To avoid the worst risks of runaway climate change, the world must cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to about zero by 2050.
About 35% of these emissions comes from heavy transport, such as from trucks, ships, airplanes, trains and buses, and from industrial heat to make energy-intensive materials. Both sectors are supposedly “hard-to-abate,” so most climate models emphasize costly and unproven ways to extract carbon from smokestack emissions or even from thin air.
However, new technologies, materials, design methods, financial techniques, business models, smart policies and aggressive investments could revitalize, relocate, or displace some of the world’s most powerful industries.
This report complements such implementation accelerators by explaining and documenting the more technical contours of how, by the 2030s, trucking, aviation and shipping could be decoupling from climate. Steel, aluminum, cement and plastics too could take new forms, saved and made in new ways and unexpected places under novel business models.