We need new fuels to transport people and goods around the globe as society moves away from coal, natural gas and oil. Here’s how things are shaping up.
In order to stay below 1.5 degrees of planetary warming and limit some of the worst effects of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends that the world hit net-zero emissions by 2050 — meaning that whatever greenhouse gases we still put into the air we take out in other ways, such as through forests or carbon capture. Groups including the International Energy Agency (IEA) — a Paris-based intergovernmental organization that analyzes the global energy sector — have laid out pathways that can get the world to net zero.
The IEA’s pathway describes a massive, hard-to-enact shift across the entire world, including all kinds of transport. Their goal: to replace fossil fuels (which release long-captured carbon into the air, where it wreaks havoc on the climate) with something more sustainable, like green hydrogen or biofuels (which either don’t produce greenhouse gases at all or recycle the ones that are already in the air).
12/07/2024