Save Our Happy Place is a climate action newsletter dedicated to making it easy for you to help protect the places you love from climate change, written by Lindsay Nunez. Read on for simple yet effective climate actions, and sustainable + eco-friendly lifestyle tips.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday filled with relaxation, recuperation, and some fun! To end our year on a high note, let’s revisit some of the biggest climate wins from 2022. Some monumental shifts were made this year. These made even the most cynical and fatalistic of us a little more optimistic about actually being able to stop the worse effects of climate change. If seeing is believing, then let these victories inspire you to keep fighting the good fight in 2023. Happy New Year!

Good Climate News of Auld Lang Syne

The Top 7 Climate Wins of 2022

1. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act

The Inflation Reduction Act is the most expansive, significant, and impactful investment in our green future that has ever come from the U.S. Congress. Overall $369 billion will be invested in energy, climate, and environmental protections as well as climate justice over the next 10 years. The bill should stimulate a remarkable renewable energy boom, create clean energy jobs, and help the U.S. curb greenhouse gas emissions up to 40 percent, below 2005 levels, by 2030.

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2. Climate Leader Elected as President of Brazil

After winning Brazil’s Presidential Election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged to end deforestation in Amazon. He has a proven history of decreasing deforestation in the Amazon. The Amazon Rainforest is considered the lungs of our planet. Deforestation under former Brazilian President Bolsonaro increased from 3,000 sq miles a year to over 10,000 sq miles a year. Replacing Bolsonaro with a pro-climate President is a huge victory for the environmental movement.

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3. Loss and Damage Funding at COP 27

The United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27 created a landmark agreement to provide “loss and damage” funding for low-income, vulnerable countries. These countries are disproportionately hit by climate disasters despite their minimal contributions to the climate crisis.

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4. World’s First Plastic Treaty

The United Nations approved a groundbreaking agreement to create the world’s first-ever global plastic pollution treaty. The treaty will be legally binding and is due to be finalized by 2024.

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5. IEA Report Forecasts Renewables Will Overtake Coal by Early 2025

Renewables are set to outpace coal as the largest source of electricity by early 2025. This is a 30% jump from the forecasts made this time last year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted an energy crisis, catalyzing countries to move to renewables and limit reliance on fossil fuels from other countries.

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6. Agreement Reached to Protect a Third of Nature by 2030

At what was considered to be the "last chance" to put nature on a path to recovery, the COP15 UN Biodiversity Summit reached a compromise to protect a third of the planet’s nature including vital ecosystems such as rainforests and wetlands and the rights of indigenous peoples. Previously only 14.6% of the land globally was designated as protected. This is considered real progress to halt biodiversity loss.

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7. Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Energy Breakthrough

Last but certainly not least, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA, were able to reproduce the power of the sun in a laboratory through nuclear fusion. This was the first time, scientists were able to create more energy than went into producing it. This is on the path to becoming a game-changing renewable energy source. Continued advancements in nuclear fusion, technology, and an updated electric grid are needed before we can rely on this achievement.

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