Discussion explores how to speed progress toward net-zero emissions

As part of a global effort to limit the extent of climate change and stave off its worst impacts, many nations, regional jurisdictions, and cities have set the goal of emitting zero net greenhouse gases by 2050. Getting there involves not just a major shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but also managing the benefits and costs of this sweeping transition in a way that distributes them fairly.

These complexities were explored in the first of a series of conversations exploring climate change, one that involved Stephen Pacala, chair of a National Academies committee that produced a recent report that lays out a roadmap for the first 10 years of a U.S. transition to an energy sector that produces no net emissions.

His partner in conversation was Benjamin Preston of the RAND Corporation’s Community Health and Environmental Policy Program. The discussion was moderated by Mariette DiChristina of Boston University’s College of Communication, who asked Preston to set the stage by explaining what “net-zero” and decarbonization actually mean.

“Decarbonization does not necessarily mean that we cannot emit any carbon; it just means that whatever we emit through human activities has to be removed through some mechanism — either other types of human activities or using the natural environment as another means of taking that carbon back out of the atmosphere,” said Preston.

Forests naturally absorb and store carbon, for example, and a range of technologies to capture emitted carbon and store it underground already exist or are in development, the National Academies report notes.

“So at the end of the day … we’re having no net impact on the atmosphere — which is the way the carbon cycle effectively worked before we came along and started the Industrial Revolution,” said Preston.

Charting a path toward net-zero
Reaching a net-zero economy would have been an extremely expensive prospect even four years ago, said Pacala, but it’s now within easier reach because of dramatic drops in the cost of generating renewable energy and storing energy. Driven by worldwide public investment in these technologies, the cost of solar energy has decreased 90% in the last 10 years, wind energy has dropped about 70%, and lithium ion batteries 85%. “That’s the cornerstone of the transition to a net-zero electricity system and a net-zero transport system.”

To reach net-zero by 2050, 75% of our electric grid should be non-emitting by 2030 — a goal that would require the U.S. to install wind and solar technologies at double its current pace by 2030, said Pacala. Fifty percent of cars and light-duty trucks also would need to run on electricity by then. “Those are the two sectors where we can make really material headway over the next 10 years.”  

“There are a lot of different levers that we can pull, and a lot of levers that we have to pull,” said Preston. Putting a price on carbon emissions would trigger action across different sectors of the economy, for example, but cities and states can also play a role in driving change and providing models for moving forward. In addition, the clean-tech industry is developing new technologies and linking up with traditional energy generation. “It’s a frothy, bubbly, really sort of fascinating space that will probably be part of the solution moving forward,” said Preston.

“In the U.S. we are better-resourced for a net-zero transition than just about any nation in the world,” said Pacala.  The U.S. has not only strong wind and solar resources but also the world’s best geologic reservoirs in which captured CO2 could be stored, along with a huge agricultural and forestry base to serve as a natural carbon sink, he said.  Finally, the country has an entrepreneurial culture that should allow the invention of needed technologies quickly. “One can argue that the U.S. is a more competitive economy in a decarbonized world than it is today.”

Managing the social harms and benefits
While the transition to net-zero will create economic opportunities and jobs, Pacala noted that those benefits won’t be distributed equally across the country, which presents a challenge. 

“There’s a broad consensus that you create more jobs than you destroy — a million or more new jobs conservatively, and they’re good jobs,” he said. “They’re jobs that are high-paying relative to American averages, and they’re primarily blue-collar jobs. The difficulty is, though, that those jobs aren’t necessarily in the same place as the fossil jobs today … That’s one of the biggest social problems we really have to manage.” 

“We have this opportunity to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them,” said Preston. “The U.S. industrial past is filled with examples where industries left — offshored, shut down — and there wasn’t much of a safety net in place to protect communities, retrain people, protect livelihoods, and to protect well-being.”

The path laid out by the recent National Academies report includes mechanisms to support these communities, Pacala explained. For example, it calls for a National Transition Task Force both to identify injustices in the current energy system and also to look ahead, supporting communities that will be affected by decarbonization.

The report also urges the establishment of a National Transition Corporation, which would deliver funds to support communities that will lose fossil fuel jobs. Communities could apply for funds to help attract and build new industries, retrain workers, and remediate legacy infrastructure. “The goal is to provide all of the workers in those towns with multiple options, both inside their town and elsewhere,” said Pacala.

‘Human ingenuity came to the rescue’
Asked by moderator DiChristina about the conversation’s key takeaways, Preston urged viewers to gauge progress not only by measuring progress toward net-zero emissions.  “Human and ecological well-being should be the benchmark by which we measure progress,” he said. “As you think about risks and opportunities, think about those criteria as being those you use to measure what’s a good technology and an appropriate pace for climate action — because at the end of the day that’s what we’re trying to deliver.”

Pacala recalled how through most of his career, the idea of net-zero was out of reach: People knew how to start making progress, but the technology didn’t exist to get all the way there. “And guess what? Human ingenuity came to the rescue, and now we know how to do it, and we can do it with a cost that is roughly comparable to what we’ve already been paying. That’s a triumph of humanity.”