These meetings could never have stopped either the expansion of China’s coal extraction (it more than tripled between 1995 and 2019, to nearly as much as the rest of the world combined) or the just-noted worldwide preference for massive SUVs, and they could not have dissuaded millions of families from purchasing—as soon as their rising incomes allowed—new air conditioners that will work through the hot humid nights of monsoonal Asia and hence will not be energized by solar electricity anytime soon.81 The combined effect of these demands: between 1992 and 2019, the global emissions of CO2 rose
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