On climate policy, there's one main thing and then there's everything else

Last week, I wrote that there is no “moderate” position on climate change. Either we act rapidly and at massive scale to avoid the worst consequences … or we suffer the worst consequences. Either outcome involves radical change. There’s no avoiding radicalism.

Lots of activists, politicians, and ordinary citizens understand this need for ambitious action — they are convinced by the scale and severity of the problem — but there is less clarity about what qualifies as ambitious.

In an atmosphere of legislative scarcity, when tough decisions are being made and policies are being prioritized, what exactly should climate advocates be pushing for? What’s a simple way to distinguish between climate policy and good climate policy?

In the great climate policy feast, what is the entrée and what are the side dishes?

We lack a common framework for judging climate policy, which creates a fog in which dedicated advocates can lose focus and malefactors can get up to shenanigans. Within the fog, people tend to pick their favorite markers of climate commitment based on instinct and affective affiliation (shut down pipelines! ramp up nuclear power! impose a carbon tax!). What counts as good policy becomes a matter of identity rather than what would most effectively ratchet down carbon emissions.

The fog allows weak and marginal policies to be branded as moderate, or, other times, to masquerade as radical. It leads activists to diffuse their energy, while core policies often don’t receive the coordinated support they need.

We need to clear away the fog, fast. Policy decisions are being made over the next few weeks that will reverberate for decades. This is crunch time on climate policy and everyone who wants serious action needs to be (at least roughly) aligned.

So I want to spend a few minutes laying out a simple framework to help people think about how to prioritize climate policies. It doesn’t cover everything, but it’s a pretty good rough-and-ready guide.

Clean electrification is the entrée. Everything else is a side.

How can the US hit net-zero emissions by or before 2050, a goal shared by almost every Democrat and, at least rhetorically, by some Republicans?

The key is to immediately begin reducing emissions and maintain a rapid pace of reduction for the coming three decades. That is the only way we have a shot. If we wait another decade to start rapid reductions, the curve will simply be too steep. It has to start now.

So we can think of the work in two parts. Job One is to rapidly push fossil fuels out of the system using technologies and strategies that we have on hand, such that we reduce carbon emissions by around 50 percent by 2030. Job Two is to research and develop the technologies and strategies we will need to continue rapidly reducing emissions from 2030 onward, such that we hit net-zero on or before 2050.

Job Two is important. But Job One is the main thing. Job One is the entrée. Without it, you don’t have a meal.

What does Job One consist of? This is important: while different climate models disagree about which policies and technologies will be needed to clean up remaining emissions after 2030, virtually all of them agree on what’s needed over the next decade. It’s clean electrification:

* clean up the electricity grid by replacing fossil fuel power plants with renewable energy, batteries, and other zero-carbon resources;

* clean up transportation by replacing gasoline and diesel vehicles — passenger vehicles, delivery trucks and vans, semi-trucks, small planes, agricultural and mining equipment, etc. — with electric vehicles; and

* clean up buildings by replacing furnaces and other appliances that run on fossil fuels with electric equivalents.

Or as I summarize it: electrify everything!

Clean electrification is the entrée. If you decarbonize electricity, transportation, and buildings, you’ve taken out the three biggest sources of emissions in virtually every country. The technologies and policies we need to do it exist today, ready to deploy.

Exactly how much of the US economy can be decarbonized through clean electrification is an open question. Saul Griffith of Rewiring America is an optimist. He thinks electrification can reduce between 70 and 80 percent of US emissions by 2035, and probably in the 90s eventually. (Listen to my podcast with Griffith.)

We’ll see. Today, there are all sorts of edge cases that are difficult to electrify — bigger trucks, airplanes, trains, ships, steel, concrete, a variety of high-heat industrial applications — that might be easier with cheaper zero-carbon electricity and a decade of innovation. There’s no way to know in advance how far electrification can get, though it’s worth noting that critics have underestimated it at every stage thus far.

Regardless, whether it can ultimately get at 60 or 90 percent, clean electrification will do the bulk of the work reducing emissions over the next decade. It is the entrée.

None of this is to diminish the scale and difficulty of Job Two — all the side dishes. We need those too. We’ll need lots of zero-carbon liquid fuels for industry, ships, and airplanes, so we need to work on developing clean hydrogen. We’ll need to figure out some sustainable biomass options, along with a variety of ways to capture and store carbon dioxide. We’ll need focused innovation in geothermal energy, long-term energy storage, energy management software, and all sorts of other things. Much work remains to be done.

Nonetheless, clean electrification — done in a way that honors and protects frontline and vulnerable communities — needs to be the top item on every list of climate demands. It would be fatal for climate activists to take it for granted or assume it’s taking care of itself. It is not.

Climate policy that’s all side dishes is not “moderate”

As I wrote last week, the danger is that weak and insufficient climate policy gains a rep