THE rIGHT CAN'T SAVE CARBON BY HATING THE lEFT:

A new coalition called the Mission Possible Partnership, with backing from Jeff Bezos's Earth Fund and the Bill Gates-founded VC fund Breakthrough Energy, is now bringing together partners in seven industries--shipping, aviation, trucking, chemicals, steel, aluminum, and cement--to accelerate their path to net zero. [...]

"These seven sectors are particularly ill-suited to being driven by a system that is kind of rigidly organized around national targets," says Paul Bodnar, managing director at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, which is running the new partnership along with the Energy Transitions Commission, the We Mean Business coalition, and the World Economic Forum. "They're organized around global supply chains, global markets, global investor groups, shared technology pathways. They're organized horizontally rather than vertically, which is the orientation of the Paris Agreement." (Bodnar, who previously served in the Obama administration, worked closely on the 2015 Paris Agreement.)

The seven industries are responsible for around 30% of global emissions now, and could run through the world's entire carbon budget by 2030 if they don't change. The organizations behind the program saw a clear need for new systems to help make the transition happen quickly. "If you want to decarbonize global industries, you've got to think and act like global industries," Bodnar says. "We're trying to create what we think is the most important missing piece of architecture in the global climate action space, which is one that's organized around the way these sectors actually work."

The new partnership brings companies, their suppliers, their customers, their regulators, and their funders into a conversation about how to get to net zero so that they can make concrete plans. "You've seen a dramatic increase in the last couple of years in the interest in and commitment to net zero, but none of them can actually execute those commitments unless they come together in a particular configuration where they're doing things together," Bodnar says. The shipping industry is further ahead because it has a global regulator, but other industries need to organize in a similar way.

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