Breakthrough Energy – State of The Energy Transition, 2023

Instead, the world had coalesced around two strategies for reducing GHG emissions. The first was just asking everyone to do less. Build less. Fly less. Drive less. Buy less. Not being wasteful is very important, but getting the entire world to pull back on the realities of modern life is not an effective or fair strategy to address climate change. This is especially true for those who don’t have enough to begin with — as they often have done the least to contribute to the climate crisis and are struggling to increase basic living standards for their families and communities. The second strategy was to rely on the limited number of clean electricity technologies we had back then, like wind turbines and solar panels. But electricity only accounts for about a quarter of all GHG emissions. The rest come from factories smelting coal to make steel, farmers laying fertilizer to grow crops, and thousands of other daily activities. Why, I wondered, weren’t more people developing new technologies to solve these problems?