Climate 411

DOE announced its largest-ever investment in decarbonizing industry. Here’s how it addresses key challenges.

Overview of a polluting factory

Photo Credit: Marcin Jozwiak for Pexels

This blog was co-authored by Natasha Vidangos, Senior Director, Climate Innovation and Technology.

Decarbonizing industry is a critical step to stabilize our climate. The sector can be tough to get a handle on — it’s on track to become the largest-emitting sector within the next couple of decades, and it involves the production of a wide variety of goods, from cement, steel, and chemicals to food and beverages. Historically, heavy industry is also a significant source of local pollution, often leading to direct harm to nearby communities, which tend to be communities of color. This complex yet critical piece of our economy needs a transformation — one that leverages cleaner and more efficient energy and processes while establishing mechanisms to ensure better outcomes on the ground. Identifying, developing and deploying transformative solutions is not an easy task: It requires innovative ideas, ambitious plans and investments, and coordination across a diverse set of stakeholders. Federal support is crucial for testing and validating these new technologies in a real-world setting, reducing the barriers to safe and effective adoption.

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DOE has a big opportunity to decarbonize industry. Here’s how it can leverage a new program.

Factory with pollution

Photo Credit: Canva

This blog is the second of a series of analyses being developed by a coalition of NGOs engaged in decarbonization of the U.S. industrial sector. It focuses on investment priorities for $5.8 billion in funding for industrial decarbonization in the Advanced Industrial Facilities Deployment Program (AIFDP), passed by Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. We and our partners will continue to update our blogs to references one another’s work. See the recent posts by ITIF, and NRDC+RMI.

The Inflation Reduction Act made a historic down payment on climate and clean energy progress across the economy, including new investments that take aim at a notoriously tough-to-decarbonize sector: industry. A key provision in this law is the $5.8 billion Advanced Industrial Facilities Deployment Program (AIFDP), which is intended to support early-stage demonstrations of technologies and processes that could cut emissions in the industrial sector. The Department of Energy now has the opportunity to design this program to maximize breakthroughs in technologies and benefit communities.

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Posted in Energy, Innovation, Policy / Comments are closed

Key climate finance programs in the Inflation Reduction Act could unleash 10 times more private investment

This blog was co-authored by Nicole Buell, Director for Federal Climate Innovation at EDF.

The Inflation Reduction Act puts a nearly $370 billion down payment on clean energy and climate progress, making it the most significant climate action ever taken by Congress. But this federal funding only scratches the surface of the law’s transformative impact on our economy.

A new policy brief from Environmental Defense Fund shows that investment in a few of the law’s key climate finance programs could pack an even greater punch, catalyzing 10 times greater investment from the private sector. Finance programs, including a new federal green bank, a program to reinvest in energy infrastructure and additional support for existing Department of Energy loan programs, could translate $38.7 billion of federal spending into $385 billion of private investment. 

key climate finance programs unlock 10X more private investment

Here are some of the main ways the law can unleash more private dollars.

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Posted in Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Innovation / Read 1 Response

The latest IPCC report unpacks the role of innovation. Here are five key takeaways.

Wind energy

Photo credit: Pexels.

Last week, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading body on climate science, issued another stark warning on the state of the climate crisis. With every fraction of a degree at stake, the world needs to speed up the clean energy revolution as quickly as possible to secure a safer future.

This sixth assessment report lays out a variety of pathways and solutions that can limit global climate warming and stymie the most harmful impacts of the climate crisis. The top takeaway: We need to swiftly and equitably transition to a global clean energy economy through rapid and wide-scale deployment of existing solutions like solar, wind, batteries and heat pumps. For the first time, however, the report also dedicates a chapter to innovation – the process of developing, testing and scaling new climate solutions. In all pathways studied, these new solutions will be important for addressing emissions in sectors where today’s clean energy solutions are not enough.

Here are 5 key takeaways about climate innovation in the IPCC report that policymakers should know.

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