DON'T SUBSIDIZE RENEWABLE; TAX CARBON:

If you packed 100 policy wonks and environmental scientists into one room and asked about the most effective way to fight climate change, you would likely receive 100 different answers. But it is also likely that a common thread would run between each of these collective responses: the need to electrify. Mitigating climate change requires decarbonization, which will be impossible unless we are able to utilize electricity to accomplish tasks that currently require fossil fuels, such as automobiles, industrial processes, and heating. You can make those things more efficient, but efficiently combusting fossils fuels is still combusting fossil fuels.

So, we must decouple our economy from fossil fuels and electrify all aspects of our daily lives; this much is certain. And while there has been a recent focus on the final pieces of the electrification puzzle (shipping, airlines, steel production), we shouldn't ignore the comparatively low-hanging fruit that is the automotive transportation sector. Transportation accounts for 28 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and my research demonstrates that we could cut per-automobile lifetime emissions from 66.4 tons to 6.3 tons of CO2 by charging cars with renewables. Most importantly, the technology exists to make it happen. We aren't dependent on some moonshot technological breakthrough. We can make the transition today.

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