By Dean Scott
Oct. 25 — The U.S. will unveil a sweeping plan to decarbonize its economy by 2050 at the Nov. 7–18 climate summit in Morocco, giving other nations a template to draw up their own plans for quickly shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources, the top U.S. climate negotiator said Oct. 25.
Under the 2015 Paris climate pact, countries are to develop what negotiator Jonathan Pershing termed “midcentury strategies” to show how they’ll halt rising greenhouse gas emissions and meet the accord’s goal to keep global temperatures from rising no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century compared to the pre-industrial era.
“We’re in the process of developing technical projections for the longer term, not stopping in 2025 but looking out beyond that” to demonstrate how “we squeeze the vast, vast bulk of carbon emissions by 2050,” Pershing said at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center in Washington, D.C.
“The pathways we lay out which we plan to release in a couple of weeks in Morocco will detail scenarios in which the U.S. can build a very low-emission economy that lets us play our part in helping achieve our long-term global target of avoiding dangerous climate change,” Pershing said.
