What is America’s energy plan?

It’s graduation season — a time filled with excitement about the future. The other day a young graduate told her father, “I’m going to be rich,” brimming with enthusiasm, adding, “and I will use my wealth to change the world.”

“That’s a great goal,” her father replied, “but do you have a plan?”

Plans don’t ensure success. The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” However, if we know where we want to go, it’s good to know how to get there.

A well-conceived plan prevents wasted time and resources. That’s especially important for one national goal: a net-zero carbon economy by 2050. We must shift from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy as rapidly as possible.

Industrial economies have transformed their energy mix several times in the last 200 years. But we must accomplish this shift more rapidly than any other because we are quickly approaching a point of no return with global climate change. And while we might think 2050 is a long time away, the energy transformation must reach deep, from foreign policy to the domestic economy and even our lifestyles.

The goal

So, we know what the goal is. Among the half-dozen gases causing the Earth to warm, carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution from fossil fuels is the most important. A “net-zero” emission goal means we will remove at least as much CO2 from the atmosphere as we put in.

That will require a complete economic transformation and several technical advances. We’ll have to replace or modify the complex and brittle infrastructure that serves fossil fuels, from pipelines to power lines. We will need new industries, skills and equipment in everything from steel mills to household appliances, cars and trucks.

To make such a profound global transformation in time to avoid catastrophic climate changes, all parts of society — governments, investors, industries and consumers — must be on the same page and act in concert. There is no time for dead ends, wrong turns, unintentional duplication, wasted resources, political quibbling or isolationism.

Congress recognized the need for national planning after the second major oil crisis in the 1970s. It passed a law requiring each president to submit a “national energy policy plan” every two years. Compliance has been sporadic, although some presidential proposals and reports have come close.

Each plan is to describe policies and investments over five and 10 years to “meet projected energy needs in an economic manner consistent with the need to protect the environment, conserve natural resources, and implement foreign policy objectives.” Today, “protect the environment” includes the biggest ecological challenge in human history, while “foreign policy objectives” include unprecedented collaboration among nearly 200 countries.

Capturing the opportunity

This is a huge and disruptive challenge, but it creates the largest market opportunity of all time. Countries must work together, but they will also compete for market share. A panel organized by the National Academies estimates the United States will have to invest $2 trillion during this decade, plus $350 billion in federal appropriations, to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Private investors will be reluctant to commit that much capital unless a national plan provides continuity and reasonable certainty.

The “race to clean” already involves our biggest international competitors. President Biden’s recent economic report to Congress notes, “The Chinese government has made a concerted and successful effort to build domestic industries that can supply a global clean energy economy … Ceding such industries to China is not only a lost opportunity for U.S. firms but also a risk to U.S. consumers, given the potential for the monopolization of important supply chains.”

Meanwhile, “the European Union is the world’s leader in subsidizing renewable electricity generation and it recently introduced a new strategy to support domestic industries with increased access to financing, reduced regulatory burdens, and capacity building.”

Investing in the future

The president’s economic report offers several other recommendations that should guide a plan, such as ending subsidies for fully mature technologies like fossil fuels; shifting government resources to high-priority emerging technologies; making the regulatory environment as certain as possible; offering reliable government support; and investing in a broad portfolio of energy solutions.

The plan should also define an off-ramp for fossil fuels so oil and gas companies, workers, and investors can plan for it. Many of the pipelines, refineries, shipment facilities and other infrastructure investors are betting on today will become obsolete well before their normal profitable lives. Congress or a presidential order should make clear the government will not bail out oil, gas and coal companies if their investments become stranded. That risk belongs to shareholders and investors — not taxpayers.

The elephant in this scenario is the need for a plan to have bipartisan support. That seems unlikely in America’s current political culture. But a recent Politico poll found, “adults across the United States and globally have damning opinions about the performance of their political leaders when it comes to climate change, and say they are noticing an escalation in extreme weather events and natural disasters.”

If Congress fails to take this seriously, if it refuses to break fossil energy’s grip on the nation’s energy policies, if it ignores the majority of Americans who want it to act, then we probably should consider another type of transition: We should replace our representative democracy with a direct democracy where the electorate makes policy rather than relying on unreliable proxies.

William S. Becker is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director who administered energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies programs, and he also served as special assistant to the department’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Becker is also executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations for the White House as well as House and Senate committees on climate and energy policies. The project is not affiliated with the White House.