Why some climate experts are optimistic about the future of cleantech

For someone whose career has been spent addressing the urgency of climate change, environmental-politics researcher Leah Stokes sounded awfully cheery in a talk in early March at the SXSW conference in Austin.

“I’m not telling you ‘don’t dry your clothes, don’t cook your food, don’t drive anywhere,’” Stokes, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the crowd. “Go for it, my friends! But let’s do it in a system that doesn’t emit pollution along the way.”

In an hour-long session, Stokes flipped a common climate-change script—solutions must include individual actions to reduce your carbon footprint as specific as altering what you eat—to a simpler policy prescription: “clean electricity plus electrification.”

Step one is simply not buying more fossil fuel-powered appliances and cars and instead replacing them with electric alternatives—going from a gas furnace to an electric heat pump, from an internal-combustion car to an electric vehicle.

Those things not only directly generate carbon pollution but are much less efficient than electric replacements.

“So many of us are actually running fossil-fuel power plants,” Stokes analogized before joking, “Am I a fossil-fuel plant manager? Shit.” 

So we shouldn’t buy more of these: “Every time one of these machines dies, it needs to be replaced by a clean-fuel replacement.”

The multiplier effect on all of these individual investments comes from the ongoing retirement of fossil-fueled power plants and their replacement with renewable sources. Said Stokes: “I’ve got another piece of cool news for you: These machines get cleaner every year.”

Her talk represents a shift to what you can call an abundance agenda, to use a phrase popular with advocates like clean-energy investor Ramez Naam. It contrasts with the guilt-driven, self-deprivation overtones of the carbon-footprint approach—a concept itself partly popularized by a greenwashing BP ad campaign.

Not only can obsessing over personal carbon footprints divert attention from fossil-fuel industries, actually doing that math can induce despair. In 2008, MIT researchers calculated that even “a homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters” in the U.S. would have an annual carbon footprint of more than 9 tons. 

That’s led such climate advocates as Bill Nye to point out that voting for environmentally-smart candidates who can push for systemic change represents a much more effective response than recycling or eating less meat.

More recently, it’s led to another shift in thinking about climate. Experts are increasingly making a point of rejecting the “doomism” view that humanity is already cooked. 

“I think some erstwhile climate advocates have been sidelined by climate depression,” says Michael Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. 

“The only obstacle at present is the politics, not the physics nor the technology,” says Mann.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report spelled things out as directly: “There are multiple, feasible and effective options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change, and they are available now.”

That reads as a response to how the IPCC’s 2018 report played out; it urged cutting carbon emissions 40 to 60% by 2030 but became a doomism accelerant when media coverage squashed that prescription into “12 years to save the planet.” 

Mann says he realized the doomist mindset had become a problem after some of his own lectures.

“People would tell me that they were depressed afterwards. I was describing the problem, but not the solutions.”

Stokes has been working with a solutions-minded nonprofit called Rewiring America to dispel the despondency. “The doom is counterproductive from a psychological perspective,” says Rewiring’s communications head Sarah Lazarovic. “We know that it’s deeply rooted in fossil fuel spin and PR.”

These abundance advocates remain clear-eyed about the situation—including that while humanity will not go extinct, things will get worse for many humans even in best-case scenarios for renewable adoption. 

And some obstacles can’t be solved as quickly with better engineering or a tax credit. 

One is the upfront cost of a new EV or electric water heater. In her SXSW talk, Stokes said the most effective carbon offset would not be companies planting trees but underwriting those upgrades for low-income populations. 

Another is regimes that can ignore clean-economy demands because they don’t have to answer to voters or have arranged politics so that they only need to answer to voters they choose. Mann sees that as a risk both overseas and in the U.S.“There is no path to meaningful climate action that doesn’t go through democracy,” he says.

And electrification isn’t such a ready remedy for much of the transportation industry, especially air travel. Most flights will continue to rely on jet fuel, even if a tiny but increasing amount of it now comes from sustainable sources that may soon include carbon dioxide extracted from the air. 

But while carbon-footprint calculators can make flying seem an intractable problem, the entire aviation industry, rounding up, contributes 3% of global carbon-dioxide emissions.

As Mann said at a conference in Washington last spring: “If we decarbonize 97% of our economy, we’d be in pretty good shape.”

And as the adoption of renewable power keeps outpacing adoption estimates (having surpassed nuclear power in contributing non-fossil-fuel electricity in the U.S. last year), reaching that goal of 40 to 60% reductions by 2030 looks a little less impossible every day. 

“What hasn’t worked is scarcity, and scarcity is also not true,” says Lazarovic. “We need not all move into the forest.”