From the linked study:
between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents […] total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2.
Oof, it very much reads like that’s total over 24 years, rather than per year. Global emissions being over 37 billion tonnes last year and rising, if my quick googling is to be believed.
a small fraction had a big impact
I wonder what glowing words would be left to describe a hypothetical situation where we were actually making things better, rather than just making them worse fractionally more slowly.
We all know that what has been done hasn’t been enough. But knowing which policies do something and which don’t is a big deal; it tells us to scale up policies which work to cover more of the world, and not to double down on ineffective approaches
It tells us that everything we’ve done so far is an ineffective approach, and therefore not really a big deal and to do anything useful we need a radical rethink. I think I envy your faith that scaling up our best approaches yet can resolve our predicament, though I’m not quite sure.
Although we do still need to keep an open mind. Most approaches take years to roll out. For example, Solar wasn’t very efficient in its infancy, but there have been massive improvements since then. Nobody was talking about e-bikes replacing many car journeys; they might not have got anywhere if we hadn’t already had big investments in battery and motor technology thanks to e-cars.