Planning for Net Zero in an Imperfect World

The Earth’s average temperature surpassed the 1.5°C threshold for the first time in 2024—a milestone driven in part by El Niño, but also a stark warning about our broader climate trajectory. While temperatures may moderate slightly in 2025, the world remains far from taking the decisive action needed to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.

The obstacles to meaningful progress are complex, spanning economics, politics at local and global levels, and questions of technological scalability. The good news is that these are solvable challenges. Yet, despite our collective capacity, we’ve struggled to overcome the headwinds that continue to slow decisive climate action.

On the podcast, Niall Mac Dowell, visiting scholar at the Kleinman Center and professor of Future Energy Systems at Imperial College London, takes stock of where we are now. His work focuses on the transition to a low-carbon economy, with recent research exploring the feasibility of clean energy development projections and the role negative emissions could play in achieving net-zero goals. He shares his perspective on what it will take to move more decisively toward a sustainable energy future.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. The Paris Climate Agreement aims to limit global warming ideally to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, there’s increasing acknowledgement that the warming threshold could be surpassed sooner than expected. In fact, the Earth’s yearly average temperature exceeded the 1.5 degree threshold for the first time in 2024. That peak was driven in part by El Niño, which has passed, and temperatures are likely to moderate somewhat in 2025.

Yet what is certain is that the world collectively has yet to take decisive action to prevent the most severe impacts of climate change. The barriers to progress are complex and span economics, local and global politics, and questions of technological scalability. On the bright side, these are challenges that we can solve. Pessimistically, despite our collective abilities, we have failed to address the headwinds that would allow us to move more forcefully on climate.

On today’s podcast, we’re going to take stock of our current climate trajectory with Niall McDowell, Professor of Future Energy Systems at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. McDowell’s work focuses on understanding the transition to a low carbon economy. His recent research has explored how realistic projections for clean energy development may be, and the role that negative emissions could play in net zero carbon scenarios. In our conversation, he’ll provide his thoughts on how we might move forward forcefully toward net zero going forward. Niall, welcome to the podcast.

Niall McDowell: Thanks so much. It’s pleasure to be here.

Stone: So your work focuses on the transition to net zero, with a focus on negative emissions technologies.

McDowell: Amongst other things, yeah.

Stone: Could you give us an introduction to your work?

McDowell: I guess maybe the place to start is, I’m a chemical engineer, and I did my PhD in molecular physics, and I started, you know, with this very, very technocratic view of the world where, you know, all I had to do was find the perfect molecule for capturing CO2, and then this would enable me to save the world. And essentially, I’ve been pulling on that piece of string for 20 years, and have been sort of successively realizing that this transition question is much more than just a technology question. It’s about, yes, we need better molecules for capturing CO2, storing hydrogen, etcetera, but we also need to understand how these technologies work together.

So when you have a CCS equipped power plant, it has to work in sympathy with other elements of the power system, but that power system is increasingly being asked to serve, you know, different types of demands as people electrify transport, electrify heating, and so on and so forth. We are also kind of emerging into in an environment, you know, where, hitherto, we thought we had a relatively stable electricity demand in places like Britain, Europe, the United States. But now, with the advent of AI and this current focus on data centers, understanding that growth phase will matter again. This complicates that challenge, because we not only need to think about decarbonizing the existing system, but also this new one that we’re building to meet these new demands.

So you sort of take that technocratic layer, and then you need to wrap around it an understanding of how it affects — essentially, how it affects society. So this implies, you know, understanding what it means for job creation, preservation, destruction, and so on, and what impact policies can have, and the way in which policy makers engage with this, and the various lenses that, through which they investigate and consider this energy transition, or net zero transition. It’s much more than just, what is the cheapest way to produce a few kilowatt hours of power? And then finally, we need to understand the role of the various actors here. So public sector, private sector, industry, policy, finance, and how all of this can be brought together. So I suppose what you could say is I spent 20 years trying to understand this problem from as many different perspectives as I can.

Stone: So it’s a complex problem?

McDowell: By definition, yeah.

Stone: So, jumping ahead here. So where we are at this point in time, the window to keep the Paris 1.5 degree ambition in the realm of possibility appears to be closing. Some have recently called the 1.5 degree target dead in the bluntest of assessments. I want to ask you, what has recently changed that this concession is being more openly made, and do you agree that this 1.5 degree window is rapidly passing?

McDowell: So, I mean short answer, no, right? I think where I want to push back a little bit in that characterization is, so Paris 2015, pursue efforts, limit temperature rise to well below two, and pursue efforts towards 1.5, right? So Paris aimed then somewhere between 1.5 and two. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is, of all of the pathways to achieve this outcome, many of them recognized that, most likely, the carbon budget that was compatible with a well below two, 1.5 degree world would be exceeded, and we would therefore have to reverse that, to mop up that spillover, using carbon dioxide removal technologies.

So we would exceed, we will peak, and then we will decline emissions, and use CDR, carbon dioxide removal, to compensate for that exceedance, such that, over the balance of the century, we will be back to where we need to be, right? The fact that there’s been a temporary breach doesn’t mean that all hope is lost. And I think maybe the worst thing that we could do right now is to, you know, go with that characterization of, it’s over, it’s dead, give up, forget it. That, no, not at all. We’re just getting started.

Stone: I want to be a little bit more specific, if we possibly can, about where we are on that trajectory right now. So you kind of mentioned the range of 1.5 to 2.0. If we look again at the global trajectory, look at the NDCs, the Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, where does that get us within that target range, if everything is actually, you know, lived up to at this point?

McDowell: Yeah, okay, so again, two ways of answering this. On the one hand, it doesn’t, right? Current NDCs, you know, we’re looking at kind of two and a half degrees if we’re lucky. You know, this is not good enough. However, go back a decade. When we started off at 2015, the NDCs we had there, but it’s at three and a half degrees. So progress is happening. In that period, also we have seen US has peaked its emissions and are declining. Britain, Europe also are declining. Now, some of that is de industrialization and so on and so forth, the switch from coal to natural gas, etcetera, but the reality is, emissions from those important parts of the world have peaked and are declining.

A lot of the emissions now, they come from places like China, India, etcetera. Fine, but many of the emissions from China, for example, are to produce good services that we consume in places like Britain, Europe, the United States. So therefore, that is where things like the European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which I think you’ve discussed on this podcast recently, come into play, because they are now saying we now make as a requirement for participating in our market that these goods and services must now be low carbon, which in turn, creates the incentive, the conditions, etcetera, for these producing countries that are ordinarily highly emitting to start driving down their emissions. And the implication is, we will pay. You give me low carbon vehicles, etcetera, give me the cost of it, and I will pay for it. So I think, again, if you look at it through a sort of a keyhole, no, this is not great. But take a step back, the trajectory is actually promising.

Stone: You and I spoke a couple of weeks ago prior to this conversation, and one of the things that came up in that conversation you talked about, and just playing on what you talked about about China, is the concept of relative competitive advantage. And to put this another way, to be very specific, you brought up the idea that, if the goal is to decarbonize rapidly at lowest cost, does it make sense to accept or even encourage that China is the industrial engine of decarbonization or of the energy transition? What’s your thought on that, and do you see it as being politically viable?

McDowell: I think the last question is the easiest one. No, right? I mean, it’s manifest. And even, you know, let’s try and take the heat out of this a little bit. Even when the United States came out with the Inflation Reduction Act, this caused quite a bit of consternation in Europe at the time, because of how much subsidy was available, how much public support was available through the Inflation Reduction Act, and other things like the loan program office, the LPO, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. How much support was available for these low carbon technologies in the United States context, that in Europe, folks were worried that, “Hang on a second, this is an unfair advantage,” and so on.

So this has always been a cause for some for some concern, right? So this is not a new problem. In modeling, so when I build a mathematical model and try and understand, you know, the transition, you know, we get this least cost transition. This is what we solve for in models. It is far from obvious that this is what society wants to solve for. And it’s far from obvious that a least cost solution to any of these things is even a desirable society. So what happens to that human capital, you know, in Germany, for argument’s sakes, or in Italy, and so on, where they’re making all these cars, what happens to that human capital if all of that manufacturing goes to China, right? We need to think about that.

And so maybe, you know, there is societal value in having slightly more expensive, but more locally or more domestically produced goods and services, that still get us to net zero. Now that’s one conversation. Another way of saying it is that, well, in principle, China and other countries perhaps, but principally China, are saying is, “We will give you a very, very deeply discounted net zero transition. But, you know, the price will be — you’ll get cheaper cars, etcetera, but what you will lose will be your industries.” Are we willing to take that? Politically, it seems no.

Stone: Well, there’s a balance here, right? So, I guess, the theory of the globalization perspective, as you’ve mentioned, if we’re looking low cost and low cost being politically palatable because people don’t see their energy prices rise, that’s a positive. But then you miss the opportunity for the longer term opportunity to industrialize with the development of the clean energy industry.

McDowell: For sure. And equally, that’s not to say that we should try and produce everything locally, right? You know, this isn’t to kind of go to the opposite end of the spectrum and pursue it exclusively. Localist agenda, right? But what you might do is, you might say, given that we want to restructure our economies such that we are no longer emitting carbon and greenhouse gasses, one trajectory for my country, which can be different to the trajectory for your country, can we pursue such that it creates the most added value and enables us to capture the maximum amount of that value within our own country?

I think, and so, for example, on the one hand, the UK has done a great job with offshore wind, right? We arguably pioneered the development of that industry. We spent a lot of money and got the wind technology deployed and brought to help bring the cost down. On the other hand, it was a failure, because we spent a lot of money, and it all went out of the country, and we didn’t capture hardly any of that value within the UK. So if we had to do that again, maybe we could have said, “Yes, we want to do this industry. We want to have renewable energy. Yes, we are willing to pay for it and support it. But which elements of that value chain can we capture?” And it needs to be more than just the kind of maintaining the wind turbines, for example, right? So thinking through that lens, I think, is increasingly salient in the world that we are in and in the world into which we are moving.

Stone: I want to talk more about that, but I want to ask you a very basic question at this point. What has the political response been to the offshore wind industry in the UK, and specifically talking about the point that you alluded to earlier, the farms are offshore of the UK, but the equipment, as I understand, came from the continent, right? So how’s that been taken?

McDowell: Well, so on the one hand, it’s great, right? Because it’s offshore, it’s out of sight, out of mind, mostly, right? In the UK, historically, we haven’t liked onshore wind. People have gotten upset about that. Offshore, not a problem. I don’t think that it’s been as much in the public discourse, the fact that this industry hasn’t been captured within the UK historically. But my sense is that it is going to become increasingly important, particularly on this new — under our current government, to, you know, be more vocal about how we can manage this transition whilst simultaneously growing the economy and reducing costs, right?

Because, don’t forget, we’ve gone through quite a trying time recently from the fallout from the Ukraine war and the increased energy bills that came with that. People are feeling quite a lot of pain from energy bills. So I think, popularly, we will need to feel, and that perception, that feeling is important, that costs of energy are going down, not up. Because again, Europe and Britain is under the same populist challenge to the net zero agenda as we see in other parts of the world. So we need to be able to address that.

Stone: You, in your work, you’ve highlighted the political challenges to decarbonization. Some of these challenges are very obvious. For example, the flip flopping on the climate issue here in United States, rising concern around energy costs, and competitiveness in the EU. We’ve seen a lack of even finance from rich countries to help developing countries in their problem. But I want to get your perspective on this political issue. If there’s something that can be encapsulated, if there’s an overarching theme here, what is the political issue that’s holding us back?

McDowell: Fundamentally, climate change is a problem. It’s a global problem. It manifests in the long term and often in areas that are remote from one’s immediate constituency. Almost none of our institutions, political, industrial, commercial, etcetera, are set up to tackle problems like that, right? So I think that’s one issue. So for example, in the UK, you know, we need to build some infrastructure and future proof it. So, you know, going back — I mean, because fundamentally, CO2 is a waste. You know, let’s not dress it up as anything more interesting, that it’s the sewage of the fossil fuel industry, right? You know, it’s not anything more than that.

We need to manage this waste product. In the Victorian era in Britain, you know, we created the sewer system, right? This infrastructure was built back then, it was oversized, and future proofed, and all these kinds of things. We need to do the same again. But this requires us today taking decisions in Britain, which is, frankly, bankrupt, right? Maybe to be kinder, you know, the economy is not doing as well as it might do. And so you are spending more money today than you absolutely need to.

That requires some sustained political will. You need to have political actors that are have the confidence to take a commit and review strategy that is long term future proofed, as opposed to doing the least cost — taking the least cost decision today. And so, for example, some work that we did a few years ago and ended up publishing, I think, in some nature journal, really demonstrated that taking this long term strategic approach can, in the long run, save you very, very significant amount. You know, cut the cost in half or more, right? By taking this long term strategic view. But you do need to be willing to commit over the long term and recognize that the value that you’re creating, that you’re locking in through this big infrastructure, this long term infrastructure, you know, this will not be manifest anytime soon.

So you’re not going to obviously be able to say, “We have done this, and it is cheaper.” You know, so you don’t get an easy win. This is complicated, it’s hard, and it requires bravery. And if I could say then, to draw on that theme, you know, we have known about the physics of climate change for many, many decades. Go back to Lyndon Johnson in ’65. You know, the US President then. Climate change, it’s real, it’s anthropogenic. We need to do something about it. We have, arguably, then lost the last 50 odd years, a half a century, not because we didn’t have the technologies to start, you know, improving the efficiency of vehicles, capturing carbon, starting to deploy renewable energy, and so on, but because we didn’t have the political will to require it be done, right? It was always, always, always cheaper to say, “This is an interesting problem. Let’s do some research,” as opposed to bite the bullet and start to regulate.

Stone: So what would you suggest, and this is a really open question, a very broad question, the ways that we might surmount that? So you’re talking about immediate realities, the costs that are, you know, placed upon certain country, people, and they have to look long term to see the bright outcome from this. And I think we’ve seen that in a lot of different ways, politically, that that is used as a tool to move away from any effort to decarbonize or to slow it down. Is there anything that you have come across that might be a counter to that?

McDowell: Yeah. You know, the first thing that I’m going to say is there is no sort of one size fits all answer to this. Just the politics and the political economy in every country are different. The value drivers are different. However, it’s been, I think, pretty comprehensively and repeatedly demonstrated that, you know, because the problem with kind of decarbonization is — it’s perceived as being costly. You know, this thing costs me so much more. A ton of steel or a ton of cement that is produced in a low carbon fashion, or a decarbonized fashion, is significantly more costly than an unabated ton, than a high carbon ton. And these are, you know, bulk, high, undifferentiated commodity goods, right?

So what’s the value proposition? And you know, if nobody’s making me produce low carbon steel, then I can’t sell it. Usefully, therefore, it’s been really demonstrated that when you build infrastructure, roads, bridges, houses, skyscrapers, cars, etcetera, with low carbon steel, cement, aluminum and so on, the marginal cost is sort of one to two percent, right? You could deeply decarbonize all of this infrastructure at a very, very low marginal cost, and that’s sort of before we start thinking about, over time, how learnings kick in and prices come down. So the first thing to say is it is not actually that expensive to do this.

Second, if we do do this, we can create huge amounts of external value. So then, how might we go about doing it? And again, this is just speaking as an academic, and so therefore, you know, very naive in many respects, but things like carbon intensity standards, emissions performance standards, low, you know, carbon product standards. We don’t allow lead in paint anymore or lead in gasoline, etcetera, right? We just recognize these things as being bad, and we require them to be phased out, as asbestos insulation.

Treat carbon in the same way. Today, we have a relatively high carbon infrastructure. We need to recognize that, we need to set a mandated target, and drive that down. The largest consumer of construction services in Britain is the Department of Education, right? They’re constantly building and repairing and so on. If the Department of Education were to commit to buying — you know, to making all cement purchases, for example, low carbon cement, you now have a market made.

We don’t really — you know, and in principle, you wouldn’t need to do very much beyond that commitment to buy. And you know, I think this can be replicated thereafter. I think we are in the foothills of seeing more of those kinds of commitments to buy from the private sector as well. And so if you look in the context of carbon dioxide removal, what you’re seeing through, let’s say, the frontier advanced market commitment is a good example of how that can work and how that, indeed, can be quite catalytic in an entirely voluntary sector today.

Stone: You have, in some of your recent work, looked at some of the modeling that’s used to decarbonize, and you’ve pointed out the integrated assessment models that policy makers use in any variety of countries to understand and create pictures of decarbonization scenarios and pathways for the future. And you’ve called out those scenarios for not being very realistic and actually being counter to success of the energy transition decarbonization efforts. Could you talk about the problems that you’ve seen in that modeling? It really focuses on materials not being as readily available as the assumption would would have it.

McDowell: Yeah, and you know, in some senses, that’s an unfair paper, right? Because it’s very, very easy to take aim at a paper or at a modeling approach or something like that, and say, “Well, you haven’t done this thing that you didn’t set out to do, or that wasn’t —“ or, “Your model is naive to something that isn’t included in it.” Yes, right? So, you know, that could be perceived as being a little bit unfair. But what one worries about, and again, we’ve seen this in other contexts, right, where these IAMs, these integrated assessment models, get used as sort of an oracle to tell us, you know, this is the quantitative pathway of what we should do, and it does, you know, at times, get used like that.

But then you say, “Well, okay, in order to build that much wind, solar, bio energy with CCS, whatever, what are we talking about in terms of raw materials and so on?” And what we concluded from this study was that, you know, looking at this, the rate at which we’re anticipating, you know that these models anticipate different energy services being provided, you know, the sheer quantity of particularly raw materials, metals particularly, it very quickly consumes all of the world’s current supply, and then goes rapidly beyond.

Stone: And the magnitudes are pretty dramatic, the amount it goes beyond, right?

McDowell: Yeah, these numbers can be quite big. And of course, once you go beyond at all, then the price kind of skyrockets, right, in principle. And of course, when the price sky rockets, we don’t — well, we just don’t buy it, right? So, you know, it is this thing. So maybe a more constructive way to think about this would be, “Well, if we want to do as much renewable energy or battery technology or whatever as these models are telling us will be a good idea, we need to get started today to be sure that we have the mining and production capacity that we’re making these metals available tomorrow, right?” Now, that’s easy for me to say, but when I then want to go and convince somebody in Anglo American, Rio Tinto, whatever, to produce a new mine, because we will need it in the future, I promise, difficult conversation.

Stone: Well, it’s difficult if they can’t rely upon the policy to reliably be there.

McDowell: There you go.

Stone: To drive the demand for their…

McDowell: Exactly, which again, starts to sort of say, you know, “Okay, maybe the role for government evolves from one where, today, what government mostly do, at least in the UK, is hand out cash to make up the difference.” You know, so it’s, “We will do a project today. We will give you a contract for difference, for your wind, for your CCS, for whatever it is. We will make up the cash difference, right?” Maybe the world is, “We commit to this policy of seeing so much wind deployed. You know, as far as the mining company conversation is concerned, we commit to this policy of seeing this deployed.” And it’s probably not just the UK. We would need Britain, Europe and so on. The more the merrier.

We commit to seeing this deployed, and we also commit to being the buyer of last resort at market price for whatever you produce that is not, you know, consumed. You know, you could imagine this kind of conversation, right? Because, you know, that is a liability that will never actually materialize, because we’ve promised to build this thing, but now you’ve got to get your treasury people happy with it, because, in principle, that’s a contingent liability on your balance sheet. I’m not so sure about that. What does that do to our bond rate, right? So these are complicated and nuanced things, but it’s an evolve — it’s trying to understand the evolving role of government in this conversation, and you know, how do we treat those debts?

Stone: You said that the government may not have sufficient empathy for the industries or the problems. I’m not sure exactly what that refers to, but I wonder if I could ask you, what does that refer to?

McDowell: So I think humans are very, very good at staying in silos, and we are not — it’s difficult, it’s uncomfortable, to come out of my little bubble of expertise and go into another bubble where I know nothing, and I’m not known, I’m not recognized, etcetera, and have to understand that other world. For example, we see, in the context of hydrogen famously, right? Almost every country around the world is a hydrogen strategy. Nobody is producing or consuming any more hydrogen than they were, you know, normally for producing ammonia, urea, etcetera, right?

So the fact that we’ve got this ambition, it isn’t getting turned into reality. Why? Well, because we don’t have off take agreements, because we don’t have financeable business models. Because, because, because, because, right? And largely, I put that down to not a failure of technology, per se, but a failure of all of the different sectors to really understand what is required for them to move. So we need governments to understand more of what is financeable, what is bankable? We need the finance sector to understand more of what technology risk looks like, what it does not look like. I think that there can be a lot of perceived risk where it doesn’t exist in practice. I think the role of the insurance industry, for example, could be hugely significant in managing some of these things. So yeah, I think we need to understand the constraints under which our counterparts operate in much more detail.

Stone: We’ve talked here about some of the difficulties in moving forward with the energy transition, adopting clean energy technologies as quickly as we might need. And you work in carbon dioxide removal, which is really major focus. Now, I want to ask you, as we go further down the path, as these windows become a little bit narrower to achieve various carbon dioxide reduction levels, temperature targets, what have you, I want to ask you about the practicality and the viability of CDR going forward.

So a lot of the problems that we have with renewables, the investability, the political stability behind them, all that, the need to invest in new infrastructure, new manufacturing, supply chains. All those apply to CDR as well. And you also have land use concerns that go along with it. The land use requirements are quite large, as I understand the models. CDR is an option to bring us back if we overshoot.

McDowell: It’s a requirement.

Stone: It’s a requirement, it’s a requirement, yep. Is it going to face the same types of hurdles that we’ve seen to date with clean energy?

McDowell: Yeah, and, you know, maybe this is a really good example of that sort of, you know, opportunity to beat up on integrated assessment models, right? So CDR first got put in to these IAMs. It was mediated through BECCS, Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage. And it was just the BECCS option. And it was essentially a technology that would consume biomass, remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and make the mass balance work out in the context of the IAM. And we showed, you know, it was shown — I’m not an IAM practitioner, so definitely not we, but it was shown that, you know, here are different ways of getting to, again, your Paris two degrees type world, and, you know, this is how much BECCS you need to do, right?

And some of these parameterizations found that we were using just, I mean, multiple planets worth of biomass. Cue much hysteria from, you know, different areas saying, “Oh, you know, you can’t do this. You’re chopping down all the forests. Blah, blah, blah.” Well, of course, we’re not going to do that. So what that has done is, over the course of the last decade or so, you know, so BECCS, what was just BECCS, has become CDR, which now refers to a portfolio of solutions which keeps growing.

I mean, back — you know, because this actually came up at first in the 1990s. I mean, people were working on, you know, what is now referred to as enhanced rock weathering, as direct air capture, as bioenergy with CCS. You know, this has, you know, come through now. And there is a much larger portfolio and many different flavors of BECCS. Some people over here call it BiCRS, different approaches for doing direct air capture. Increasingly now, we’re looking at technologies for removing CO2 from the sea water, and I think that this is really exciting, because, in principle, these technologies, they can be modular.

So they’re very stackable, as it were. They don’t require much land. You’re processing sea water. That water, via Le Chatelier’s principle, it will re-equilibrate rapidly with the atmosphere. So you’re pulling the CO2 out of the air. You’re precipitating the carbon dioxide essentially as seashells, which, you know, we know are quite happy to sort of sit around —

Stone: Spread them around the beach.

McDowell: Spread them around. But you know, they just sit there happily in the ocean environment, right? So you get this permanent removal. You, therefore, do not need all of this infrastructure around CO2 transport and storage. That’s a big hurdle done away with. Oh, and by the way, because you’re electrolyzing sea water to do this, you’re producing a hydrogen byproduct, which is useful too, right? So, you know, this is something that was not on the agenda at all five years ago, and now is coming through. So I think, you know, yes, carbon removal is very, very important. And the reason that we need to start thinking about and working on it now is because this then catalyzes the creation of these new tech tools and techniques and ideas, which then translate into, you know, pretty cool companies, which fundamentally, are going to be integral to saving the planet.

Stone: What’s interesting, because I recently read an article that there’s a proposal to do something just like you said, you know, using the oceans to to reduce carbon dioxide. An experiment in the Gulf of Maine, and I think it got significant pushback as well. One group says it’s the best thing, we have to try it. The other says it can — I don’t remember the details. It might be harmful to the ocean ecosystem. So everything, obviously, has its trade offs and its concerns.

McDowell: This is also fair. There will always be kind of proponents and opponents for many things. We also got to be a little bit careful, right? About, you know, getting ourselves into a kind of analysis paralysis. We are exceptionally good at this in Britain, right? Will we do something, will we not? Oh, I don’t know. Let’s discuss, let’s analyze, let’s re evaluate. At some point, you got to go and do some things. And I think we are getting to a point where, actually, you know, if we agree that climate change is real, it’s urgent, it’s harmful, we probably need to kind of, you know, fix that first, will be where I will be starting to get to.

Stone: So I want to ask you about that. So in a prior conversation, you mentioned that it is time to double down on our efforts to decarbonize. What does that mean from a policy, economic, and technological perspective? One of the things that we had discussed earlier was that political realities must be more fully taken into account to accelerate the transition. Just wanted to point out, for example, looking at the Paris Agreement, that, through each each country’s NDCs that is intended to address the political realities of each country, so each country can decide what its own path forward will be. What is missing there, and how do we take it the next step?

McDowell: Easy question.

Stone: Easy question.

McDowell: Yeah. I think it’s very easy to become rapidly despondent in these conversations, right? Because, you know, we agreed this back in 2015, and I’ll look at how the world has changed. We used to be, you know, very globalized, pretty much harmonious. Low energy prices, low capital price, you know, low inflation rates, cost of money was low, all the rest of it. Now we’re in basically the opposite world, right? Carbon emissions have gone up, not down, etcetera, etcetera. It’s all very bad.

Once we committed to Paris, we had to think about, what does that mean? How do we get there? It took between, say, 2015 to 2018 for the IPCC to come out with their special report of 1.5 degrees. That was the start of, okay, globally, this is what this looks like. The UK started the ball rolling. And again, you know, not to sound overly booster-ish, but the UK was the first major economy to say, “We will commit to net zero by 2050.” And you know, because the IPCC evidence was, sometime in the sort of period, 2050 to about 2070, we need to get to net zero. UK said, “All right, we’ll do it by 2050.”

The period, say, from 2019 through ’21 was the period of countries, companies, etcetera, committing to net zero. We then had a pandemic. It kind of distracted things. As the pandemic receded, then we’ve had this war in Ukraine, right? This has, again, distracted things. So it is wrong to sort of position solving for climate as the only and the overwhelming and the absolute priority for everybody at all times. That’s just not the case. So I think it’s actually pretty good, despite this once in a century pandemic, etcetera. 

Broadly speaking, momentum has not stalled, right? We’ve kept going. Doesn’t mean it’s perfect and done, but, you know, we’ve kept going. I think what we — you know, in the UK recently, for example, we got to a place where the final investment decision was finally taken on the net zero Teesside CCS project. I mean, that’s 20 years in the making in the UK. So, you know, I think progress is happening, maybe slower than we would like, but it’s always going to be slower than we would like. And I think what we need is to sort of, you know, keep calm and carry on, and ideally, learn from what we’ve done, accelerate, and also disseminate, right? And this is, again —

Stone: Dissemination. Important.

McDowell: Yeah. You know, this is also really interesting, right? Because, you know, it is very much the kind of trying to fly the plane and build it at the same time, or redesign the plane that we’re already flying in, right? So we’re trying to create these new industries and new business models and so on. So there’s a competitive thing, a commercial thing. But we also desperately need to help everybody else get up the learning curve as well. So we need to share knowledge simultaneously. I mean, that’s kind of paradoxical when you think about it. So we need to sort of figure out, in real time, how to thread that particular needle.

Roughly speaking, you know, all countries have massive amounts of debt. You know, the United States debt ceiling is famous, Britain is in the same position, and so on. We need, you know, one of the things we need to decarbonize, right? Maybe not the biggest thing, but aviation is two, two and a half percent of global emissions. We need to decarbonize that. One way of doing that is through sustainable aviation fuel. SAF is more expensive and requires, you know, an advanced market commitment, a commitment to buy. Well, this is just not what the airlines normally do. Governments can’t be consistently and continuously asked to make up that price difference. So what could we creatively do to solve for that? So these are the kinds of things that we need to be trying to tackle in real time, buyers, alliances, and so on.

Stone: You look at carbon capture technology, we’ve talked about renewables here. There are political headwinds and tailwinds for all of these things in the present tense as well as into the future. And I think what we’re getting to here is that some element of all of the above is going to be necessary to solve our problems here, number one. Number two, when we look at the critiques of certain technologies, I wonder if we are allowing perfection to be the enemy of the very good. I’m going to pose that to you as an open question, and let you talk about that.

McDowell: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely the case. I think we get into this place as well of, well, my definition of perfect and yours could be quite different, right? So, you know, you’ll have some folks who believe that we should rapidly transition to an economy exclusively powered by wind and solar power, for example. And that’s a very, very bookend case, right? I don’t think very many people really think that. But you know, that that is one narrative. You know, just stop oil, wind and solar only, etcetera. That is a model of perfection that is hugely challenging.

You know, to me, the problem is, we have been very good over the last couple of hundred years at taking fossil carbon out of the geosphere, from the underground, and putting it into the atmosphere, where it’s happy to stay for a very long time, and causing this climate effect, right? So what we need to do is stop doing that. That will mean energy efficiency, it will mean reduced — you know, insulating homes better, it will mean fuel switching coal to natural gas, where it makes sense. But it will also mean things like carbon capture and storage.

And so going back to the previous conversation, think we spoke about it earlier today, you know, when I was working with the World Bank and I was spending time in South Asia, Southeast Asia, you know, a lot of the conversations that I was having with folks in Indonesia and India, particularly, “We are going to continue to burn coal because it’s a local, it’s an indigenous resource that provides energy security, but also employment and value for the economy. We will transition away from internal combustion engines, because this allows us to stop importing oil and gas from other countries. We will, however, buy EVs cheaply from China because it’s affordable. We will power them with coal that gets, you know, a lot of the fossil fuel pollution off of our streets.”

And you know, I remember being in Delhi, where you couldn’t see the end of the street because of the air pollution. So cleaning up the air has a very, very real, near term, personal to me, benefit. So I see the purpose for this transition. What you’ve essentially done by that, so on the one hand, this is terrible, because you’re powering them by coal. Is that even a reduction relative to a — you know, a net reduction relative to a gasoline powered internal combustion engine and so on? Okay, but what you’ve also done is you’ve swept all that pollution over to one place. Now, when you’re sweeping your floor at home, you sweep the dust up into one spot, then you put it on the shovel and put it in the dustbin.

Powering EVs in this way is essentially the same thing. You’re concentrating the pollution at the coal plant, you then can capture that CO2, sequester it, and you’ve achieved your outcome, right? In other parts of the world, so for example, Denmark is a really great example. Relatively small power demand. Very just absolutely phenomenal wind resource. Deeply interconnected with neighboring countries who are, again, committed to achieving a net zero transition. Okay, a much more wind focused transition will make a lot more sense there. You move across to places like Poland, you know, a lot of sort of extractive industries, heavy industry requiring base load power. There, in my view, transition will continue to rely on coal, but with CCS and efficiency improvements.

Stone: What does that mean for the transition? Going to the Indian example that you gave, or the Polish example you just mentioned. What does that actually mean for carbon reduction?

McDowell: Well, I mean, so for example, for example, if you take some of the least efficient coal plants in the planet, and, you know, I don’t want to sort of lionize coal particularly or anything like that, but it in Southeast Asia, I think it’s something like 60 percent of electricity comes from coal, right? Many of those power plants are not terribly efficient, and they will produce, therefore, more than a ton of CO2 for every megawatt hour. Now, in principle, if you upgraded those coal plants from something that could be as low as in the twenties percent efficient, to a high efficiency, low emissions, a Healy coal plant, your emissions are down in the sort of seven hundreds. You have avoided a huge amount of coal based pollution, as well as the kind of, you know, mercury, SOx, NOx particulates, and so on, but without sort of asserting that someone needs to stop using their indigenously available energy source. So that’s a hugely useful thing.

Stone: And then you jump in with CCS for the rest, and you’ve got a lower hurdle to go over at this point?

McDowell: Absolutely, absolutely, because you’ve got a higher efficiency power plant producing less CO2, you add CCS to that, and you could readily have a power plant that is 98 percent decarbonized. It’s not 100, but 98 is pretty good.

Stone: Well, this is an interesting conversation, because you’re taking into account some very real, local realities. Obviously, somebody who is interested in the most rapid absolute decarbonization possible would take major issue with this, right? The different realities here, right, that we’re trying to —

McDowell: Well, I mean, I would push back on that characterization a little bit, because, you know, if you are genuinely interested in them, in the most rapid decarbonization possible, well, instead of fighting with people, you say, “Well, what is it that you’re willing to do? And let me walk with you on this.” So by insisting that you do it my way, I’m probably not going to get you to do anything, right? Whereas, if you meet people where they are, you can actually then have a constructive conversation.

Stone: Niall, thank you very much for talking.

McDowell: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Stone: Today’s guest has been Niall McDowell, Professor of Future Energy Systems at Imperial College in London, England. Visit the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy website for more energy policy insights, including research, blog posts, and live events with leaders from government, academia and industry. You can keep up with the center by subscribing to our monthly newsletter on our website. Our web address is Kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu. Thanks for listening to Energy Policy Now and have a great day.