How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Often, the risks that come with testing new products and introducing them in the market are simply too great. Investors get scared off. This is particularly true for low-carbon technologies, which can require a lot of capital to get going and may…

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feet high and produce enormous quantities of seed. Oddly, most plants can’t make their own nitrogen; instead, they get it from ammonia in the soil, where it’s created by various microorganisms. A

you can see why the private sector systematically underinvests in R&D on energy. Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D.

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.

TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack.

We’ll need to shore up power grids, seaports, and bridges. We’ll need to plant more mangrove forests (stay tuned if you don’t know what a mangrove is) and improve our early-warning systems for storms. I’ll return to those projects later

that decarbonizing its power grid by 90 to 95 percent would cause average rates to go up about 20 percent.9 (This study used a different methodology from the way I figured America’s Green Premium.)

We could solve this problem by crisscrossing the country with thousands of miles of special long-distance power lines carrying what’s called high-voltage current.

Even if country 2 otherwise lacks the ambition to reduce its emissions, it will end up doing so, simply because someone else invented a better, cheaper fuel. Finally, although R&D yields benefits on its own, it is most effective when you pair it with demand-side incentives. No business is going to turn that new idea published in a scientific jo

limiting the use of cement and steel, and in some cases cross-laminated wood—made of layers of timber glued together into a stack—is sturdy enough to substitute for both materials.