Climate Realism: What Can Technology Do For Us And What Will We Have To Do Ourselves?

Climate realism is at a recent low. In creating this first article for the tech review, I wanted to start with a crucial question to the climate solution space: what can we realistically expect technology to provide for us, and what will we need to take collective action on? In seeking the answer to this question, I have often found the sentiment that we can deprioritize collective action and sacrifice because the massive corporations responsible for pollution will be the drivers of a green tech revolution. This may be a result of a particular bubble I am in, but I am frequently confronted with techno-optimist perspectives that assume innovation alone will resolve the climate problem, often severely discounting the physics, economics, and politics required to deploy those innovations at scale. 

I see this as part of a growing sentiment in the business world, coming from titans such as Bezos (general messaging), Musk (All In podcast Oct. 31), and even Gates (Three Tough Truths About Climate), that we should effectively offload the responsibility of solving major world problems onto business leaders or that we have decades before climate change is a real problem. Writing for the Tech Review, I will dare to contradict these business leaders and many others who hold this sentiment, arguing that even in addition to the incredible innovations happening in climate tech, we will also need to be active in taking collective responsibility politically and financially. This is what I mean by climate realism, a pragmatic assessment of likely outcomes based not only on technological capability, but on deployment speed, infrastructure constraints, and economic incentives. 

There exists a fair bit of writing critiquing climate optimism or cataloging potential climate damages, but often without specificity about mechanisms, timelines, or tradeoffs. This essay seeks to address that gap by using the U.S. electricity production and distribution system as a case study, focusing on how the physical and economic nature of the problem and infrastructure timelines shape what climate technologies can realistically achieve. 

To contextualize the argument, I make several assumptions. First, over the next few decades, the pace of infrastructure deployment and technological innovation will continue along its current accelerating pace. In other words, there is unlikely to be a breakthrough in the next few years that allows society to build large scale systems, such as national transmission networks, orders of magnitude faster than we can today. Betting on such a development seems foolish given the stakes. Second, climate change is real, anthropogenic, and will cause substantial damage to ecosystems. Third, economies are inseparable from ecosystem health. Ecosystem services, including food production, water filtration, nutrient cycling, climate regulation, and human well-being, have been estimated to provide economic value exceeding global GDP at between 125-147 trillion dollars per year (Costanza et al.). As these services suffer changes and climate driven disasters become more frequent and more intense, economic output declines and prices for essential goods rise. Finally, because economic stability underpins employment, public services, and living standards, economic damage translates directly into reduced individual well-being. 

With the assumptions discussed, it is now imperative to describe the most important physical drivers of climate change impacts. I find that generally the concept most missing from techno-optimistic or adaption based ideologies is that of climate tipping points. Climate tipping points are a very well established idea in climate science. The essence is that major climate systems rely on a certain temperature range to remain in balance, and if one is unbalanced by temperature increase, they will spiral out of balance until they no longer function in their role in the global system. Some major ones are the albedo effect from various ice sheets, Atlantic current circulation, and monsoon cycles. In October, it was deemed under general consensus that we had reached the first tipping point: tropical coral reefs die off (Tollefson). This is a very big deal, as coral reefs are the foundation of large portions of ocean ecosystems. Hitting this tipping point means that it is essentially impossible to avoid the collapse of major aquatic ecosystems, and the subsequent economic and well-being damage to countries that depend on these aquatic ecosystems for food, exports, etc. However, we won’t see the full effects of this tipping point for decades to come, despite already having effectively guaranteed that it will happen. Looking down the list of tipping points, we can see that for every partial degree we allow the earth to warm, we can expect more and more systems to collapse. Keep in mind that a conservative estimate of the warming we will cause before hitting net zero is 0.5 degrees greater than where we are before taking drastic action. This means that we can expect to hit several more climate tipping points even if we shut down the global economy to stop emissions. So why talk about this? First, almost nothing short of miraculous technological development is going to prevent the damage we have already locked in per the estimated economic value of ecosystem services. Furthermore, prevention will always be a better investment than real-time adaptation (Amine Benayad et al.). Therefore, we must largely shift the focus of conversation from adaptation to immediate mitigation if we want to minimize damage from climate change. 

This leads me to my second point on the physics of climate change: the consequences of inaction get exponentially worse over time. For a combination of reasons, some discussed in the last paragraph, the consequences we will face from the increase of global temperatures from 1 degree to 1.5 degrees is not as bad as the additional consequences we would face from the increase from 1.5 degrees to 2 degrees, and so on. This means that waiting for technologies to mature before acting is itself a costly decision, even if those technologies eventually arrive. These driving forces mean that Musk is wrong in saying that climate change won’t really be a problem until 50 years from now (All In podcast Oct. 31). We might only get full blown refugee crises and massive food systems collapse in 50 years, but what we do now is what determines those effects. 

The physics of climate change and its relation to our response naturally bring us to the economics behind climate change mitigation, and the role technology can and cannot play in this. Economic activity initially benefits from using the environment as a sink for emissions and other byproducts. The way this plays out is very simple, as in both free and command economies around the globe, the prices consumers buy at are not taking into account the price governments and citizens will pay down the road from the emissions of producing these products. In fact, products like beef and oil receive billions of dollars in government subsidized pricing. We are effectively putting ourselves into price debt against the environment, the definition of an inefficient economy. Over time, this disrupts environmental processes, often invisibly at first, triggering long lasting or even irreversible changes in ecosystem function as discussed previously. The critical feature of this process is delay. The physical damage accumulates quietly, while its economic and social effects emerge only years or decades later. By the time impacts become undeniable, the cost of preventing further damage has risen substantially, and the options available are narrower than they once were. To simplify, there is a hidden price to beef, gas, energy, essentially everything that we consume accruing interest over decades and that comes to collect at multiple times the price. 

Here, the economic structure of climate solutions becomes central. Many of the most important mitigation and adaptation efforts, such as electric grids, transportation systems, water infrastructure, and coastal defenses, are neither consumer products nor benefit from a cohesive stakeholder group willing to pay great sums. They are large, expensive systems with long lifetimes, distributed benefits, and costs that cannot be fully captured by any single firm or household. Technological innovation can help parts of this problem, particularly in distributed and modular systems where private investment aligns well with deployment. Technological innovation has already begun to reshape the climate problem. Clean electricity is cheaper than fossil generation in many regions, energy storage is improving quickly, industrial decarbonization methods are technically viable, and entirely new categories of climate technology, ranging from advanced geothermal to carbon removal, are moving from theory to early deployment. The question is no longer whether solutions exist in principle, but whether they can be deployed at the necessary scale and speed, and under what economic conditions that deployment becomes possible. 

Markets alone struggle to deploy such systems at scale, not because the technologies are unprofitable in principle, but because the benefits are shared broadly while the upfront costs are concentrated. This is a classic market problem. I have written other pieces on how I believe climate tech will be profitable and will play a major role in climate solutions. But it cannot eliminate the need for collective action in systems that require national coordination, shared financing, and long-term planning. These are not failures of technology; they are consequences of scale, asset lifetimes, and the structure of economic incentives. If we back out and take a look at how a natural free market is set up to coordinate stakeholders to pay for innovators to address problems, it becomes clear that this model alone is insufficient here. The burden on the American public, in this case, would be to actively elect into paying for things like seawalls, carbon removal from the air, higher electricity bills in some cases, basing food selection at the grocery store on emission levels, and much, much more, while not seeing any benefits at all, only a maintenance of the status quo, for decades. Given that the American public is not exercising this ability at scale, even now with all the evidence available, suggests that we should not rely on this system alone. 

A natural rebuttal would be to suggest that with the right innovations, sustainable products will replace unsustainable ones at the same and better price points. While this is true in some cases, it is very much not in others. As discussed previously, our current consumption is borrowing against the environment. Not only that, but it has been designed to create things as cheaply as possible without much regard for environmental damage. All of the physics and economic framing above is to set up the challenge of this next statement: we are trying to reinvent the global economic system, keep our consumption the same or even account for growth, ensure it is not subsidized by unpriced damages, has constraints on the supply chain and resources to remain sustainable, and keeps the same prices, all within the next few decades. My argument is that this is simply not possible, especially not through private technological innovation alone. I will use electricity production and distribution to demonstrate this more rigorously. 

Electricity provides a clear and instructive case study for understanding both the power and the limits of technological solutions to climate change. The U.S. electricity sector remains one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is also the foundation upon which most other decarbonization strategies depend. Electrifying transportation, buildings, and portions of industry only reduces emissions if the electricity supplying those systems is itself low carbon. For this reason, the federal climate strategy has placed power sector decarbonization at the center of its approach, with goals such as achieving 100 percent carbon free electricity by 2035. At the same time, this challenge is becoming more difficult rather than easier, as electricity demand is no longer flat. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that electricity consumption reached a record 4,097 billion kilowatt-hours in 2024 and will continue rising through at least 2026, driven by electrification and rapidly growing demand from data centers and artificial intelligence workloads. This means that decarbonization must not only replace existing fossil generation but also keep pace with new load growth. 

From a technological standpoint, progress has been meaningful. Clean electricity technologies have become dominant in new energy capacity additions. In 2024, solar power accounted for the overwhelming majority of new U.S. generating capacity, reflecting dramatic cost declines and mature supply chains. More broadly, wind, solar, and battery storage have reshaped the economics of power generation, and by early 2025, fossil fuels were around 50 percent of total U.S. electricity generation. Grid software, advanced controls, and grid enhancing technologies are also improving the system’s ability to manage variable generation. Taken together, these developments demonstrate that the core technologies needed for a low carbon power system are real, scalable, and increasingly cost-competitive. The problem facing the electricity sector is therefore not a lack of innovation at the component level. 

Instead, the constraints come at the system level, particularly in the infrastructure required to connect new energy sources to consumers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the state of grid interconnection and transmission. As of the end of 2024, roughly 2,300 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity, nearly twice the size of the existing U.S. power fleet, was waiting in interconnection queues. However, being in a queue does not mean a project will be built. Data from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that the median time from interconnection request to commercial operation has grown from less than two years in the early 2000s to roughly five years for projects completed in 2023, and only a fraction of projects in line ultimately reach operation. These delays are not driven by shortages in solar panels or batteries, but by congestion, cost allocation disputes, permitting delays, and the need for major grid upgrades. In response, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has taken on major reforms to the interconnection process, an implicit acknowledgment that market mechanisms alone have failed to keep deployment timelines aligned with climate goals. 

Transmission expansion presents an even clearer example of why electricity decarbonization is a collective action problem. A wide range of studies synthesized by the Department of Energy conclude that the U.S. transmission system must grow dramatically to support a clean grid. Median estimates suggest roughly a 57 percent expansion by 2035, and in scenarios that achieve deep decarbonization at the lowest cost, total transmission capacity grows to between 2.4 and 3.5 times its 2020 level by mid-century. These investments are not small, they are foundational. Yet they are also expensive, slow to permit, and inherently multi-jurisdictional. Importantly, DOE and NREL analyses show that accelerated transmission buildout would reduce total system costs by hundreds of billions of dollars through 2050, saving roughly $1.60 to $1.80 for every dollar invested. The paradox is that while transmission is economically beneficial in aggregate, no single private actor can capture enough of those benefits to justify building it at the necessary scale without coordinated planning and shared financing, especially not in the timeframe needed. 

When these infrastructure constraints are translated into build rates, the challenge becomes even clearer. Analyses from the World Resources Institute indicate that reaching roughly 90 percent clean electricity by 2035 would require installing on the order of 60 to 70 gigawatts of new renewable capacity per year for more than a decade, in addition to storage, transmission, and firm clean generation. Recent deployment, while impressive, still falls short of that sustained pace. Achieving such build rates consistently would require not only manufacturing capacity and labor, but also interconnection throughput, transmission siting, and long-term investment certainty. These are precisely the areas where fragmented markets and short political time horizons struggle most. 

Rising electricity demand further raises the stakes. Because electrification of other industries is so important for net neutrality, data centers, electrified transportation, and heat pumps add load to the grid. Delays in clean infrastructure deployment do not simply slow decarbonization, they can actively reinforce fossil fuel lock-in by forcing other growing industries to build around fossil fuel infrastructure if they want to grow as fast as they can. When reliability is threatened, grid operators often keep older fossil plants online longer than planned, regardless of their emissions profile. In this way, insufficient collective investment in shared infrastructure can make technological progress meaningless. 

Some may argue that companies will and should naturally lead the charge of creating a green grid to cut through all of this bureaucratic load without government contracts and subsidies to support it (because these things come with bureaucracy). I would question who would pay for it?. New microgrid formations, geothermal, and even fusion innovations create many new opportunities for structuring the grid in modern ways that decrease reliance on outdated large scale grids. However, there are some challenges that make it essentially impossible without government involvement. First, grids require baseline energy in conjunction with flexible high energy capacity to cover all dips and spikes in energy demand. Furthermore, they need a combination of low and high inertia sources to create reliability and safeguard against failures (Denholm et al.). This means that a fully renewable grid should have access to flexible low low inertia sources like solar and wind in addition to base load providing high inertia sources like geothermal and fusion. However, there are massive parts of the country that don’t have access to either, and therefore require coordination and building of extensive transmission infrastructure. 

If this is done privately and directly charged to consumers, the estimated trillions in cost that it would take to develop this infrastructure will be passed to consumers immediately through electricity price spikes. Private entities need to recoup losses in a shorter time frame than the government, meaning competitive pricing without government subsidies will significantly increase energy prices. Transmission alone is commonly projected in the hundreds of billions even before accounting for distribution upgrades. Brattle estimates 30–90 billion dollars of incremental transmission upgrades by 2030 and 200–600 billion more by 2050, while Princeton’s Net-Zero modeling shows cases approaching 2.5 trillion dollars invested in transmission alone by 2050. These do not even account for the new energy production infrastructure where valuations vary immensely, but are also in the trillions. The reason to focus on transmission is that this does not pay for itself the way energy production infrastructure does, it serves more as a public good with most stakeholders being middle income Americans whose quality of life would be very affected by energy price changes. 

Given the recent political landscape, it is clear we have not made much progress towards decarbonization goals. Now I understand that these costs would be unevenly distributed, and most consumers would pay significantly less relative to industry that consumes the bulk of electricity, but industry will also pass increased costs onto the consumer. Even though it would make long term economic sense at a market scale for consumers to elect to pay massively higher electricity prices in the short term to expedite the transition to renewables, the average American is not in a place to be paying the cost necessary to support private ventures providing this service. If the last election had a focus on inflation, that would be nothing compared to the uproar over the price hikes resulting from unaided private grid modernization. If the government provides incentives, subsidies, and otherwise offloads costs to be paid over longer time periods and by different stakeholders, this becomes much more feasible. 

This creates what can be thought of as an economic tipping point: a dynamic in which the cost of delayed action rises faster than the political and economic willingness to pay for it. As damage accumulates and infrastructure needs grow, interventions become larger, more disruptive, and more expensive, potentially faster than public consensus can form around funding them. In this scenario, action is perpetually deferred not because solutions are unavailable, but because they are always deemed “too expensive” relative to short-term economic priorities. 

The electricity sector is a great case study which illustrates a central point of climate realism. Technological innovation has already solved many of the hardest problems in power generation, and continued innovation will remain essential. But innovation alone cannot overcome the economic structure of electricity systems, where benefits are diffuse, costs are concentrated, and coordination spans states, utilities, regulators, and the public. Decarbonizing electricity at the speed demanded by climate physics requires collective action to finance, permit, and plan the infrastructure that makes clean technology usable at scale. Without that coordination, even the most impressive technological advances risk failing not because they do not work, but because they cannot be deployed fast enough and economically enough to matter. 

Climate change is no longer a problem defined by a lack of solutions. The technologies required to decarbonize large portions of the economy exist, and in many cases are already cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable than the systems they would replace. Climate change mitigation is the economically sound thing to do; it always has been. However, the incentive timeframes of consumers, politicians, corporations, and the physical realities of the climate are far from aligned. Climate realism begins with accepting that markets, left to the irrational and short-sighted actors humans are, are structurally ill-suited to deliver shared infrastructure whose benefits are distributed and whose costs are immediate. It also requires rejecting the comforting fiction that responsibility can be outsourced to corporations, future technologies, or later generations. None of this takes away from the importance of technological innovation. It clarifies its limits. The climate challenge is therefore not a question of optimism or pessimism, nor of faith in technology versus faith in government. It is a question of alignment. Until institutions, incentives, and investment timelines are brought into alignment with physical reality, even the most impressive technological advances will arrive too slowly to matter. The defining decision of the coming decades is not whether we can invent our way out of climate change, but whether we are willing to fight against our own shortsightedness and build collectively, deliberately, and at scale the systems we already know we need.

Gabriel is a second-year student-athlete studying environmental science and economics.

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