12

KEY PRESCRIPTIONS

Building on the previous chapter’s general advice for various sorts of countries, activists, and companies, in this chapter we’ll lay out more specific and short-term prescriptions. Generally, this book has aimed to present a logically tight framework which acknowledges various possible options and the nuances of each. At the same time, some readers are probably looking for a prescriptive list of things we should work on. Below is such a list—a starting point consisting of the most immediate individual projects to be pursued.

These initiatives and policies would not alone add up to a 100% solution, but most of them are essential components of one. Many of them represent the largest chunks of emissions reductions we could achieve in the short term, thus buying time for other technologies to be readied and deployed, and decreasing the eventual need for sequestration.

NUCLEAR SCALE-UP

As discussed in Chapter 5, the most concentrated form of clean energy, and therefore the one that can scale up fastest, is nuclear. The main prospect for getting nuclear plants to the point that their capital costs are lower than coal or methane plants is to mass-manufacture them in shipyards with one (or a few) standardized design(s). The best shipyards for this purpose are currently in South Korea, though there are likely candidates in Japan as well. To add a large amount of electricity generation by 2030, many more shipyards will have to be built quickly. That’s a task any industrialized country could undertake.

Similarly, the supply chain of steel, low-enriched uranium, turbines, and workers will have to be scaled up rapidly. Again, any country (or individual state or province in some cases) can bite off a chunk of the supply chain and start scaling up enrichment facilities or open a new institution to start training the bigger workforce we will need.

However, perhaps most important is getting the first batch of these standardized plants built. Unlike smaller pieces of technology, there’s a lot of financial risk in building a multi-billion-dollar power plant.

Even if the whole project might make a lot of money, traditional investment isn’t geared toward accelerating the demonstration phase and moving to the first commercial plant. Countries that are too small to finance the entire scale-up project may still be able to propel the project by becoming the first customers of these standardized plants. If the United Kingdom, for example, ordered ten standardized plants, and signed a power purchase agreement to buy the electricity at a rate equivalent to its current fossil fuel electricity costs, it could guarantee that there is a market for these products and thus spur investors to fund the manufacturing of the first batch of plants.

The physical success of a new battery or solar cell chemistry could be proven by hiring a roll-to-roll processing facility to make one from materials a research lab provides. Proving the physical success of a new nuclear design requires building one full plant, even if it’s a small one.²³

The standardized design in question could be a simplification of an existing design, such as the South Korean reactor that has already been exported successfully. Or it could be a new design that is quickly brought through the demonstration phase, as various startups are working on. The plants could be deployed on floating platforms, or barged to their end locations and installed on land as normal or on the seabed just next to shore.

This is a project that individual companies, or even certain individual people, could fund and carry out. Demonstrating a new design would cost about $1 billion and take perhaps five years if it were pursued vigorously. Adopting an existing design would cost very little. And each power plant would cost a couple billion dollars in the beginning, dropping as manufacturing is scaled up to about one billion dollars per one gigawatt plant—the mark at which they will be cost-competitive with coal and methane worldwide.²⁴

HYDROGEN ELECTROLYSIS EQUIPMENT

Another key technology that has to be developed is hydrogen electrolysis equipment with significantly lower capital costs. As discussed in Chapter 7, current electrolyzers cost so much up front that even with a couple decades of methane feedstock costs, methane-derived hydrogen is still cheaper than clean electrolysis-derived hydrogen. Yet hydrogen is an essential ingredient in ammonia production (for fertilizer or fuel) and for any drop-in fuel. As also noted, equipment with extremely low capital costs that could economically be run intermittently to balance renewables or nuclear on the grid would enable a faster and cheaper scale-up to 100% clean electricity generation.

For both those reasons, a top priority for lab and startup research funding should be revolutionary hydrogen electrolysis equipment. New catalysts, new membranes, new electrode materials, different designs of the systems, and cheaper manufacturing processes could all help achieve this goal. Various academic researchers are working on materials to serve in these roles, or on chemical pathways that could make hydrogen synthesis cheaper. Certain proposed but not commercialized hydrogen electrolysis methods, such as several that use high temperatures, could turn out to have lower capital costs as well.²⁵

Large companies already build hydrogen electrolyzers at scale, but most are currently optimized for efficiency given the input cost of electricity. If electricity becomes much cheaper through the nuclear scale-up, or in certain locations with abundant solar or wind sites, hydrogen electrolysis plants might be able to be designed that are optimized for lowest possible capital cost rather than efficiency. Design and commercialization projects as part of moonshot efforts should focus on electrolysis plants that can achieve the lowest possible capital costs even at the expense of efficiency, because the up-front cost is usually the main factor in decisions about whether to build new infrastructure (whether or not it would save money over thirty or more years), and because clean electricity costs are likely to continue decreasing over the coming decades. This is the opposite of the mentality of academic research, which rewards efficiency improvements (the inventions that add to scientific knowledge) rather than capital cost improvements (the inventions that make for short-term commercial viability). Academic labs usually don’t have many barriers to buying or creating high capital cost devices, either. This is another example of the need for coordination and focus driven by moonshot leaders to convene engineers who might not otherwise have incentives to work on commercial-focused rather than science-focused designs.

And as noted in Chapter 7, some proposals for clean hydrogen don’t rely on electrolysis at all, but on converting biomass wastes or dedicated biomass crops into hydrogen fuel. The wastes in question are dispersed in small amounts across many farms, so aggregating them takes a significant amount of energy in itself—in some cases, more energy than one would get by turning that amount of waste into fuel. Making space for dedicated crops threatens to create more deforestation, but if pursued alongside serious reforestation and afforestation efforts and with the most high-yield crops available, the net impact could be quite positive. CCS with methane-derived hydrogen can also be used, but like all CCS will only happen where policy mandates it. That could be an easy intermediate, short-term policy step certain countries can take.

Hydrogen itself can be used as a fuel, but many researchers and startups are developing processes to turn it into carbon fuels or other products. These conversions can happen relatively affordably already—not cheaply enough to compete with fossil fuels, but enough to make mandates or subsidies viable and to possibly outcompete remaining fossil fuels after electrification. Hydrogen, ammonia, and carbon fuels can all be interconverted relatively easily. The missing piece is an initial way to generate any one of them, and hydrogen is the most likely to become that first step (and most versatile to then be turned into the other products). If clean hydrogen can become cheaper than fossil-derived hydrogen, this will take care of a significant portion of the work needed in Pillar 3.

ELECTRIC CARS AND BATTERIES

This is a simple one. Electric cars are already cheaper to operate than gas cars over either’s lifetime.²⁶ All electric cars need is to be scaled up in manufacturing so their capital costs come down to the same level as those of gas cars. A lot of the difference in cost is from the batteries in electric cars, so entities with research and testing capital should fund improvements in lithium-ion batteries, or inventions for post-lithium-ion batteries. Batteries are a good case for testing a wide range of possible materials to eventually find one or more that work well, even if that means many disappointments along the way. The basic science that drives battery degradation, charging effectiveness, and such isn’t totally understood. But the outcomes that we care about are easy to measure. Rather than trying to figure out exactly what chemical side reactions are messing up the intended working of a given battery cell (the academic focus that develops new scientific knowledge), this is a case for large-number trial and error (the commercial focus that gets a product deployed sooner). Unlike nuclear, battery cells can be tested at small size to determine which exact configuration of materials might work. Then, once a design is proven, they can be scaled up with little risk.²⁷

Aside from batteries, electric cars simply haven’t been manufactured at anywhere near the scale of gas cars, so a simple increase in the order of magnitude of manufacturing, with improvements to efficiency in business practices and so forth, could bring the cost of electric cars down to reasonable levels. States and countries can either subsidize or mandate the adoption of electric cars, and they can also purchase them in bulk for public car fleets.

The same goes for trucks. Although there are fewer government-owned big trucks, Amazon, UPS, and FedEx could take serious initiative and build the network of charging stations and procure the first batches of electric trucks necessary to electrify that industry.

Hydrogen tanks and fuel cells can substitute for batteries in cars and trucks, and offer much longer ranges (per weight and per volume taken up by the “battery”) and shorter refueling times. The rest of the car remains the same, running on electricity produced in the fuel cell. Hydrogen fuel cells are even more expensive than lithium-ion batteries right now, so similar materials and manufacturing innovations would be needed to bring down the capital costs of these cars.²⁸ And as battery-based electric cars need charging stations to be deployed in larger numbers, hydrogen tank and fuel cell–based electric cars would require hydrogen fueling stations. Japan and a few other countries are putting government and corporate efforts into this approach and their model could be applicable across the world.

AIR-SOURCE HEAT PUMPS

For most buildings, the best way to eliminate heating emissions will be to install air-source heat pumps, sometimes known as mini-splits, which run on electricity. They can also cool buildings, so their use makes particular sense for the swaths of India, China, and other warm regions of developing countries where demand for air conditioning is projected to skyrocket in the coming decades.²⁹

Heat pumps are also in the category of technologies that can currently compete with fossil options, but aren’t yet definitively cheaper. Research and testing funding can help. Scale-up can help, and this one is even easier than electric cars for governments to promote and support. Public initiatives could create programs to weatherize (retrofit for improved insulation and other efficiency) homes and commercial buildings, including installing heat pumps. Governments could bulk-purchase heat pumps to convert their own buildings. Policies could encourage or subsidize individual families or businesses to make the switch.

CEMENT AND STEEL

The largest industrial sources of CO₂ emissions are cement and steel production. As noted in Chapter 8, research and demonstration can be supported in order to develop new processes that reduce or eliminate emissions from these factories, and hydrogen can be used as a replacement fuel with some level of reconfiguration of the factory equipment. Getting these high-inertia industries to adopt these new practices and pieces of equipment might take several decades, though.

In the meantime, any country that can muster the political clout to do so should impose mandates or create incentives to get all steel and cement factories to use CCS equipment and sequester their emissions. This equipment will initially be expensive, but as it gets deployed at scale and industries learn best practices for its manufacture and use, it will drop slightly in cost so that at least the additional cost won’t be wild. Between their fuel use and their process emissions, cement and steel combined contribute about 10% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, so mandating CCS for these factories would accomplish tremendous early reductions in emissions. A large number of these plants are in China, so this is a case where either Chinese presidential leadership or trade pressure from other countries—for example, policies prohibiting or taxing imports of steel or cement that don’t have an objective certification of CCS use—will make a major difference.³⁰

CCS MANDATES

More generally, in any region where it is politically possible to impose modest to significant extra costs for emissions reductions, one of the easiest ways to guarantee immediate emissions reductions would be to mandate (or subsidize) CCS for all factories and fossil fuel power plants. At a glance, this seems politically unlikely in most countries. But considering how fast political discourse has changed in the last two years, perhaps such significant mandates could be within reach. The cost for sequestering CO₂ from power plants is a little less than $100 per ton, which is not far from the eventual cost we will need governments to pay for atmospheric sequestration.³¹ In fact, the more that is spent on CCS (less than $100 per ton) now, the less that will need to be spent on atmospheric sequestration (around or sometimes more than $100 per ton) later.

AGRICULTURE AND REFORESTATION

Another realm for immediate policy action on the non-energy side is growing or regrowing forests. National governments generally have significant power to designate large swaths of land as protected for certain uses. Simply leaving land alone for a few decades usually is enough for it to become a forest, especially if it had previously been a forest. With scientific management, new forests can be grown to be even healthier than they would be if left alone. Forests could also be optimized to capture CO₂ as fast as possible based on what species are growing in them. Sustainably managed forests can also be a source of wood for construction, which sequesters CO₂ into buildings themselves and also displaces cement and steel, which are far more emissions-intensive building materials.³²

National leadership can force massive-scale reforestation and afforestation, but absent national leadership, communities in forest areas can also work to protect their lands, local governments can enforce laws against deforestation, and nonprofits can work to designate more and more sections of forest for protected management. As noted in Chapter 11, companies—mostly food companies—can also exert leadership by requiring their supply chains to be deforestation-free.

On farms, nonprofits have even more room to work. Organizations that train volunteers or staff to conduct outreach to farmers around the world can accelerate the adoption of sustainable farming practices. Such organizations can also partner with academic institutions to conduct continuous research and monitoring on various farms so that we understand better what practices to push for. And again, national and local governments could incentivize or in some cases require various crop rotation, soil management, cover crop, and fertilizer use practices. This work comes with the benefit of immediate cost-saving (or extra profit–making) opportunity.

CARBON PRICING

The most significant policy incentive to support the work of the five pillars is probably carbon pricing. The idea is simple: Fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gas emissions are bad and we want people and companies to use them less, so we’ll make them more expensive. Usually, proposals charge the price at the first possible point (entry into the state for state-level policies, extraction from a well or mine or importation into the country for national-level policies) for efficiency. Most proposals include a specific use of the revenue generated from the price—often reinvesting it into the economy through either spending on clean energy, dividend checks (or tax rebates) to every resident of the state/country, or both. Perhaps most importantly, every proposal includes some sort of increase in the price over time, to give both individuals and businesses long-term certainty that clean options will be a good investment. The most prominent national US proposal, put forward by the single-issue carbon pricing advocacy group Citizens’ Climate Lobby, is to start at $10 per metric ton of CO₂ that would be released from a given amount of fossil fuel, and to increase the price $10 every year, indefinitely.³³ The indefinite increase is the best way to guarantee that certainty—companies then know that paying up front for clean options will be a good investment over time.

Carbon pricing, as the vast majority of economists agree, is the most economically efficient way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The limitation of carbon pricing is that it takes a long time to ramp up to a price high enough to make every clean option cheaper than every fossil option. At the $10-per-year increase rate, it would take twenty years or more before virtually every clean option was definitively the cheapest. That doesn’t leave enough time to then transition to electrified equipment and such before 2050. Still, along the way, the fact that everyone knows the price will eventually get there can create an incentive to transition—through early investments that companies know will pay off. The revenue raised can also be used to speed along various aspects of implementing the five pillars—for instance, supporting clean energy technology research or helping low-income families switch to electric home heating. And because it is the most economically efficient method of reducing emissions, carbon pricing can reduce the need for mandate-based policies to speed the implementation of the pillars.

Anywhere carbon pricing is politically viable, it should be implemented immediately, with the fastest possible ramp-up in price, and with that ramp-up continuing indefinitely to give economic certainty that the society will be transitioning entirely away from fossil fuels.

Carbon pricing can also be used to address some portion of non-energy emissions, if the price is applied to emissions-intensive goods such as cement and steel. When such products are produced at a factory or imported into a country, a price could be charged based on the non-energy emissions involved in making them. A well-designed pricing system might add a price to methane based on its fugitive emissions, and might also charge a price on livestock or other foods (at the point of production or importation) based on their average methane and deforestation impacts. Similarly, point-of-importation prices can account for the fossil fuel emissions embodied in goods manufactured overseas, and would be charged on imported goods coming from a country that does not have its own equivalent pricing system.

Carbon prices on imports, accounting for both energy and non-energy emissions, would incentivize other countries to impose their own pricing systems or to convert their industries to clean processes so their products don’t face an added cost when imported into countries with robust carbon prices. This is especially important because while industrialized countries’ economies have become lower in emissions intensity, much of their emissions have simply shifted to China and elsewhere—the places where most manufacturing now takes place. Industrialized countries can’t claim to be carbon neutral if they rely on imports from places with carbon-intensive industry.