Where will Carbon Emissions Come From in 2030?

Researchers at the Rhodium Group have eleven answers.

The Biden administrations Inflation Reduction Act helps regulate carbon pollution from power plants and cars and trucks. Progressive states such as California, New York, and Illinois responded by passing tougher climate laws of their own. To reach the Paris Agreement goal of cutting carbon emissions in half at the end of this decade, where will America’s remaining greenhouse gas emissions come from? What should climate policy focus on next?

A study by the Rhodium Group, a nonpartisan research firm offers a glimpse of the future during the next decade. What might the next climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2030, look like?

Rhodium finds that just eleven industries will be generation more than 80% of our country’s greenhouse gas emission in 2030. And just three of these will emit nearly half of the country’s total pollution. If we could decarbonize these activites, then a net-zero U.S. economy might be in sight.

About 19% of the remaining emissions will come from the fossil-fuel economy involved in storing, moving, or transforming oil or natural gas into other products.

Another 12% of the remaing emissions will come from the tougher problems in transportation: heavy-duty trucking and aviation.

Farms will fill out another 10% of emissions. About half of those emissions will come from fermentation of plant matter in the guts of plants and animals. The other half will come from the interaction of soils, microbes, and fertilizer. When fertilizer is applied to soil, bacteria convert its nitrogen into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

The most important category of emissions come from what are thought of as the “Big Three”, which together will account for nearly half of 2030 emissions. They are cars, trucks, and SUVs; furnaces and water heaters in buildings; and power plants.

So climate hawks will be thinking about cars, trucks, building furnaces, and power plants for a long time.