Twelve winters ago, as a Wall Street Journal reporter, I spent two dark weeks in Copenhagen covering a round of global-warming negotiations billed as existentially important to the planet. The 2009 Copenhagen climate talks sought to lock down commitments by industrialized countries to bankroll a clean-energy transformation in developing ones. The summit ended as a dud — more chest-thumping by partisans on all sides of the decarbonization debate than an attempt to build a coalition for an environmental transformation.

Since then, however, technology has advanced in ways Copenhagen climate campaigners only dreamed of. For any number of green machines — solar panels, wind turbines, batteries — costs have plummeted and installations have soared. In many parts of the world, studies calculate, installing renewable energy now is cheaper than building coal-fired plants. Renewable energy is ascendant.

There’s just one problem: So, still, are carbon emissions.

Through the end of this week, the movers and shakers of the international economy are gathered at another climate conference, this time in Glasgow. The ambitions have grandly grown; today, governments and corporations are promising, somehow, to slash their emissions to “net zero” by mid-century. Yet the focus in Glasgow remains largely the same as it was in Copenhagen: getting the biggest economies to invest more in clean energy in the countries whose emissions are growing the fastest.

But the history of the past dozen years shows that laboratory progress and overseas investment aren’t enough decarbonize growth in the nations that matter most for the future of the climate — countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and others beyond Southeast Asia, including in Latin America and Africa. Just as important as gear and cash, and harder to deliver, are workable strategies to rewire these countries’ political economies.

Read the full article about climate infrastructure by Jeffrey Ball at Brookings.