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Climate change has been a crisis brewing ever since the Second Industrial Revolution. From carbon emissions to food insecurity and rising sea levels, climate outbursts are slowly becoming a constant occurrence with more pressing long-term concerns looming in the future. After decades of awareness campaigns and education, the public generally understands that the solution to reversing climate change involves everyone – individuals, corporations, and every governing body there is in the world – and requires faster and larger preventive measures and remediation. Braced with this knowledge, ordinary people suffer in silence as their trust in climate action by authoritative bodies and belief in community efforts dwindle.

Yet, the world had triumphed before.

We used to hear of holes in the ozone layer. In the 1980s, the depletion of the ozone layer and its consequential health risks were popularised after scientific investigations fault chlorofluorocarbon (CFCs) as the catalyst. Public dissatisfaction had pressured national leaders to mitigate the phenomenon, which gave way to the Montreal Protocol in 1987. Since then, the joint action of nations to eliminate the production and use of ozone-depleting compounds worldwide had successfully averted more holes and facilitated ozone regeneration, where the ozone layer is forecasted to achieve complete recovery by 2065.

In the energy sector, promising trends for the transition to alternative clean energy owe their credentials to science-backed policies and incentives within its enforcement as far back as the 1970s. The oil crisis coaxed the U.S. government to turn to alternative energy, investing $1 billion into research and development in solar energy sources. The solar energy race involved China and Japan passing batons in solar cell innovation while Germany and the U.S. grew the solar energy market with policy incentives such as feed-in tariffs and investment tax credits. The effect of policies stimulating renewable energy markets was tremendous, where the cost of electricity generation from solar photovoltaics decreased by 89% from 2009 to 2019 ($359 per megawatt hour to $40 per megawatt hour) and is currently cheaper than fossil fuels.

Therefore, the crucial factor in transitioning to a more sustainable world is effective policymaking and implementation. While environmental laws are enforced to penalise harmful externalities (e.g., chemical plant run-offs, excessive carbon emissions etc.), incentives such as subsidies and tax credits hold an equally positive reaction from corporations to pursue sustainable practices or even ventures. Money makes the world go round indeed, and governments wield the power to keep them both green.

So we have cracked the code, no? No.