MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit about government investments. And then the other big thing is there's widespread concern about climate change around the world, and governments are putting billions - hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies into a lot of these technologies in the hopes that they'll help cut carbon dioxide emissions. So that's really taken these from a niche energy source that everyone used to think was too expensive to something that now looks like it can be a very real and serious part of the energy mix. PLUMER: So the two biggest things are one, just the extraordinary fall in the cost of particularly wind, solar and lithium-ion batteries - have just plummeted over the last decade. What are some of the high-level actions that are actually driving this? MOSLEY: More is being spent on clean energy this year than ever before, your team reports. So it's something that's caught even the experts who study this for a living by surprise. And every year, it would turn out that they just way underestimated the speed of the transition. You know, the International Energy Agency, for years, they would put out this forecast of how much wind, how much solar, how many electric vehicles they expect in the coming years. So the amount of money going into it is just staggering. We keep seeing automakers openly talk about expiration dates for the internal combustion engine, talking about how they're going to make more and more miles go electric.Īn astonishing stat was this year, about $1.7 trillion worldwide was going to be invested in clean energy technologies - wind, solar power, electric vehicles, nuclear batteries - compared with $1 trillion on fossil fuels. So just a few things - renewable electricity, globally, is now expected to overtake coal by 2025 as the world's largest source of electricity. PLUMER: You know, things are moving at such an astonishing pace. Can you paint a picture of your findings? MOSLEY: You write about this transition to clean energy, that it's happening faster than we might think. He's also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape. Our guest today is Brad Plumer, a New York Times climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. But even with the growth in renewable energy use, there are some unanswered questions about the impacts of these alternative technologies. Climate forecasters predict a catastrophic future if we don't move away from sources like oil and coal, which are warming the Earth at unprecedented speeds. The New York Times' three-part series called 'The Energy Transition' explores the speed, challenges, politics and economics of this move toward newer sources of energy. We're talking places like Texas and Oklahoma, once dominated by oil and gas, now building essentially new industries. Huge swaths of our country are turning away from fossil fuels as an energy source and investing in wind, solar and other renewable energy.

Recently, a team of reporters at the New York Times produced what kind of feels like an optimistic break from the doom and gloom of climate news.

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