How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

“When we have a fact-based worldview, we can see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.”

Economics 101: One involves expanding the supply of innovations

This is what economists call an externality: an expense that’s borne by society rather than the person or business who’s responsible for it.

you can think of adaptation in three stages. The first involves reducing the risks posed by climate change, through steps like climate-proofing buildings and other infrastructure, protecting wetlands as a bulwark against flooding, and—when necessary—encouraging people to relocate permanently from areas that are no longer livable.

Rich and middle-income people are causing the vast majority of climate change. The poorest people are doing less than anyone else to cause the problem, but they stand to suffer the most from it. They deserve the world’s help, and they need more of it than they’re getting.

sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this:
Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation.
Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation.
Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this.
Use materials more efficiently. Same.

making plastics. If enough pieces come together, plastics could one day become a carbon sink—a way to remove carbon rather than emit it.

molten oxide electrolysis: Instead of burning iron in a furnace with coke, you pass electricity through a cell that contains a mixture of liquid iron oxide and other ingredients. The electricity causes the iron oxide to break apart, leaving you with the pure iron you need for steel, and pure oxygen as a by-product. No carbon dioxide is produced at all.

We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.

We manufacture an enormous amount of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year. We need to get those emissions down to zero, but it’s not an option to simply stop making things.