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

The U.K. is the world’s biggest user of offshore wind today, thanks to clever government subsidies that encouraged companies to invest in it. China is making big investments in offshore wind and will…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

power, or using microbes that naturally produce hydrogen as a by-product. The more we explore, the more opportunities we’ll create for breakthroughs.

Some of the best inventions have emerged when scientists start their research with an end use in mind; Louis Pasteur’s work on microbiology, for example, led to vaccines and pasteurization. We need more government programs that integrate basic and…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Uranium, the fuel it uses, can be converted for use in weapons. The waste is dangerous and hard to store.

The U.S. government does more to drive the supply of energy innovation than anyone else. It’s the biggest funder and performer of energy research and development, with 12 different federal agencies involved in research…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Geoengineering is a cutting-edge, “Break Glass in Case of Emergency” kind of tool. The basic idea is to make temporary changes in the earth’s oceans or atmosphere that lower the planet’s temperature. These changes wouldn’t be intended to absolve us of the responsibility to reduce emissions; they’d just buy us time to get our act together.

limits utilities to using only certain approved low-carbon technologies (wind, solar, geothermal, sometimes hydro), and it excludes options like nuclear power and carbon capture. That

Without demand for innovation, inventors and policy makers won’t have any incentive to push out new ideas; without a steady supply of innovations, buyers won’t have the green products the world needs to get to zero. I realize this may sound like business-school theory,

The server farms containing thousands of computers that make today’s computing advances possible (including the ones that run the cloud services where you store music and photos) generate huge amounts of heat. If they didn’t stay cool, the servers would melt down. If you live in a typical American home, your air