A year ago, I made some climate predictions for 2025. They may have been a little optimistic, as it turns out.
I’m glad I was optimistic. I mean, it would’ve been sad if I wasn’t? Then?
Let’s review my 2025 predictions, ever so delicately.
Prediction: “Corporate Sustainability Reporting just got real. In Europe. Mostly.
The EU’s CSRD rules are kicking off, and a big swath of EU-based companies and others that do enough business there now have to report their emissions.”
Outcome: Half-right. Although there have been many delays and some backsliding as to which companies need to submit CSRD reporting, it’s still happening. Add to that the persistent progression of the California climate disclosure laws, which have been subject to similar if less intense caveats, and it’s a good-enough outcome. Plus, large companies are disclosing their emissions anyway, whether they’re fully compliant with these laws yet or not.
Prediction: “Optimizing AI for energy efficiency has to be a focus for someone in 2025.”
Outcome: Three-quarters right? 2025 was a year of progress in AI energy and carbon reporting. It’s not standardized yet, but organizations like the Green Software Foundation have published specifications outlining how to properly measure (and perhaps disclose) this sort of data. [And, full disclosure, I was a contributor to some of the discussions and revisions to the linked spec.] Meanwhile, Google published more detail than just about anyone on improvements in Gemini’s energy efficiency, with data on carbon and water cost, too. It’s much better than the single parenthetical number OpenAI shared about ChatGPT.
Prediction: “We’ll see more cool (pun intended) approaches to making [data centers] more energy efficient in 2025, but we’ll also see demand to continue to require natural gas for a dirty fallback to renewable energy, not to mention diesel backup generators, which some data center operators might prefer we not mention.”
Outcome: Going to give myself an easy A for this one, 100% correct. I spent a serious amount of time in 2025 at data center and/or energy conferences, not to mention what seems like 1,263 hours of podcast listening and daily reading on this topic. I’ll have more to say about this in my 2026 predictions, assuming that’s the next post I write here!
Prediction: “Lots of companies won’t hit their 2025 climate goals, but that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone paying attention.”
Outcome: Correct, not a surprise, and not surprising given the way 2025 went that some large companies and other organizations walked back their public enthusiasm for their 2030 goals and beyond.
Prediction: “The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA” is a branding choice, but context is helpful) has been a huge success, and the majority of funding for climate tech it put in place can’t be undone.”
Outcome: 90% wrong. Ohhhhh, January 17th 2025 Ryan, you are not going to like what happens next. It was naïve of me to expect the Trump administration to respect the rule of law, as has been proven many times over in the past 51 weeks. Once we get past that legal and political raging maelstrom of grief, although I’m not sure we should, the outcome of batteries, other energy storage, and distributed approaches like Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are the clear non-fossil-fuel winners. A lot of things went wrong in this category, but some parts of the clean energy market (and economy, and community) are buzzing. We know renewables and cheaper, and they work; now is a good time to work on other infrastructure to make them easier and more efficient.
2026 Predictions? Sure, this wasn’t that painful, I’ll do it again soon.
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