Business Maverick Op-Ed: Energy transition: Towards a zero-emission future By Jeffrey Sachs
relative to Earth’s pre-industrial temperature. Alarmingly, warming has already reached 1.1ºC, and the global temperature is rising around 0.2ºC each decade. That’s why the world must reach net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest.
Asia’s continued construction of coal plants, with ongoing deforestation in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Brazil, is putting our climate, air, and nutrition at huge and wholly unnecessary risk. In the United States, the Trump administration’s promotion of fossil fuels, despite American’s vast renewable-energy potential, adds to the absurdity. So does the renewed call by Brazil’s populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, to develop — that is, to deforest — the Amazon.
Governments and utility commissions should require that all new power-generating capacity is zero carbon. As old fossil-fuel plants age and are shut down, they should be replaced by clean power generation on a competitive basis, for example through. China and India, in particular, should stop building new coal-fired power plants at home, and capital-exporting countries such as China and Japan should stop financing new coal-fired plants in the rest of Asia, such as Pakistan and the Philippines.
The story with land use is the same. If Bolsonaro really thinks he’s going to bring about a Brazilian economic boom by opening the Amazon to further deforestation for soybeans and cattle ranches, he should think again. Such an effort would isolate Brazil and force the major downstream food companies, facing the threat of a massive global consumer backlash, to stop buying Brazilian products.
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