How We Turned the Corner on Climate Change by 2050
The epic story of how America made the shift to clean energies, electric transportation & sustainable everything as seen from 2100
Editor’s Note: We pick up with our third installment of our interview with renowned author Stuart Rand as he looks back on the story of America from 2020 to 2050 from his vantage point towards the end of his life in 2100. He gives his version of how America reinvented itself alongside the rest of the world in the largely successful effort to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and adapt to the changes that could not be stopped. The interview has been lightly edited to bring out just the narrative from Stuart. This piece can be read on its own, but here are the previous installments: 1 and 2.
You have to remember the seriousness of the climate challenge we faced in the 2020s to fully appreciate what we all did in the end. The carbon dioxide levels that trap heat in the atmosphere in 2020 were higher than at any time in the previous 800,000 years — long before homo sapiens appeared on the savannah. At the beginning of the industrial revolution the amount of carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere was about 280 parts per million (PPM). By 2020, after burning carbon fuels for a couple hundred years, the levels had dramatically risen to 410 PPM. The level most scientists warned could cause a rise in temperature of 2 degrees Celsius and cause catastrophic climate change was just 450 PPM.
Waiting for the magic of the market alone to solve the climate crisis was not an option. Thinking government programs alone could pull it off was a pipe dream too. We needed climate cooperation, a combined effort between governments in the public sector and companies in the private sector if we had any chance to stay under that level of 450 PPM or even come close. We needed a mobilization of our societies on a scale last seen in the combined efforts of almost all countries around World War II. During that past war effort, strong governments set clear objectives and businesses fell in line partly because they often were guaranteed profit margins to build tanks and the like, and partly because it was the right thing to do. We needed a 21st-century version with a similar calculus — good for business and good for all.
On the political Right there was a common misconception at that time that the only way for businesses to make good money was to lower government regulations and free them to operate however they wanted. This was simply not true. There were many instances in history where businesses made even more money by following the lead of governments that were mobilizing what can be immense public resources and channeling the whole society toward common goals.
On the political Left there was a common misconception at that time that national governments needed to raise resources through taxes and directly invest in building new infrastructures that could deal with climate change. That simply was not true either. Governments needed to set clear goals, set high standards, and make some strategic investments to stimulate new markets. But when it came to scaling up mass adoption of any new technology, they mostly just had to backstop the private sector with guarantees.
The Coronavirus Crisis blew apart that long-standing debate and made a speculative plan about how to solve climate change a reality. The pandemic and ensuing economic devastation changed the whole calculus. More than a quarter of the American workforce was thrown out of work at the beginning of the crisis and so everything became about reviving the economy and creating jobs.
Climate Cooperation: governments & businesses strategically align
Just about the only shovel-ready infrastructure project with the size and scope needed to drive the revival of the whole U.S. economy and get tens of millions of Americans back to work with good jobs was to fully make the clean energy transition. Those jobs could utilize a wide range of blue-collar and white-collar skills spread across every part of the country, in Red and Blue America alike.
The federal government needed to invest trillions just to keep the economy afloat during the pandemic and begin the rebuild. It made little sense to prop up an old 20th-century economy based on carbon energy that needed to be superseded anyway. It made much more sense to build the 21st-century sustainable infrastructure that we actually did need through what many of us called at the time The Green New Deal. With Interest rates close to zero, the United States ultimately borrowed and invested one and half times its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) into building out sustainable infrastructure over the 2020s. That number was half the amount (as a percentage of GDP) spent by the United States to win World War II.
Not all the money needed for this clean energy transition came from the government. We updated other concepts from America’s past. The financial innovation of a home mortgage in the 20th century had allowed average people to make a huge consumer purchase well beyond their means and pay it off over many years while they used it. The federal government just needed to backstop those private sector loans in order for the whole system to work right. The feds did not loan the money but just guaranteed the deal.
The 21st-Century Homestead Act did the same thing. This was a federally guaranteed program that encouraged financial institutions or even manufacturing companies to finance a green overhaul of any American home. Any reasonably qualified family could finance a complete package that put solar on the roof, a home battery that could power them off the grid, an electric powered heat pump and up to two electric cars — immediately. The entire cost of retrofitting all 120 million American homes and cars was roughly $8 trillion — but the federal government paid little of it.
This greatly stimulated the transition to renewable energy and electric transport but also helped revitalize the heartland and rural America like the original 19th-century Homestead Act had. The non-urban parts of America away from the coasts could be part of this new energy and tech transformation too.
Clean Energies: making clean electric power cheap & ready to scale
Each region of the world had a role to play in the bigger picture in solving climate change for the planet. From that vantage point, the United States and other advanced economies needed to develop the new clean energy technologies and drive the prices down to the point where they were cheaper than carbon energy. Only then could those clean energies spread through the developing world via market forces and scale up in a way that had a chance to truly solve the climate challenge.
California had taken the lead in America and started that process. In the 2010s the state set very ambitious goals to move the power supplying their electric grid to renewable clean energy. This led to an explosive expansion of solar power in large-scale installations and on home rooftops across the famously sunny state. The state created subsidies and set high efficiency standards for vehicles that helped jumpstart the nascent electric car industry. Early action by California helped create enough of a market that by the end of the decade the two critical technologies of solar panels and electric cars were on the verge of being cheaper than the carbon-powered legacy ones.
The timing again was incredibly fortuitous, and we again owed a debt to those in the previous era who laid the foundation. In 1980 the cost of solar energy was about $75.00 a watt, but by 2020 it was under .25 cents a watt — which was a 350 percent price decline. Wind power followed a similar but less dramatic price decline over the same timeframe as it scaled up. (The technology was simpler with less potential to gain in efficiency.) In 1980 the cost of wind energy was $.57 a kilowatt, but by about 2020 it was only $.03 — marking a 20 times price decline.
The first carbon casualty was coal, the dirtiest of the carbon energy sources. Throughout the 2010s the cost of building new energy plants using solar or wind in the United States became less expensive than building new coal plants. By the middle of the decade market forces took over and building new renewable energy installations became cheaper than simply maintaining legacy coal plants. Even utilities in conservative parts of the heartland were shutting down coal utilities and opting for cheaper solar and wind. Smart money moved away from coal and the bottom fell out of the American coal industry — leading to widespread bankruptcies.
By the mid-2020s wind and solar prices started to undercut the use of natural gas. This opened up a new front on climate change that started to transition energy systems related to heating and cooking. Soon all new buildings in developed economies ran exclusively on electricity for cooking and used electric heat pumps for heat. This also made the buildings and eventually cities safer since we no longer had to maintain a parallel underground system for distributing highly explosive & flammable gas.
Solar and wind kept growing at phenomenal rates around the world for decades more. By 2030 renewable energy outcompeted coal and natural gas plants almost everywhere in the world. By 2050 more than half the electric power of the world was supplied by renewable energy with a substantial contribution coming from nuclear reactors, including smaller 4th generation nuclear fission reactors powering mega-cities in Asia. By that time renewables constituted almost 100 percent of electric power in Europe and North America — and that’s after our electricity needs dramatically expanded to power all transportation.
Electric Transportation: blowing up the legacy auto industry
If there was one character who personified the audaciousness of that era, it was Elon Musk. Part innovator, part entrepreneur, part visionary, part showman, part larger-than-life spokesperson for the sustainable world that lay ahead, Musk jump-started the electric transportation industry and took down the century-old automotive business built around the internal combustion engine. It took an iconoclastic outsider like Musk to finally blow the whole system up and kickstart electric mobility.
Musk approached the electric transport problem with design thinking. He set aside the preoccupation with how to evolve a traditional car to become electric — and just started from scratch. How would you build an electric car for the future? You’d start with an updatable computer on wheels. And then you would drive down the cost of a new technology — in Tesla’s case, batteries.
In 2010 the average price of a battery pack was about $1,200 per kilowatt hour, but by the end of the decade it was about one-tenth that price. The scaling of the industry kept going and the price of batteries declined another 5 times by 2030. By the early 2020s electric vehicles of comparable utility were actually cheaper to buy than traditional vehicles. Once they were cheaper, gas-guzzlers couldn’t compete. Electric vehicles had virtually no maintenance costs because they had few moving parts since they had no engines. And they were much safer because the heavy battery packs that filled out the entire chassis on the underside of vehicles kept them much more stable and intact in crashes.
The problem with electric transport had been their limited range and the lack of a charging infrastructure to compete with the gasoline infrastructure that had been built up over the previous century. For electric vehicles to go mainstream, the government had to step in aggressively to enable the rise of a standardized system of charging stations, which they did as part of the Green New Deal. This happened across the US and in many cities around the world, but it was bound up in an even bigger shift to autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous Cars: reconfigures cities & makes them more livable
The Coronavirus Crisis had a complicated impact on cities and transportation, scrambling previous assumptions. Just before the crisis hit, most big American cities were choked with traffic, jammed with individuals commuting to work in their own cars. The shift in the virtualization of much knowledge work lessened the traffic and lowered the numbers of people using traditional public transportation. After a temporary paranoid phase during the pandemic, car sharing became a compelling alternative. And that option became even more compelling when autonomous vehicles finally worked through all the kinks and became practical.
Shared autonomous vehicles, summoned on demand, could drive all day and all night and service all of us. The costs were so cheap that they could compete with individual car ownership as well as public transportation. Traffic plummeted, especially when the technology to interconnect all the vehicles — powered by AI naturally — was perfected in the 2030s.
The rise of autonomous vehicles over the next couple decades led to the restructuring of cities around the world too. No longer did cars sit idle in parking spaces that had eaten up one-third of all open space in cities. That space could be reclaimed for better uses like housing and businesses in cities where 80 percent of the world’s population was living by 2050.
Burgeoning Capital: finance supertanker follows the smart money
Around the time of the Coronavirus Crisis, there was about $100 trillion of capital sloshing around the global markets searching for good investments with decent returns. The crisis brought some temporary market crashes, but despite the economic carnage in many sectors of the global economy, the markets rebounded and even grew as they looked to the future. There was even more incentive to find long-term investments to build back up.
New technologies that create new scalable industries often are where the best opportunities lie. Around 2010 a small but growing number of what were called “impact investors” had been making the case that great fortunes could be made by simply looking ahead and tracking the inevitable. They argued that over the course of several decades the world would inevitably shift to clean energies and a more sustainable world. Investors could do the right thing, make a positive impact on the planet, and make good returns in the long run too.
The question through the 2010s had come down to timing. When would the smart money shift toward fully investing in the sustainable future? The general consensus was that between $2 trillion to $4 trillion needed to be invested in clean energy and climate-related activity each year in order to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. By 2020 the actual amount invested was only about half a trillion dollars a year.
Sustainable Investments: applies to environment & economy too
These impact investors meant “sustainable” in the conventional sense of lower impact on the environment, but also sustainable when it came to getting the economy to work better for everyone rather than just the few. The ratcheting up of inequality in the global economy was unsustainable because it was causing deep dissatisfaction with the whole system of capitalism. Young people, workers, and average citizens in the developed and developing world alike were becoming increasingly discontented with the status quo. Some were getting so radicalized that the legitimacy of the entire system was being threatened.
There was a category of investor called “universal owners,” such as sovereign wealth funds, who controlled funds that were so large that they essentially were invested in almost everything. They had to care about the state of the whole market because they were so big that they could not outmaneuver downturns, let alone crashes. It was in their interest to help sustain the entire system by doing the right thing, for the environment, and for all.
Then the Coronavirus Crisis hit. The mass layoffs and impoverishment that came with the pandemic brought all this discontent with the whole system to a head — and brought many people, particularly young people, into the streets. The government infrastructure investments to keep the economy afloat began moving in the direction of clean energy. The politics in America and the West sent signals to the smart money that the transition had begun, and it was time for the early movers to take full advantage. The capital markets initially were happy to go where governments in the developed world incentivized them to invest. But in the next several years the pure economic opportunities around these new technologies became more generally understood.
By the middle of the decade, the supertanker of global finance steered towards sustainability. After that, there was no shortage of capital to invest in clean energies, electric transport and the new sustainable infrastructure. Money also moved toward investments to build a more inclusive economy — particularly in the developing world. Capital for sure could make good returns on building out solar and 5G telecommunications infrastructure in places like Africa. But there were other opportunities too.
One of the keys to success for companies in the digital technology world was to leverage a business model of low-margin but high-volume products and services. Capital markets had long understood that formula for tech. Now investors found they could make decent returns by investing in low-margin but high-volume products and services that helped lift people out of poverty and into entry-level middle-class lifestyles in the developing world too. Using new financial vehicles that aggregated small investments, global capital could be leveraged to help bring clean water, sanitation, refrigeration and air conditioning to the bottom billions.
Creative destruction of the oil industry & the geopolitical fallout
The flip side of all this investment into clean energy was the buckling and eventual collapse of the oil industry, which came much quicker than almost anyone expected. The dramatic drop in transportation during the pandemic and the collapse of oil prices signaled the beginning of the end. What happened to the oil industry throughout the 2020s was a repeat of what happened to the coal industry through the 2010s — at much greater scale. The value of the global oil companies was based to a great extent on their proven oil reserves. But that value was premised on the fact that the oil would be extracted and sold. As the clean energy shift and electric transport revolution took off, the value of that oil dropped — along with the value of those companies.
The transition in the core energy sources of the planet was not an easy one. The oil industry and their allies did not go down without a protracted fight. Every country had some portion of their population with a vested interest in sticking with carbon energy and drawing the transition out. Various countries had different strategies. The European oil companies were the first to really make a genuine push to become 21st-century energy companies and abandon carbon. The American oil companies were able to extract some public bailouts for their investors in return for keeping the bulk of their reserves in the ground.
Entire countries, like Russia or the Middle Eastern sheikdoms, had much to lose in economic or geopolitical terms and did everything they could to maintain the status quo. But the economics inexorably changed, the politics inexorably changed, and the climate kept changing as well. It took decades, but the energy transition was largely completed by 2050 and the world came close (good enough, we found out) to hitting the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions roughly on time.
Planetary geoengineering came after 2050 due to our late start
However, our relatively late start in shifting off carbon energies meant that a significant rise in global temperatures were baked in before we got serious about amending our ways. So we did see much ice at the planet’s poles permanently melt and sea levels rise. And extreme weather — from wildfires to hurricanes — became more frequent and violent. As this increasingly dawned on us through the 2020s, we stopped talking about “solving” climate change once and for all, and started using metaphors like “turning the corner on climate change,” or “getting a better handle on climate change.”
We realized that the 21st century was going to be about mitigating the worst effects of changes in the planet’s climate, and adapting our societies to deal with climate changes that were baked in from our late start. By 2050 we achieved a level of competency and got increasingly good at rolling with the punches that the climate kept throwing at us.
To be sure, we did have to resort to some geoengineering and a lot of carbon sequestration in the second half of the century, but that’s getting beyond the scope of this interview that just tells the story of our world until 2050. For the purposes of our retrospective in 2100, I’ll end this topic by saying that we know now that humans can and do closely monitor the climate and make constant adjustments to keep the whole planetary ecosystem working.
We would not have been able to get to that point of civilizational sophistication if not for the epic efforts in America and around the world during those critical three decades from 2020 to 2050. Indeed, they did turn the corner on climate change and we are truly grateful.
Editor’s Note from the Medium package marking the arrival of the year 2100: This is the 3rd installment of the Medium interview of renowned journalist and author Stuart Rand to kick off the new year in 2100. You can read all installments of the entire interview at the series landing page or find them in order here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Due to popular demand we may take questions from our global audience and Stuart will answer the best of them as a regular feature in the year ahead.
Ending note from the world of 2020: This story is part of The Transformation series that tells the largely positive story of America and the world from 2020 until 2050 from the perspective of Stuart Rand, a journalist and author born into Generation Z, looking back at the end of this life in 2100. All the stories can be found on the series landing page here. You can directly go to an introduction to the series in the voice of author Peter Leyden writing in 2020 here. You can get an overview of the overarching story of the series from Stuart’s perspective in 2100 here.
We may continue the series with periodic updates from Stuart Rand in the year 2100 as he answers queries from his global audience. The best way to be notified on those updates is by following author Peter Leyden or subscribing to the newsletter of The Transformation.
