The funeral was for the wrong body

Government after government is backing away from green energy.

UK weakening EV targets. EU watering down their “green deal”. The White House paying billions to cancel offshore wind. Canada shelving its carbon tax. The World Bank dumping its climate target.

Except none of it matters.

So what's actually happening?

While the pledges died, clean energy records are broken.

• Solar became 91% of new American generation this year and out-generated coal in May – a first in history, under the most hostile administration ever elected.

• Texas – Texas – now covers half its afternoon grid with solar, nine times the level of four years ago.

• China's building so much clean power than CO₂ has been flat or falling for the best part of two years.

• The IEA says the world's power sector is already past peak coal. Rich-world emissions are back at levels last seen fifty years ago – while the economies above them kept growing.

And the cleanest evidence comes from where no pledge has ever reached. Africa imported 15GW of solar panels in the year to last June – up 60%. Sierra Leone bought panels equal to 61% of its entire electricity output. In twelve months. A panel in Nigeria pays for itself in avoided diesel inside six months.

No COP ordered any of this. No minister gets to claim it. Cheap panels met expensive fossils, and the accountants did the rest.

So governments don't matter now?

They matter differently. Clean power generation is solving itself; connection isn't. Britain just priced that: £89bn of wires. Progress this week: Ofgem cleared 7.6GW of long-duration storage, including the first serious pumped hydro in forty years. Not a subsidy: a floor and a cap. Plumbing.

Spain shows the cost of not connecting: so much solar that prices collapsed, and investors are running. That's not a generation failure. It's not getting power to where it’s needed.

The state's job is no longer to mandate or subsidise the transition. It's to connect it.

Where the retreat actually hurts

One category of cancellation does matter – the kind no market will ever replace. Britain shelved £400m of rainforest money this year over “optics”, and cut its Congo Basin programme by 79%. No fund manager is coming for that. There is no yield on a standing forest, no offtake agreement on a flood defence.

The pledges dying here really matter.

The bottom line

Ignore the retreat headlines. Watch the grid queues, the storage auctions, the pricing mechanisms. The boring stuff.

And keep your outrage for the stuff the market can’t do.