A lot of human activities generate greenhouse gases:
generating electricity, transportation, growing food,
heating buildings, and making materials like steel and cement.
If our goal was simply to emit ten percent less greenhouse gas,
you could imagine trying to limit those activities.
But because we need to get to zero emissions by 2050,
we have to come up with an alternate way
which isn’t too much more expensive
to perform those same activities without emitting any greenhouse gases.
We can compare the cost per unit of the current way of doing it
to the approach that creates no emissions.
The actual extra cost, which we call the “green premium,”
for things like green jet fuel, is very high.
Jet fuel is a good example because there’s a significant premium.
In the United States, a gallon of jet fuel averages about $2.20.
One way to go green is instead of taking that oil out of the ground
that has carbon from millions of years ago coming up into the atmosphere
we can take the oil by generating it from plant material or bio-waste or even algae.
Biofuels cost $5.35 per gallon.
So that's quite a premium,
$5.35 versus $2.20 so, $3.15 premium.
More than double the typical price.
The green premium is a tool that gives us
a way of looking at how far away we are from making it easy.
And where this green premium is the highest,
that’s where we need to put resources behind solving that particular area.
We need a lot of research and development,
a lot of innovative companies,
to help us get the green premium down.
And if you can get it down close to zero,
yes, that will get us to this 2050 goal of zero emissions.