Good things are happening at this year’s UN Climate Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. These annual conferences, named for the number of years the meeting has been in existence, serve as the formal meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and assess progress in dealing with the crisis.

COP30 is attended by delegations from 193 countries, plus the European Union, enjoying the second largest attendance in COP history. Only four governments have not sent delegations: Afghanistan, Myanmar, San Marino and the United States, the latter in keeping with the Trump administration’s anti-environment policies.

Normally the U.S. would be sorely missed, but not this time. According to Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the Paris Climate Agreement, if the United States was there, it would only try to obstruct progress. “I do think they’ll be working through the Saudis,” she said, “but they won’t be able to do their direct bullying.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom, who is attending, along with other American governors and mayors, applauded Figueres’s comments, saying, “We [California] will fill that void. Donald Trump doesn’t understand how enthusiastic President Xi is that the U.S. is nowhere to be found at this conference.” China has the largest delegation after Brazil, the host.

One encouraging project is a bold plan to protect tropical forests. Led by Brazil, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) aims to raise $125 billion US and pay developing countries directly to halt deforestation. The initiative adds to a number of programs designed to save the forests.

The destruction of tropical forests threatens water and food security, biodiversity, and the livelihoods of millions, and is pushing us closer to climate tipping points. They provide essential carbon sinks that can help stabilize a warming planet. It is unfair to impose all the responsibility for safeguarding these critical resources on poorer countries.

According to its website, “The TFFF recognizes that a transparent, results-based, large-scale financing mechanism is required to reward those who have taken concrete and successful steps to keep their forests standing. It aims to finally recognize the ecosystem services of standing forests and provide adequate long-term finance that will match the potential conversion income and make the preservation of the forest a viable and reliable economic model.”

The facility is essentially an investment fund, with capital put up by donor countries and the private sector. According to Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, Norway’s environment minister, “The idea behind the TFFF is to create a permanent revenue stream, making it more profitable to allow forests to stand rather than to cut them down.” Norway has made the largest contribution yet announced. Appropriately, COP30 is being held in Belém, a city in the Amazon rainforest.

Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, when the leaders of nearly every country agreed to try to slow down global warming, we have seen mixed results.

The not so good news is that emissions are still rising, although not as fast. The world continues to heat up—the 10 years since the agreement was signed have been the hottest on record. And the demand for power soars, in part because of A.I. According to Bloomberg, the physical damage caused by global warming costs the world economy about $ 1.4 trillion US a year.

The good news is that solar power is spreading faster than was expected, mostly because of China. Led by solar, renewable energy is experiencing strong global growth, projected to more than double by 2030. Clean energy technologies are now attracting twice as much global investment as fossil fuels.

Progress is much to slow, but momentum appears to be building and has reached a point where decarbonizing the economy has become inevitable. The U.S. and its reactionary friends fight a rearguard action to increase reliance on fossil fuels, but the train has left the station. They can either hop on or watch it rumble by, China at the controls.