What will it take to get the world's major economies off fossil fuels?

Climate One Conversations explore all dimensions of the climate challenge, the exciting and scary, the individual and systemic.

I'm Greg Dalton.

The purveyors of doubt and lies and distortion have declared war on common sense and science, and we need to fight back.

In late 2019, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry declared a World War Zero on

Carbon Pollution. The name highlights both a national security threat posed by global warming

and the type of wartime mobilization needed to cut carbon emissions.

U.S. emissions are forecast to drop 7% this year, about the rate of decline needed globally to meet the Paris climate commitments.

But can those commitments be met without sending the economy off a cliff like Wiley-E. Coyote in the old cartoons.

Well, the commitment is made if you make a transition and begin to do the things necessary

to not make this the result of a catastrophe, but to make it part of everyday life.

The bet in Paris was that people were going to begin immediately to be able to make that transition.

And for the first two years after Paris, $358 million a year, billion dollars, was invested

in alternative renewable energy.

So for the first time ever, more money began to shift away from fossil fuel and into

sustainable energy. If we had stayed on

that track and the United States had continued to lead, we would be in a position now to begin

to see where you would meet that point where these could be sustainable reductions

in five years, six years, ten years, by bringing online smart grids,

the capacity to send energy from one part of the country to the other, beginning to transition

out of coal into alternative energy sources, large solar fields, wind, wind farms, hydrogen fuel mixed with hydro and geothermal and other things.

But none of that planning, none of it, has taken place with the hand of the partnership

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