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

To my surprise, despite all the limitations of lithium-ion batteries—the ones that power your laptop and mobile phone—it’s hard to improve on them.

And they might have low credit ratings that make it hard to finance big investments in new power plants.

If the world’s biggest private-sector consumers of materials like steel and cement got together and demanded cleaner substitutes—and committed to investing in the infrastructure needed to make them—it would accelerate research and shift the market in the right direction.

For one thing, city planners need the latest data on climate risks and projections from computer models that predict the impact of climate change. (Today, many city leaders in the developing

all adds up to a high Green Premium for electrofuels:9 What does that mean for the average family? In the United States, a typical household spends around $2,000 a year on gasoline.10 So if the price doubles, that’s an extra $2,000 premium, and if it triples, that’s an extra $4,000 for every conventional passenger car on the road in America.

Taking all these factors into account, the math suggests you’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime.

Because the solutions will vary from place to place, they’ll need to be shaped by local leaders. But the federal government can help—as part of an overall plan for getting to zero—by providing funding and technical advice and by connecting communities around the country that are experiencing similar problems so they can share what’s working.

the fish that coastal communities depend on for food. But these and other natural defenses against climate change are rapidly disappearing. Nearly nine million acres of old-growth forest were destroyed

People pay the costs of adaptation up front, but its economic benefits may not come for years down the road. For example, you can flood-proof…

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