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It’s hard to think of a more alarming news story: The United Nations said yesterday that the world failed to reduce carbon emissions in recent years and was on pace for catastrophic damage from climate change.

The U.N. called its own report “bleak,” and I know that bleakness can often lead to a sense of hopelessness. So I want to emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. In the last few years, some places have begun to show what a transition to a clean-energy economy would look like.

The main message from those places: We can do this.

As the report notes, 65 countries and some “subnational regions,” like California, have begun moving toward net zero greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2050. That’s the benchmark many scientists favor, because it has the potential to restrict planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — which would still be damaging but also radically different from, say, 2.5 degrees.