The tough stuff

Until about decade ago, the central focus of climate mitigation efforts was how to make progress??"how we might drastically reduce fossil energy emissions. By 2018, though, it was increasingly clear that electricity from renewables would beat fossil fuels on cost, and the focus shifted from just making progress to how we reach the ultimate goal of net-zero emissions. That shift entailed grappling with the most difficult-to-abate sources of emissions--what makes them particularly difficult and what are potential solutions? I’ll present the latest work by my group assessing net-zero pathways for the power sector, aviation and marine shipping, heating, and industry processes, and discuss the salience of this work as technologies, costs, geopolitics, and climate ambitions evolve.

Speaker: Steve Davis, Stanford University