The Biden Administration’s climate plan targets multiple sectors. The top three are transportation, power plants, and methane emissions from Oil & Gas operation. The first two are more familiar than the third. Let us talk about methane with the aid of a new visualization tool called En-Roads (beta) https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/. En-Roads visualizes the climate impact of different clean energy policies. The tool was recently published by MIT and Climate Interactive.
Open En-Roads and you will have a dashboard that looks like this:
The planet is on a path to a 3.60C (6.50F) warming by 2100.
Electrifying the Transportation Sector
To see the potential impact of electrifying the transport sector – slide the Transport/Electrification slider all the way to the right:
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The potential impact of electrifying the entire transportation fleet to electric – including cars, trucks, buses, and trains is reducing global temperature by 0.10C by 2100 (from 3.60C warming to 3.50C). How very disappointing!
This means that the aggregate of Tesla (>$800bn when I write this). Tens of billions of dollars invested in SPACs. Overall, nearly a Trillion Dollars of ESG capital earmarked to electrifying the transportation sector – will only account for 0.1 degrees by 2100.
In the future, we’ll deploy residential, hydrogen-driven Stirling engines to help charge EV’s at home. But for now, until there is a hydrogen economy, we focus on the methane mitigation sector.
Methane Emissions Mitigation
To see why mitigating methane is so important, slide the methane slider to the left to estimate the potential impact of the sector:
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Half a degree. A significantly larger impact than transportation.
The methane abatement sector raised a fraction of a percent to achieve a significantly larger impact than the electric transportation sector. The difference in capital efficiency in terms of GHG mitigation exceeds three orders of magnitude.
Don’t get me wrong – electrifying the transportation fleet is very important and we wholeheartedly support it. But for those interested in deploying capital to mitigating GHG emissions, methane abatement is where you will maximize your climate returns.
