The climate is not the only thing that changes.
What comes next in the nation’s struggle to fight global warming is likely to transform the way Americans drive, where they get their power from and other parts of everyday life, both quietly and obviously, experts say. So far, America’s greening has been subtle, driven by market forces, technology and voluntary actions.
The Biden government is about to change that.
In a flood of executive actions In his first eight days in office, the president is trying to steer the United States economy from a fossil-fuel economy to one that no longer emits heat-trapping gases into the air by 2050.
The United States is returning to the Paris international climate agreement and is also joining many other nations in setting an ambitious goal that previously seemed unattainable: net zero carbon emissions in the middle of the century. This means many changes aimed at combating increasingly expensive climate disasters, such as forest fires, floods, droughts, storms and heat waves.
Think of the journey to a carbon-free economy like a car trip from Washington, DC to California, which started about 15 years ago. “We managed to get through Ohio and get to the Indiana border. But the road has been pretty quiet so far. Things get more difficult ahead, ”said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute.
“The Biden administration is accelerating and working to update our vehicle,” said Hausfather.
The end results of some of Biden’s new efforts may not yet be noticeable, as his energy eventually comes from increasingly cheaper wind and solar energy instead of coal and natural gas that now supplies 59% of American energy. But when it comes to going from here to there, you’ll notice.
General Motors announced on Thursday that from 2035 it expects to become fully electric for their light vehicles, no longer selling gas cars. Experts expect most new cars sold in 2030 to be electric. The Biden government has pledged 550,000 charging stations to help transition to electric cars.
“You will no longer go to a gas station, but you will need to load your vehicle at home or on the road,” said Kate Larsen, director of international climate policy research at Rhodium Group. “It can be a whole new way of thinking about transportation for the average person.”
But it will still be your car, which is why most of the major climate action over the next 10 years will not be very noticeable, said Princeton University ecologist Stephen Pacala.
“The biggest difference is that, as wind and solar energy are distributed, you will see much more in the landscape,” said Pacala, who leads a decarbonization study of America by the National Academy of Sciences that will be launched next week.
Other recent detailed scientific studies show that, due to the drop in prices of wind, solar energy and batteries, Biden’s goal of zero net carbon can be achieved much cheaper than feared in the past and with benefits to health “many, many times” exceeding costs, said Pacala, who was part of a study in Princeton. These studies agree on what needs to be done for decarbonisation, and what Biden presented “is to do the things that everyone is now concluding that we must do,” said Pacala.
This is the kind of shift that doesn’t cost much – about $ 1 a day per person – and doesn’t require people to abandon their current cars and furnaces, but replace them with cleaner electric vehicles and heat pumps when the time comes. of a new one, said Margaret Torn, a senior science at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who co-authored a peer-reviewed study Wednesday
Part of the problem, said study co-author Ryan Jones, co-founder of Evolved Energy Research, is that for years people mistakenly portrayed the battle against climate change as a “problem of personal morality”, in which individuals need to sacrifice themselves by driving and flying less, decreasing the heat and eating less meat.
“In fact, climate change is a problem in the industry economy where most of the big solutions are happening under the hood or upstream of people’s homes,” said Jones. “It is a major change in the way we produce and consume energy. It is not a change in people’s daily lives or it need not be. “
A Biden interim target – “a carbon-free energy sector by 2035” – may not be feasible so quickly, but it can be done by 2050, said study co-author Jim Williams of the University of San Francisco.
Biden’s executive orders presented plans for a fully electric federal vehicle fleet, conserving 30% of the country’s land and water, doubling the country’s offshore wind energy and funding to help communities become more resilient to climate disasters. Republicans and fossil fuel interests objected, calling the stock killers jobs.
“Using the incredible leverage of federal government purchases of green electricity, zero-emission cars and new infrastructure will quickly increase demand for climate-friendly technologies grown at home,” said Rosina Bierbaum, professor of environmental policy at the University of Michigan.
The next big thing for the government is to reach a Paris climate agreement goal – called a Nationally Determined Contribution – how much the United States expects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It should be ambitious for the president to reach his ultimate goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, but it must also be doable.
His government promises to reveal the target, required by the climate agreement, but not binding, before the Earth Day climate summit on April 22.
This new number “is actually the centrally important activity for next year,” said University of Maryland environment professor Nate Hultman, who worked on the Obama administration’s Paris goal.
Reaching net zero carbon emissions in the middle of the century means a 43% cut from 2005 levels – the baseline the US government uses – by 2030, said Larsen of the Rhodium Group. The United States can realistically achieve a 40% cut by 2030, which is about a third of the reduction from what U.S. carbon emissions in 2020 would have been without a pandemic, said Williams, the San Francisco professor.
All of this work with energy and vehicles is easy compared to decarbonizing agriculture with high methane emissions from livestock and high-heat industrial processes, such as steelmaking, said Hausfather of Breakthrough.
“There is no magic solution for agriculture,” said Hausfather. “There are no solar panels for cows, so to speak, other than meat alternatives, but even there you have challenges in terms of consumer acceptance.”
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Read The Associated Press climate stories at https://apnews.com/hub/climate
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.
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