How to Avoid a Climate Disaster • Juan's blog

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Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.

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The case for zero was, and is, rock solid. Unless we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, the temperature will keep going up. Here’s an analogy that’s especially helpful: The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it. The only sensible goal is zero.

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I wrote this book because I see not just the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it. That’s not pie-in-the-sky optimism. We already have two of the three things you need to accomplish any major undertaking. First, we have ambition, thanks to the passion of a growing global movement led by young people who are deeply concerned about climate change. Second, we have big goals for solving the problem as more national and local leaders around the world commit to doing their part. Now we need the third component: a concrete plan to achieve our goals.

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Even the most powerful storm typically lasts only a few days, but its impact can reverberate for years. There’s the loss of life, a tragedy in its own right that can leave survivors both heartbroken and, often, destitute. Hurricanes and floods also destroy buildings, roads, and power lines that took years to build. All of that property can eventually be replaced, of course, but doing so siphons off money and time that could be put into new investments that help the economy grow. You’re always trying to catch up to where you were, instead of getting ahead. One study estimated that Hurricane Maria in 2017 set Puerto Rico’s infrastructure back more than two decades. How long before the next storm comes along and sets it back again? We don’t know.

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“The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

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Tip: Remember that emissions come from five different activities, and we need solutions in all of them.

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How much is the premium? Changing America’s entire electricity system to zero-carbon sources would raise average retail rates by between 1.3 and 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly 15 percent more than what most people pay now. That adds up to a Green Premium of $18 a month for the average home—pretty affordable for most people, though possibly not for low-income Americans, who already spend a tenth of their income on energy.

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Using less. I used to scoff at the notion that using power more efficiently would make a dent in climate change. My rationale: If you have limited resources to reduce emissions (and we do), then you’d get the biggest impact by moving to zero emissions rather than by spending a lot trying to reduce the demand for energy.

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Here’s the conundrum: 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. Assuming we don’t make any improvements in the amount of food we get per acre of pasture or cropland, growing enough to feed 10 billion people will drive up food-related emissions by two-thirds.

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But this isn’t primarily a technological problem. It’s a political and economic problem. 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. So we need political and economic solutions, including paying countries to maintain their forests, enforcing rules designed to protect certain areas, and making sure rural communities have different economic opportunities so they don’t have to extract natural resources just to survive.

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Another drawback is that it takes an hour or more to fully charge an EV, yet you can gas up your car in less than five minutes. In addition, using them to avoid carbon emissions works only if we’re generating electricity from zero-carbon sources. This is another reason why the breakthroughs I mentioned in chapter 4 are so important. If we get our power from coal and then charge up our electric cars with coal-fired electricity, we’ll just be swapping one fossil fuel for another.

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Here’s what that means in practical terms. According to a 2017 study by two mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo. And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would need so many batteries that it could hardly carry any cargo at all.

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In short, 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. The idea isn’t to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it’s to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives.

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Governments (as well as big companies) can help energy start-ups make it out of the valley alive because they’re massive consumers. If they prioritize buying green, they’ll help bring more products to market by creating certainty and reducing costs.

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And—this is a really important point—lowering the Green Premiums that the world pays is not charity. Countries like the United States shouldn’t see investing in clean energy R&D as just a favor to the rest of the world. They should also see it as an opportunity to make scientific breakthroughs that will give birth to new industries composed of major new companies, creating jobs and reducing emissions at the same time.

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Be an early adopter.