Warnings About Humanity’s Future Don’t Get More Dire Than This
WiredToday, the plummeting price of renewables is helping humanity decarbonize: Wind energy prices dropped by 55 percent in the 2010s, the new report notes, while solar power and lithium ion batteries got 85 percent cheaper—much cheaper than researchers had anticipated. The report “makes it clear that the world has made some progress on climate change—there is some good news,” says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Stripe and the nonprofit Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t involved in the synthesis. “We can be cautiously optimistic about the direction of these trends, and also realize that technology’s not going to save us all by itself,” says Hausfather. “Without stronger policies to propel these adoptions, we’re not going to meet our targets.” The new IPCC report lands in the middle of those ranges—it warns that unless policymakers get a lot more ambitious about reductions, we could be heading toward a rise of around 3 degrees by the year 2100. “So suddenly, this transition to net zero is a major, major win for public health around the world,” says Elizabeth Sawin, founder and director of the Multisolving Institute, which focuses on climate solutions.