'How cheap renewable energy is finally flattening emissions' is Science Magazine's 2025 Breakthrough of the Year

I'm beginning my year-end retrospectives with Science Magazine explaining How cheap renewable energy is finally flattening emissions, its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.

For decades, rising carbon emissions have accelerated climate change, but this year marked a critical turning point that could finally reverse that trend. Renewable energy has now graduated beyond the need for subsidies and incentives, emerging as a cheaper alternative to fossil fuels in many countries. News Editor Tim Appenzeller and policy expert Li Shuo describe the economic forces behind this shift, and the obstacles that remain to the continued rise of green energy.
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1:15 The graph has mislabeled trend lines. "Other renewables" generate more energy than hydropower alone.

This is the same good news reported in PBS Terra says 'We Just Crossed Our FIRST Tipping Point… And It’s NOT What You Think'.

Unlike passing the other tipping points, like the AMOC, permafrost, West Antarctic ice sheet, and coral reefs, passing the renewable energy tipping point is good news. I wrote about it in DW News asks 'Earth Overshoot Day: What can we do to try live within the planet’s limits?'

[C]onvincing people to be less wasteful, particularly creating less food waste and eating less meat, especially beef, would be helpful. [One] could consider that to be a technology. So is renewable energy. Between the two, it would move Earth Overshoot Day back more than a month. Progress!

Yes, it is, and it's good news I can share with my students. Welcome to blogging as professional development.

Science Magazine's video is shorter and more focused than PBS Terra's, so it's one I'm more likely to show to my students. Again, welcome to blogging as professional development.

Here are the runners-up:

• Custom gene editing shows promise for ultrarare diseases
• New weapons against a sexual scourge
• Neurons make a deadly donation to cancer cells
• An all-seeing eye on the sky
• Face to face with a Denisovan
• Large language models do science
• Triumph of calculation helps resolve particle mystery
• Xenotransplants set new records
• Rice that beats the heat

Including the "winner," that's four health stories, two computer science stories, one of which is also a physics story, an astronomy story, an evolution story, a genetics story that touches on climate change, and an energy story that also touches on climate change. Six of these are biology in some form, so these selections please me as a biologist. One of them is also paleontology, so I'm doubly pleased as a paleontologist. All of that is on top of the good sustainability news.

Not all of 2025's science stories were good. Follow over the jump for the bad news this year.

I foreshadowed two of 2025's science breakdowns last year.

1. Lessons not learned from COVID-19: Worse than not learning the right lessons from the pandemic are learning the wrong lessons, and I think the responses to avian flu and mpox are among them. The re-election of convicted criminal Donald Trump and his nomination of RFK Jr. just make the possibilities even worse.

2. Science as collateral damage: The U.S. may suffer from this next year, but this year's dishonorees are Russia, Ukraine, Israel, and Argentina. May we learn from their bad examples!

Compare these with 2025's science breakdowns.

• Trump roils U.S. science
• Global health in crisis
• AI and fraud degrade the literature

It's not like I and others didn't warn you.

Science uploaded two videos about the first two breakdowns, beginning with How the Trump administration is dismantling science.

Executive orders, sweeping budget cuts, and other actions in the first 100 days of the Trump administration have had innumerable impacts on science in the United States and throughout the world. The scientific workforce, biomedical research, and global health initiatives all face widespread, perhaps permanent damage. Science news staff weigh in on how these changes have affected the funding and practice of scientific research, and what kinds of lasting impacts the administration may have on the global scientific enterprise.

A lot of this was in Project 2025, but some of it resulted from "Elon Musk's...Chainsaw Massacre of our federal workforce." The latter played a major role in the next Science video, The children left behind by U.S. global health cuts.

Science News staff traveled to communities that received U.S. global health aid to understand the impact of these cuts on the most vulnerable members of society: children. They focused on programs combatting malnutrition, malaria, and HIV/AIDS, three diseases for which U.S. aid has played a critical role.

"Years of progress wiped away" might be understating the impact. We could lose decades of progress.

I'm recycling what I wrote about the Economics Nobel Prize in Science, peace, economics, and literature winners for Nobel Prize Day 2025 and repeated in TODAY reveals TIME's people of the year for 2025.

This award is as much about technology as it is about economics. May it mean that AI be a net benefit for the economy. Right now, it looks like it's doing more destruction than creation.

Science is another field where AI is destroying as well as creating. AI also contributed to one of the breakthroughs.

That's a wrap for today's retrospective. Stay tuned for another tomorrow as the final Sunday entertainment feature of 2025.