Everyone loves a good TED Talk. Here is one of our favorites:
In this timely TEDTalk, Hal Harvey, climate expert and CEO of Energy Innovation and John Doerr, engineer, venture capitalist and chairman of Kleiner Perkins discuss how to radically shift to a carbon free economy by 2050. In their view, it’s a simple formula: decarbonize the grid and electrify everything using renewable energy resources such as solar and wind energy.
To make this happen, governments and policymakers have to get on board. For example, China has invested heavily in electric buses and cars, and mandated that cities have charging stations at parking spots. Today, China has 420,000 electric buses. America has fewer than 1,000.
In Germany, the government drove the price of renewable energy down by agreeing to pay an extra price for early phases of solar energy, on the basis that the price would drop. They created demand by using policy. The Chinese government invested in the supply side. The result was one country buying a lot of solar panels and the other producing it, which helped drive the price down by 80 percent. Harvey and Doerr say that we should be doing that with 10 technologies around the world, focusing on the countries that are the biggest emitters.
Currently, we are dumping 55 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere every year. To reach zero emissions by 2050, we need to reduce carbon emissions by 10% every year.
This sounds daunting.
Seventy-five percent of the emissions come from the 20 largest emitting countries. And from four sectors of the economy: grid, transportation, buildings, and industrial activities. Greening these sectors need to be addressed at speed and at scale.
According to Harvey, it is now cheaper to generate electricity from clean energy sources than from dirty energy sources like fossil fuels. It’s possible to decarbonize the grid, then use that clean energy to run everything else in the economy from vehicles to houses.
How quickly can we get off fossil fuels and decarbonize the grid? Doerr says we are 70-80 percent of the way there. But we urgently need a breakthrough in batteries to make them higher energy, safer and faster charging. They need to take less space and less weight, and above all else, they need to cost a lot less.
Doerr and Harvey also advocate for a focused, measurable plan not just campaign promises. Countries can do great things when they work together towards one strategic outcome: think of America's rural electrification or the interstate highway system. Those are huge projects that transformed the country.
The crucial question is: Can we do what we must, at speed and at scale? The good news is, it's now clearly cheaper to save the planet than to ruin it. The bad news is, we are fast running out of time.