The Decarbonization Dialogue: Brainstorming Opportunities for Accelerating Nation-wide Decarbonization

May 7, 2021

From industry to agriculture, buildings, power generation, and transportation, each sector has unique challenges and opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Coordinating those efforts so that policies intended to curb emissions in one sector also reduce emissions in others is an additional challenge. However, such efforts could accelerate the implementation of these decarbonization policies—bolstering broad stakeholder support and improving political durability over the long term.

That was part of the initial thinking behind the Decarbonization Dialogue, a project of the Great Plains Institute and Keystone Policy Center, that brought 50 experts from the agricultural, power, and transportation sectors together for extended discussions on decarbonization policy between August 2020 and January 2021. Participants—divided into a steering committee, topical working groups, and a plenary group—developed a suite of policy recommendations for each sector, along with six recommendations that could drive decarbonization across multiple sectors.

Those six recommendations are:

Expand urban and rural broadband infrastructure
Enhance cybersecurity
Accelerate deployment of clean technology and climate-resilient infrastructure by establishing a national climate bank
Increase funding and initiatives for specific technologies such as hydrogen, natural and technological carbon removal, and long-duration energy storage
Seek coordination at the federal level through a mandate to work on these proposed solutions across departments and agencies
Identify opportunities to standardize measurement and verification of emissions and emissions reductions

Bipartisanship was a key component of the process, emphasized President and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, Shailen Bhatt.

“It’s weird that bipartisan is a hard thing to do nowadays,” Bhatt said during a webinar announcing the report’s rollout. “Because for many of us, that's where we've come from: this idea that there are ideas that appeal to the left and the right. I thought that was one of the hallmarks of this discussion, which was, how do we just focus on the things that we know make sense.”

An example of a bipartisan recommendation, Rich Powell, executive director of ClearPath, pointed out, is the proposed energy sector innovation tax credit. According to Powell, this credit would be “a broad-based permanent incentive, which would continuously pull new generations of innovative clean power technologies into the market.”

Along with the broader policy recommendations, participants in topical working groups also produced between six and eight recommendations specific to each sector.

Each expert in the rollout webinar noted their favorite recommendations for their issue area. Bhatt said that in regards to transportation she was excited about incentivizing electrification, particularly of vehicle fleets and ports. Powell showed similar enthusiasm for early energy and storage research and development programs, along with incentives for technology deployment in the power sector. For Anjali Marok, global sustainability strategy and analysis leader at Corteva Agriscience, a notable recommendation is augmenting efforts to reward climate-positive agricultural and ranching practices.

The Decarbonization Dialogue did not always end in consensus—each group of recommendations included areas of debate and strategies for moving forward with policies that are sensitive to disparate viewpoints. For example, participants chose not to make recommendations on the highly contentious political issue of a gas tax versus a vehicle miles traveled tax. While acknowledging the difficulty of implementing either of those approaches to transportation pricing and taxation, participants recommended policymakers should “focus first on what cities and states will need for their transportation systems, followed by determination of the cost and the funding mechanisms that would address those needs.”

Opportunities abound for accelerating decarbonization, both within and across sectors. As policymakers consider their options, the Decarbonization Dialogue shows both a model for collaborative consensus-building and presents a menu of policy considerations that can help legislators improve the impact and longevity of their proposals.