Net Zero Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Debunking four zero-sum myths about reaching net-zero goals—and the need for collaborative, systemic thinking

Most societies and their business and government leaders agree that the mitigation of climate change requires ambitious restructuring of economic and industrial activity to reduce or remove critical greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). This is widely referred to as a “net-zero” goal of ensuring that future GHG emissions are either fully abated or entirely offset by commensurate volumes of new GHG extractions from the atmosphere (i.e., such that the “net” emissions are “zero”).

Current Consensus and Dissensus

The challenge of mastering climate change, which seemed abstract or esoteric in years past, is increasingly tangible and close to home. The significant growth in natural disasters associated with climate change is extremely troubling.[1] From 1970 through 2023, the world experienced a nearly five-fold increase in catastrophic events such as severe storms, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and intense freezes (Figure 1). Over recent decades, the economic losses from these events have grown on a similar trajectory (Figure 2).

Figure 1. World Number of Climate-Related Natural Disasters (1970–2023) [2]

 

Figure 2: Global Economic Damages from Climate-Related Natural Disasters (1980–2023) [3]

 

Figures for 2024 may be even higher due to the impacts of numerous summer wildfires around the world and major hurricanes and typhoons throughout the Pacific and Atlantic basins.[4]

The impacts and costs of climate change are increasingly less abstract and more concrete. Most people have had a family member, friend, or colleague suffer personal injury, property damage, travel or business interruptions, or lesser inconveniences due to extreme weather associated with climate change. Additionally, the financial impacts of climate change are being felt throughout society in the form of higher property insurance premiums, which have spiked as much as 30 to 50 percent, or inability to obtain insurance altogether, following recent devastating wildfire and hurricane seasons, for some regions in the Western world.[5]

But even though the general goal of achieving net-zero GHG emissions is broadly agreed, there is no consensus as to the best transition strategies and technologies and the urgency of the timeline to achieve net-zero goals.

Net Zero Is Not Zero Sum

Many public- and private-sector strategies for achieving the goal net-zero emissions are built around the presumption that climate change and the energy transition will be a zero-sum game played by economic winners and losers. This zero-sum mindset can be found in both the progressive and conservative wings of the energy transition discourse and is common at many levels of policy and business, ranging from international trade and investment to national policy and regulation. Here are some examples of zero-sum logic evident in prominent energy transition and economic policy debates:

1. China’s win on solar panel, electric vehicle (EV), and battery manufacturing is America and Europe’s loss of manufacturing and jobs.[6]
2. The US Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) win on directing energy transition investments toward North America is Europe and Asia’s [7]
3. A win for sustained massive production of natural gas, such as from shale gas, is a loss for the massification and penetration of renewable energy, or vice versa.[8]
4. A win for massive, rapid penetration of renewable energy, electricity storage, and transmission grid enhancement will be an economic loss for society.[9]

It is easier, and often entertaining, to think in terms of such simplistic zero-sum dichotomies, but in the case of climate change they present false choices. Let’s assess each example above.

Zero-Sum Myth 1: China’s win is America and Europe’s loss

China’s success in foreseeing the renewable energy revolution and proactively (over)building the massive, low-cost supply chain of critical minerals, solar panels, EVs, and utility and automotive batteries has been the foundation of much of renewable energy’s success in driving the energy transition over the last decade.

As the US and Europe redouble efforts to build a comparable scale of capabilities and combine them with cutting-edge innovations in advanced materials and information technology, a common assumption is that they cannot succeed unless Chinese production is subjected to protective tariffs.

The immediate result of these measures has been to slow the uptake of renewable energy and the energy transition inside the US and European Union (EU), and to accelerate renewable energy installations within China much faster than grid interconnections can be built.[10] It is unclear that trade protection is accelerating investment and innovation by US- and EU-based companies, although other policies may be doing that.

On balance, everyone is losing. Critical supply chains are broken, and replacement capabilities will take a long time to build. Critical years are being lost when time is of the essence. Greater international collaboration is needed. There is plenty of trade and investment to benefit everyone given the estimated $215 trillion needed by 2050 to fully decarbonize the global energy system, including developing critical minerals, renewable manufacturing, storage facilities, transmission infrastructure, and other transition technologies worldwide.[11]

Further, national and regional competition to “win” the energy transition trade and investment boom diverts attention from addressing the environmentally and economically optimal ways to organize trade and investment systemically. While China currently has the minerals and low-cost labor, energy supply, and manufacturing to succeed economically, its labor practices defy international standards, and its energy system has a very high GHG intensity due to excessive use of coal and heavy hydrocarbons relative to cleaner energy sources (and unacceptable labor practices).[12] As a result, China’s production of renewable energy minerals and equipment is energy and GHG intensive (Figure 3). Adding the emissions from international shipping compounds the GHG intensity as compared to products manufactured in cleaner energy systems closer to end-market demand. It is counterproductive to consolidate the production of clean energy minerals and equipment in a highly GHG-inefficient manner.

Figure 3. Emissions Intensity of Photovoltaic Manufacturing Globally [13]

 

The global challenge is not to win a clean energy trade competition, but rather to accelerate and optimize international trade and investment in a clean and efficient matter to support the energy transition. Neither is accomplished in practice under the current zero-sum approach. Doing so will require the massification of technologies and practices for GHG emissions measurement, monitoring, verification, and lifecycle analysis; and application of GHG taxes or fees at points of trade.[14]

The foregoing analysis does not address other critical trade fairness issues regarding labor standards and practices, state aid, and subsidies as these fall beyond the focus and scope of this article. These other issues are also important and tend to compound the net-zero challenge.

Zero-Sum Myth 2: America’s investment win is Europe’s green energy loss

Similarly, the notion of energy transition winners and losers from the US Inflation Reduction Act, which is criticized for drawing critical investments away from Europe and Asia, loses the forest for the trees. By all accounts, energy transition investments need to increase from the current $1 trillion per year to at least $3 trillion per year.[15] Large pools of capital are looking for profitable investments, with even more capital available if the high-interest-rate penalty on renewable energy investment subsides.[16]

The EU environmental regulations and Emissions Trading System (ETS) for traded carbon pricing have already done much to stimulate investment. Tax credits and other incentives in the IRA have quickly redoubled that activity within North America.

Problems arise where governments seek to craft policies and incentives to micromanage the development of supply, delivery infrastructure, and consumption in ways that exceed their capabilities and/or don’t work fast enough or at all. These approaches also squeeze resources because they are ultimately taxpayer funded, and citizens don’t like to pay for things that don’t work or seem to produce more costs than solutions.

Meanwhile, vast sums of private capital are poised to scale up energy transition investments if and when interest rates moderate.[17] The problem does not seem to be finite capital but rather clear, reliable, sustainable, and effective policy and regulation to stimulate and facilitate clean energy investment over the long term across the world’s major GHG-intensive economies.

In addition, a clear incentive of national GHG pricing or taxes, backed by accurate mandatory measurements at points of supply, transaction, and international trade, would go far to level the playing field and give clear investment and price signals across industries and across state, provincial, and national borders. The measurement and monitoring technologies are at hand, and pilot programs for GHG pricing have been tested such that national policies and global collaboration are becoming possible.[18] But it will take broader thinking about shared goals and incentives to unlock the vast sums of private capital available to optimize resources on a systemic, global scale.

Zero-Sum Myth 3: the false choice between natural gas and renewable energy

As renewable energy has scaled over the last decade in Europe and the US from a marginal, high-cost, low-volume technology to an industry-leading source of low-cost, high-volume investment and supply, the prior thesis of natural gas providing the “energy transition bridge” has come under attack. Increasing numbers of public interest groups, environmentalists, and policymakers now conceive of natural gas, along with oil, as an obstacle to renewable energy. This has given rise to slogans such as “keep it in the ground” and policies to ban new gas investments or usage on public lands or in municipal construction.

To achieve stated, and shared, goals of rapid energy transition, this zero-sum approach to natural gas and renewable energy investment is often based on geographically and temporally narrow thinking that misses the bigger picture.

While natural gas and renewable energy may well compete for investment capital and market share within national markets, both are urgently needed to manage the transition on a global scale. It is very likely that blocking gas would benefit coal generation more than renewables in the near term.

The energy transition will be a multidecade process requiring a massive scale of investment and infrastructure change. Over the coming decade, renewable energy will not be ready to serve all demand growth—including new demands from artificial intelligence (AI) in leading economies and electrification economic growth in the Global South—and replace all coal combustion, not to mention oil.

As of July 2024, 8.7 billion tons of coal were still being burned for power generation and industrial production worldwide.[19]

• Total electricity demand growth is expected to reach 22 percent from 2023 to 2030, increasing by 6,508 terawatt-hours (TWh) from 29,862 TWh in 2023 to 36,370 TWh in 2030 if national pledges are upheld.[20]
• Electricity generation from coal is expected to decrease by 30 percent, from 9,920 TWh in 2023 to 6,998 TWh in 2030. Replacing all remaining coal generation by 2030 with clean energy would require almost 7,000 TWh of alternative supply from 2030.[21]
• Thus, providing for clean growth and replacing coal generation with clean energy would require a total of 13,505 new TWh.
• Coal is typically used as a baseload fuel, while solar and wind power are intermittent sources of energy. To mitigate the daily intermittency of the clean energy, storage systems would need to be able to hold at least four hours of energy electricity storage. This would require about 20 and 44 TWh of short-term battery storage capacity for onshore wind or solar, respectively, which would cost as much as $5 or $11 trillion, respectively.
• Due to the intermittency of renewable energy and the round-trip efficiency of battery storage, producing this electricity would require the installation of 11 TW of solar or 5 TW of onshore wind by 2030, likely to cost as much as $6 or $8 trillion in today’s rates, respectively.[22]
• This would bring the total cost to $11 to $19 trillion.

This estimation does not consider numerous sensitivities and complexities of large-scale renewable energy installation, such as geography, regional load flexibility, transmission, and load balancing. For example, massification of inverter-based renewable energy such as wind and solar installations poses considerable engineering challenges for grid stability and frequency regulation. This must be managed through a combination of appropriately designed and sited energy storage facilities (i.e., utility scale batteries) and transmission network upgrades.[23]

BRG professionals regularly study 100 percent decarbonization scenarios for clients and routinely see that transmission and long-duration storage costs can be one to two times as high as clean energy and short-term storage costs. If those are accounted for, costs could easily balloon from $20 to $40 trillion.

In that sense, the challenge of serving load growth and retiring all coal generation is too massive for renewable energy to tackle alone given the current scale of the renewable energy industry, critical mineral production, and global supply chain constraints (and other issues addressed above). By comparison, a future renewable energy system buttressed by sufficient low-capacity-factor natural gas generation capacity could achieve deep levels of power-sector decarbonization (80 to 90 percent) at a fraction of the cost of 100 percent decarbonization without gas. Leveraging existing and new gas generation alongside heavy investment in renewables/storage/transmission could enable much more cost-effective, faster, and deeper decarbonization than the market could otherwise bear. Those massive cost savings could be returned to stakeholders to keep down energy costs or reinvested in more cost-effective decarbonization opportunities outside the power sector. On this basis, natural gas will need to grow alongside renewable energy over the coming decade or longer.[24]

Additionally, zero-sum thinking about the competition between renewable energy and natural gas misses important systemic challenges and opportunities for win-win solutions. For example, one manifestation of this approach has been the extensive environmental attacks on US LNG exports from the environmental community and other progressive interests, arguably culminating in the temporary LNG export moratorium implemented by the US government and revocation of some export permits for individual terminals in US courts. These efforts are narrow and miss the chance for larger systemic gains for renewable energy, natural gas, and GHG abatement worldwide.[25]

Consider the bigger picture:

• Banning LNG exports bottles up natural gas inside the US and will eventually drive prices down.
• In most US power markets, the price of marginal gas-fired generation units sets power prices, especially when gas generation is cheaper than the limited remaining coal generation.
• As a result, future renewable energy revenues will come from selling power on the power markets at reduced prices due to natural gas oversupply.
• Investors in renewable energy will not see hoped-for returns in renewable energy and may favor funding gas generation due to the low gas prices.
• But if LNG exports are kept open, the opposite would be true, and there would be additional global GHG benefits:
  • Foreign demand for US LNG and natural gas would support natural gas price levels.
  • Renewable energy generation and investment would be more competitive with natural gas generation and investment inside the US, resulting in accelerated uptake of renewable energy to replace coal and fill market space left by gas, leading to reduced GHG emissions from US power generation.
  • Foreign buyers of US LNG could more rapidly reduce or retire coal-fired generation (which remains only 16 percent of total generation in Europe but approximately 57 percent in Asia–Pacific for 2023), producing additional climate benefits.[26]

Here again, narrow zero-sum thinking about the emerging competition between natural gas and renewable energy is counterproductive and an obstacle to achieving broader, systemic renewable energy and GHG reduction goals inside the US and worldwide.

Zero-Sum Myth 4: a climate win requires an economic loss

Another area of zero-sum thinking about net-zero goals relates to the economic cost of the energy transition and who pays, which is estimated to be about $215 trillion, as noted above. Costs will be borne at all levels of society by multinational programs and initiatives, national governments, states and provinces, utilities, taxpayers, and energy ratepayers and customers. Current investments in clean energy of below $2 trillion per year will need to grow to over $3 trillion per year by 2030 to achieve national climate pledges and to well over $4 trillion per year to reach net zero (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Net-Zero Global Trend in Annual Clean Energy and Fossil Fuel Investment (2023–2050) as Share of Global GDP [27]

 

While governments (read taxpayers) subsidize a large amount of initial investments with monies for research, tax incentives, and direct investments, the carrying capacity of governments and patience of citizens and taxpayers are limited and may soon reach a breaking point.

In the near term, these initial investments need to be made while current supply and infrastructure also are maintained to ensure energy security and reliability during the transition process. This means that expensive new investments will seem largely redundant and not yet be matched by the savings that will result from eventually reducing expensive fossil fuel consumption and/or repurposing or retiring fossil fuel infrastructure.

Another compounding variable has been the energy and mineral commodity price spikes that have resulted from the Russian aggression in Ukraine since 2014 and especially since 2022, responsive US and European sanctions, and resulting curtailment of Russian energy exports since late 2021. This significantly increased oil prices and caused natural gas and LNG prices to spike to extreme record levels. With natural gas–fired generation driving power prices in most developed markets worldwide, the high gas prices have also produced high electricity rates. The increased energy costs borne of the Russian war make the energy transition seem much more expensive and painful.

In early 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine and before Israel and Iran began trading direct attacks in 2024, we analyzed the likely long-term pattern of energy transition investments and fossil fuel reductions and retirements over the coming decades. This showed that the total costs would likely peak in the 2030s before energy cost savings would overtake investment costs, with the promise of providing increasingly stable, low-energy costs after several decades.[28]

 

Figure 5. Net Cost of Energy Transition Investments [29]

 

Utilities and their regulators typically use financing to spread resource and transmission costs over the life of their assets on a gradual, levelized basis to insulate ratepayers from rapid cost increases from utility capital expenditures. But there is no precedent for the magnitude of clean energy investments and fossil fuel reductions and retirements now required of public service utilities, state companies, and private energy companies worldwide.[30]

Effectively funding the transition and equitably sharing the cost is a very large nut to crack. Meanwhile, the mounting near-term costs of the energy transition in North America, Europe, and OECD Asia already have become intensely political “pocketbook” issues.

Many politicians and/or political campaigns in North America and Europe blame energy transition policies for recent and near-term energy costs without parsing the effects of wars or addressing long-term investment paybacks, which may partly explain the polarized views among US voters with respect to the effect of energy transition on prices.[31] Of equal concern, it is hard to find political leaders with the vision to understand, publicly explain, and effectively manage the near-term economic costs and long-term environmental and economic benefits in clear and effective policies and programs through a multidecade, multinational effort.

So here again, net-zero programs risk falling prey to zero-sum thinking where environmental wins are seen as society’s economic loss.

Conclusion

Achieving, or even approaching, global net-zero emissions to mitigate the human and economic harm caused by climate change is a serious problem that requires serious solutions. The zero-sum thinking typical of today’s hypercompetitive economic and political structures may not be up the task.

The urgent imperative of mitigating climate change requires that governments, companies, and individuals think outside the box to craft and implement net-zero strategies that are:

• effective in rapidly minimizing the most impactful and easily abatable GHG emissions, such as CO2 from power generation and heavy industry and CH4 from oil and gas production and supply chains
• sequenced chronologically to maximize and build upon near-term gains to achieve compound benefits; for example, by first massifying renewable energy generation before seeking to achieve large-scale green hydrogen or ammonia production
• optimized systemically across state, provincial, and national borders to maximize overall GHG reductions and avoid achievements in one jurisdiction becoming negated by avoidable setbacks or failures in another; for example, by reducing gas production in North America before coal production can be reduced or eliminated throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia
• managed economically and financially to equitably allocate and spread over a long-term horizon the initial costs of the energy transition to avoid penalizing over a short horizon the individual populations and jurisdictions able to make the most immediate or sizeable GHG reductions

 

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[1] Leaving aside the complexities of attribution science in regard to climate-related disasters, the growth in numbers of natural disasters is concerning in terms of human and economic impacts.

[2] EM-DAT, CRED/UCLouvain (2024), with major processing by Our World in Data. “Global reported natural disasters by type – EM-DAT” [dataset]. EM-DAT, CRED/UCLouvain, “Natural disasters” [original data]. Retrieved October 4, 2024, from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/natural-disasters-by-type

[3] EM-DAT, CRED/UCLouvain (2024), with major processing by Our World in Data. “Global damage costs from natural disasters, All disasters.” [dataset]. Retrieved October 9, 2024, from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/damage-costs-from-natural-disasters

[4] NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Assessing the U.S. Climate in June 2024 (July 9, 2024). https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202406 ; Kate Abnett, “EU manages record number of responses to extreme weather,” Reuters (September 4, 2024). https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-manages-record-number-responses-extreme-weather-2024-09-04/

[5] National Bureau of Economic Research, “Disaster Risk and Rising Home Insurance Premiums,” The Digest (October 1, 2024). https://www.nber.org/digest/202410/disaster-risk-and-rising-home-insurance-premiums; Emily Flitter, “As Hurricanes Strike, Insurance Costs Soar for Commercial Real Estate,” The New York Times (October 8, 2024). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/business/hurricane-commercial-real-estate-insurance.html

[6] Christian Shepherd, “China is all in on green tech. The U.S. and Europe fear unfair competition,” The Washington Post (March 29, 2024). https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/29/china-clean-green-energy-technology-trade/; Kate Abnett and Nina Chestney, “With solar industry in crisis, Europe in a bind over Chinese imports,” Reuters (February 6, 2024). https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/with-solar-industry-crisis-europe-bind-over-chinese-imports-2024-02-06/

[7] Ilaria Mazzocco, “Why the New Climate Bill Is Also about Competition with China,” CSIS (August 25, 2022). https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-new-climate-bill-also-about-competition-china; Bloomberg News, China Files WTO Complaint Over US Electric-Vehicle Subsidies (March 26, 2024). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-26/china-files-wto-complaint-over-us-electric-vehicle-subsidies

[8] Ivan Penn, “The Next Energy Battle: Renewables vs. Natural Gas,” The New York Times (July 6, 2020). https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/business/energy-environment/renewable-energy-natural-gas.html; United Nations Climate and Environment, ‘Without renewables, there can be no future’: 5 ways to power the energy transition (September 7, 2023).

[9] Tim Gould et al., “Financial headwinds for renewables investors: What’s the way forward?” IEA (December 8, 2023). https://www.iea.org/commentaries/financial-headwinds-for-renewables-investors-what-s-the-way-forward

[10] Scott Walmand et al., “How tariffs threaten Biden’s climate goals,” E&E News by Politico (May 15, 2024). https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-tariffs-threaten-bidens-climate-goals/; Philip Blenkinsop, “EU presses ahead with Chinese EV tariffs after divided vote,” Reuters (October 4, 2024). https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/eu-governments-face-pivotal-vote-chinese-ev-tariffs-2024-10-04/

[11] Bloomberg New Energy Finance, New Energy Outlook 2024 (2024). https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/

[12] Didi Tang, “US officials ban new types of goods from China over forced labor allegations,” PBS News (October 2, 2024). https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-officials-ban-new-types-of-goods-from-china-over-forced-labor-allegations; Amy Hawkins, “Growth in CO2 emissions leaves China likely to miss climate targets,” The Guardian (February 21, 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/22/growth-in-co2-emissions-leaves-china-likely-to-miss-climate-targets

[13] Yu Gan et al. “Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in the U.S. solar photovoltaic supply chain,” Environ. Res. Lett. 18 104012 (2023). https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acf50d

[14] Athanasia Arapogianni Konisti describes such potential solutions for GHG emissions measurement in “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measurement and Reporting: Obstacles and Solutions,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).

[15] David Lawder, “Yellen says $3 trillion needed annually for climate financing, far more than current level,” Reuters (July 27, 2024). https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/yellen-says-3-trillion-needed-annually-climate-financing-far-more-than-current-2024-07-27/

[16] BloombergNEF, Energy Transition Investment Trends 2024 (2024). https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/Energy-Transition-Investment-Trends-2024.pdf

[17] Ibid.

[18] Alayna Tria provides further detail on the introduction of GHG pricing and carbon taxes and tariffs in “The Year of the Climate Election,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).

[19] IEA, Coal Mid-Year Update- July 2024 (2024). https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-mid-year-update-july-2024

[20] IEA, World Energy Report 2023 (2023). https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/86ede39e-4436-42d7-ba2a-edf61467e070/WorldEnergyOutlook2023.pdf

[21] Ibid.

[22] Assuming a capacity factor of 16.2 percent for utility-scale solar panels and 36 percent for onshore wind turbines, and global weighted average total installed cost at $758/kW for solar and $1,160/kW for onshore wind. See IRENA, Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2023 (2024), pp. 18, 20, 64. https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2024/Sep/IRENA_Renewable_power_generation_costs_in_2023.pdf

[23] Traditional power plants such as gas-fired systems contribute to grid stability through rotational inertia, which helps maintain a consistent frequency. Inverter-based systems lack this inherent inertia, making frequency regulation more challenging.

[24] Dr. Matthew Tanner emphasizes this need for a mix of renewable energy and natural gas in his outlook on procurement strategies for large commercial consumers, “Shouldering the New Load: What Rising Power Demand Means for Large US Commercial Consumers,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).

[25] Athanasia Arapogianni Konisti touches on the importance of such efforts and collaboration for larger systemic gains in “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measurement and Reporting: Obstacles and Solutions,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).

[26] IEA, Electricity 2024 (2024). https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/18f3ed24-4b26-4c83-a3d2-8a1be51c8cc8/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

[27] IEA, World Energy Report 2023 (2023).

[28] Christopher Goncalves, Matthew Tanner, Alayna Tria, and Tristan Van Kote, From Resource Scarcity to Energy Abundance and Infinite Supply, Transition Economist (January 25, 2021). https://pemedianetwork.com/media/10251/brg-whitepaper-jan-2021.pdf

[29] IEA, World Economy Outlook 2023 (2023). https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/86ede39e-4436-42d7-ba2a-edf61467e070/WorldEnergyOutlook2023.pdf; IEA, Net Zero Roadmap: A Global Pathway to Keep the 1.5°C Goal in Reach – 2023 Update (September 2023). https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/9a698da4-4002-4e53-8ef3-631d8971bf84/NetZeroRoadmap_AGlobalPathwaytoKeepthe1.5CGoalinReach-2023Update.pdf

[30] Yury Issaev delves into the costs and risks associated with energy infrastructure retirement in “Planning for Energy Infrastructure Removal: Tips for Landowners,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).

[31] Alayna Tria provides an overview of the political landscape surrounding the climate discourse in “The Year of the Climate Election,” ThinkSet (Fall 2024).