Name: How America can leave fossil fuels behind, in one chart
Uploaded: 2020-09-10T18:05:16.000Z
Duration: 11 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

For more than 10,000 years, the average global temperature

didn't change by more than 1 degree Celsius.

But then humans started burning fossil fuels,

Today, global temperatures have risen about 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times.

and ancient glaciers are melting faster and faster.

Without global action, the world is on track to warm at least 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.

That's why most scientists agree that we need to limit global warming to this range,

Carbon dioxide, which is emitted when we burn fossil fuels,

accounts for most of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

It's the main culprit behind climate change.

And to limit global warming to the degree that scientists are calling for,

The US doesn't currently emit the most carbon dioxide of any country.

But as one of the oldest industrial powers, it's emitted more carbon dioxide in total

So America has a big role to play in decarbonizing.

If you want to get halfway there by 2030, you have to start now.

There is literally zero more time to waste.

Dave writes about energy and climate for Vox.

And he says the 2020 US election comes with fairly clear stakes.

If Trump is reelected, that's it. Like there's no chance for 1.5.

And probably all chances for 2 degrees are gone.

“The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.”

“...new offshore oil and gas leasing program.”

President Trump doesn't have a climate policy.

And his reelection will most likely continue policies designed to boost the fossil fuel industry.

They'd increase carbon emissions instead of decreasing them.

You just can't have the world's second biggest economy opting out,

moving kin the opposite direction, and expect the world to get there.

The other major candidate in the election does have a plan to address climate change.

And this part of it in particular is ambitious:

Biden has been convinced and pushed to the point that he's got a great climate plan.

What Biden's plan doesn't get into are the details on exactly how the US would actually do that.

But there are people who have thought about what it might look like to decarbonize by 2050.

And to understand that, it helps to get a picture of where America's energy comes from,

This is Saul Griffith. He's a physicist, and an engineer, but this is how Dave describes him:

Probably the person who knows more about energy as it's used in the United States

A few years ago, Saul decided to make a model of America's energy use.

He ended up reading basically every available piece of data, from...

...the Energy Information Administration,

And so we pulled all of those together to build a very comprehensive picture of the US energy economy.

If you're just looking at the whole thing at once, it just looks like a big pile of spaghetti.

It's hard to make sense of, but it just traces energy, every unit of energy.

How does it enter the economy? How is it used throughout the economy?

This kind of chart is called a Sankey diagram. And it's easier to understand in 3 sections.

These columns here on the left are the sources of all the energy used in the US,

like natural gas, coal, solar, wind, nuclear, and oil.

This column in the middle is what those energy sources get converted into.

So a lot of it becomes electricity. Most oil becomes the fuel we use for transportation.

And here, you can see how much natural gas energy is being used to generate electricity,

versus being used directly to power things like cooking stoves.

And over here on the right? This is where all the energy is used,

Like how much energy is used to light shopping malls in the US.

Or how much energy is used by vehicles driven for work.

So you start to get this incredibly detailed picture of all of the interconnections,

which is really, really important when you do the next exercise:

Remember that carbon emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels. This stuff.

And Saul says that means that to decarbonize, we just need to follow their path.

The first place that leads you is here, with electricity and the energy we use to generate it —

the majority of which, in the US, comes from two kinds of fossil fuel: natural gas and coal.

If the US wants to decarbonize, it needs to stop getting electricity this way,

and replace it with other decarbonized energy sources.

All electricity would come from renewable sources —

wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and biomass. Or, nuclear energy.

Decarbonizing the way we get electricity would be a huge investment.

But it would also only eliminate 20% of emissions.

And that's because electricity and energy are not exactly the same thing.

It doesn't solve your heating emissions from using natural gas or fuel oil in your basement.

All these other parts of the economy draw their energy directly from fossil fuels.

Like transportation: We use oil for fuel.

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How America can leave fossil fuels behind, in one chart

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