EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Technology disruptions already underway in the energy, transportation, and food sectors have extraordinary implications for climate change. These three disruptions alone driven by just eight technologies can directly eliminate over 90% of net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide within 15 years. Market forces can be leveraged to drive the bulk of global GHG emissions mitigation because the technologies required are either already commercially available and competitive today, or can be deployed to market before 2025 with the right societal choices. The same technologies will also make the cost of carbon withdrawal affordable, meaning that moonshot breakthrough technologies are not required to solve the ‘Last Carbon Problem’ and go beyond net zero from 2035 onwards.
Our previous research has shown that disruptions of the energy, transportation, and food sectors are inevitable. Solar, wind, and batteries (SWB) will disrupt coal, oil, and gas. Autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) providing transportation-as-a-service (TaaS) will disrupt internal combustion engines and private vehicle ownership. And precision fermentation and cellular agriculture (PFCA) will disrupt meat, milk, and other animal products. The three disruptions are already unfolding simultaneously, and their implications for climate change are profound. Yet it will be up to us to decide whether or not we deploy these technologies worldwide rapidly enough to avoid dangerous climate change.
The greatest barrier to fighting climate change is therefore our mindset. Conventional thinking views emissions mitigation through a linear, reductive lens that fails to appreciate the character, speed, and dynamics of change in both natural systems and human systems. By failing to fully appreciate these systems dynamics, conventional models have tended to underestimate not only the threat of climate change itself, but also the potential of technology to address it. As a result, we have seen a consistent pattern of mistakes and corrections over time, where each year the underestimated threat of climate change is corrected in the direction of ‘worse than we originally thought’ while the underestimated potential of technology to address it is corrected in the direction of ‘better than we originally thought’. Conventional thinking has therefore wasted time, attention, and resources on an eclectic array of ‘Band-Aid’ approaches to solving climate change like subsidies and taxes, biofuels, clean coal, clean diesel and other superficial techno-fixes that merely treat symptoms rather than the underlying problem.
Instead, a simpler and more effective approach is to focus on a handful of key technologies that will transform the entire foundation of our economy. But simple does not mean easy. Simple means we understand the key drivers and levers of major systemic change. However, there are many obstacles to overcome, and we cannot afford to be complacent. Despite the tremendous opportunities that the clean disruption of energy, transportation, and food will bring, technology alone is not enough. Societies around the world must make the right choices. We can either accelerate the disruptions and solve the climate crisis by ushering in a new era of clean prosperity, or we can waste precious time and trillions of dollars propping up the incumbent system with an ineffective ‘all-of-the-above’ approach that exposes humanity to additional risk of climate change impacts.
In this report, we help decisionmakers understand these choices by categorizing sources of emissions according to three stages of mitigation readiness: Research, Deploy, and Scale. More than three quarters of global GHG emissions can be mitigated by just eight key technologies that are either already at market and able to scale immediately, or ready to begin deploying to market. This provides a guide for decision-making based on how to prioritize our efforts to maximize mitigation benefits as soon as possible. Without such a framework, decisionmakers are left with a scattershot rather than focused approach to fighting climate change, which runs the risk of misallocating financial, material, and political resources.
To maximize the climate benefits of these disruptions, investors, policymakers, civic leaders, and other decisionmakers should focus attention and resources in direct proportion to where the fastest and most impactful opportunities for emissions mitigation are located. Since the overwhelming majority of these opportunities already lie in the Deploy and Scale stages, our primary efforts should be on enabling economic forces to do the heavy lifting by ensuring open, competitive, and transparent markets. This means removing barriers that favor the incumbents such as utility monopolies in the energy sector, removing regulatory hurdles to electric and autonomous vehicles in the transportation sector, and removing livestock farming subsidies and protections in the food sector.
Regions, nations, cities, communities, businesses, and investors choosing to embrace and lead the disruptions rather than resist them will reap enormous economic and social rewards as well as environmental benefits. Some may choose to lead the disruptions in order to capture the extraordinary economic benefits, or to mitigate dependence on imported fragile food and energy supplies, while others may do so because of the political capital to be gained. As different actors seek to accelerate the disruptions in their own context to avoid risks or secure advantages, the ensuing race to the top will generate further powerful accelerating feedbacks that will compound the speed and scale of disruptions worldwide. Moreover, the clean technologies are inherently decentralizable and democratizing, and will therefore allow less-developed areas to leapfrog over previous barriers to human development, lift their disadvantaged populations into prosperity, and level the playing field between rich and poor economies.
Although reaching net zero emissions will not solve the problem of climate change entirely on its own, it represents a huge step in the right direction. The same technologies that make these dramatic emissions reductions possible will also make carbon withdrawal at the gigaton scale feasible. The combination of superabundant clean energy, electric and autonomous vehicles and machines, and billions of hectares of land freed from animal agriculture, will transform the economics of both reforestation and technology-based carbon withdrawal. This makes the three disruptions doubly essential for achieving a complete climate change solution.
By supporting the clean disruption of energy, transportation, and food, societies can choose to accelerate global greenhouse gas mitigation to reach net zero emissions before 2040 and lay the groundwork for a complete solution to climate change, simultaneously saving trillions of dollars and improving prosperity and quality of life worldwide. But to do so, we must escape the confines of the conventional mindset and rethink what is possible through a larger lens that captures the full complexity of disruption.
KEY FINDINGS
Key Implications of the Energy, Transportation, and Food Disruptions for Climate Change
We can achieve net zero emissions much more quickly than is widely imagined by deploying and scaling the technology we already have.
We can achieve net zero emissions without collateral damage to society or the economy.
Markets can and must play the dominant role in reducing emissions.
Decarbonizing the global economy will not be costly, it will instead save trillions of dollars.
A focused approach to reducing emissions is better than an all-of-the-above ‘whack-a-mole’ approach.
We no longer need to trade off the environment and the economy against each other.
The clean disruption of energy, transportation, and food will narrow rather than widen the gap between wealthy and poor communities, and developed and less-developed countries.
The same technologies that allow us to mitigate emissions will also enable us to withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere affordably.
Societal choices matter, and technology alone is not enough to achieve net zero emissions.