This article, by Bryce Johnson, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
Many Americans look to the future to solve climate change, whether in futuristic cars, new energy storage sources, or floating wind turbines. But Gregory Nemet, professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs, looks somewhere else: the past.
Nemet says that past policies can help us to solve climate change. This could mean studying the development of solar technologies, which are now the cheapest they have ever been, or historical trends in the retirement of coal plants.
“We are making a lot of progress,” Nemet said. “We’re so much better off today than we were 10 years ago.”
Nemet said analysis of past trends can help us develop new technologies such as carbon dioxide removal, an emerging technology the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is necessary if we are to stay with the 1.5-to-2-degree limit made by the Paris Agreement in 2015.
This technology directly removes CO2 from the air or oceans and stores it underground. The technology is still in its infancy, with a 2022 report stating it makes up less than 0.1 percent of all carbon captured from the atmosphere.
Nemet draws parallels to the development of solar panels nearly 70 years ago, which were thousands of times more expensive than they are today and required an international effort from the public and private sector to make them economically viable.
But the 70-year development timeline of solar panels is not fast enough for the current crisis.
“If we had the first carbon dioxide removal plant in 2017, if we put that on the solar timeline, seventy years takes you to 2087,” Nemet said. This timeline is much too late for carbon dioxide removal, considering current climate pledges that aim to avoid 1.5 or 2 degrees of degrees warming.
Speeding up a technology’s development isn’t impossible either, if given the proper attention. Nemet referenced the creation of Covid-19 vaccines, a process that normally takes companies five to ten years but lasted only nine months.
Looking at the past can also help ease economic concerns. In 2010, there were arguments that having Wisconsin go renewable would cause it to gain 30,000 jobs. However, counter-arguments held that the state would subsequently lose 50,000 jobs.
“But now we’ve got evidence and data,” Nemet said. “There are more than 30,000 jobs in Wisconsin doing clean energy, and it’s like hundreds of thousands of jobs in the whole country.”
Not all zero-emission technologies have such a pleasant past to dissect, such as nuclear energy, which has become increasingly expensive, with a dwindling workforce and increasing reg
ulation. Many of these slowdowns have come from public’s disapproval of the technology after terrifying events such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
Despite this, small-scale nuclear reactors, which are no bigger than a semi-truck in size, have received little to no public pushback. In fact, there has been one operating on the UW–Madison campus for the past fifty years. Nemet suggests that developing technology which caters to human psychology and fears can play a crucial role in societies’ acceptance of a new, crucial zero-emission technology.