new direction” in the US is among “major new policies” in 48 countries. The other changes it lists include Brazil’s “energy transition acceleration programme”, Japan’s new plan for 2040 and the EU’s recently adopted 2040 climate target.

Overall, the IEA data still points to peaks in demand for coal, oil and gas under the stated policies scenario, as shown in the figure below.

Alongside this there is a surge in clean technologies, with renewables overtaking oil to become the world’s largest source of energy – not just electricity – by the early 2040s.

In this year’s outlook under stated policies, the IEA sees global coal demand as already being at – or very close to – a definitive peak, as the chart above shows.

Coal then enters a structural decline, where demand for the fuel is displaced by cheaper alternatives, particularly renewable sources of electricity.

The IEA reiterates that the cost of solar, wind and batteries has respectively fallen by 90%, 70% and 90% since 2010, with further declines of 10-40% expected by 2035.

(The report notes that household energy spending would be lower under the more ambitious NZE scenario than under stated policies, despite the need for greater investment.)

However, this year’s outlook has coal use in 2030 coming in some 6% higher than expected last year, although it ultimately declines to similar levels by 2050.

For oil, the agency’s data still points to a peak in demand this decade, as electric vehicles (EVs) and more efficient combustion engines erode the need for the fuel in road transport.

While this sees oil demand in 2030 reaching similar levels to what the IEA expected last year, the post-peak decline is slightly less marked in the latest outlook, ending some 5% higher in 2050.

The biggest shift compared with last year is for gas, where the IEA suggests that global demand will keep rising until 2035, rather than peaking by 2030.

Still, the outlook has gas demand in 2030 being only 7% higher than expected last year. It notes:

“Long-term natural gas demand growth is kept lower than in recent decades by the expanding deployment of renewables, efficiency gains and electrification of end-uses.”

In terms of clean energy, the outlook sees nuclear power output growing to 39% above 2024 levels by 2035 and doubling by 2050. Solar grows nearly four-fold by 2035 and nearly nine-fold by 2050, while wind power nearly triples and quadruples over the same periods.

Notably, the IEA sees strong growth of clean-energy technologies, even in the current policies scenario. Here, renewables would still become the world’s largest energy source before 2050.

This is despite the severe headwinds assumed in this scenario, including EVs never increasing from their current low share of sales in India or the US.

The CPS would see oil and gas use continuing to rise, with demand for oil reaching 11% above current levels by 2050 and gas climbing 31%, even as renewables nearly triple.

This means that coal use would still decline, falling to a fifth below current levels by 2050.

Finally, while the IEA considers the prospect of global coal demand continuing to rise rather than falling as expected, it gives this idea short shrift. It explains:

“A growth story for coal over the coming decades cannot entirely be ruled out but it would fly in the face of two crucial structural trends witnessed in recent years: the rise of renewable sources of power generation, and the shift in China away from an especially coal-intensive model of growth and infrastructure development. As such, sustained growth for coal demand appears highly unlikely.”

The post IEA: Fossil-fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless ‘stated policies’ are abandoned appeared first on Carbon Brief.

IEA: Fossil-fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless ‘stated policies’ are abandoned

Greenhouse Gases

Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role

Published

1 week ago

December 24, 2025

Alice Rush

Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role

Dec. 22, 2025 – After a six month interim period, Ricky Bradley has been appointed Executive Director of Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Citizens’ Climate Education. The decision was made by the CCL and CCE boards of directors in a unanimous vote during their final joint board meeting of 2025.

“Citizens’ Climate Lobby is fortunate to have someone with Ricky Bradley’s experience, commitment, and demeanor to lead the organization,” said CCL board chair Bill Blancato. “I can’t think of anyone with as much knowledge about CCL and its mission who is held in such high regard by CCL’s staff and volunteers.”

Bradley has been active with Citizens’ Climate for more than 13 years. Prior to his former roles as Interim Executive Director and Vice President of Field Operations, he has also served as a volunteer Group Leader and volunteer Regional Coordinator, all of which ground him in Citizens’ Climate’s grassroots model. Bradley has also led strategic planning and implementation efforts at HSBC, helping a large team adopt new approaches and deliver on big organizational goals.

“We are confident that Ricky has the skills to guide CCL during a challenging time for organizations trying to make a difference on climate change,” Blancato added.

Since stepping into the Interim Executive Director role in July 2025, Bradley has led Citizens’ Climate through a season of high volunteer engagement and effective advocacy on Capitol Hill. Under his leadership, CCL staff and volunteers organized a robust virtual lobby week with 300+ constituent meetings, despite an extended government shutdown, and executed a targeted mobilization to support the bipartisan passage of climate-friendly forestry legislation through the Senate Agriculture Committee.

“We have heard nothing but glowing descriptions of Ricky’s ability as a leader, as a manager, and as a team player,” said CCE board chair Dr. Sandra Kirtland Turner. “We’ve been absolutely thrilled with how Ricky’s brought the team together over the last six months to deliver on a new strategic plan for the organization.”

The strategic plan, which launched during CCL’s Fall Conference in November, details Citizens’ Climate’s unique role in the climate advocacy space, its theory of change for effectively moving federal climate legislation forward, and its strategic goals for 2026.

“Ricky has the heart of a CCLer and the strategic chops to take us into the next chapter as an organization,” Dr. Kirtland Turner said.

Bradley shared his vision for that next chapter in his conference opening remarks last month and, most recently, during the organization’s December monthly meeting.

“There’s a lot that we don’t control in today’s politics, but we do know who we are. The power of our persistent, nonpartisan advocacy is unmistakable,” Bradley said. “If we stay true to that, deepen our skills, and walk forward together, I know we’re going to meet this moment and deliver real results for the climate.”

CONTACT: Flannery Winchester, CCL Vice President of Marketing and Communications, 615-337-3642, flannery@citizensclimate.org

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Citizens’ Climate Lobby is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. Learn more at citizensclimatelobby.org.

The post Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.

Ricky Bradley named Citizens’ Climate Executive Director after strategic and legislative progress during interim leadership role

Greenhouse Gases

DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading

Published

2 weeks ago

December 19, 2025

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

EU easing up

HITTING THE BREAKS: The EU “walked back” its target to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2035, “permitting some new combustion engine cars”, reported Agence-France Presse. Under the original plan, the bloc would have had to cut emissions entirely by 2035 on new vehicles, but will now only have to cut emissions by 90% by that date, compared to 2021 levels. However, according to the Financial Times, some car manufacturers have “soured” on the reversal.

ADJUSTING CBAM: Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that the EU is making plans to “close loopholes” in the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) before it goes into effect in January. CBAM is set to be the world’s first carbon border tax and has drawn ire from key trading partners. The EU has also finalised a plan to delay its anti-deforestation legislation for another year, according to Carbon Pulse.

Around the world

NCAR NO MORE: The Trump administration is moving to “dismantle” the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said USA Today, describing it as “one of the world’s leading climate research labs”.
DEADLY FLOODS: The deadliest flash flooding in Morocco in a decade killed “at least” 37 people, while residents accused the government of “ignoring known flood risks and failing to maintain basic infrastructure”, reported Radio France Internationale.
FAILING GRADE: The past year was the “warmest and wettest” ever recorded in the Arctic, with implications for “global sea level rise, weather patterns and commercial fisheries”, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2025 Arctic report card, covered by NPR.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE: Reuters reported that Kenya signed a $311m agreement with an African infrastructure fund and India’s Power Grid Corporation for the “construction of two high-voltage electricity transmission lines” that could provide power for millions of people.
BP’S NEW EXEC: BP has appointed Woodside Energy Group’s Meg O’Neill as its new chief executive amid a “renewed push to…double down on oil and gas after retreating from an ambitious renewables strategy”, said Reuters.

29

The number of consecutive years in which the Greenland ice sheet has experienced “continuous annual ice loss”, according to a Carbon Brief guest post.

Latest climate research

Up to 4,000 glaciers could “disappear” per year during “peak glacier extinction”, projected to occur sometime between 2041 and 2055 | Nature Climate Change
The rate of sea level rise across the coastal US doubled over the past century | AGU Advances
Repression and criminalisation of climate and environmentally focused protests are a “global phenomena”, according to an analysis of 14 countries | Environmental Politics

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

The latest coal market report from the International Energy Agency said that global coal use will reach record levels in 2025, but will decline by the end of the decade. Carbon Brief analysis of the report found that projected coal use in China for 2027 has been revised downwards by 127m tonnes, compared to the projection from the 2024 report – “more than cancelling out the effects of the Trump administration’s coal-friendly policies in the US”.

Spotlight

What climate scientists are curious about

This week, Carbon Brief spoke to climate scientists attending the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, Louisiana, about the most interesting research papers they read this year.

Their answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dr Christopher Callahan, assistant professor at Indiana University Bloomington

The most interesting research paper I read was a simple thought experiment asking when we would have known humans were changing the climate if we had always had perfect observations. The authors show that we could have detected a human influence on the climate as early as the 1880s, since we have a strong physical understanding of how those changes should look. This paper both highlights that we have been discernibly changing the climate for centuries and emphasises the importance of the modern climate observing network – a network that is currently threatened by budget cuts and staff shortages.

Prof Lucy Hutyra, distinguished professor at Boston University

The most interesting paper I read was in Nature Climate Change, where the researchers looked at how much mortality was associated with cold weather versus hot weather events and found that many more people died during cold weather events. Then, they estimated how much of a protective factor in the urban heat island is on those winter deaths and suggested that the winter benefits exceed the summer risks of mitigating extreme heat, so perhaps we shouldn’t mitigate extreme heat in cities.

This paper got me in a tizzy…It spurred an exciting new line of research. We’ll be publishing a response to this paper in 2026. I’m not sure their conclusion was correct, but it raised really excellent questions.

Dr Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central

This year was when we saw source attribution studies, such as Chris Callahan‘s, really start to break through and be able to connect the emissions of specific emitters…to the impact of those emissions through heat or some other sort of damage function. [This] is really game-changing.

What [Callahan’s] paper showed is that the emissions of individual companies have an impact on extreme heat, which then has an impact on the GDP of the countries experiencing that extreme heat. And so, for the first time, you can really say: “Company X caused this condition which then led to this economic damage.”

Dr Antonia Hadjimichael, assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University

It was about interdisciplinary work – not that anything in it is ground-shakingly new, but it was a good conversation around interdisciplinary teams and what makes them work and what doesn’t make them work. And what I really liked about it is that they really emphasise the role of a connector – the scientist that navigates this space in between and makes sure that the things kind of glue together…The reason I really like this paper is that we don’t value those scientists in academia, in traditional metrics that we have.

Dr Santiago Botía, researcher at Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

The most interesting paper I’ve read this year was about how soil fertility and water table depth control the response to drought in the Amazon. They found very nicely how the proximity to soil water controls the anomalies in gross primary productivity in the Amazon. And, with that methodology, they could explain the response of recent droughts and the “greening” of the forest during drought, which is kind of a counterintuitive [phenomenon], but it was very interesting.

Dr Gregory Johnson, affiliate professor at the University of Washington

This article explores the response of a fairly coarse spatial resolution climate model…to a scenario in which atmospheric CO2 is increased at 1% a year to doubling and then CO2 is more gradually removed from the atmosphere…[It finds] a large release of heat from the Southern Ocean, with substantial regional – and even global – climate impacts. I find this work interesting because it reminds us of the important – and potentially nonlinear – roles that changing ocean circulation and water properties play in modulating our climate.

Cecilia Keating also contributed to this spotlight.

Watch, read, listen

METHANE MATTERS: In the Guardian, Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley wrote that the world must “urgently target methane” to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

CLIMATE WRAPPED: Grist summarised the major stories for Earth’s climate in 2025 – “the good, the bad and the ugly”.

COASTING: On the Coastal Call podcast, a biogeochemist spoke about “coastal change and community resilience” in the eastern US’s Long Island Sound.

Coming up

27 December: Cote D’Ivoire parliamentary elections
28 December: Central African Republic presidential and parliamentary elections
28 December: Guinean presidential election

Pick of the jobs

BirdLife International, forest programme administrator | Salary: £28,000-£30,000. Location: Cambridge, UK
World Resources Institute, power-sector transition senior manager | Salary: $116,000-$139,000. Location: Washington DC
Fauna & Flora, operations lead for Liberia | Salary: $61,910. Location: Monrovia, Liberia

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

The post DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 19 December 2025: EU’s petrol car U-turn; Trump to axe ‘leading’ research lab; What climate scientists are reading

Greenhouse Gases

Guest post: How to steer EVs towards the road of ‘mass adoption’

Published

2 weeks ago

December 18, 2025

Alice Rush

Electric vehicles (EVs) now account for more than one-in-four car sales around the world, but the next phase is likely to depend on government action – not just technological change.

That is the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Net Zero, the Rocky Mountain Institute and the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute.

Our report shows that falling battery costs, expanding supply chains and targeted policy will continue to play important roles in shifting EVs into the mass market.

However, these are incremental changes and EV adoption could stall without efforts to ensure they are affordable to buy, to boost charging infrastructure and to integrate them into power grids.

Moreover, emerging tax and regulatory changes could actively discourage the shift to EVs, despite their benefits for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, air quality and running costs.

This article sets out the key findings of the new report, including a proposed policy framework that could keep the EV transition on track.

A global tipping point

Technology transformations are rarely linear, as small changes in cost, infrastructure or policy can lead to outsized progress – or equally large reversals.

The adoption of new technologies tends to follow a similar pathway, often described by an “S-curve”. This is divided into distinct phases, from early uptake, with rapid growth from very low levels, through to mass adoption and, ultimately, market saturation.

However, technologies that depend on infrastructure display powerful “path-dependency”, meaning decisions and processes made early within the rollout can lock in rapid growth, but equally, stagnation can also become entrenched, too.

EVs are now moving beyond the early-adopter phase and beginning to enter mass diffusion. There are nearly 60m on the road today, according to the International Energy Agency, up from just 1.2m a decade ago.

Technological shifts of this scale can unfold faster than expected. Early in the last century in the US, for example, millions of horses and mules virtually disappeared from roads in under three decades, as shown in the chart below left.

Yet the pace of these shifts is not fixed and depends on the underlying technology, economics, societal norms and the extent of government support for change. Faster or slower pathways for EV adoption are illustrated in the chart below right.

Left: The S-curve from horses to cars. Right: The predicted shift from ICE to EVs. Note that S-curves present technology market shares from fixed saturation levels to show the shape of diffusion, rather than absolute numbers; Cars were both a substitute for, and additional to, horses. Sources: Grubler (1999), Technology and Global Change (left); Rocky Mountain Institute, IEA data (2023) (right).

Internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles did not prevail in becoming the dominant mode of transport through technical superiority alone. They were backed by massive public investment in roads, city planning, zoning and highway expansion funded by fuel taxes.

Meanwhile, they faced few penalties for pollution and externalities, benefitting from implicit subsidies over cleaner alternatives. Standardisation, industrial policy and wartime procurement further entrenched the ICE.

EVs are well-positioned to follow a faster trajectory, as they directly substitute ICE vehicles while being cleaner, cheaper and quieter to run.

Past transitions show that like-for-like replacements – such as black-and-white to colour TVs – tend to diffuse faster than entirely novel products.

Late adopters also benefit from cost reductions and established norms. For example, car ownership took 60 years to diffuse across the US, but just 20 years in parts of Latin America and Japan.

In today’s globalised economy, knowledge, capital and supply chains travel faster still. Our research suggests that the global EV shift could be achieved within decades, not half a century.

Yet without decisive policy, investment and coordination, feedback loops could slow, locking in fossil-fuel dependence.

Our research suggests that further supporting the widespread deployment of EVs hangs on three interlinked actions: supporting adoption; integrating with clean electricity systems; and ensuring sustainability across supply chains and new mobility systems.

Closing the cost gap

EVs have long offered lower running costs than ICE vehicles, but upfront costs – while now cost-competitive in China, parts of Europe and in growing second-hand markets – remain a major barrier to adoption in most regions.

While battery costs have fallen sharply – lithium-ion battery packs fell by 20% in 2024 alone – this has not fully translated into lower retail vehicle prices for consumers.

In China, a 30% fall in battery prices in 2024 translated into a 10% decline in electric SUV prices. However, in Germany, EV retail prices rose slightly in 2024 despite a 20% drop in battery costs.

These discrepancies reflect market structures rather than cost fundamentals. Our report suggests that a competitive EV market, supported by transparent pricing and a strong second-hand sector, can help unlock cost parity in more markets.

Beyond the sale of EVs, government policy around running costs, such as fuel duty, has the potential to disincentivse EV adoption.

For example, New Zealand’s introduction of road-pricing for EVs contributed to a collapse in registrations from nearly 19% of sales in December 2023 to around 4% in January 2024.

EV-specific fees have also been introduced in a number of US states. Last month, the UK also announced a per-mile charge for EVs – but not ICEs – from 2028.

Addressing the loss of fuel-duty revenue as EVs replace ICE vehicles is a headache for any government seeking to electrify mobility.

However, to avoid slowing diffusion, new revenues could be used to build out new charging infrastructure, just as road-building was funded as the ICE vehicle was scaling up.

While subsidies to support upfront costs can help enable EV adoption, the best approach to encouraging uptake is likely to shift once the sector moves into a phase of mass diffusion.

Targeted support, alongside innovative financing models to broaden access, from blended finance to pay-as-you-drive schemes, could play a greater role in ensuring lower-income drivers and second-hand buyers are not left behind.

Mandates as engines of scale

Zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandates and ICE phase-out deadlines can reduce costs more effectively than alternatives by guaranteeing market scale, our research finds, reducing uncertainty for automakers and pushing learning rates forward through faster production.

California’s ZEV mandate was one of the first in the 1990s, a policy that has since been adopted by ten other US states and the UK.

China’s NEV quota system has produced the world’s fastest-growing EV market, while, in Norway, clear targets and consistent incentives mean EVs now account for nearly all of new car sales. These “technology-forcing” policies have proved highly effective.

Analyses consistently show that the long-run societal benefits of sales mandates for EVs far outweigh their compliance costs.

For example, the UK’s ZEV mandate has an estimated social net present value of £39bn, according to the government, driven largely by emissions reductions and lower running costs for consumers.

Benefits can also extend beyond national borders. For example, California’s “advanced clean cars II” regulations – adopted by a number of US states and an influence on other countries – have been instrumental in compelling US automakers to develop and commercialise EVs, which can, in turn, trigger innovation and scale to reduce costs worldwide.

Research suggests that, where possible, combining mandates and incentives creates further synergies: mandates alleviate supply-side constraints, making subsidies more effective on the demand side.

Public charging: a critical bottleneck

Public charging is one of the most significant impediments to EV adoption today.

Whereas EVs charged at home are substantially cheaper to run than ICE vehicles, higher public charging costs can erase this benefit – in the UK, this can be up to times the home equivalent.

While most homes in the UK, for example, do have access to off-street parking, there are large swathes of low-income and urban households without access to private driveways. For these households, a lack of cheap public charging has been described as a de facto “pavement tax”, which is disincentivising EV adoption and resulting in an inequitable transition.

Our research shows that a dual-track charging strategy could help resolve the situation. Expanding access to private charging – through cross-pavement cabling, “right-to-charge” legislation for renters and planning mandates for new developments could be combined with strategic investment in public charging, to overcome the “chicken-and-egg” problem for investors uncertain about future EV demand.

Meanwhile, “smart charging” in public settings – where EV demand is matched with cheaper electricity supply – can also help close the affordability gap, by delivering cheap off-peak charging that is already available to those charging at home.

The Centre for Net Zero’s research shows that drivers respond to dynamic pricing outside of the convenience of their homes, which reduces EV running costs below those of petrol cars.

The figure below shows that, while the level of discount being offered had the strongest impact, lower-income areas showed the largest behavioural response, indicating that they may stand to gain the most from a rollout of such incentives.

Impact on charging behaviour from a “green message”, 15% or 40% discounts, according to the average disposable income in the area. Source: Centre for Net Zero (2025)

Our research suggests that policymakers could encourage this type of commercial offering by creating electricity markets with strong price signals and mandating that these prices are transparent to consumers.

Integrating with clean electricity grids

Electrification is central to decarbonising the world’s economies, meaning that sufficient capacity on electricity networks is becoming a key focus.

For the rollout of EVs, pressure will be felt most on low-voltage “distribution” networks, where charging is dispersed and tends to follow existing peaks and troughs in domestic demand.

Rather than responding to this challenge by just building out the grid – with the corresponding economic and political implications – making smart charging the norm could help mitigate pressure on the network.

Evidence from the Centre for Net Zero’s trials shows that AI-managed charging can shift EV demand off-peak, reducing residential peak load by 42%, as shown in the chart below.

Additionally, the amount of time when EVs are plugged in but not moving is often substantial, giving networks hours each day in which they can shift charging, targeting periods of low demand or high renewable output.

Average hourly consumption of electricity (kWh) across different hours of the day, showing baseline consumption (grey) and that with an EV tariff (navy). Source: Centre for Net Zero (2025)

The system value of this flexible charging is significant. In the UK, managed charging could absorb 15 terrawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity that would otherwise be curtailed by 2030 – equivalent to Slovenia’s entire annual consumption.

For these benefits to be realised, our research suggests that global policymakers may need to mandate interoperability across vehicles, chargers and platforms, introduce dynamic network charges that reflect local grid stress and support AI-enabled automation.

Bi-directional charging – which allows EVs to export electricity to the grid, becoming decentralised, mobile storage units – remains underexploited. This could allow EVs to contribute to the capacity of the grid, helping with frequency and providing voltage support at both local and system levels.

The nascency of such vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology means that penetration is currently limited, but there are some markets that are further ahead.

For example, Utrecht is an early leader in real-world V2G deployment in a context of significant grid congestion, while Japan is exploring the use of V2G for system resilience, providing backup power during outages. China is also exploring V2G systems.

Our research shows that if just 25% of vehicles across six major European nations had V2G functionality, then the theoretical total capacity of the connected vehicles would exceed each of those country’s fossil-fuel power fleet.

Mandating V2G readiness at new chargepoints, aligning the value of exports with the value to the system and allowing aggregators to pool capacity from multiple EVs, could all help take V2G from theory to reality.

A sustainable EV system

It is important to note that electrification alone does not guarantee sustainability.

According to Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) analysis, the total weight of ore needed to electrify the world’s road transport system is around 1,410mtonnes (Mt). This is 40% less than the 2,150Mt of oil extracted every year to fuel a combustion-based system. EVs concentrate resource use upfront, rather than locking in fossil-fuel extraction.

Moreover, several strategies can reduce reliance on virgin minerals, including recycling, new chemistries and improved efficiency.

Recycling, in particular, is progressing rapidly. Some 90% of lithium-ion batteries could now be recycled in some regions, according to RMI research. Under an accelerated scenario, nearly all demand could be met through recycling before 2050.

Finally, while our report focuses largely on EVs, it is important to highlight that they are not a “silver bullet” for decarbonising mobility.

Cities such as Seoul and New York have demonstrated that micromobility, public transport and street redesign can cut congestion, improve health and reduce the number of overall vehicles required.

Better system design reduces mineral demand, lowers network strain and broadens access.

The ‘decision decade’ ahead

Policy decisions made today will determine whether EVs accelerate into exponential growth or stall.

Our research suggests that governments intent on capturing the economic and environmental dividends of electrified mobility are likely to need coherent, cross-cutting policy frameworks that push the market up the steep climb of the EV S-curve.