This is scientific American's 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intalyata. Got a minute?

The Paris Climate Agreement pledges to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

But really nobody and certainly not the United States has really laid out the plan to get there.

Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University.

So we wanted to model what would be the effects of actually putting in the place policies

that would get us to a level that we've pledged to reach.

Shindell and his colleagues forecast that to stay within 2 degrees C,

we'd have to electrify nearly every car in the nation,

and we'd have to get more than half our power from renewables.

And if we do all that, in addition to keeping warming in check,

the researchers estimate that we'd avoid nearly 300,000 premature deaths

due to air pollution in the U.S. by 2030.

And they say the health-related financial benefits of that clean energy conversion,

amounting to $250 billion over the next 15 years

would likely outweigh the cost of implementing all that new technology.

The analysis appears in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Big caveat, a lot of politicians these days,

don't think on 15-year time scales.

They're looking only as far as the next election.

Right, but you start putting in these policies and you know you see the benefits for

public health the same year the policies start to go into a place. There's no lag time.

Air quality is something that unlike climate doesn't take decades.

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