5 Amazing Climate Change Breakthroughs You Need to Know About
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."
There’s been so much reporting about climate change in recent years, and experts’ alarm is not in the least misplaced. The window for taking critical actions is quickly narrowing, according to the latest report by a group of international experts known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But the crisis has fueled impressive and necessary momentum among scientists, organizations, and individuals aiming to slow the planet’s warming. “I’m absolutely optimistic. When it comes to innovation, there’s a good amount of progress being made,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, Ph.D., a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and an expert on advances in battery energy storage.
Here are some technological breakthroughs and new approaches we can all get behind—and participate in—to keep the progress rolling and mitigate the impact of climate change as much as we can.
The electric car boom is coming
Electric vehicles are projected to make up 10% of those on our roads in the next few years, with cars, light trucks, and buses rapidly going electric.
Transportation produces the largest share—some 27%—of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). If enough of us switch to EVs, that could keep more than 10 gigatons of greenhouse gases from being belched into the air in the next few decades, according to environmental nonprofit Project Drawdown.
Fifteen years ago, the idea of driving past gas stations to plug in our ride or charging up at home or at the office seemed like sci-fi. But now we all know about electric vehicles, and by 2030 fully half of Americans are expected to make their next car electric, according to a report from BloombergNEF. Tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and
batteries that now let people go up to 300 miles per charge are fueling the speedy adoption, Stefanopoulou says. By next year, car buyers will have some 20 new electric models to choose from.
Boosting electric vehicles is one of the most crucial components of curbing climate change. “The world must replace all gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles with a fleet of zero-emission cars, trucks, and buses by 2050,” states the climate action plan Speed & Scale. Such a shift will make us healthier too, as tailpipe emissions are associated with asthma, neurological and cardiovascular diseases, cancers, and immune system damage, according to the EPA.
What vehicles are electrifying most quickly? Community buses, and that makes sense given they cover great distances each year and have had notoriously poor fuel efficiency. School buses are also great candidates, and last fall the EPA awarded $1 billion to school districts to help the wheels on the bus go round and round gas-free. And don’t be surprised if your next package is delivered via a clean (and silent) electric truck—companies such as Amazon are moving swiftly to switch over their local fleets.
We have better solutions for CO2
Companies are increasingly capturing CO2 from power and manufacturing plants and turning the waste into useful products.
Even if CO2 stopped being produced tomorrow (and we’re very far from that), there’s still too much in the atmosphere and the oceans to avoid warming the planet. To hit climate goals by 2050, the U.S. may need to vacuum up as much as 1,850 million tons a year.
One of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S. is carbontech, which aims to remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and put it to safe and productive use. In short, carbontech techologies capture CO2 emissions from places such as coal and oil power plants and cement and steel factories or suck it directly from the air and oceans, says Volker Sick, Ph.D., a mechanical engineering professor and director of the Global CO2 Initiative at the University of Michigan. Companies do this with CO2 filters or CO2-attracting chemicals. Once it’s collected, the CO2 can be cleaned and used to make products or compressed and stored in tanks to be transported to another user.
DyeCoo, a Dutch textile company, is using reclaimed CO2 instead of water and processing chemicals to affix fabric dyes; Air Company, a New York City–based manufacturer, produces vodka and perfume made with the stuff. Sick expects captured CO2 to eventually be widely used in construction materials and plane fuels, and some estimate that carbontech will ultimately become a trillion-dollar industry. That’s in part because crucial products like plastics and medicines cannot be made without carbon; as we stop using fossil carbon, says Sick, demand for recycled carbon from CO2 will grow.
Solar power is more accessible than ever
People are banding together with other rooftop solar buyers through co-ops, saving both money and Mother Earth.
Electricity heats and cools our homes, cooks our food, and lets us get onto the Internet. But that energy doesn’t have to come from plants that burn fossil fuels, the planet’s largest contributor of greenhouse gases, according to Speed & Scale. Instead, we can power our homes cleanly and cheaply by installing solar arrays on our roofs. Solar today accounts for 2.8% of America’s power generation, but it’s growing fast: Some 500,000 new residential systems were installed in 2021, up 30% from the year before. And you don’t need to live in super-sunny Florida or California to benefit from solar—residents of Minnesota, Michigan, and even Alaska successfully use this renewable power, says Ben Delman, a spokesperson for the co-op Solar United Neighbors. Co-ops like this one can help you figure out whether your home is a good candidate for solar panels, and they organize free information sessions. Homeowners choose an installer through a competitive bidding process, with a proposal provided to each co-op member. Members then review their personalized proposals and decide whether they want to go solar.
Doing so can be economical, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Up-front costs with a co-op discount average about $15,000, Delman says, but that doesn’t include tax credits of up to 30%. “In general, you’ll probably save one-third or two-thirds of your current electric bill,” Delman says, with the majority of folks recouping their
investment in savings within five to 10 years. Other co-ops operating around the country include Solarize and Spark Northwest.
Cows don’t have to produce so much methane
Scientists are sprinkling seaweed into cow feed to dramatically reduce the methane the bovines belch into the air.
Methane accounts for some 11% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, and raising livestock is responsible for more than a quarter of that, according to the EPA. But when a handful of the red seaweed Asparagopsis was added to the usual cattle feed, it reduced methane in the animals’ digestive tracts by as much as 80% without changing the taste of the milk or the meat the cows produced, according to research published in the scientific journal PLOS One. “This is a rare win-win for the planet—it is simple and cost-effective, yet has a huge impact,” says Joan Salwen, CEO of Blue Ocean Barns, which cultivates the seaweed used in the study.
To get this climate fix out fast, Blue Ocean gives the feed to farmers; the cost is eventually paid by companies, such as Clover Sonoma Dairy and Ben & Jerry’s, that use the animals’ milk or meat. By the end of this decade, the company intends to have capacity to grow seaweed for all 100 million cattle in the U.S. Another company, Symbrosia, has
created a proprietary blend of red seaweed called SeaGraze that also cuts methane substantially.
Moms are making major change
More than a million people, mostly moms, are joining forces to push legislators and regulators to protect children from the ravages of climate change.
The 1.4 million Moms Clean Air Force volunteers have (among other things) written hundreds of thousands of messages to Congress and regulatory agencies and scored important climate wins.
A dozen years ago, when major national climate legislation went down in defeat, the environmentalist (and mom) Dominique Browning saw one major reason it failed: There was no groundswell of worried parents urging lawmakers to do something about coal-fired plants spitting out toxic mercury alongside CO2, or methane-emitting fracking sites injecting unhealthy chemicals into the ground. “Parents weren’t engaging on big, systemic fixes because they weren’t being educated about the link between the climate crisis and their children’s health,” Browning says.
Working with donors and colleagues at the Environmental Defense Fund, Browning started Moms Clean Air Force. Its goal is to harness the energy of everyday Americans to press lawmakers to act. On their site, you can learn about issues in order to spread the word. Others sign petitions or use the group’s guidance to write to the EPA about things like supporting stronger methane rules. The group also trains volunteer “Supermoms” to call or present their concerns in person to their local and national representatives.
Browning believes the actions of Moms Clean Air Force helped make the climate-focused IRA legislation a reality by meeting some 300 times at congressional offices and hosting more than 100 public-awareness events about the bill. These Moms are successful on a local level too, Browning says, pointing to Mom-aided wins on methane rules in New Mexico and Pennsylvania and pressure from Orlando mothers that nudged a dirty coal-fired power plant to start transitioning to renewables. “Moms will do everything to keep our children safe, and now we’re uniting to take action that ensures cleaner air and a better climate for their future,” Browning says.
You Might Also Like
