A talk on transforming the economy to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. The speaker examines what countries have committed to, how California is leading the way, and the sweeping changes needed across transportation, housing, and carbon removal.
So it's not just about people, you know, having electric cars and changing their light bulbs and recycling. You're talking about much bigger actions that are needed. Yeah, we have to transform our economy and decarbonize it. So decarbonizing, if you imagine carbon in every aspect from fertilizers all the way through the energy we produce, the cars we use, the transportation, the entire system is built upon fossil fuels and we have to decarbonize. And the pace of that, if we're going to have a chance of living on a habitable planet, has to be between now and 2045. You saw China recently commit to 2060 carbon neutrality last week, South Korea and Japan both committed to 2050, the European Union, there's more and more commitment. So the commitments are hopeful. I think what California offers is a model of once you've committed, what do you do? And it really isn't going to be one thing. It isn't just going to be electric vehicles. It's going to be the entire way we think about the distribution of products in commerce. So the goods movement system is huge, and that's going to involve not just passenger vehicles, but trucks all the way through ships and planes and locomotives. And then thinking about how we build our new homes. Should new homes have connection to natural gas? Should we be having homes use natural gas in 2045? If you work back from what we need in 2045, which is zero carbon emissions, we also then need to look at sequestering carbon.
