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A California coalition is tackling one of the hardest, unsexiest parts of climate policy
(VOX Energy Environment, 15 Feb 2019) Decarbonizing buildings: it’s tedious, but oh so necessary.
Ask most people about reducing carbon emissions to tackle climate change and they will mention solar panels or electric cars — the sexy stuff.
But scaling up the sexy stuff is only half the job.
The challenges of decarbonization fall into four basic buckets. There’s the electricity grid, which is rapidly getting less carbon-intensive as coal fades and renewables rise. There’s transportation, where there’s a long, long way to go, but the path is clear, namely electrifying the vehicle fleet as rapidly as possible and reducing vehicle use through densification and public transit.
Those two make up the sexy half, which gets wildly disproportionate attention.
Then there’s heavy industry, which everyone ignores in these conversations and I’m going to ignore as well, at least in this post.
And then there’s the fourth bucket: buildings. As the Green New Deal acknowledges, any plan to tackle climate change has to tackle the building sector, even if it won’t get headlines.
VOX Energy Environment, 15 Feb 2019: A California coalition is tackling one of the hardest, unsexiest parts of climate policy
