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 is why studies show that depending on where it’s built, a dam can actually be a worse emitter than coal for 50 to 100 years before it makes up for all the methane it’s responsible for.*2

adding up the extent to which emissions will go down by the year 2030 as a result of all the federal and state policies now on the books. All told, it comes to about 300 million tons, or about 5 percent of projected U.S. emissions in 2030. That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not going to be enough to get us near zero.

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.

the Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries signed up to eventually limit their emissions, was such an achievement. Not because the current commitments will make a huge dent in emissions—if everyone meets them, they’ll reduce annual emissions by 3 billion to 6 billion tons in 2030, less than 12 percent of total emissions today—but

Reduce your home’s emissions.

what else it’s going to take to adapt to a warmer climate.

Finally, after a disaster, there’s the recovery period. We’ll need to plan for services for people who’ve been displaced—services like health care and education—as well as insurance that helps people at all income levels rebuild and standards to ensure that whatever gets rebuilt is more climate-proof than what was there before.

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!

Broadly speaking, you can think of adaptation in three stages. The first involves reducing the risks posed by climate change, through steps like climate-proofing buildings and other infrastructure, protecting wetlands as a bulwark against flooding, and—when necessary—encouraging people to relocate permanently from areas that are no longer livable.