153 Experts Send Biden a Letter: You Can Be Remembered as the 'Climate President'

Meeting the climate goals of President Joe Biden will require setting a national cost for carbon pollution and spending heavily on social programs to assist Americans hurt by the clean-energy transition. Those are the findings in a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the latest group to lay out a detailed strategy for making the U.S. economy carbon-neutral by 2050.

The goal to be carbon-neutral by mid-century — which the global scientific community says is the only way to avert the worst effects of climate change — has been widely embraced in the private sector and by nine of the top 10 biggest economies, including the U.S. Yet 30 years is very little time to wind down and replace an energy system that's taken generations to build. Urgent steps and market signals are needed, the report said, such as a mechanism to place a price on carbon emissions.

“The big difference between this and any previous report is the attention paid to the social connections to the equity and diversity, and community worker-protection issues,” said Stephen Pacala, committee chair and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “The report was specifically created to have a full representation of the social dimensions of a transition like this. At least half of our policy recommendations are in that camp.” One of their suggestions is to establish a White House Office of Equitable Energy Transitions to develop criteria to ensure that energy transition funds are equitably shared so that historically marginalized communities can benefit from new jobs and low-cost net-zero energy.

Federal officials are at the receiving end of several firehoses of expertise specifying what, exactly, needs to be done to put the U.S. economy on a climate-safe footing by mid-century.

There’s a map of what federal agencies should do. There’s a database of job-creating policy ideas. Princeton researchers in December illustrated five decarbonization scenarios for the 2020s that could leave the U.S. well-positioned to meet the world’s science-driven mid-century deadline. There’s “quiet climate policy,” whose clean investments steadily pay off at epic scale. A research team concluded last month that the U.S. “can reach zero emissions without requiring changes to behavior. Cost is about $1 per person per day, not counting climate benefits.” The Decarb America project today reported that its incremental cost estimates “are small relative to the projected size of the U.S. economy, constituting only 0.4-2.2% of GDP,” compared with 5% to 10% for the volatile traditional energy system.

Above all, time is of the essence: An analysis published Wednesday by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology LLC, a nonpartisan energy and environmental policy research firm, concludes that delaying decarbonization from today until 2030 would raise the overall cost of energy capital, operations, and fuel by 72%. The time-crunch forces industries to make more draconian changes more quickly, including more aggressive pushes, for example, into building efficiency and expensive technologies that captures CO₂ directly from air.

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