How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.

Make calls, write letters, attend town halls.

Look locally as well as nationally.

Where do we need to focus our research and development spending, our early investors, and our best inventors? Answer: wherever we decide Green Premiums are too high.

We already know the emissions number; it’s 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn’t been firmly established, but it’s at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that’s the number I’ll use.

Energy source Watts per square meter Fossil fuels 500–10,000 Nuclear 500–1,000 Solar* 5–20 Hydropower (dams) 5–50 Wind 1–2 Wood and other biomass Less than 1

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.

DAC is an expensive and largely unproven technology, but if it can work at a large scale, it would allow us to capture carbon dioxide no matter when or where it was produced.

In some cases, such as the jet fuel example I mentioned earlier, the direct approach to estimating Green Premiums is simple. But when we apply it more generally, we have a problem: We don’t currently have a direct green equivalent in every case. There’s no such thing as zero-carbon cement (at least not yet). How do we get a sense of the cost of a g