IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

[T]here are some common themes for how to accomplish this energy transition -- ways to focus our efforts on the things that will matter most. These are efforts that go beyond individual consumer choices such as whether to fly less or eat less meat. They instead penetrate every aspect of how society produces and consumes energy.

Such massive changes will need to overcome a lot of resistance, including from companies that make money off old forms of energy as well as politicians and lobbyists. But if society can make these changes, it will rank as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. We will have tackled a problem of our own making and conquered it.

Here's a look at what we'll need to do.

Make as much clean electricity as possible

To meet the need for energy without putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, countries would need to dramatically scale up the amount of clean energy they produce. Fortunately, most of that energy would be generated by technologies we already have -- renewable sources of energy including wind and solar power.

"Renewables, far and wide, are the key pillar in any net-zero scenario," says Mayfield, who worked on an influential 2021 report from Princeton University's Net-Zero America project, which focused on the U.S. economy.

The Princeton report envisions wind and solar power production roughly quadrupling by 2030 to get the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050. That would mean building many new solar and wind farms, so many that in the most ambitious scenario, wind turbines would cover an area the size of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma combined.

How much solar and wind power would we need?

Achieving net-zero would require a dramatic increase in solar and wind power in the United States. These maps show the footprint of existing solar and wind infrastructure in the contiguous United States (as of 2020) and a possible footprint for a midrange scenario for 2050. Gray shows population density of 100 people per square kilometer or greater.

Such a scale-up is only possible because prices to produce renewable energy have plunged. The cost of wind power has dropped nearly 70 percent, and solar power nearly 90 percent, over the last decade in the United States. "That was a game changer that I don't know if some people were expecting," Hidalgo-Gonzalez says.

Globally the price drop in renewables has allowed growth to surge; China, for instance, installed a record 55 gigawatts of solar power capacity in 2021, for a total of 306 gigawatts or nearly 13 percent of the nation's installed capacity to generate electricity. China is almost certain to have had another record year for solar power installations in 2022.

Challenges include figuring out ways to store and transmit all that extra electricity, and finding locations to build wind and solar power installations that are acceptable to local communities. Other types of low-carbon power, such as hydropower and nuclear power, which comes with its own public resistance, will also likely play a role going forward.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and hydropower, account for a larger share of global electricity generation today than they did in 2015. The International Energy Agency expects that trend to continue, projecting that renewables will top 38 percent in 2027.

Get efficient and go electric

The drive toward net-zero emissions also requires boosting energy efficiency across industries and electrifying as many aspects of modern life as possible, such as transportation and home heating.

Some industries are already shifting to more efficient methods of production, such as steelmaking in China that incorporates hydrogen-based furnaces that are much cleaner than coal-fired ones, Yu says. In India, simply closing down the most inefficient coal-burning power plants provides the most bang for the buck, says Shayak Sengupta, an energy and policy expert at the Observer Research Foundation America think tank in Washington, D.C. "The list has been made up," he says, of the plants that should close first, "and that's been happening."

To achieve net-zero, the United States would need to increase its share of electric heat pumps, which heat houses much more cleanly than gas- or oil-fired appliances, from around 10 percent in 2020 to as much as 80 percent by 2050, according to the Princeton report. Federal subsidies for these sorts of appliances are rolling out in 2023 as part of the new Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that contains a number of climate-related provisions.

Shifting cars and other vehicles away from burning gasoline to running off of electricity would also lead to significant emissions cuts. In a major 2021 report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that one of the most important moves in decarbonizing the U.S. economy would be having electric vehicles account for half of all new vehicle sales by 2030. That's not impossible; electric car sales accounted for nearly 6 percent of new sales in the United States in 2022, which is still a low number but nearly double the previous year.

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