How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Two, the effect on clouds lasts for a week or so, so we could use them as long as we needed to and then stop with no long-term impacts. And three, whatever technical problems these ideas might face are nothing compared with the political hurdles they’ll definitely face. Some critics attack geoengineering

And the same thing can happen in clean energy. There are markets worth billions of dollars waiting for someone to invent low-cost, zero-carbon cement or steel, or a net-zero liquid fuel. As I’ve tried to show, making these breakthroughs and getting them to scale will be hard, but the opportunities are so big that it’s worth getting out in front of

more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent. That’s bad for people who don’t have enough to eat, bad for the economy, and bad for the climate. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.

One option is plant-based meat: plant products that have been processed in various ways to mimic the taste of meat. I’ve been an investor in two companies that have plant-based meat products on the market right now—Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods—so I’m biased, but I have to say

Merely picking the routes and establishing rights-of-way would be a massive undertaking; people tend to object when you want to run a big power line through the local park.

We can also use zero-carbon electricity to combine the hydrogen in water with the carbon in carbon dioxide, resulting in hydrocarbon fuels. Because you

what we do know is that between now and 2050 we have to build them much faster—on the order of 5 to 10 times faster—than we’re doing right now. And remember that most countries aren’t as lucky as the

Some companies are working on next-generation transmission that would eliminate the heat problem and reduce the cost of underground lines significantly.

There are various ways, including a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program, to ensure that at least some of these external costs are paid by whoever is responsible for them.