we're unleashing our imagination and exploring a dream, a possible future in which we're bringing global warming to a halt. It's a world in
which greenhouse emissions have ended.
Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)
(Editor's note: Each story has two sections, the first reflecting the present and the second imagining the world of 2050.)
2019: I went looking for people who've mapped out this world without greenhouse emissions. I found them in Silicon Valley.
Sila Kiliccote is an
engineer. The back deck of her house, high up in the hills, overlooks
Cupertino. Apple's circular headquarters is hidden in the morning mist.
It's a long way from Istanbul, in Turkey, where she grew up; a great
place to conjure up future worlds.
"Maybe you'd like some coffee?" Kiliccote says.
Her coffee machine is powered by solar panels on the roof. So is her laptop and her Wi-Fi.
"Everything runs on electricity in this house," she says.
This is the foundation of a zero-carbon world: Electricity that comes
from clean sources, mainly the sun and the wind, cheap and increasingly
abundant.
Today, it powers this house; tomorrow, it could drive the world.
***
2050: The first step was electric cars. That was actually pretty easy
"By 2025, battery technology got cheaper," she says. Electric cars
were no longer more expensive. "At that point there was a massive shift
to electric vehicles, because they were quieter, and cleaner, and
[required] less maintenance. No oil change! Yippee! You know?"
Heating
and cooling in homes and office buildings have gone electric, too.
Gas-burning furnaces have been replaced with electric-power like heat
pumps.
We needed more electricity to power all this right when
we were shutting down power plants that burned coal and gas. It took a
massive increase in power from solar and wind farms. They now cover
millions of acres in the U.S., 10 times more land than they did in 2020.
Huge electrical transmission lines share electricity between North and
South America. Europe is connected to vast solar installations in the
Sahara desert, which means that sub-Saharan Africa also has access to
cheap power.
"It just changed Africa," Kiliccote says. "It actually fueled the economies of Africa."
***
The Urbanization Of Everything (A Desire Named Streetcars)
2019: I'm taking a walk through downtown Toronto, in Canada, with Jennifer Keesmaat, the city's former chief planner.
Keesmaat wants me to see one particular street. King Street. It's the seed of a zero-carbon future, she says.
King Street has a little bit of everything: glass-walled office buildings, theaters, old brick warehouses.
Two years ago, a
new set
of traffic rules went into effect here. "Basically, what we've done is,
we've limited through-traffic for cars," Keesmaat says. It forced cars
away from King Street and launched a whole cascade of changes.
The streetcars that run down the middle of King Street weren't stuck in traffic anymore.
They
became the best way to get across town at rush hour. "The volume of
people being moved is astronomical!" Keesmaat says, as one rolls by. The
streetcars, of course, are powered by electricity, and one passes every
two or three minutes.
Meanwhile, thousands of people have been moving into this downtown
neighborhood, buying condos and renting apartments. Keesmaat knows one
of them. He's the father of one of her friends.
"He said to me a
few weeks ago, he thinks he takes out his car about once every two
weeks," Keesmaat says. He walks to shops, restaurants and basketball
games. His neighbors walk to jobs in the financial district right down
the street. He's not heating a big free-standing house, either.
He has cut his energy use, and his greenhouse emissions, dramatically.
"That
wasn't the driver for him," Keesmaat says. "He didn't say, 'How do I in
fact live smaller?" It just happened naturally in this new urban
geography.
2050: At this point, Keesmaat and I open up our minds and take a
leap into a world that could be. Greenhouse gas emissions have dropped
to zero.
How did we do it? By gradually reshaping our cities so that they look
more like this neighborhood, with lots of people living close together,
within walking distance of many of the things they need.
Keesmaat
can already see this city in her mind, and describe it. "The vast
majority of streets have been pedestrianized; that's how people get
around, by walking down the street," she says.
"What has happened to the sprawling suburbs?" I ask. "Are people living there? How are they getting around?"
"Some
of the large homes haven't changed at all," Keesmaat says. They've just
been turned into multifamily units." Other free-standing houses that
once lined suburban cul-de-sacs have disappeared; each one has been
replaced with a building that contains five or six homes. With the local
population booming, those neighborhoods also attracted shops and
offices. Suburban sprawl morphed into urban density.
Cars have
mostly disappeared. "There are cars, but people don't own cars,"
Keesmaat says. "Because a car is something that you use occasionally
when you need it." Streetcars and buses go practically everywhere in the
city now, and you rarely have to wait more than a couple of minutes to
catch one. Fast buses and trains connect towns. For other destinations,
there's car-sharing.
And it wasn't just technology, Hoornweg says. Over the past three
decades, from 2020 to 2050, a huge cultural shift has taken place.
Just
one example: In Toronto, the sharing economy that started decades ago
with Uber and Airbnb is everywhere now. "Sharing rides, sharing tools,
sharing somebody to look after your dog when you're not there."
Yes, we apparently still have dogs in 2050.
In
part, people are forced to share things; cars are scarce and homes are
smaller. (Scores of home builders went belly-up in the 2030s when
millions of people suddenly decided that big houses weren't just
expensive; they were lonely, too.)
But the scale of zero-carbon
life also makes it easier to share. We're living closer together and
run into neighbors all the time. "We have more acquaintances — somebody
we met in our ride pool or car pool or whatever," Hoornweg says.
"There's no better way to [meet your neighbors] than sitting in a
[shared] car and you can't get away from them for 20 minutes or
whatever."
Some people hated losing their yards and their
solitary commutes at first. Others loved the changes. Eventually,
Hoornweg says, it just became normal. People stopped talking about it.
Life now goes on as it always did. But there's one huge difference. We're no longer heating up the planet.
