NPR

So — what does this world look like?

Mass Electrification (Batteries Hold The Power)

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.

Last year, Kiliccote quit her job at Stanford University and launched a startup company, eIQ Mobility, helping companies replace their fleets of vehicles, such as delivery vans, with electric-powered versions.

"In order to have impact, timely impact, I figured that I need to leave research and focus on impactful things that I want to do. And fast," she says.

It has to happen really fast. Last year, the world's climate scientists put out a report showing what it will take to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C by the end of this century, averting the worst consequences of climate change. It requires bringing the globe's net greenhouse emissions down to zero by 2050.

It's a giant leap for humankind.

So Sila Kiliccote and I take that leap. Sitting in her kitchen, with solar panels overhead and an electric car parked outside, we pretend that it has happened. It's 2050 and we've stopped climate change.

"Any sense of how we did it?" I ask her.

She pauses. "Yes," she says.

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."

We now store electricity so that it's always there when we need it. With batteries, of course, but in lots of other ways, too. For instance, cities are using electricity to heat and chill massive tanks of water, which then heat or cool buildings at any hour of the day or night.

Sally Benson, co-director of the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy, is so ready to take the leap and imagine this zero-carbon world 2050, it's a little startling.

"I regularly take a helicopter, an electric helicopter, from here to San Francisco," she assures me, totally deadpan.

"You can run a helicopter on batteries?" I ask, not quite believing it.

"Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes. That happened a long time ago," Benson says, laughing. "That happened in the 2030s. That was great."

But she says that even in this all-electric world, there are some holdouts. Some things have just been really hard to electrify.

Some big cement and steel plants still are burning coal or natural gas, but they also have to install massive plants to capture carbon dioxide from their smokestacks and put it back underground.

"We just had to kind of bite the bullet and say, 'OK, if you're making cement or steel, you are capturing and sequestering that CO2,'" Benson says. "And in some cases we actually had to say, 'We're not going to make those things here anymore'" because it wasn't economically feasible to capture the CO2 emissions from that factory.

Big, long-distance freight trucks were a problem, too. "They're really heavy, and batteries are really heavy, and if you have to put a whole bunch of batteries on a truck it's really inefficient," Benson says.

In some areas, like this one, our picture of the future gets a little fuzzy. Different guides to this 2050 world show me slightly different things.

Some of my guides see "electric highways" with wires overhead, and trucks tapping into the electric power in those wires the same way trains do. Others see trucks running on hydrogen fuel; we make that hydrogen using solar or hydro power.

It appears that aircraft still are burning jet fuel. When you buy a plane ticket, you're also paying to cancel out that flight's carbon emissions, capturing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air. This makes air travel expensive. Fortunately, we now have much faster trains. Teleconferencing helps, too.

Sally Benson is absolutely convinced about one thing. The hardest part of this journey wasn't finding technical solutions. They all existed, even back in 2019. The hardest part was navigating the social disruption.

"The transformations were so profound that it really needed to be a collective effort," she says.

Entire industries died — like oil exploration and gas furnace manufacturing. Others rose to take their place, as the country rebuilt its electrical systems. People didn't know what would happen and they were scared. The changes only moved ahead when people were convinced that they weren't getting ignored and left behind. It was the political struggle of a generation.

Now, in 2050, there's a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

"Are there children who look around at all the old buildings and say, 'What are those things they call chimneys? What were they for?' " I ask.

"They do," Benson says with a chuckle. "You know, it's like a historical artifact, but you know, they find it very touching. They are appreciative, because they're living in a world where they don't need to worry about climate change anymore."

It wasn't easy and it wasn't free, Benson says. But it was absolutely worth it.

The air is so much cleaner. Cities are quieter. And we're no longer heating up the planet.

"2050? It's a wonderful life!" says Daniel Hoornweg, another one of my guides to this zero-carbon world. He's a professor of energy systems at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. Years ago, he wrote a big report on cities and climate change for the World Bank.

He also can describe this new city, and how it took shape. Local governments created it, he says. First, they gave people new ways to get around: subways, bike lanes, buses and streetcars.

But along with those carrots, there was also a stick. Cities took control of the precious real estate known as "roads" and started charging for the right to use them. "Maybe the most powerful thing that got us here, is [that] we got the pricing right," he says. "So, you want an autonomous vehicle? Bless your heart, but it costs you more to drive that autonomous vehicle on the road by yourself. If you ride-share, it's a little bit less."

"And this is even if they are electric vehicles?" I ask.

"Even more if they're electric vehicles!" Hoornweg says. Personal electric cars for everyone couldn't solve the problem, he explains. First of all, electricity is precious. We can't waste it powering everybody's electric car.

Second, electric cars could have clogged the streets of our densely populated cities the same way gas-burning cars once did, back in, say, 2019. Our city of 2050 functions because streets are clear for buses and streetcars and bikes.

The basic recipe — densely populated neighborhoods linked by mass transit —has been the same for cities all over the world, Hoornweg says. But the details came from constant experimentation. If an idea worked in one place, other cities snatched it up. For instance, way back in 1991 the city Curitiba, in Brazil, built dedicated roads for fast buses, kind of a train system running on wheels. That kind of system has now spread around the globe.

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.