Could every country have a Green New Deal? Report charts paths for 143 countries

4 years ago
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191220150545.htm

In this update, Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University and his team find low-cost, stable grid solutions in 24 world regions encompassing the 143 countries. They project that transitioning to clean, renewable energy could reduce worldwide energy needs by 57%, create 28.6 million more jobs than are lost, and reduce energy, health, and climate costs by 91% compared with a business-as-usual analysis. The new paper makes use of updated data about how each country's energy use is changing, acknowledges lower costs and greater availability of renewable energy and storage technology, includes new countries in its analysis, and accounts for recently built clean, renewable infrastructure in some countries.

"There are a lot of countries that have committed to doing something to counteract the growing impacts of global warming, but they still don't know exactly what to do," says Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and the co-founder of the Solutions Project, a U.S. non-profit educating the public and policymakers about a transition to 100% clean, renewable energy. "How it would work? How it would keep the lights on? To be honest, many of the policymakers and advocates supporting and promoting the Green New Deal don't have a good idea of the details of what the actual system looks like or what the impact of a transition is. It's more an abstract concept. So, we're trying to quantify it and to pin down what one possible system might look like. This work can help fill that void and give countries guidance."