US carbon emissions peaked in 2007 and have been coming down since. US capita carbon emissions peaked in the 1970s and have been coming down since.

The concern has always been with the much, much larger developing world, if they would one day become rich enough to emit carbon like North America. And as it turns out, China’s push for low cost solar and low cost EVs have revolutionized the energy world for development economics. Now if you’re a poor agrarian country looking to industrialize, the cheapest energy available just happens to be clean.

It’s like how the developing world mostly skipped landline infrastructure in the 2000’s because cell phones became easier and cheaper to build. We’re seeing the same thing play out with fossil fuel electricity generation, where most new capacity coming online, even in the third world, is solar.

I’m not a doomer, in large part because I think that economic forces will reduce greenhouse emissions significantly on their own, and despite hitting recent setbacks in policymaking that would push those reductions to happen more more quickly or with deeper cuts, that decarbonization back down to 1990 levels is still going to happen in our lifetimes.

Here’s how I think we’ll get there:

• Phasing out fossil fuel electricity generation. Solar power is just ridiculously cheap compared to any other method of generation. As we deploy grid scale storage, demand-shifting technology and pricing structures, develop redundancy with wind and advanced geothermal (and possibly fusion in the coming decades), we’re going to make fossil fuel electricity generation uncompetitive on price. Maybe ratepayers and governments don’t want to subsidize carbon-free energy, but why would they want to subsidize carbon emitting energy when those are no longer competitive?
• Electrification of transportation (electric vehicles, including big stuff like trains and buses and small stuff like bikes and scooters).
• Electrification of heat, both for indoor climate control and furnaces/boilers for water and industrial applications. Heat pumps are already cost effective for new construction in most climates, and even retrofits are approaching cost competitiveness with fossil fuel powered heaters.
• Carbon capture as a feedstock into chemical production, including alternative fuels like sustainable aviation fuel. Once electricity is cheap enough, even only at certain times of day, energy-intensive chemical production can hit flexible output targets to absorb surplus energy supply from overproduction of solar, to store that energy for later or otherwise remove carbon from the atmosphere.

To borrow from a Taoist concept, we shouldn’t expend effort fighting the current of a river when the current itself can be utilized to accomplish our goals. In this case, the capitalist incentive structure of wanting to do stuff that makes money is now being turned towards decarbonization for cost savings or outright profit.

Yup, Iceland has such cheap geothermal and hydro energy that they just use electric furnaces to smelt aluminum.