Electrify Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Decarbonizing America will require a building spree not seen in generations.

- JESSE D. JENKINS

FOR THE FIRST time in history, the full financial weight of the United States federal government is aligned behind an epic transition to clean energy. A trio of energy, infrastructure, and science laws passed by the last Congress will deploy more than half a trillion dollars of public funding over the next decade to wean us off fossil fuels and make greener alternatives cheap and ubiquitous.

Uncle Sam will pick up a huge chunk of the tab for energy sources like wind and solar, and cleaner consumer choices like electric vehicles and heat pumps. Thanks to these new laws, which will also unlock hundreds of billions in private investment in clean energy, it'll simply be the smarter financial decision to choose clean over dirty in the countless decisions made by millions of households and businesses. With the thumb firmly on the clean side of the scale, the fight against climate change in America has fundamentally changed.

And yet the work is just getting started.

I'm a macro-energy systems engineering expert. I've spent the past four years at Princeton leading research teams that have carefully modeled pathways for America to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and analyzed the impacts of proposed and enacted federal climate and energy policy. According to our research, these three laws could roughly double our current pace of decarbonization, leading to an average 4 percent drop in emissions each year through 2030, reducing total emissions to roughly 40 percent of their peak, and to levels not seen since 1967.