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Over the last two years, the US has made historic investments in climate progress, and federal regulations and state policies have helped bend the projected greenhouse gas emissions curve further down. Additional policies could help put the US’s target under the Paris Agreement within reach, to cut emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, there’s a long way to go to get on track for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. The emissions that remain in 2030, assuming the US reaches its Paris target, will almost certainly be more difficult to eliminate than the emissions abated through 2030. Much of the remaining emissions will come from sectors that have been less of a focus to date.
In this note, we revisit our 2023 updated Pathways to Paris scenarios, in which the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act plus the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as additional ambitious federal and state policies, reduce emissions to 41-52% below 2005 levels in 2030, and explore the sources of remaining emissions at the end of this decade. We identify the key emitting subsectors and the specific underlying emissions drivers within each, and we provide high-level decarbonization solutions that could address these drivers. Light-duty vehicles, the power sector, and residential and commercial buildings remain the top emitting sectors in 2030, despite some decarbonization gains, while other sources like freight trucks, chemical production, and natural gas systems increase their overall share of emissions contributions.
Cutting these remaining emissions will be challenging, but we find that a substantial fraction of emissions can be tackled using existing and widely available decarbonization solutions. Common areas of decarbonization focus across subsectors include increasing electrification, the use of low-carbon fuels and other sources of clean heat, improving energy efficiency, and use of point-source carbon capture. Additional policies will certainly be required to reduce these emissions, and future Rhodium Group work will identify sets of policies that can do just that.
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