Environmental Defense Fund unveils new tool to help transportation, power sectors cut climate pollution

With a new tool developed by Evolved Energy Research, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) demonstrated this week a series of low cost actions and cuts the power and transportation sectors could undertake to get the United States halfway to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

“The electricity and transportation sectors are the lowest hanging fruit for climate progress, offering the biggest and cheapest opportunities to cut carbon pollution right now,” Morgan Rote, senior manager for U.S. Climate at EDF, said. “With the falling costs of renewable energy and the growing market for electric vehicles, supportive policies like tax credit extensions for EVs and clean energy can rapidly accelerate the emissions cuts we need this decade. This is a winning strategy all-around because cleaning up electricity and transportation will also create new, good-paying jobs and cut harmful air pollution that unfairly burdens low-income communities and communities of color.”

The tool provides a revised Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) curve, to showcase the emissions reduction possibilities and costs per ton of carbon pollution reduction of various technologies. Setting itself apart from traditional MAC curves — which focus solely on the cost and emissions impact of single measures — the new tool provides insights into the time needed to develop technologies and the markets for them, as well as how technologies in the energy system can build on one another’s work.

With that tool and data in hand, EDF noted that nearly half of the emissions cuts needed to get the country to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 are possible at low costs, and pointed out that many supportive policies building on these reductions are currently being considered by Congress, from tax credit extensions for electric vehicles and clean energy, to support for domestic manufacturing. Further, the organization urged immediate investments into newer, not yet widely available technologies, such as zero-carbon fuels.