BDLA Monthly Webinar: Transitioning California and the World to 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything
September 13, 2024 11am-12pm PT
Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the most significant problems facing the world today. This talk discusses the development of technical and economic roadmaps to solve these problems across 149 countries and all 50 states, including California. The solution is to electrify buildings, transportation, and industry and provide the electricity with 100% clean, renewable wind, water, and solar (WWS) sources and storage. This talk also discusses technologies already available to electrify buildings fully. It further discusses the electricity and heat generation technologies and the electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen storage technologies needed for a transition, including firebricks to store industrial process heat. It then evaluates methods of keeping the electric grid stable. Results indicate that the grid can remain stable at low cost in each of 29 world regions encompassing 149 countries examined. Aside from mitigating global warming, these roadmaps have the potential to eliminate over seven million air pollution deaths annually, reduce international conflict over energy, stabilize energy prices, reduce catastrophic risk, and create jobs. Finally, the talk discusses why policies that encourage carbon capture and direct air capture are opportunity costs that increase carbon dioxide, air pollution, fossil mining, and fossil infrastructure and should be abandoned. Click here for more information.
Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering, an A.B. in Economics, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford in 1988. He received an M.S. and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in 1991 and 1994, respectively, from UCLA and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994. His career focuses on better understanding air pollution and global warming problems and developing clean, renewable energy solutions to them. He has published six books, including his latest, “No Miracles Needed,” and over 185 journal articles. He is ranked as the #1 most impactful scientist in the world in Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences and #6 in Energy among those first publishing past 1985. In 2018, he received the Judi Friedman Lifetime Achievement Award “For a distinguished career dedicated to finding solutions to air pollution and climate problems.” In 2023, he was named one of the top 100 globally “who have made an impact on the world this year” by Worth magazine. He has served on a committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy, appeared in a TED talk and on the David Letterman Show, and co-founded The Solutions Project nonprofit. He served as an expert witness in the first U.S. constitutional climate trial to win, Held v. Montana, and the world’s first constitutional climate trial to reach a settlement, Navahine v. Hawai’i. His work is the scientific basis of the energy portion of the U.S. Green New Deal and laws to go to 100% renewable energy worldwide.
Webinar Recording
