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Here’s where things stand now, according to the International Energy Agency.
Two years ago, the International Energy Agency sent shockwaves through the climate community when it published its first net-zero by 2050 roadmap. The report made a declaration that proved to be a sort of energy transition Rorschach test: “There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net-zero pathway,” it said.
Climate advocates quickly began talking up the fact that the authoritative IEA was calling for an end to fossil fuels. But from another perspective, the statement highlighted the scale of the challenge ahead. In order to forego more fossil fuel supplies, there would have to be an unprecedented deployment of clean energy, efficiency improvements, behavioral changes, and technological advancements. The world was not on track for that net-zero pathway in 2021. And while a lot has changed in two years — much of it in the right direction — that’s still the case.
On Tuesday, the IEA published an update to its blueprint for hitting net-zero and halting warming by mid-century. The research group insists that it’s still possible to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, with a brief period where temperatures tip above that benchmark, but “the path has narrowed.”
Here are seven charts from the report that show the good, the bad, and the ugly of where we’re at and where we need to be.
One of the most hopeful takeaways from the report is that two key clean technologies — solar installations and electric vehicle adoptions — are already being deployed at a pace in line with achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Not only are they on track today, but companies’ plans to expand their manufacturing capacity for EVs and solar would enable us to deploy about 30% more than the IEA’s roadmap requires.
This is huge, since those two technologies alone are responsible for about 30% of emission reductions between now and 2030 in the roadmap.
The report also highlights rapid growth in two other key, mass-manufactured technologies — heat pumps and energy storage for the electric grid.
IEA
Though solar has seen steady growth since 2015, there was a significant uptick between 2021 and 2022, when about a third of all installations took place. Similarly, about 60% of total electric car sales took place in that one-year period.
Much of this growth has taken place in advanced economies like the European Union and the United States, but the vast majority has taken place in China. In 2022, the nation was responsible for more than 40% of the global deployment of solar panels and nearly 60% of electric vehicles.
Another chart from the report that I find particularly hopeful shows how much less energy the world will need, overall, if we electrify everything that we possibly can. That’s because solutions like electric vehicles and heat pumps are inherently much more efficient than the fossil fuel-burning boilers and engines they replace. The world would use 15 exajoules less energy annually simply by switching fully to electric cars and heat pumps alone. That’s about the amount that the entire nation of Japan uses in a year.
IEA
Despite significant clean energy progress in the last two years, emissions remain “stubbornly high,” the IEA notes. Global carbon emissions reached a new high of 37 gigatons in 2022, with most of that growth driven by China and other developing economies.
IEA
The report also warns that current planned investments in fossil fuel supplies, power plants, and other end uses are estimated to be about $3.6 trillion higher by 2035 than they are in the net-zero roadmap.
Getting on track for net-zero already requires shutting many existing fossil fuel plants before they are fully paid off. The challenge will only get harder if we build more. “Further delaying the hard choices necessary to reach global net zero emissions by 2050 would make the problems substantially worse, and much harder to solve,” the report says.
In 2022, scientists estimated that the world’s carbon “budget,” the amount we could emit before surpassing 1.5 degrees C, was around 380 gigatons of CO2. The figure below shows we might emit nearly double that amount by 2050 if we don’t make the tough decision to shut down existing fossil fuel power plants early. This is especially an issue that China will need to confront, the report notes, as it has a large fleet of young coal plants and accounts for nearly half of the emissions in the chart below.
IEA
One of the gravest charts in the report pertains to a topic that doesn’t get enough daylight in western discussions of the energy transition. A tenth of the global population still lacks access to electricity, and a third use polluting open fires or stoves that threaten their health.
IEA
The electricity chart’s downward slope, which is due to major electrification efforts in India and Indonesia, shows it’s possible to turn this trend around. But access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa has decreased. Throughout the report, the IEA emphasizes that success in reaching net-zero hinges on stronger international cooperation and support for developing economies. The roadmap requires clean energy investment to increase sevenfold in developing economies other than China by 2030.
There has been a long-running debate among energy experts and climate advocates about how to improve energy access in the developing world. Should countries be allowed to exploit their fossil fuel reserves, the way wealthy countries have? Or should they “leap-frog” fossil fuels and go straight to renewables? The chart below, which shows the energy mix the IEA has modeled, has solar providing more than half of modern electricity access by 2030.
IEA
Okay, I cheated — there’s one more chart worthy of your time, and it doesn’t fall neatly within my good, bad, and ugly rubric. It’s about individual action.
The IEA’s net-zero roadmap illustrates just one potential pathway out of many to keeping climate change in check. It’s based on all kinds of assumptions about energy demand, policies, and costs. But it also makes assumptions about something that’s incredibly hard to model — human behavior.
The authors put about 1 gigaton of emissions mitigation into the hands of the people. I don’t want to put this entirely on you and me — policy support can go a long way to helping us make these changes. But if we don’t start flying less, driving less, and taking steps to make our buildings more efficient, this monumental project of unprecedented technological advancement and clean energy deployment will be much, much harder.
IEA
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Current conditions: Colorado’s major snow storm will continue well into the weekend • More than 900 people in Pakistan were hospitalized in a single day due to extreme air pollution • Devastating flooding continues in Spain.
The world continues to underestimate climate risks, and irreversible tipping points are near, UN Secretary General António Guterres toldThe Guardian. “It is absolutely essential to act now,” he said. “It’s absolutely essential to reduce emissions drastically now.” His warning comes before the COP29 summit kicks off Monday in Azerbaijan, where negotiators are set to agree on a new global finance target to help developing countries with climate adaptation. Guterres said that if the U.S. leaves the Paris Agreement again under a Trump presidency, the landmark goal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would be “crippled.” Experts say 2024 is now expected to be the first full calendar year in which global temperatures exceed the 1.5 degrees target.
With climate-skeptic Donald Trump set to retake the White House in January, many are wondering what his policies will mean for U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. He’s likely to walk back pollution rules on cars and power plants, repeal some parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, boost oil and gas drilling, and pull out of the Paris Agreement. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab and is co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast, said projected emissions will indeed be higher than they would under current policies, but “since Trump cannot repeal grants already awarded or tax credits already provided to date, and it is unlikely that every provision in IRA will be repealed,” they probably will remain lower than Jenkins’ so-called Frozen Policies scenario, which assumes no new climate policies since January 2021.
Jesse Jenkins/REPEAT Project
Varun Sivaram, senior fellow for energy and climate at the Council on Foreign Relations, added some global context: “Even with sharp Trump domestic climate policy rollbacks, the change in U.S. emissions is trivial on a global scale and far less meaningful than expected emerging economy emissions growth,” he said.
In case you missed it (we did!): Oil giant BP said in its most recent earnings report that it has abandoned 18 early-stage hydrogen projects. It still plans to back between five and 10 projects, but that’s down from the “more than 10” it had planned for. The move will save BP some $200 million, and “could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry,” wrote Tim De Chant at TechCrunch.
Rivian reported Q3 earnings yesterday. Here are some key takeaways:
A new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment found that carbon dioxide emissions from private jets have risen by 50% over the last four years. The research analyzed data from about 19 million private flights (half of which were shorter than 300 miles) made by more than 25,000 private aircraft between 2019 and 2023. In 2023 alone, private flights resulted in about 15.6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. Most private flights are taking place in the United States: The researchers say that while the U.S. is home to 4% of the global population, nearly 70% of all private aircraft are registered there. The 2022 FIFA World Cup was one of the most carbon-intensive events for private aircraft. Also on the list? The Davos conference and – uh oh – COP28.
Most private flights occur in the U.S. Communications Earth & Environment
Donald Trump’s election victory this week resulted in a $1.2 billion windfall for investors who bet against renewable energy stocks.
It was a curious alliance from the start. On the one hand, Donald Trump, who made antipathy toward electric vehicles a core part of his meandering rants. On the other hand, Elon Musk, the man behind the world’s largest EV company, who nonetheless put all his weight, his millions of dollars, and the power of his social network behind the Trump campaign.
With Musk standing by his side on Election Day, Trump has once again secured the presidency. His reascendance sent shock waves through the automotive world, where companies that had been lurching toward electrification with varying levels of enthusiasm were left to wonder what happens now — and what benefits Tesla may reap from having hitched itself to the winning horse.
Certainly the federal government’s stated target of 50% of U.S. new car sales being electric by 2030 is toast, and many of the actions it took in pursuit of that goal are endangered. Although Trump has softened his rhetoric against EVs since becoming buddies with Musk, it’s hard to imagine a Trump administration with any kind of ambitious electrification goal.
During his first go-round as president, Trump attacked the state of California’s ability to set its own ambitious climate-focused rules for cars. No surprise there: Because of the size of the California car market, its regulations helped to drag the entire industry toward lower-emitting vehicles and, almost inevitably, EVs. If Trump changes course and doesn’t do the same thing this time, it’ll be because his new friend at Tesla supports those rules.
The biggest question hanging over electric vehicles, however, is the fate of the Biden administration’s signature achievements in climate and EV policy, particularly the Inflation Reduction Act’s $7,500 federal consumer tax credit for electric vehicles. A Trump administration looks poised to tear down whatever it can of its predecessor’s policy. Some analysts predict it’s unlikely the entire IRA will disappear, but concede Trump would try to kill off the incentives for electric vehicles however he can.
There’s no sugar-coating it: Without the federal incentives, the state of EVs looks somewhat bleak. Knocking $7,500 off the starting price is essential to negate the cost of manufacturing expensive lithium-ion batteries and making EVs cost-competitive with ordinary combustion cars. Consider a crucial model like the new Chevy Equinox EV: Counting the federal incentive, the most basic $35,000 model could come in under the starting price of a gasoline crossover like the Toyota RAV4. Without that benefit, buyers who want to go electric will have to pay a premium to do so — the thing that’s been holding back mass electrification all along.
Musk, during his honeymoon with Trump, boasted that Tesla doesn’t need the tax credits, as if daring the president-elect to kill off the incentives. On the one hand, this is obviously false. Visit Tesla’s website and you’ll see the simplest Model 3 listed for $29,990, but this is a mirage. Take away the $7,500 in incentives and $5,000 in claimed savings versus buying gasoline, and the car actually starts at about $43,000, much further out of reach for non-wealthy buyers.
What Musk really means is that his company doesn’t need the incentives nearly as bad as other automakers do. Ford is hemorrhaging billions of dollars as it struggles to make EVs profitably. GM’s big plan to go entirely electric depended heavily on federal support. As InsideEVsnotes, the likely outcome of a Trump offensive against EVs is that the legacy car brands, faced with an unpredictable electrification roadmap as America oscillates between presidents, scale back their plans and lean back into the easy profitably of big, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Such an about-face could hand Tesla the kind of EV market dominance it enjoyed four or five years ago when it sold around 75% of all electric vehicles in America.
That’s tough news for the climate-conscious Americans who want an electric vehicle built by someone not named Elon Musk. Hundreds of thousands of people, myself included, bought a Tesla during the past five or six years because it was the most practical EV for their lifestyle, only to see the company’s figurehead shift his public persona from goofy troll to Trump acolyte. It’s not uncommon now, as Democrats distance themselves from Tesla, to see Model 3s adorned with bumper stickers like the “Anti-Elon Tesla Club,” as one on a car I followed last month proclaimed. Musk’s newest vehicle, the Cybertruck, is a rolling embodiment of the man’s brand, a vehicle purpose-built to repel anyone not part of his cult of personality.
In a world where this version of Tesla retakes control of the electric car market, it becomes harder to ditch gasoline without indirectly supporting Donald Trump, by either buying a Tesla or topping off at its Superchargers. Blue voters will have some options outside of Tesla — the industry has come too far to simply evaporate because of one election. But it’s also easy to see dispirited progressives throwing up their hands and buying another carbon-spewing Subaru.
Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act — and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.