What Might the Future Look Like If We Took Climate Change Seriously?

A new analysis lays out several detailed “pathways” to a low-carbon future for the United States, and offers practical guidance for policy makers.  The bottom line finding is that there are multiple ways we can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with known technologies and with an incremental cost equivalent to less than 1 percent of gross domestic product.  But the choices we make in the short term matter a lot if we want to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

This work is important because the negotiations in Lima last week set a positive direction for the international climate agreement planned for next December in Paris.  As the United States considers its strategy, it is important to reflect on what it would take – on a nuts and bolts level – to meet an aggressive climate target.  This includes talking about sources of energy, power lines, industrial facilities, homes and buildings, cars and trucks, and the fuels they run on – the physical infrastructure necessary to massively reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Fortunately, the United States has an important new resource to help answer these questions.  The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP), convened by several nonprofit organizations affiliated with the United Nations, recently released a preliminary technical report and identified four technology “pathways” that America could take to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.  This is a target that would allow the United States to do its part to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, an objective agreed upon by the international community to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change.  The United States is not doing this analysis in isolation.  There are 14 other high-emitting countries (including China, India and Brazil) that are part of the DDPP doing similar concrete analyses to identify pathways to reduce their carbon emissions (i.e. to “decarbonize”).  The United States team includes the consulting firm Energy and Environmental Economics (E3), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The results are stunning both in their detail and in the stark clarity of the key principles they highlight.  The analysis explores four scenarios described by the technology they use most heavily to meet the GHG target:  High Renewables, High Nuclear, High Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and a Mixed Case that uses a combination of these technologies.  They find that it may be possible for any of these technologies, or a combination, to meet the target at a relatively modest cost – less than 1 percent of gross domestic product.  And that doesn’t account for the benefits of avoiding the human and infrastructure costs of climate change and air pollution.

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