To continue advancing global decarbonization efforts, institutions must ensure they have the capability to deliver on their climate targets, experts said at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment’s twelfth annual Princeton E-ffiliates Partnership Retreat.
The retreat convened experts from across academia, industry, non-government organizations (NGOs), and the public sector to discuss strategies for navigating the energy transition in the face of lagging global progress.
“Stating a very ambitious long-term goal like net-zero by 2050 is problematic without a robust and realistic plan to deliver the infrastructure implied by that commitment,” said Armond Cohen, executive director of Clean Air Task Force, during a morning fireside conversation.
Rather than fixating on the shortfall between current climate action and the emissions targets set by treaties like the Paris Agreement, speakers urged greater emphasis on practicality and implementation-focused clean energy pathways.
Navroz Dubash described practical strategies for promoting clean energy deployment, including reframing climate targets around other societal goals beyond emission reductions.
According to Navroz Dubash, a professor of public and international affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, one practical strategy would involve reframing climate goals around other societal benefits beyond emission reductions.
“In a lot of the developing world, the most compelling stories for clean energy are all about job creation, building industrial competitiveness, and avoiding air pollution,” Dubash said. “Ironically, to address emissions, we may have to de-center them from the conversation.”
Reframing climate goals in this way could help build broader support for clean energy implementation and would allow countries and sectors to tailor decarbonization pathways to their unique needs. Such broad support could also ensure the clean energy transition achieves and maintains the social license and credibility to implement projects at the scale required for global decarbonization.
“Pursuing the policies that are plausible and durable today can open the door for more ambitious technologies and policies in the future,” said moderator and retreat co-chair Wei Peng, an assistant professor of public and international affairs and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
The clean energy challenge: Everything, everywhere, all at once
Speakers on a panel about clean energy deployment outlined the sheer scale and speed of technology and policy innovation needed to decarbonize the global energy system.
Not only must the world rapidly scale up early-stage energy technologies needed to mitigate emissions across industries, they said, but institutions must ensure that mature technologies retain their competitive edge.
Scott Hobart, chief investment officer at Mercator Partners, pointed to nuclear fission in the United States as an example of a promising zero-carbon technology that ultimately failed to remain competitive, leading to its gradual decline in the energy system.
Laura Leonard of Worley moderated a panel discussion about strategies for accelerating clean energy deployment. Left to right: Leonard, Jesse Jenkins, Scott Hobart, and Kurt Waltzer.
“Even in industries where technology risk has been retired, there still needs to be a focus on the broad systemic requirements necessary to drive rapid capacity deployment,” Hobart said. “Nuclear is an example of an industry where the conditions for systemic bankability were lost. Wind and solar in the US could also be vulnerable, given, for example, some of the obvious challenges to scaling supportive transmission infrastructure.”
Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, outlined the role of policy in providing early incentives for the scale-up of clean energy technologies. Policy can also indirectly support technologies via the construction of enabling infrastructure, such as pipeline systems for CO2 transport, that would be difficult for the private sector to coordinate on its own.
Both types of policy are important for meeting climate targets, said Jenkins, as are reforms to existing regulatory processes, such as the process by which new energy projects connect to the power grid.
“We need institutions that are designed to build,” Jenkins said. “I think that’s where we have the biggest problem, especially in the United States.”
‘Adaptation should be part of every energy pathway’
While institutions struggle to take swift and proper clean energy action, speakers on a panel about climate adaptation emphasized that people around the world are already facing the negative impacts of climate change. The world’s most vulnerable populations, such as those living in poverty and those fleeing from violence and warfare, are particularly at risk.
Cynthia Rosenzweig spoke about the importance of considering climate adaptation as an integral component of any resilient energy pathway.
At the same time, funding for climate adaptation has trailed behind funding for mitigation, with one panelist noting that many in the financial sector perceive adaptation as a way to avoid losses rather than generate revenue. As such, the private sector tends to see adaptation as a public good rather than a sound investment, and NGOs fear that investment in adaptation will be interpreted as admitting defeat to climate change.
Yet the panelists also argued that investments in adaptation yield value beyond mere loss-avoidance. Pointing to a growing literature around the ‘triple dividends of adaptation,’ they said investing in adaptation can also drive additional economic and development activity by reducing perceived disaster risks and supply significant economic, social, and environmental co-benefits.
Cynthia Rosenzweig, an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research, added that adaptation and mitigation should be seen as inherently interconnected concepts.
“It’s all one system,” she said, emphasizing that new technologies deployed to mitigate greenhouse gases will still have to withstand increasingly severe climate hazards. “Adaptation should be part of every energy pathway.”
No Plan B for the climate
If the world fails to decarbonize and is unable to adapt to a warming planet, some have proposed deliberate interventions into the climate system — such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet — as a potential backstop against extreme climate disaster.
However, speakers on the day’s last panel said such ‘Plan B’ strategies are likely to be too risky to implement and regulate to be worthwhile.
Alan Robock, a distinguished professor of climate science at Rutgers University, said that by studying historic volcanic eruptions as proxies for solar geoengineering, researchers have learned that injecting particles into the atmosphere will likely lead to unintended and unwanted consequences. For instance, while solar geoengineering might reduce surface temperature on Earth, it will also cause less precipitation to fall during summer monsoons and could deplete atmospheric ozone, which protects people from the Sun’s UV rays.
Panelist Dale Jamieson, a professor emeritus of environmental studies at New York University, also expressed doubt about humanity’s ability to govern geoengineering approaches, given its poor track record at regulating other forms of technological innovation. Similarly murky, the panelists said, would be the question of who would have the moral right to implement geoengineering approaches.
“When things seem to be going badly, the first inclination is to try and do something,” Jamieson said. “But it may well be that the greatest contributions from corporations and governments in the near future will come from not doing — from taking a step back and allowing other sources of resilience to emerge.”
In his closing remarks, event co-chair Chris Greig, the Theodora D. ’78 & William H. Walton III ’74 Senior Research Scientist in the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, noted that the panel’s conclusion underscored the day’s theme of pragmatic, resilient, and implementation-focused energy pathways over risky moonshots.
“As Warren Buffett said, ‘In order to succeed, you must first survive,’” Greig said. “When we think about setting ambitious targets, we must also think about building the institutions and structures we need to be capable of delivering on them. I’ve been encouraged by the discussions we’ve had today that we can, in fact, learn from our prior mistakes to make meaningful, practical, and durable progress moving forward.”