NET ZERO

Give a ton of a carbon, take a ton. That's what we must do by 2050 or face climate catastrophe. Remarkably, it's possible with pretty simple math: Seven pioneering entrepreneurs plus seven technologies plus seven economic pathways equals a cool, carbon-neutral planet-and continued prosperity.

- Peter Keating

YOU ENTREPRENEURIAL TYPES are good with numbers. Solutions, too. So here's our pitch for the planet: We need to transform the U.S. economy such that by 2050 we are eliminating one ton of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere for every ton we emit. That's net zero. To get there means dialing back to zero our yearly output from 6.6 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. That figure represents our 2005 emissions in billions of tons, which is the U.S. global contribution we pledged to eliminate per the Paris Agreement. Balancing the carbon equation-zeroing it out-will require radical and rapid changes across the entire American economy, which contributes 11 percent of global emissions.

The urgency is that if we don't cap the global average temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2050, climate change turns calamitous. We're already at plus-1.1 degrees Celsius, and we can plainly see the impact in climate-related mega-disasters. But science-based doom and gloom is only a starting point.