W eta.
Judy: We returned to climate
change and the U.N. Panel latest
report stressing the need for
dramatic cuts in greenhouse
gases to head off the worst
impact of climate change.
William brangham has the
details.
William: The jury has reached
the verdict and it is damming.
This report of the
intergovernmental panel on
climate change is a litany of
broken climate promises.
William: In his typically blunt
language, U.N. Secretary general
Antonio guterres was withering
towards the world's leaders,
calling today's U.N. Report an
indictment of their in action
against climate change.
The third and final part of the
latest ipp -- ipcc report
written by hundreds of
scientists from around the
world, finds that greenhouse gas
omissions from 2010-2019 were at
their highest level in human
history.
At this pace, the planet will
blow past the goal of keeping
warming below 1.5 degrees
celsius in just eight years.
The U.N. Report argues that
without substantive sweeping
changes, warming will make life
on Earth increasingly dangerous
and deadly.
While the report cited some
increase in positive climate
policies, it said much more were
needed.
This report is principally
focused on the concrete actions
that nations can take to reduce
the emissions driving climate
change.
Those include a rapid turn to
cleaner ways of generating
electricity, and using it as the
principal source of power in our
buildings and vehicles.
Adapting the infrastructure of
our cities, where over half the
world's population lives, to
make them more efficient.
Harnessing the ability of the
land, forests, wired --
waterways, and how we farm to
release less carbon and store
more of it.
>> Human activities got us into
this problem.
Human agency can get us out of
it.
It is not all lost.
We really have the chance to do
something.
William: Given those warnings,
how likely is it that world
leaders will in fact do
something?
I'm joined by someone who looks
closely at clean energy
technology and broadly at the
politics of climate policy.
Dave Roberts writes the
newsletter called volts, also a
terrific podcast.
Great to have you back on the
newshour.
This U.N. Report paints a pretty
damming picture.
Warming is accelerating, the
pledges thus far to do something
about it are nowhere near
enough.
But they try to lay out all of
these things that we can do if
we really get our act together.
What do you take away from this
most recent warning?
Dave: It's interesting.
There are two parallel paths
going on with each passing ipcc
report.
On the one hand, we continue
running out of time and not
acting fast enough.
And the sort of cliff of 1.5
degrees gets closer and closer.
On the other hand, there is the
second-story running alongside
witches the tools we need to
solve the problem, to mitigate
the problem, are growing ever
more sophisticated and evermore
cheap, and evermore plentiful.
The need to do something and our
ability to do something are both
rising alongside one another.
It is just the intensity of the
whole message is cranking up and
up and up.
William: I know this is one of
the things you have written
about, that people don't
appreciate the real revolution
underway in clean energy
technology.
We always hear about the doom
and gloom side, and less about
that flowering.
When you look at that landscape,
what are the things I give you
some sense of, you know what,
this stuff really good work?
Dave: I would say the biggest
chunk of decarbonization, the
biggest single item on the list
is clean electrification, which
means cleaning up the
electricity sector, generating
electricity without carbon, and
then hooking up the
transportation sector to
electricity by electrifying
vehicles and then hooking up the
building sector to the
electricity sector by
electrifying building, heating,
and cooling.
To the extent you can, hooking
up the industrial sector to
electricity to use electricity
for industrial heat and process
heat and stuff like that.
Electrification is the big menu
item, and the tools for
electrification, which are
mainly wind and solar power,
data raise, -- batteries and
electrolysis to create green
hydrogen, all four of those
technologies are on what are
called learning curves, which
means every time the deployment
of those technologies doubles,
their price drops by a
predictable amount.
This has been going on for
decades.
It is very predictable going
forward.
If they just stay on those
learning curves that they are on
now, they are going to dominate
the landscape within a few
decades, purely because they
will be so much cheaper than the
alternatives that no one will --
the political argument around
them will fade.
It will be the obvious option.
It is all just a matter of
speed, trying to nudge that
process along faster, but it is
underway already.
William: What are the levers to
nudge those things along?
Are they happening at a pace
that is fast enough or does this
require the lever of, say, a
state, a government, a nation,
to push them in the right
direction?
Dave: Well, yes.
They require policy.
To hit our temperature targets
we are talking about, we
definitely need public policy to
accelerate them, because we are
at the point now where no market
purely market substitution could
work fast enough.
We are talking about completely
transforming several sectors of
the economy, the global economy,
within 10 years.
That is not something that will
ever happen, no matter how cheap
they get.
So they have got to be pushed
along by government policy.
And it has been very
frustrating, government policy
has not kept up, has not pushed
hard enough.
William: On the U.S. Policy
front, president Biden surprised
many with the build back better
legislation, which had a lot of
very sensitive to climate change
policies.
But that is thus far has been
shelved, as far as I can tell.
Does that not make it difficult
for the president both to meet
America's goals, but also cajole
other nations to try to do the
right thing?
Dave: Absolutely.
If the U.S. -- If congress does
not pass the climate and energy
provisions of the build back
better act, which mansion says
he is ok with and everyone says
they are support, if we do not
do that, it will be a failure, a
complete failure on climate
change, and we will lose
credibility in front of other
nations.
Conversely, if we pass those
provisions, we will be almost
very close to the trajectory we
need to be on, and it will be an
enormous boost for our
credibility on the international
stage.
William: Dave Roberts of the
volts newsletter and podcast,
thank you for being here.
Dave: Thanks, William.