A few years ago, climate change become a climate crisis and the calls for immediate action became louder and more incessant. For example, in 2018 the proposed Green New Deal legislation called for a 10-year national mobilization to:

  • Meet 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.

  • Upgrade every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency. 

  • Eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture.

More recently, President Biden's national “clean energy standard” aims to zero out greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the power sector by 2035. This would be mostly achieved through through a mix of renewable energy, carbon capture, and nuclear power. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the technological know-how to achieve the emissions goal any time soon. Renewables still have an intermittency problem, carbon capture technology is in its infancy, and smart nuclear plants can’t be built fast enough to take up the slack (especially after factoring in delays due to public resistance).

Strict deadlines coupled with ambitious goals tend to encourage premature commitment to suboptimal action plans. As a result, the plans don’t pan out but looming deadlines allow less and less time to change course, so the focus becomes trying to fix what isn’t working instead of using another approach. This is the problem of path dependencies, lock-in effects, and the tyranny of sunk costs.

I’ll end with a couple quotes:

“…decisions made now will result in lock-in of development paths and resources for potentially several decades, while every year of inaction necessitates even faster cuts of emissions in the future.” - Vadén, Majava, et al. (2019).

“A policy prescription that overpromises on the benefits of relying on a narrower portfolio of technologies options could be counterproductive, seriously impeding the move to a cost effective decarbonized energy system.” - Clack, Qvist, et al. (2017)

Of course it’s important to have goals and timetables, but they shouldn’t be carved in stone. The best way forward often reveals itself just a few steps at a time.

References:

Clack, C. T. M., S. A. Qvist, et al. (2017). "Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(26): 6722-6727. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/26/6722.full

Vadén, T., A. Majava, et al. (2019). "To continue to burn something? Technological, economic and political path dependencies in district heating in Helsinki, Finland." Energy Research & Social Science 58: 101270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101270