Climate change can seem like a problem that’s either too big – or too far down the road – to solve.
But we know the main sources of the majority of today’s global greenhouse gas emissions: manufacturing (31 percent), electricity (27 percent), agriculture (19 percent), transportation (16 percent), and buildings (7 percent). To get to zero, we’ll need to tackle all of these Five Grand Challenges – and we need to get started right away.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in any of these sectors, we know we have to speed up the cycle of innovation and attract patient, risk-tolerant capital. That means investing in research and development, creating market demand for clean technologies, and designing public policy that encourages consumers and companies to make environmentally-friendly choices across all Five Grand Challenges.
How We Make Things
Manufactured goods and materials – the cement in our buildings, the steel in our appliances, the clothes we wear, the books we read, the plastic in the device you’re using to read this sentence – these account for nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. To bring this sector to net zero, we need clean electricity and production processes to make things whenever possible. When it’s not, we need to scale up technology that captures and stores carbon so that it doesn’t enter the atmosphere. Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC) technologies, which store carbon underground or use it to produce carbon-based products, can help us reach net zero if we put these solutions into widespread use.
Every ton of cement creates a ton of carbon dioxide. The U.S. produces more than 96 million tons of cement a year - nearly 600 pounds per person.
How We Plug In
Thanks to technological advances and policy incentives, the costs of onshore wind and solar power have declined by 44 percent and 87 percent respectively since 2005. But while we are using more solar and wind than ever before, they aren’t always available, and we still rely heavily on fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emitting technologies to power our lives. We need to find new ways to generate, store, and use low-carbon electricity all over the world while scaling up existing technologies like wind and solar, advanced nuclear power, geothermal energy, and thermal generation with carbon capture.
Energy demand is expected to increase 50 percent by 2050.
How We Grow Things
Some emissions from agriculture come from nitrous oxides in the soil itself. Others come from the livestock we raise for meat and dairy, which produce methane. Bringing these emissions to zero while still meeting growing global demand for food will require us to make significant changes to the ways we farm and eat. That means reducing the use of fertilizers, improving soil management, cutting methane emissions from livestock, and minimizing the consumption and waste of high-carbon foods, including by scaling up new technologies like plant-based meat and dairy products.
There is more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined.
How We Get Around
The internal combustion engine has changed everything about the way we live, but it has come with a steep price. While transportation emissions represent only about one-sixth of the global total, fossil fuel combustion in cars, trucks, trains, planes, and ships is the leading source of emissions in the U.S. And as transportation infrastructure continues to improve in the developing world, transportation emissions are projected to go up 50% by 2040. From electric vehicles to low-carbon fuels, getting transportation to zero will require a complete transformation of the way goods and people move from place to place.
One gallon of gas has as much energy as 130 sticks of dynamite.
How We Live
Buildings emit carbon in two ways: when we build them (using manufactured cement, steel, and iron) and when we use them (with heating and air-conditioning). While we can make existing buildings more energy efficient, we cannot change the emissions released when they were built. And there is a lot of building happening: by 2060, the world’s building stock is expected to double. In fact, we are effectively adding a new New York City to the planet every month for the next 40 years. From greener materials to cleaner industrial processes, we must find ways to build and use buildings without emitting carbon.
The world’s building stock is growing so fast that it’s like adding a new New York City every month for the next 40 years.
