How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

But cheap oil and expensive transmission lines aren’t the biggest drivers of the electricity Green Premium. The main culprits are our demand for reliability, and the curse of intermittency.

Between 2000 and 2018, China tripled the amount of coal power it uses. That’s more capacity than in the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined!

After the corporate income tax was established in 1913, oil and gas producers got the right to deduct certain expenses, including drilling costs. In all, these tax expenditures represented roughly $42 billion (in today’s dollars) in support for coal and natural gas producers from 1950 through 1978, and they’re still in the tax code today. In additi

The main reason it’s so cheap is that fossil fuels are cheap. They’re widely available, and we’ve developed better and more efficient ways to extract them and turn them into electricity. Governments also go to considerable effort to keep the prices of fossil fuels low and encourage their production.

Today, the United States spends only 2 percent of its GDP on electricity, an amazingly low number

When you cover land with water, if there’s a lot of carbon in the soil, the carbon eventually turns into methane and escapes into the atmosphere—which

Here’s a summary of all five tips: Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of 51 billion. Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm. Kilowatt = house. Gigawatt = mid-size city. Hundreds of gigawatts = big, rich cou

Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay.

We’d need to build more than 50,000 DAC plants around the world just to manage the emissions we’re producing right now. In addition, DAC doesn’t work on methane or other greenhouse gases, just carbon dioxide. And it’s probably the most expensive solution; in many cases, it will be cheaper not to emit greenhouse gases in the first place.