U study outlines viable, affordable plans for America to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 dailyprincetonian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailyprincetonian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
by Chris Mooney (Washington Post) … And all of it is powered by an array of solar and sometimes distant wind installations, which route electricity across the country thanks to a gargantuan network of power lines that triples the scale of the United States’ current transmission infrastructure. You see them the panels, the turbines, the lines everywhere you drive, everywhere you go.
By 2050, in President-elect Joe Biden’s vision of the country even more ambitious than what the Obama administration proposed the United States would no longer be putting greenhouse gases into the air. And for that to happen, it is likely that our world would have to look a lot like what was just described.
The United States can set a course to net-zero carbon by midcentury if it can radically overhaul its energy generation, transport, building and industrial sectors over the next decade, according to a major study from Princeton University.
And while the pathways to reach this goal entail large-scale shifts to renewable energy, electric vehicles and electric heating, or to alternative fuels and carbon-capture technologies, the costs of doing so are only slightly higher than projected “business-as-usual” investments in energy infrastructure and could yield major value in economic growth and human health.
Tuesday’s report comes as President-elect Joe Biden is pressing for a major shift in federal energy and climate policy, including a $2 trillion clean energy and infrastructure spending plan that faces the likelihood of strong opposition from Republicans in Congress. The Princeton study highlights the need for this kind of massive policy shift.
Big but affordable effort needed for America to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, study shows phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Larson,
Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and
Chris Greig, the Theodora D. 78 & William H. Walton III 74 Senior Research Scientist at the Andlinger Center. The research is an ongoing project of HMEI’s
Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a research program focused on studying and addressing climate change, and is aligned with the Andlinger Center’s
Rapid Switch, a broad research initiative investigating how to accelerate decarbonization efforts globally.
The new research, which involved ten Princeton researchers and eight external collaborators, lays out five pathways by which the United States could decarbonize the entire economy in the next 30 years.