Biden’s emissions plan? Transformative
Success would lead to an America with a very different look
President Joe Biden’s new pledge to slash America’s greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decade is long on ambition and short on specifics, but experts say that success would require rapid and sweeping changes to virtually every corner of the nation’s economy, transforming the way Americans drive to work, heat their homes and operate their factories.
In several recent studies, researchers have explored what a future America might look like if it wants to achieve Biden’s new climate goal: cutting the nation’s planetwarming emissions at least 50% below 2005 levels by the year 2030.
By the end of the decade, those studies suggest, more than half of the new cars and SUVs sold at dealerships
would need to be powered by electricity, not gasoline. Nearly all coal-fired power plants would need to be shut down. Forests would need to expand. The number of wind turbines and solar panels dotting the nation’s landscape could quadruple.
It’s achievable in theory, researchers say, but it’s an enormous challenge. To get there, the Biden administration would likely need to put in place a vast array of new federal policies, many of which could face obstacles in Congress or the courts. And policymakers will have to take care in crafting measures that do not cause serious economic harm, such as widespread job losses or spikes in energy prices, that could trigger blowback.
“It’s not an easy task,”
said Nathan Hultman, director of University of Maryland’s Center on Global Sustainability. “We won’t be able to sit back and hope that market forces alone will do the job.”
For now, the United States has a head start. The nation’s greenhouse gas emissions have already fallen roughly 21% since 2005, according to estimates by the Rhodium Group. Much of that decline came as electric utilities retired hundreds of their dirtiest coal plants and shifted to cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power.
But roughly one-third of the reductions to date have come as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, as business activity slumped and Americans drove less. That drop is likely to prove fleeting. “We expect emissions to rebound this year as the economy recovers, so we’re already backtracking a bit,”
said Kate Larsen, a director at the Rhodium Group.
The harder part is yet to come. In two recent studies, Hultman and his colleagues modeled possible paths to achieving at least a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. The changes would be far-reaching:
• By 2030, half the country’s electricity would come from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydropower, up from one-fifth today.
• New natural gas plants would largely be built with technology that can capture carbon dioxide, instead of releasing it into the atmosphere — technology that is still in its infancy.
• Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal plants would shut down unless they, too, can capture their emissions and bury them underground.
• By 2030, two-thirds of new cars and SUVs sold
would be battery-powered, up from roughly 2% today.
• All new buildings would be heated by electricity rather than natural gas.
• The nation’s cement, steel and chemical industries would adopt stringent new energy-efficiency targets.
• Oil and gas producers would slash emissions of methane, a potent heattrapping gas, by 60%.
• The nation’s forests would expand, and farming practices would be reworked, so that they pull 20% more carbon dioxide out of the air than they do today.
While that research provides only one example of how the United States might meet its target, it illustrates the vast scale of the transformation envisioned. “Those are massive changes to electricity and transportation, and even then you can’t just focus on
those sectors alone,” said Hultman. “If we fall short in any one area, the task becomes that much harder.”
It’s still an open question whether the Biden administration can adopt new policies that will actually achieve all of those goals. The White House has yet to lay out the precise steps it will take to ensure the United States reaches its new climate target, although it has offered some signals.
For instance, Biden has floated the idea of a clean electricity standard that could require utilities to get all of their electricity from low-carbon sources such as wind, solar, nuclear or even natural gas with carbon capture by 2035. But that policy faces a battle in Congress.
Republicans have already sharply criticized Biden’s climate target as damaging for the U.S. economy. “The
president’s scheme will cost working families a fortune in higher energy bills,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo. “It will also hurt America’s international competitiveness.”
Biden sought to frame the transformation as a vast economic opportunity. “I see line workers laying thousands of miles of transmission lines for a clean, modern, resilient grid,” he said Thursday. “I see the engineers and the construction workers building new carbon capture and green hydrogen plants to forge cleaner steel and cement.”
Ultimately, for Biden to make his climate goals stick, experts said, he will essentially have to win that argument, showing that it’s possible to rapidly scale new clean-energy industries that benefit Americans and create large new constituencies that make his policies politically difficult to unwind.