The Green New Deal: The enormous opportunity in shooting for the moon.

Decarbonizing with massive electrification will bring about a new American abundance.

The conversation about a Green New Deal is bold, timely, and necessary. The most important component of the Green New Deal as currently drafted is its commitment to complete decarbonization. That is the destination, the moon for our moonshot. The question is: how do we get there? What we learn is it is at least twice as easy as we think.

The most important component of the Green New Deal as currently drafted is its commitment to complete decarbonization.

Traditionally, the discussion of the energy economy has been about efficiency and domestic production, and not about decarbonization. This is an artifact of the oil crises of the 1970s and concern for US energy independence. This old fashioned approach translated essentially to more fuel efficient (but still petroleum) cars and better insulated (but still natural gas heated) homes. This approach can get us only a small fraction of the way to total decarbonization. We need substitution technologies, ways of satisfying our energy needs with zero emissions, in addition to improving efficiency. Electricity generated from renewables (solar, wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal) and nuclear are the substitution technologies that meet the scale of the problem. The good news is that the path to total decarbonization using these technologies is clearer (and more compelling economically) than most people think.

Decarbonization is not an unattainable ideal; it follows directly from the best data available on US energy usage. In 2017, Otherlab, the company I founded and lead, was contracted by the Advanced Research Project Agency of the Department of Energy (ARPA-e) to review all available energy data sources and create an ultra-high resolution picture of the US energy economy. The purpose was to identify research priorities, and to model scenarios for new energy technologies and policies. This work leveraged many decades of effort by the EIA¹ and Lawrence Livermore National Lab² analyzing the US energy economy and providing annual snapshots in a Sankey³ Flow Diagram format…