Doerr’s 2026 Climate Report: Clean Energy Booms Amid Stark Failures

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 20, 2026 – Legendary investor John Doerr today issued an urgent call to action, warning that despite record progress in clean energy, the world remains dangerously off course in its fight against climate change. The call came with the release of the 2026 Speed & Scale Tracker, an exhaustive data-driven report card on the global energy transition.

The updated tracker, from Doerr’s Speed & Scale initiative, paints a picture of a world at a pivotal and paradoxical juncture. On one hand, the transition to clean energy is gaining unstoppable momentum, driven by economic advantages and geopolitical necessity. On the other, overall global emissions continue to climb, and progress in critical sectors has stalled, threatening to undermine the path to net zero.

“Three forces are converging for the first time—and they're presenting us with a better path forward,” said Doerr, chair of Kleiner Perkins, in a letter accompanying the release. “Only clean energy delivers abundance that lasts. We must build clean energy to displace fossil fuels. The two go hand in hand.”

A New Geopolitical and Economic Reality

The report argues that the case for clean energy has transcended environmentalism to become a core tenet of economic and national security. Doerr identifies three converging forces reshaping the global landscape: surging electricity demand, the growing geopolitical advantage of clean technology, and the disruptive market forces of plummeting clean energy costs.

The geopolitical imperative has been thrown into sharp relief by recent global conflicts. The press release explicitly notes that the “war in Iran has exposed the fragility of dependence on oil and gas,” creating volatility and reinforcing the strategic weakness of relying on fossil fuels from unstable regions. This instability, the report suggests, makes domestically produced renewable energy not just a green choice, but a strategic one.

This push is powerfully combined with a compelling economic pull. The tracker highlights staggering cost reductions over the past decade, with the price of solar power falling by 75%, wind by 55%, and the batteries that power electric vehicles and store grid energy by a remarkable 89%. These dramatic price drops are no longer theoretical; they are fueling record adoption and fundamentally altering the energy market.

A Tale of Two Transitions

Digging into the tracker’s data reveals a starkly divided story of progress. In a few highly visible sectors, the clean energy transition is not just happening—it’s accelerating at a pace few predicted.

Passenger transport is a clear leader. Electric vehicles (EVs) have crossed a critical tipping point, now accounting for one in four new car sales globally. The world’s EV fleet has exploded from just one million vehicles in 2015 to 56 million in 2024. In the power sector, renewables are now generating more electricity worldwide than coal, once the undisputed king of global power generation. These are monumental achievements that demonstrate rapid, large-scale transformation is possible.

“Global emissions are still rising, but there are real bright spots—places where the clean transition is already delivering,” said Ryan Panchadsaram, co-author of Speed & Scale.

However, the tracker cautions against celebrating these victories without acknowledging the vast and perilous gaps that remain. Progress is dangerously concentrated. While power and passenger cars advance, the world is failing dramatically in other crucial areas. The decarbonization of heavy industry, responsible for a massive share of global emissions, is barely off the starting blocks. According to the report, there is no net-zero facility for primary steel production anywhere in the world, and only a single one for cement. To meet climate goals, thousands of each are needed.

This finding is echoed by independent analysis from the Mission Possible Partnership, which tracks progress in these “hard-to-abate” sectors and has called for a seven-fold acceleration in project development to meet 2030 targets. The challenge is further compounded by a significant investment shortfall. Research from BloombergNEF noted that while overall clean energy investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, investment in industrial decarbonization and carbon capture actually fell in 2024 due to high costs and policy uncertainty.

Measuring What Matters: The OKR Playbook

To cut through the noise, Speed & Scale employs a novel methodology borrowed from Silicon Valley: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The goal-setting framework, famous for driving growth at companies like Google and Intel, is used to translate the immense challenge of climate change into a clear, measurable, and data-driven action plan. The tracker assesses progress across every sector of the economy, measuring it not in vague promises but in gigatons of carbon emissions.

This approach provides an unflinching, quantitative view of where the world is winning and losing. For example, the objective for cement is to build 3,300 zero-carbon facilities by 2050; the current status is labeled as “Failing.” In contrast, the goal to scale the global EV fleet is currently rated “On Track.”

Panchadsaram emphasized the framework's diagnostic power. “Where progress has stalled or is going in reverse, the gaps should be read as signposts for decisionmakers to speed up investment and supercharge deployment.” By making the shortfalls as visible as the successes, the tracker aims to direct capital, policy, and innovation to the areas of most urgent need.

Bridging the Chasm

The central message of the 2026 Speed & Scale Tracker is that momentum in a few sectors is not enough. The world cannot reach net zero by simply buying more Teslas and installing more solar panels. The deep, systemic challenge lies in the industrial backbone of the global economy and in protecting the natural world.

Closing this gap will require a monumental push in both investment and policy. While overall clean energy investment is at a record high, it remains just over a third of the annual level that BNEF estimates is required to stay on a net-zero trajectory. The most significant shortfalls are in the very sectors Speed & Scale identifies as lagging.

Experts argue that overcoming this inertia requires a new playbook. This includes massive public and private investment in R&D for new industrial processes, government policies like green public procurement to create markets for low-carbon steel and cement, and advance market commitments from corporations to de-risk investment in first-of-their-kind clean industrial facilities. Without a concerted global effort to tackle these hard-to-abate sectors, the bright spots in the energy transition risk being overshadowed by a catastrophic failure to meet the climate challenge.