Our zero-emission future

The main obstacle isinertia: politicians continue to favour the fossil-fuel industry andtraditional agriculture mainly because they don’t know better or are onthe take.Most global warming, and a huge burden of air pollution,results from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and gas. The other mainsource of environmental destruction is agriculture, includingdeforestation, excessive fertiliser use, and methane emissions fromlivestock. The energy system should shift from heavily pollutingfossil fuels to clean, zero-carbon energy sources such as wind and solarpower, and the food system should shift from feed grains and livestockto healthier and more nutritious products. This combinedenergy-and-food transformation would cause net greenhouse-gas emissionsto fall to zero by mid-century and then become net negative, asatmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed by forests and soils.Reachingnet-zero emissions by mid-century, followed by negative emissions,would likely secure the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5? Celsiusrelative to Earth’s pre-industrial temperature. Alarmingly, warming hasalready reached 1.1?C, and the global temperature is rising around 0.2?Ceach decade. That’s why the world must reach net-zero emissions by 2050at the latest. The shift toward clean energy would prevent hundreds ofthousands of deaths each year from air pollution, and the shift tohealthy, environmentally sustainable diets could prevent around tenmillion deaths per year.A low-cost shift to clean energy is nowfeasible for every region of the world, owing to the plummeting costs ofsolar and wind power, and breakthroughs in energy storage. Thetotal system costs of renewable energy, including transmission andstorage, are now roughly on par with fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuelsstill get government preferences through subsidies, as a result ofincessant lobbying by Big Coal and Big Oil, and the lack of planning forrenewable alternatives.The key step is a massive increase in powergeneration from renewables, mainly wind and solar. Some downstreamenergy uses, such as automobile transport and home heating, will bedirectly electrified. Other downstream users – in industry, shipping,aviation, and trucking – will rely on clean fuels produced by renewableelectricity. Clean (zero-emission) fuels include hydrogen, syntheticliquids, and synthetic methane. At the same time, farms should shifttoward plant-based foods.Asia’s continued construction of coalplants, together with ongoing deforestation in Southeast Asia, Africa,and Brazil, is putting our climate, air, and nutrition at huge andwholly unnecessary risk. In the United States, the Trumpadministration’s promotion of fossil fuels, despite American’s vastrenewable-energy potential, adds to the absurdity. So does the renewedcall by Brazil’s new populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, to develop –that is, to deforest – the Amazon.So, what to do?The most urgentstep now is to educate governments and businesses. National governmentsshould prepare technical engineering assessments of their countries’potential to end greenhouse-gas emissions by mid-century. And businessesand banks should urgently examine the technologically compelling casefor clean, safe energy and food systems. An important new studyshows that every world region has the wind, solar, and hydropowerpotential to decarbonise the energy system. Countries at higherlatitudes, such as the US, Canada, northern European countries, andRussia, can tap relatively more wind than tropical countries. Allcountries can shift to electric cars, and power trucks, ships, planes,and factories on new zero-carbon fuels.This energy transition willcreate millions more jobs than will be cut in the fossil-fuelindustries. Shareholders in companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron thatrefuse to acknowledge the coming energy transition will end up paying aheavy price. Their ongoing fossil-fuel investments will be strandedassets in future years.Governments and utility commissions shouldrequire that all new power-generating capacity is zero carbon. As oldfossil-fuel plants age and are shut down, they should be replaced byclean power generation on a competitive basis, for example throughrenewable-energy auctions. China and India, in particular, should stopbuilding new coal-fired power plants at home, and capital-exportingcountries like China and Japan should stop financing new coal-firedplants in the rest of Asia, such as Pakistan and the Philippines.Private-sectorfirms will compete intensively to lower still further the costs ofrenewable energy systems, including power generation, energy storage,and downstream uses such as electric vehicles, electric heating andcooking, and the new hydrogen economy. Governments should set limits onemissions, and the private sector should compete to deliver low-costsolutions. Government and business together should finance new researchand development to drive costs even lower.The story with land use isthe same. If Bolsonaro really thinks he’s going to bring about aBrazilian economic boom by opening the Amazon to further deforestationfor soybeans and cattle ranches, he should think again. Such an effortwould isolate Brazil and force the major downstream food companies,facing the threat of a massive global consumer backlash, to stop buyingBrazilian products.Consumer foods are going another way. The bignews is that Burger King, in a new venture with Impossible Foods, ismoving toward plant-based burgers. Impossible burgers taste just likebeef burgers, but smart chemistry using plant-based ingredients allowsburger lovers to savour their meal while saving the planet.Bytransforming our energy and food systems, we can enjoy low-cost powerand healthy, satisfying diets without ruining the environment. Thehigh-school kids striking for climate safety have done their homework.Politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro need to do theirs or get out of theway. - Project Syndicate