Season 4 | Episode 5

Not Rocket Science

We keep hearing (and saying) that solving climate change is really hard. But we actually know what we need to do—and have the technology to do it—right now. It’s more a question of what happens if we don’t act fast enough. In this episode, we look at some models for how we can realistically meet the 1.5C goal and get to net zero by 2050. There is hope and there are also challenges, but the biggest barriers and our most promising tools are our imperfect human selves.

Guests

Read More

• The Power Grid: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — John Oliver discusses the current state of the nation’s power grid, why it needs fixing, and, of course, how fun balloons are.

• When cities were Nature’s haven: a tale from Bangalore — The Conversation

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] Introduction

SAM EVANS-BROWN: Threshold is nonprofit, independent, and listener-supported. Join us at thresholdpodcast.org. 

AMY: I remember the day when I first realized that it might be possible to solve climate change. It was September 2016, and I was at a conference of environmental journalists in Sacramento, California. One of the speakers was an unassuming British man named Christopher Clack. He was wearing a suit. He walked to the front of the room, started up his PowerPoint presentation, and in about 20 minutes, he explained how to decarbonize the U.S. economy. And not in some dreamy, theoretical way. He had a plan. He'd spent five years building a computer model showing how we could transform our electricity grid to run on carbon-free sources. And he showed how if we connected everything we possibly could to that grid, we could be at net zero emissions by 2050. And the kicker was that he said he'd figured out how to do it in a way that would result in lower energy bills for consumers. That's huge. If you don't worry about cost, anybody can tell you how to transition off of fossil fuels. But Chris was saying we could decarbonize and lower our power bills. And I was like...what? I remember that I was listening and frantically taking notes at first. But eventually I just put my pen down and tried to keep my jaw from dropping.

MUSIC

AMY: Since then, I've actually had this experience multiple times. These strange lightning bolt moments, when someone explains to me that getting the United States off of fossil fuels is completely feasible. One of those people is Jim Williams.

JIM: I would say it like this is like, be of good cheer. There is hope, there are also challenges, but they're probably not what you think they are.

AMY: Jim is a professor at the University of San Francisco and an energy systems expert. And like Christopher Clack, he's been hard at work for years trying to answer the question: can the United States be carbon neutral by 2050? Carbon neutral, or “net zero” means what comes in, goes out. No human-caused carbon emissions going into the atmosphere beyond what can be naturally re-absorbed, or potentially removed with technology. The whole world needs be at net zero by 2050 in order to limit temperature rise to one-point-five degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

JIM: We wanted to ask the question, could we reach that net zero by 2050, and if so, how could we do it and what would it cost to do it? And what would be some of the implications of trying to do it, in addition to cost? But we wanted to come up with scenarios that were realistic, that actually relate to who we are and where we're at. So that was what we set out to do.

AMY: I kind of hate to, like, jump to the punch line, but...can we do it?

JIM: The answer is yes.

MUSIC

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I know Jim's simple “yes” there raises a million questions. How does he know? And is he right? And if so, what do we need to do? We're going to try to answer those questions, but first, I just want to linger on the headline here for a minute, because I think it might be one of the best-kept secrets in America. Breaking our fossil fuel addiction is possible and affordable. We know what we need to do and we have the technologies we need to take all of the most important actions. We're going to examine those actions in this episode. We're going to study the maps that Chris Clack and Jim Willams have built, that show us how to get to net zero by 2050. And we're going to begin investigating how we can start working together to follow those maps. Two things to know before we start this journey. First, prepare to nerd out. When you start asking how to realistically meet the one-point-five goal, the conversation moves away from passionate slogans and toward concrete details. Things like the power grid and what percentage of cars need to be electric by when. And secondly, although we make Threshold for an international audience, this episode is about how the United States in particular can decarbonize by 2050. Every country needs to be asking this question, but the U.S. has a special role to play. Historically, we've emitted more carbon than any other country in the world—around 25% of all cumulative planet-warming emissions have come from the United States. And we're still the world's second-largest carbon emitter on an annual basis, behind China. So the U.S. has a huge responsibility for causing the climate problem, and therefore, a huge responsibility for helping to solve it.

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“People are inherently cooperative. I don’t know why we’re so willing to believe the worst of ourselves.”

It’s not an insurmountable problem but it’s a hard problem in a divided country.”

“I think in a lot of ways, it attacks the foundation of modern mythology of human beings controlling the environment.”

“We shouldn’t wait for, like, a miracle. We can start right now. There’s just no reason not to do it.”

[06:11] Segment A

SOUND: people chatting and silverware clinking in a restaurant

AMY: It's the fall of 2016, and I'm in a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. It's about a month after that conference where I first saw Christopher Clack present his work, and it turned out we both happened to be living in Boulder at the time, so we met up to talk about his big idea—this elaborate computer model he built, showing us how we could get 80 percent of the energy we need carbon-free by 2030, and get to net zero by 2050. And end up with lower electricity bills.

CHRIS: So we can reduce the price of electricity and solve the carbon problem and solve the local pollution problem all at the same time from electricity. We can solve all of them.

AMY: It sounds good, right? Really good. Like...maybe too good to be true? I needed to find out. I was taking a course on energy policy as part of a journalism fellowship at the University of Colorado, so I reached out to my professor in the class, Adam Reed, to get his opinion on Chris' model. And in a weird bit of serendipity, Adam told me, “Oh, Chris? He's a good friend of mine. I think he's a genius.” So Adam actually joined us in the restaurant for this conversation.

AMY: When you first heard about this, what did you think?

ADAM: My initial reaction was what a completely outside the box way to look at the problem.

CHRIS: And this is one of the reasons why I became good friends with Adam, is he got it really quickly. Which is why I know he's a really smart, intelligent, good looking man, is that he got it really quickly. (Adam laughing in the background)

AMY: So there we are, sitting around a table with a pitcher of beer, and I start grilling Chris and Adam, because I really want to understand how this model works, and—if it's as cool as it seems to be—I want to know why we aren't acting on it. Adam said he could field those questions.

ADAM: Chris' job is telling you what's possible and my job is telling you why that's harder than he's going to tell you.

AMY: Let's start with what's possible. This computer model Chris built: how did it arrive at this conclusion that we can switch to renewables and save money? And maybe we should back up a step and ask: what are computer models anyway? Well there's nothing magical about them; they're just programs that are able to run huge numbers of calculations much faster than people could do on their own. They use specific sets of information to try to solve problems or answer questions. Chris set up his model to draw on enormous data sets about energy use and supply in the United States, and then he gave it these instructions:

CHRIS: Find the cheapest way to supply power to every single customer in the U.S. for a minimum of a year. And then come back to it and say, OK, you did a great job, computer, tap on the head and say, unfortunately, this time you've lost the power line because there's a hurricane. Redo the same thing, and tell me, can you keep the lights on for everybody still and do that again and again and again, to make sure that you are reliable. So the the grid lights don't go off, ever, for any American.

AMY: Chris programmed the model to have no agenda beyond cost and reliability. He fed it mountains of information about where and when Americans use energy—turning on the lights, running the air conditioner—and where we get that energy. And he asked the model: what is the cheapest way to keep the lights on for everyone in the United States, using all currently available ways of producing energy. Coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, whatever.

CHRIS: Yeah, anything you want. We're completely agnostic to the technology. So we have wind, solar, coal, geothermal, everything under the sun that we could think of putting in there. And we tell it to build the cheapest possible system it can find.

AMY: And what the model spit out was pretty remarkable. It said we could power our lives primarily on wind and solar energy in the United States, and have lower energy bills. The cheapest option was also a climate-friendly option. And that was a surprise.

CHRIS: We were like, this can't be right. There must be something we're doing wrong. So we did it time and time and time again.

AMY: And every time it came back with the same result. The cheapest way to provide reliable power to all Americans is to decarbonize the U.S. energy system. But the model also said that to make that work, we need to redesign how the energy moves through the system: the network of wires that we call “the grid.” In Chris' model, upgrading the grid is the key to decarbonizing the energy sector. And the reason for is the mantra that gets repeated whenever wind and solar are discussed: the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine. It's a problem known as “intermittency.”

CHRIS: We all know that wind and solar go away. Sometimes it's really windy, sometimes not windy at all. Sometimes it's day, sometimes night.

AMY: But of course, we expect energy to be available to us at all times in any weather. And making that happen is not just a question of the amount of energy produced, but also the timing.

ADAM: And this is really important because the unique characteristic of energy as a good is that it must be consumed at the same moment that it is being produced. And that makes it unlike almost any other good. Any time you want to use energy, it has to be generated at essentially the same moment that you want to use it.

AMY: I didn't really understand this until I took Adam's class. Energy demand has to be constantly balanced with energy supply. The fact that I can flip on the lights at any moment without a second thought is thanks to a big, mostly anonymous army of technicians who watch over the grid, making that balance happen.

CHRIS: There's really smart engineers who understand that and they're working all the time to make sure this is always in lockstep.

AMY: So, given that energy demand needs to be balanced with supply all the time, you can see how the intermittency of wind and solar could look like a problem. How could energy sources that come and go be secure and reliable? But what Chris Clack is saying is: do they come and go, really?

CHRIS: What I always do, is I do the thought experiment on myself of if you step back from Earth and you look at the whole planet, somewhere on the planet, the Sun is shining on Earth. The Sun never goes away, it's just we're turning. And so if you go all the way back, you can see immediately that somewhere it's sunny and you can do the same sort of argument is that the wind somewhere is always blowing.

AMY: We think of the sun and wind as being intermittent, because they come and go for us, individually, wherever we happen to be. But actually, the wind is blowing and the sun is shining somewhere all the time. And if you study the weather at a large enough scale, patterns emerge. You can see the places where the wind is reliably blowing, where the solar energy is least likely to be blocked by clouds. What Chris' model shows is if we design a renewable energy system around those patterns, and then connect the wind turbines and solar panels to each other on a national scale, renewable energy doesn't look so intermittent after all.

CHRIS: And so what you want to do is you want to build your grids bigger and bigger until you get to a point where there's always some sun or wind. You don't always have to Sun, but one or the other has to be available all the time.

MUSIC

AMY: The enormous size of the United States is an advantage here. We have lots of different kinds of weather happening in different places at the same time. Imagine two houses in two different states, each with a wind turbine in the backyard. Maybe at my house there's no wind blowing, but at yours, there is. My demand is balanced out by your supply. Or vice versa.

AMY: So your model then multiplies these two people by millions of different points where we're generating these different types of renewable resources, and by putting them all together …

CHRIS: Exactly, so what it says is and you just multiply that effect by more and more people, and aggregating enough generators together to constantly meet the demand. And you can only do that if you've got a nice big area that you're pulling from, if you're just doing it from the one place you are, you lose that ability.

MUSIC

AMY: Part of what makes Chris' model special is the depth and breadth of the data he used. Computer models are widely used in the energy sector today, but a lot of them zero in one just one aspect or another: how we consume energy, or how we generate it. But Chris fed his model tons of information on both energy use and generation, and existing transmission lines, and all kinds of weather data. And this comprehensive approach showed that making the transition to renewable energy affordable isn't just about building more wind turbines and solar panels. The crucial step is for them all to be connected to a national grid. But unfortunately, that's not the grid we have.

ADAM: If you didn't know anything about the grid, you would probably think what most people think, that we have a national United States grid and that the government must control that. And of course, it's that's not it at all.

AMY: We actually have three grids: eastern, western and Texas. They operate independently and don't exchange much power. Then within those grids there's an alphabet soup of sub-regional organizations: independent system operators, or ISOs, regional transmission organizations, or RTOs. It's pretty mind-boggling, honestly. The complexity of the American grid—or grids, really—is a reflection of the complexity of the country. There wasn't one moment when someone said: hey, let's build a grid. It happened in fits and starts, at very different paces in different places. For example, New York City had electric power before New Mexico was a state, for example. Some parts of the grid were developed as small grassroots projects, with people wiring their own homes into a local power plant. And others were planned as part of massive, government-funded endeavors, like the Tennessee Valley Authority. So all of this scattered history led us to the system we have today. And that's why people in the U.S. tend to think about energy on the state or regional scale. And that's also why there's no single overarching entity that could implement Chris' idea on the national level. Because there is no single United States grid.

ADAM: The most important infrastructural system to modern society is actually has dramatically less government control than most people realize.

AMY: But Chris didn't confine his model to our current fragmented, factionalized system. He set it up to be more holistic. To demonstrate what might be possible if we thought about energy as a whole country, together.

CHRIS: And we were kind of laughed at for thinking in this way. We were saying, well, no, and so you have to connect the grid together over these big scales. And we showed that it was cheaper and emitted less carbon than not doing that.

AMY: Chris isn't the only person thinking about intermittency of renewable energy, of course. But so far, the dominant response to this problem has been to try to figure out how to store more energy. Meaning bigger, better batteries. But as Bruno Rodriguez talked about in our last episode, batteries are not a problem-free solution. Making them requires mining raw materials—and already, human rights are being violated and ecosystems are being contaminated as the global demand for cobalt, lithium, graphite, and other materials goes way up. And there are problems at the other end of the life cycle too. Batteries have a limited shelf life, so using more of them means we'll be generating a lot more hazardous waste. And there's another big issue: cost. As the industry is growing, prices are coming down, but even so, battery storage capacity at the scale we would need would be very expensive. There are other kinds storage technologies in development, some of which can hold a lot more energy than batteries can, but they're not at all ready to be deployed at the scale we need. And Chris says at the end of the day, rather than aiming for each home or city to be its own little, expensive island of energy self-sufficiency, it makes a lot more sense just to connect to each other.

CHRIS: And so what I'm saying is, share. It helps everybody. It helps you, and it also helps your neighbor and people further away by sharing the power because it costs much less to share those resources than it is to say, I've got my own little fenced area and I'm going to use the power that I get on that.

AMY: He's not saying share, as in give everything away for free. He's saying build a system that gets the different parts of the country selling energy to each other, and everyone can win. He takes the example of Montana, a state with a very small population and a capacity to produce a lot of renewable energy, and New York, with 20 times the number of people.

CHRIS: So if you just separate them and say they're not going to talk to each other, well, less gets built. But you connect them together, Montana go hey, hang on, these East Coast fools can buy our power really expensively, and we can get economy coming to our state, and we can power ourselves cleanly, we can send the power there, sell it. And New York goes, this is great. And then suddenly all these sort of corporations and competition is set up that drive down the price of everything and allows more and more variable generation on the grid, which wouldn't have happened if it didn't have this bigger region.

AMY: That's what Chris' model shows is possible. And again, the task he programmed it for was not: show us how to power the country on renewables.

CHRIS: I care about the cost. And so the underlying principle is it has to be the least-cost solution.

AMY: And the answer the model spit out was that the cheapest solution was also a huge win for the climate. The model suggested that by 2030 we could be at around 40 percent wind and 20 percent solar, with nuclear and hydro power together making up the next 20 percent or so.

CHRIS: So it's 80 percent carbon-free generation.

AMY: And that sets us up to be almost completely carbon-free in the following decades. 

MUSIC

AMY: It would cost something to redesign the grid as Chris is suggesting, of course. But the sooner we do it, and the more holistically it gets planned, the more affordable it would be. And we'd be creating jobs in the process. Chris' model predicts the number of jobs in the electricity sector would rise from two million in 2020 to more than eight million in 2050.

AMY: I have to say every this is the third time I've heard you explain it. And every time I have this moment where I actually get choked up because I feel like what you're saying is we can solve a huge portion of the carbon emission problem from the energy sector. We actually can solve that if we decide to. Am I understand that correctly? I mean that's a huge thing.

CHRIS: What I'm actually saying is slightly more. We can reduce the price of electricity while solving the electricity carbon problem. But bigger than that, if you can decarbonize electric grid, you've solved 90 percent of all the problems. So transportation, most of it will be electrified. Heating, all of it can be electrified. Water heating can all be electrified.

AMY: This is where Chris' model really gets exciting. If we get fossil fuels out of our grid, and electrify the majority of our big energy-consuming equipment like cars and home heating systems, the U.S. could dramatically reduce emissions not only in the energy sector, but also from transportation, commercial and residential buildings, and from industry. We'd still have some emissions in what are called the “hard to abate” sectors, like producing steel or cement. But we could pluck almost all of the lowest-hanging fruit, and make huge strides toward becoming carbon-neutral overall. So we're not just talking about decarbonizing the energy sector here. We're talking about decarbonizing the entire U.S. economy. You've probably heard people say that to solve the climate crisis, we need systems change. Deep transformations of the architectures behind our economy. This is what that looks like.

AMY: I kind of still just blows my mind, you know, because usually this is the way this is the way energy and climate things usually turn out. It's like you have this choice. If you want it to be cheap, keep burning the stuff that's going to ruin the planet. Or you can pay a lot of money, and can get this nice green planet that you want. But your model said, what?

CHRIS: My model says if you actually do the wind and solar right, what you find is if you go to big areas, it becomes much cheaper than the traditional ones. And the reason you get this dichotomy that normally happens, which is these models are saying, oh, you can either pay lots of money and get a clean grid, or you pay cheap and you burn coal, or any other fossil fuel. The reason you get that is because from the starting point, they say, well, the grid has to be as it is today. And they say, well, the grid is like this and that will never change. And what I came in and said with the model was: the grid is an evolving machine. It's never been static. It's never been this is where the coal plant has always been forever, no, 150 years ago the coal plant wasn't there. And so it's a dynamic machine, and it's got to evolve. And what we're seeing is this new generation type means that it has to evolve to go to larger scales.

AMY: Are we willing to evolve? It feels like no matter what thread we pull on in the tangled web of climate change issues, we end up here, at this central question. Can we change, and change quickly enough? And creatively enough? Because that, to me, is what's fascinating about Chris' work. The creativity of it, and the willingness to rethink something that a lot of other people will not: a redesign the energy grid. This is what makes Chris' work so innovative. And, Adam says, it's also what makes it hard to implement.

ADAM: There's a whole lot of kind of social, technical, and economic baggage that comes with the existing system that makes thinking in that way difficult for people that are used to the system the way it is.

AMY: Some of that baggage has been intentionally created. Major oil companies spend vast sums of money lobbying politicians to implement pro-fossil fuel laws and policies, and some, like Exxon, have even funded campaigns designed to cast doubt on climate science and confuse the public. This is definitely a big part of the reason the U.S. is still the number two carbon emitter in the world. But Adam says there's also a much more mundane set of obstacles to the kind of deep systems change that Chris' model points us toward.

ADAM: Transforming the grid in the way that Chris' model would suggest we need to do it is a tremendous challenge. How do you coordinate the over 3000 entities that control the U.S. power grid collectively in order to plan that?

AMY: And beyond the logistics of that, there's the simple fact that redesigning how we generate and deliver energy means changing how we think and how some of our institutions run. And that's hard. For example, if you imagine yourself as one of the people responsible for keeping the lights on for everybody, you can see how something like a coal-fired power plant looks appealing, because it gives you a feeling of control. It puts energy into the grid at a steady, predictable rate, 24/7. You, as the grid operator, know in advance when that plant is going to turn on or off, and how much energy it will produce every moment that it's running. Wind and solar don't work that way, obviously. No one controls them. The wind gusts, and the energy surges. A cloudy day, and the energy dips. And that's really unsettling, if it's your job to balance load and supply 50 times a second. But what Chris is saying is that if the energy going into the grid is being generated in lots of places simultaneously, the gusts and clouds in one area can be compensated for by another.

CHRIS: So as you get to these bigger grids, you can actually use the generators as sort of insurance against each other. If you spread them out and you think about them carefully. You'll be losing power in one place, but new power will be arriving at another place. And so you're actually insuring each other.

AMY: We're used to thinking of the stuff we humans build as being more reliable than natural processes. But when you really think about it, what could be more certain than the fact that the Sun is going to continue to rise every morning? What's actually more trustworthy: a coal-fired power plant, or the turning of the Earth on its axis? And also, all forms of energy actually depend on natural resources. For instance, nuclear plants have to shut down when there's not enough cold water nearby, which could mean they become an intermittent energy source in a water-stressed world.

ADAM: The popular image that we often have of traditional generating resources is that they're just kind of black boxes of stability, but they are, in fact, as dependent on the global environment as anything else. There's no separating the human endeavor and its economic aspects from environmental processes.

AMY: But we don't tend to think that way, because our modern energy systems can be traced all the way back to James Watt and his steam engine, when we began to imagine that our processes of producing power could be divorced from natural systems. Adam says that paradigm still dominates the energy sector in the United States. And Chris' model challenges that mindset.

ADAM: I think in a lot of ways it it attacks the foundation of the modern mythology of human beings controlling the environment. Which is, of course, it's a complete fallacy. We don't. Right. But we created technologies that create an illusion that we are in control. And having to give that up and adapt to more complex systems is frightening to people in a lot of ways.

AMY: But whether we're using the wind, the sun, the ancient plants known as coal, or a controlled nuclear explosion, we are in collaboration with the natural world. This is what the climate crisis is forcing us to recognize, one way or another. And just to underscore: Chris is not advocating for a system in which we only have power when the wind blows or the sun is shining. He's saying we can design a system smart enough to work with those natural systems instead of fighting them.

ADAM: The existing grid is almost like a Henry Ford-esque assembly line, right. Chris's approach and the approach that, Chris' model, does is more like conducting a symphony. It's an entirely different approach to thinking about how an electrical system could work. It's not a factory, right, it's this incredible confluence of all of these chaotic but not random elements in a way that creates a beautiful kind of order.

AMY: Since we had this conversation in the fall of 2016, Chris Clack has been developing his model through his company, Vibrant Clean Energy. His work is frequently featured in the national press, and he and his team have adapted his model for the state and regional level. And although getting Chris' ideas implemented on a national scale is full of challenges, I continue to find his approach incredibly inspiring. The climate conversation is dominated by talk about what we need to stop doing, and what horrible outcomes we need to work to avoid. Chris' model gives us something to work for. It shows that decarbonizing the American economy is possible and affordable. And I think if more people were walking around with that basic fact in mind—that we can do this—then we might figure out how to implement it. Or come up with alternative solutions. Knowing that one thing is possible helps us to imagine what else we could do.

CHRIS: It will happen. The problem is we've got a clock that we're running against. So we can't have another delay, and so we have to move much faster.

AMY: We'll have more after this short break

Break

[31:58] Segment B

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and the first half of this episode deposited us in a somewhat uncomfortable place—this big ravine between a really exciting, transformative climate solution and the difficulties of implementing it. This conundrum shows up again and again in climate work, because a lot of the most effective actions we could take—things like redesigning the electricity grid—don't only require a bunch of individuals to want those things to happen. We have overcome institutional inertia, and large groups of humans have to decide to collaborate in new ways. And that leads to the question: are we capable of that? Do we humans have the capacity to cooperate at the level the climate crisis demands?

HARINI: I don't think we should be naive about sustainability optimism. That's why for me it's a journey. Can we get from here to a world that's maybe 10 percent better in the next year, or 20 percent better in the next year?

AMY: Dr. Harini Nagendra, is an ecologist who leads the Center for Climate Change and Sustainability at Azim Premji University in Bangalore, India. And she knows that it's not in vogue right now to believe in humanity. But she says we actually do have enormous capacity for working together.

HARINI: People are inherently cooperative. But yet this narrative has taken over our imaginations. I don't know why that is and I don't know why we're so willing to believe the worst of ourselves.

AMY: But Harini says we also need to get comfortable with the fact that collaboration takes time, so the systems changes we need just aren't going to happen all at once. Her research has primarily been on urban sustainability, and she says that work has taught her the value in just starting wherever you are, and being willing to take small concrete steps from there. For example…

HARINI: Somebody that I knew was working in Bombay with terrace gardening and organic gardening groups in the city. And she said their journey was very interesting because they'd started with this whole idea of feeding themselves and their families healthy food. So just purely self related. Then they started working with other groups to say, OK, now if you want organic, healthy food, we need compost. And compost is largely in a city like Bombay also would be around manure, cow manure. And then when they got the cow manure, they saw a lot of plastic in it. So then they started thinking, oh, my God, what are the cows eating? They're eating plastic. Why are they eating plastic? Because we have garbage. And then they started activism in terms of there is a garbage and why is the city not cleaning it up? So it went from one thing to another. I really think that's a beautiful description of how mindsets change. When you start doing something, you have to start doing something.

AMY: When you start doing things, Harini says, it's easier to believe that more things are possible. And she says we need to consciously seek out experiences that reinforce that sense of possibility—not just because it makes us feel good, but because the expectations we bring into climate work have a huge impact on the outcomes. For instance, urbanization is often seen as the opposite of ecosystem health. The expectation is that when cities grow, nature dies. And that expectation limits our ability to imagine cities and nature flourishing together. But in her book, Nature in the City, Harini examined the process of urbanization in Bangalore, and she found some surprises. She says it started two or three thousand years ago.

HARINI: There were people here, and it's an unusual old civilization to have because it's in a semiarid place. So it doesn't get much rainfall. It doesn't have any large sources of water. No river, not next to the sea. No perennial your sources of water. So why would you have an old civilization where you don't have water?

AMY: It turns out that way back in time, people figured out how to dig out basins in the landscape for collecting rainwater, and bit by bit, by storing water, they made the area more verdant, and more able to produce the food they needed.

HARINI: As people moved into this landscape, they improved it in terms of its ecology from a human perspective. So what was a semiarid place becomes this lush landscape with rice, with the coconut groves, its flower gardens, with wells, trees over ground. You have this continuous process that as more people come in, more trees are planted and more water, rainwater harvesting is done. And that, I think, should upend our view that urbanization inevitably leads to destruction. Because we have this narrative in our minds that what can you do? It's a city, it's going to grow, it can't be sustainable. People get really surprised when you hear this, that there were hundreds of years in which people kept coming into this landscape and kept protecting it more and kept improving it from a from an ecological services perspective. More shade, more water.

AMY: Harini says in the late 1800s there was a break from the past.

HARINI: And that breach has gotten us into a very unsustainable situation today. High rates of air pollution and high rates of water pollution, asthma. It's not a healthy city anymore.

AMY: But she says we can't just look at the last hundred years or so and draw our conclusions about humankind. We also need to look at the previous thousand years, when people here were strengthening their own society, while also enhancing the natural world around them.

AMY: The idea that humans are inherently destructive and that we're going to ruin things, it didn't it didn't come out of nowhere. We do have a lot of destructive tendencies. If you were giving a talk and someone stood up and said, don't give me this baloney about people can be a positive force. Look at this we've done, and we've done and this we've done look how destructive we currently are and all these different places. How do you combat the nihilism end of the spectrum? The people who are just like, not only are we going to go kind of sink as a species, we should because we are so bad. I mean, that's it's not an uncommon thing to hear on, frankly, often from really young people.

HARINI: Absolutely true. I think for me two things. One is that I don't think we can give up hope because we don't have another planet to go. And so I think we just we can't lose hope, whatever, even in the darkest of times.

AMY: Harini says for every story of destruction we can find a story of a person, or a group of people, doing something inspiring, innovative, brave. But, she says, rather than setting up a competition between hopeful and depressing stories of humankind, what we need to do is study what helps people be better.

HARINI: So there are certain principles of collective action I think the people have been looking at: small groups, whether people can make their own rules, whether people can have a long term tenure or security over their own resources that are some of these that are very strongly related to conditions that help people want to organize and make it successful. And I think those are the conditions we need to create. Rather than saying people are like this, are people like that because we cherry picking examples then.

AMY: And people can be like all kinds of things if they're given the right context.

HARINI: Exactly, yes.

AMY: And, she says, we need to embrace incremental steps. To not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

HARINI: I mean, renewable energies. They're not quick fixes. They're not without their own sustainability challenges. So nothing's perfect. I think if we hold ourselves up to the standards of what is perfect, we're not going to get anywhere. Is it better than a coal-fired plant? Is it better than fracking? Infinitely. Right? The question is, can we be better than we are now? I think we can be much better than we are right now. And maybe along the way we have figured out ways to tackle some of these larger problems.

AMY: The question of how to get groups of humans cooperating effectively on something as big and urgent as the climate crisis is a huge topic, and we're going to explore it in more depth in future episodes this season. But I wanted to plant these seeds from Harini here, so we can keep these internal and interpersonal aspects of the work in mind as we continue to learn about the technical side. So here's one last bit of wisdom from her: she says we need to let go of any fantasies about one miracle solution, or any dogma that says there's only one path forward.

HARINI: I think you need to do multiple things always. One thing's not going to do it. We'll have to have multiple things coming together. What are those multiple things and what could be that combination that hopefully tips us over into a better space 10 years from now?

AMY: And what you just said, it really strikes me that it gets really, really biomimetic, because nature doesn't just come up with one solution. Like, ecosystems that work have so many different pieces and parts, and it's complicated.

HARINI: Absolutely. Absolutely yes, yeah.

JIM: Sort of my overall label on it is that there is no reason for advocates of different approaches to clean energy to to have any, like, internecine warfare for the next decade in terms of what needs to happen.

AMY: This is Jim Williams, you heard from him at the very beginning of this episode. Like Harini, Jim is an advocate of doing multiple things and taking incremental steps. He's one of the leaders of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways project, an international effort that aims to map out ways for countries around the world to transition off of fossil fuels by 2050.

AMY: Well, you know I discovered you through this really fascinating paper. Just the title alone has, I think, a remarkable amount of hope in it. Carbon Neutral Pathways for the United States. When I saw that title, I was like, what? There is such a thing as carbon neutral pathways for the United States? And then when I started reading it, I was like, oh! There's so much about this that says we can become carbon neutral as a country. Not only is it possible, it doesn't even have to be terribly painful. And I guess maybe before I ask anything more about the specifics, do you feel like that general understanding of it is correct?

JIM: Yes.

AMY: That's that in itself is kind of mind blowing.

JIM: I'll say this, it's correct, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy. But is the fact that we can do it technologically and the fact that it is affordable for our country doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be easy to accomplish from an institutional standpoint or a political standpoint, so.

AMY: Right.

JIM: One has to be a little bit cautious when when saying (laughs) yes, but the answer is still yes.

AMY: Like Chris Clack, Jim and his team created a highly detailed computer model to map out the pathways to net zero by 2050. And again, that's where the world needs to be in order to limit temperature rise one-point-five degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. Jim and Chris's models share a lot of features. They're both focused on how the United States can get to net zero by 2050, they both try to find the lowest-cost ways to do that, and they both assume that Americans will for the most part continue to drive, fly, and generally do the stuff we currently do.

MUSIC

AMY: And a lot of what Jim's model tells us is similar to Chris' too. They both arrive at the conclusion that we need to decarbonize the energy sector, and electrify everything. Meaning, charge up our grid with clean energy, and then plug everything we possibly can into it. Not just our toasters and computers, but our cars, home heating systems, and even, eventually, our industrial processes. But the road maps these two models provide for how get there are a little different. Rather than a redesign of the grid, Jim and his team mapped out eight different pathways for the United States to be carbon neutral by 2050. His model is designed to allow us to weigh the pros and cons of different options. For instance, one pathway prioritizes preserving open space, while another shows what it would take to shut down all fossil fuels and nuclear energy by 2050.

AMY: Where do we start? Like, what do we have to do first?

JIM: Well, it turns out that in the next 10 years, regardless of where you're going eventually, it's pretty clear what needs to be done from from a technology standpoint.

AMY: This is a really cool thing that Jim and his team learned: all eight pathways to net zero by 2050 start the same way. It's only after we get through the first decade of work that the roads start to diverge. So, eventually we have to face some really thorny issues like how much total land we're willing to turn over to wind farms, and to what degree we are comfortable with nuclear energy. But for the next ten years, we don't have to fight about that stuff, because every road to a livable future starts with us doing certain key things in this decade. Six things, to be exact. Let's go through them.

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JIM: What needs to happen in the next 10 years. One of them is getting out of coal altogether. Basically, that's the the biggest single thing that can be done in the next 10 years is eliminating coal-fired power plants.

AMY: The U.S. currently has around 240 active coal-fired power plants, and all of them need to close in the next decade. That's really bad news for the people who work in those plants—nationally, that's around 40,000 people. We need to find more ways to cushion the blow for those communities and families. But we also cannot equivocate here: after 300 years of burning this fuel at mass scale, we have to stop. Every pathway to net zero includes facing that reality, and acting on it, now. Moving on to the second item on the to-do list: build more wind and solar. Jim says we need…

JIM: Something like three to four times the level that we currently have. So that means a faster rate of of building than we have currently, but not unprecedented. It means picking up the pace.

AMY: Ramping up wind and solar power by three to four times in the next ten years isn't a nothing project. But it's not an impossible project either. It's not like the model said we have ramp it up a hundred-fold. So, I call that good news. Item number three? More electric cars. Jim's model was built with the assumption that Americans are going to upgrade their vehicles at the same rate that they do now. So, the idea is not that everyone runs out immediately and sends their fossil-fuel cars to the junkyard. But when it comes time to upgrade, we need to make it easy for people to choose to go electric. He says our goal should be for half of all new vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2030. Then we'd be on track to meet the goal of transitioning completely away from fossil fueled vehicles in the 2040s.

JIM: Vehicles last for a long time, right, 10, 12, 15 years. But for that whole fleet to be electrified by the 2040s you got to start by changing over that vehicle fleet a purchase at a time.

AMY: Item number four on the list is to do the same thing with the major equipment in our buildings.

JIM: Heating and cooling of space and also of water. Those are some of the biggest energy uses, both in residential buildings and commercial ones.

AMY: As with cars, we don't need to junk stuff that's working. But when that gas stove or fuel oil furnace dies, it needs to be replaced with an electric version. And again, we need to aim for 50 percent by 2030.

JIM: I's not that all buildings will be 50 percent electrified in these ways by 2030, but that the sales of equipment reach basically 50 percent electric by in those applications by that time.

AMY: We're going to focus on decarbonizing our homes in our next episode, so I won't elaborate on this point now. I'll just give you two key words: heat pumps. Americans need to fall in love with heat pumps. But moving on to item number five on Jim's list: don't build new stuff that depends on oil and gas.

JIM: And that would apply especially to new oil and gas supply, infrastructure, distribution, infrastructure and so forth.

AMY: He says we will continue to use fossil fuels in the U.S. for a few more decades.

JIM: You know, this may not be music to the ears of activists, but it's going to take a while for this transition to happen.

AMY: But while it happens, you don't want to be spending money—or time—building the infrastructure of a dying system. These things are called stranded assets.

JIM: Meaning you build new pipelines only to find that you can't use them 10 years from now. Somebody is going to end up paying a lot for that. And that's a big economic loss. So it just doesn't make sense in a decarbonizing world to be building shipping ports for LNG or pipelines coming down from Canada or any of that sort of stuff. Makes no sense.

AMY: This is one of the things I really enjoyed about talking with Jim. His pragmatism cuts right through all kinds of supposed fault lines. In one breath he's disappointing climate activists. In the next, he's telling the oil and gas industry their attempts to build new ports and pipelines are nonsensical.

JIM: And finally, to get to that last share of emission reductions where we have the hard to electrify options. Things like, you know, air travel. We need to do some more R&D. We need to pilot projects. We need to have incentive programs. We need to develop the technologies in the next decade that are going to be needed at large scale in the 2030s and 2040s.

AMY: Learn stuff. That's the last item on Jim's to-do list for this decade. To get rid the bulk of our emissions, we already know what to do. But for that last slice that's harder to solve—really carbon-intensive processes like producing steel and cement—we need to do research that will allow us to choose the smartest path as quickly as possible.

JIM: So that that's sort of the, the technological benchmarks that we need policy to get us to by 10 years from now. You know, it's a whole nother question about what those policies are, but those should be the outcomes of the policy if we want to be on a straight line path to net zero by mid century.

AMY: So let's do a quick recap. These are the six things we need to do by 2030 in the United States in order to limit global heating to one-point-five degrees and get to net zero by 2050:

One: end coal.

Two: build three to four times more wind and solar then we have now.

Three: increase sales of electric cars, aiming for 50 percent of new cars sold.

Four: make big strides on decarbonizing buildings. More on that next episode.

Five: do not build new oil and gas infrastructure.

And six: invest in the research and development we'll need to make the next set of decisions

AMY: Jim says if we get to work on these top six highest priority tasks, we can argue all we want about what happens after that. We just have to agree to have those arguments while we're getting these first six things done. Because doing these six things by 2030 will get us well on our way to a full decarbonization in the decades to follow. Just take that in for a minute. We don't need any new technology to do this stuff. There's no eco-police state involved. No sudden moral awakening on a mass scale. No one's shivering caves. We just have to increase some things we're already doing—like buying electric cars and building out renewables—and decrease some other things—burning coal, building new fossil fuel infrastructure. A lot of what needs to happen is stuff that most Americans barely think about, like where the power comes from when we flip on the lights.

JIM: The vast majority of what needs to happen is going to be like literally under the hood, and how many people do you know that even look under their hood? That's actually the things we're saying need to be changed. And most people are not going to notice the difference. I mean, yeah, OK, so maybe you plug in your car instead of taking it to a gas station.

AMY: And if you're thinking, “but isn't this going to kill the economy? Isn't it going to be super expensive?” Jim says: nope. For most of the pathways, this transition would cost less than half a percent of GDP.

JIM: Which is a little less than 150 billion dollars in the year 2050.

AMY: Here's some context for that number. In 2020, we spent four trillion dollars on health care in the U.S. More than 19 percent of GDP. We spent 778 billion on the military. That's three-point-seven percent of GDP. And again, to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, Jim's model predicts we'd need to spend less than 150 billion dollars per year. Less than one-half of one percent of GDP.

MUSIC

JIM: And so when we talk about affordability, that's that's what we mean. It's just not that big an impact on the economy. And no case that we look at does it say this is a burden on the U.S. economy that just can't be born, that that simply isn't isn't true.

AMY: In the United States, we're so used to thinking about everything to do with climate—or just, everything, maybe—as an ideological battle. The forces of good vs the forces of evil. And those things are defined very differently by different camps, of course. But what Jim and Chris' models both point toward is that if we could just agree on the fact that prevent climate catastrophe is in everyone's interest, then most of the work isn't really ideological at all. It's just group problem solving.

JIM: It really is about what are our building codes, you know. What are contractors required to do. Are you going to build the next set of houses to be, you know, running off of clean electricity and not put in that gas pipeline infrastructure that is going to be obsolete and stranded in 10 years. You know, do we have the land use decisions we need in order to make siting of wind and solar and transmission lines and so forth, you know, possible at the sort of scale and speed that they need to happen at?

AMY: Doing this nitty-gritty implementation work requires the approach Harini was talking about: a belief that it's possible to solve these problems together, and a willingness to take concrete, incremental steps to get there. Those are things all of us can put into practice, immediately. We can go to a city council meeting. Get involved in rewriting our local building codes to be more climate-friendly. Or even just get informed about what our local building codes are. I know a lot of the stuff we talked about it that can sound really technical and kind of dry, but when I really think about it, I...have feelings. Like, hope. Because it is absolutely possible to do the six things Jim's model points us toward. Sure, they take some effort and some planning, but these are imminently reachable goals.

JIM: This is way less of a daunting problem than producing a vaccine for covid in a year. That's fabulous science. And this doesn't take fabulous science.

AMY: Do you feel like a little bit like you're holding this magic box that has all of the answers that we desperately need and and no one's paying attention to you? Maybe people are paying attention to you. I don't know. But when I hear you say this and when I read a heading titled, “the actions required in the next 10 years are known with high confidence,” it just kind of makes me both want to do a happy dance and also, like, shake somebody.

JIM: Yeah. One way I like to say that is the good news is that you know, decarbonization is. Is really not a problem of technology or cost, and the bad news is that decarbonization is not really a problem of technology or cost.

AMY: That's good news, because nothing is really standing in our way except ourselves. And that's the bad news.

JIM: The way our politics work and our institutions run that that's the hard stuff from my standpoint.

AMY: Yeah. Those patterns are more deeply entrenched than a combustion engine versus an electric engine.

JIM: Yeah. It's it's not an insurmountable problem, but it's a hard problem in a divided country.

AMY: Yeah. But. I hear you saying that. Well, I think I hear you saying that you think we can do this.

JIM: Yeah, yeah, I, I think we can do this. It's late, a lot has gone down, you know, globally, a lot will be lost, you know, ecosystems, species. It's sad, it's tragic. We're we're decades too late. And there's a lot to be sorry about and a lot to be angry about. But that doesn't mean that we should let all of that stuff get in our way going forward. There's still there's always a right thing to be done, no matter what mistakes have been made in the past. And I think now we're pretty clear about what the right thing to do is. And we can do it. And there's no big barriers to doing it. Not on not on the sort of tangible physical side of things. And I like to believe that that somehow, you know, we are going to do those things.

AMY: To make any of the changes we've talked about in this episode, the number one thing we need is a well-functioning democracy. We need the ability to think together, listen to each other, plan ahead. Cooperate. And that makes me want to repeat what Jim said at the beginning of this episode. There is hope. There are also challenges, but they're probably not what we think they are. Limiting temperature rise to one-point-five degrees is hard. But it's not rocket science. We're not facing huge technological or financial hurdles. Our biggest barriers and our most promising tools are our imperfect human selves.

Credits

REMY: I'm Remi from Door County, Wisconsin, reporting for the season of Threshold was funded by the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the Pleiades foundation, NewsMatch, the Llewellyn foundation and listeners. This work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it, people like you. Join our community at thresholdpodcast.org.

AMY: This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erika Janik. The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wiske, Eva Kalea, Sam Moore and Shola Lawal. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sara Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. And special thanks to Steven Rascon, Taliah Farnsworth, Sam Evans-Brown, and Remy Carmichael. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose.