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

After all, in gloomy Germany, photovoltaic generation works on average only 11–12 percent of time, and the combustion of fossil fuels still produced nearly half (48 percent) of all electricity in 2020. Moreover, as its share of wind generation has increased, its construction of new high-voltage lines to transmit this electricity from the windy nort

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In the course of writing How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, I developed a way to answer that question. I call it Green Premiums — the differences in cost between a fossil-fuel-based way of doing something and the clean, non-emitting way of doing the same thing.

Bill McKibben has put some very precise numbers on our remaining carbon budget. You’re saying we’re going to need to safeguard some portion of that budget for some of these critical transitional steps? Gopal: We need to be very smart about how we use our carbon budget. We should absolutely not be expending any fossil energy exploring for more fossi

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Still, major reductions in carbon emissions—resulting from the combination of continued efficiency gains, better system designs, and moderated consumption—are possible, and a determined pursuit of these goals would limit the eventual rate of global warming. But we cannot know to what extent we will succeed by 2050, and thinking about 2100 is truly

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