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Nuclear fusion. There’s another, entirely different approach to nuclear power that’s quite promising but still at least a decade away from supplying electricity to consumers.
Although it’s still in the experimental phase, fusion holds a lot of promise. Because it would run on commonly available elements like hydrogen, the fuel would be cheap and plentiful. The main type of hydrogen that’s usually used in fusion can be extracted from seawater, and there’s enough of it to meet the world’s energy needs for many thousands of years.
The biggest project currently under construction, a collaboration between six countries and the European Union, is an experimental facility in southern France known as ITER (pronounced like “eater”). Construction on the project began in 2010 and is still ongoing. By the mid-2020s, ITER is expected to generate its first plasma, and to generate excess power—10 times more than it needs to operate—in the late 2030s.
Here’s the problem: Right now, it’s expensive to produce hydrogen without emitting carbon. It’s not as efficient as storing the electricity directly in a battery, because first you have to use electricity to make hydrogen and then later you use that hydrogen to make electricity. Taking all these steps means you lose energy along the way.
we’ll be producing 50 percent more steel by mid-century than we do today,
Making 1 ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.
Several other countries now produce more raw steel than the United States does—China, India, and Japan among them—and by 2050 the world will be producing roughly 2.8 billion tons every year. That adds up to 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide released every year by mid-century, just from making steel, unless we find a new, climate-friendly way to do it.
After burning the limestone, you end up with the thing you want—calcium for your cement—plus something you don’t want: carbon dioxide. Nobody knows of a way to make cement without going through this process. It’s a chemical reaction—limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide—and there’s no way around it. It’s a one-to-one relationship. Make a ton of cement, and you’ll get a ton of carbon dioxide.
Like cement and steel, plastics are cheap because fossil fuels are cheap.
When we make cement or steel, we release carbon dioxide as an inevitable by-product, but when we make a plastic, around half of the carbon stays in the plastic.
To figure the Green Premiums on materials, you need to understand where emissions come from when we make things. I think of it in three stages: We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.
the final cost to consumers isn’t the only factor that matters. Suppose you’re an engineer working for the City of Seattle, and you’re reviewing bids to repair one of our many bridges. One bid comes in charging $125 a ton for cement, and another comes in charging $250 a ton, having added on the cost for carbon capture. Which one will you pick? Without some incentive to opt for the zero-carbon cement, you’ll go with the cheaper one.
There are different ways to bring the premiums down. One is by using public policies to create demand for clean products—for example, by creating incentives or even requirements to buy zero-carbon cement or steel.
Businesses are much more likely to pay the premium for clean materials if the law requires it, their customers demand it, and their competitors are doing it.
Raising animals for food is a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions; it ranks as the highest contributor in the sector that experts call “agriculture, forestry, and other land use,” which in turn covers a huge range of human activity, from raising animals and growing crops to harvesting trees.
We need to produce much more food than we do today, but if we keep producing it with the same methods we use now, it will be a disaster for the climate.
As the world eats more meat, it accelerates the deforestation in Latin America. More burgers anywhere mean fewer trees there.
People cut down trees not because people are evil; they do it when the incentives to cut down trees are stronger than the incentives to leave them alone.
Taking all these factors into account, the math suggests you’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world. Those trees would have to be maintained forever. And that’s just for the United States—we haven’t accounted for any other country’s emissions.
Ironically, the very thing we’ll be doing to survive in a warmer climate—running air conditioners—could make climate change worse.
To decarbonize our air conditioners, we need to decarbonize our power grids.
emissions will keep going up, and we’ll be stuck in a vicious cycle, making our homes and offices progressively cooler while making the climate progressively hotter.
Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world’s buildings.
The cruel injustice is that even though the world’s poor are doing essentially nothing to cause climate change, they’re going to suffer the most from it.
don’t take away vaccine money and put it into electric cars. Africa is responsible for only about 2 percent of all global emissions. What you really should be funding there is adaptation. The best way we can help the poor adapt to climate change is to make sure they’re healthy enough to survive it. And to thrive despite it.”
Despite its penchant for alphabet soup, CGIAR will be indispensable in creating new climate-smart crops and livestock for the world’s poor farmers.
One study by a UN agency found that if women had the same access to resources as men, they could grow 20 to 30 percent more food on their farms and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 to 17 percent.
only a tiny sliver of the $500 billion that governments spent on agriculture between 2014 and 2016 was directed at activities that will soften the blow of climate change for the poor.
Extreme poverty has plummeted in the past quarter century, from 36 percent of the world’s population in 1990 to 10 percent in 2015—although COVID-19 was a huge setback that undid a great deal of progress. Climate change could erase even more of these gains, increasing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 13 percent.
“policy” is a vague, dull-sounding word. A big breakthrough like a new type of battery would be sexier than the policies that led some chemist to invent it. But the breakthrough wouldn’t even exist without a government spending tax dollars on research, policies designed to drive that research out of the lab and into the market, and regulations that created markets and made it easy to deploy at scale.
innovation is not just a matter of developing new devices. It’s also a matter of developing new policies
Now it’s time to turn our policy-making experience to the challenge at hand: zeroing out our greenhouse gas emissions.
when it comes to massive undertakings—whether it’s building a national highway system, vaccinating the world’s children, or decarbonizing the global economy—we need the government to play a huge role in creating the right incentives and making sure the overall system will work for everyone.
Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D. The electronics and pharmaceutical industries, by contrast, spend nearly 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
In some sectors, like digital technology, the government-to-company handoff happens relatively quickly. With clean energy, it takes much longer and requires even more financial commitment from the government, because the scientific and engineering work is so time-consuming and expensive.
we can reduce Green Premiums by making carbon-free things cheaper (which involves technical innovation), by making carbon-emitting things more expensive (which involves policy innovation), or by doing some of both.
policy makers need to be clear about the goal they’re trying to achieve and aware of the technologies they’re trying to promote.
when we focus on all three things at once—technology, policies, and markets—we can encourage innovation, spark new companies, and get new products into the market fast.
What we can do—and need to do—in the next 10 years is adopt the policies that will put us on a path to deep decarbonization by 2050.
Making reductions by 2030 the wrong way might actually prevent us from ever getting to zero.
we’re better off pursuing two strategies at the same time: First, going all out to deliver zero-carbon electricity cheaply and reliably; and second, electrifying as widely as possible—everything from vehicles to industrial processes and heat pumps, even in places that currently rely on fossil fuels for their electricity.
If we think the only thing that matters is reducing emissions by 2030, then this approach would be a failure, since it might deliver only marginal reductions within a decade.
In energy, software, and just about every other pursuit, it’s a mistake to think of innovation only in the strict, technological sense. Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. Innovation is both new devices and new ways of doing things.
Innovation is not just a matter of inventing a new machine or some new process; it’s also coming up with new approaches to business models, supply chains, markets, and policies that will help new inventions come to life and reach a global scale. Innovation is both new devices and new ways of doing things.
Quintuple clean energy and climate-related R&D over the next decade. Direct public investment in research and development is one of the most important things we can do to fight climate change, but governments aren’t doing nearly enough of it.
Government policies should be technology neutral (benefiting any solutions that reduce emissions, rather than a few favored ones), predictable (as opposed to regularly expiring and then getting extended, as happens frequently now), and flexible (so that many different companies and investors can take advantage of them, not just those with large federal tax bills).
Even cost-competitive low-carbon technologies won’t be able to gain market share if the infrastructure isn’t in place to get them to market in the first place. Governments at all levels need to help get that infrastructure built. This includes transmission lines for wind and solar, charging stations for electric vehicles, and pipelines for captured carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
Electricity markets that were designed around 20th-century technologies often put 21st-century technologies at a disadvantage.
every national government needs to do three things.
To get to zero by 2050, we’ll need to have the policy and market structures in place by 2030.
