Rapidly advancing technology and the falling costs of clean energy make the Green New Deal’s goal of transforming the U.S. economy to zero emissions by mid-century eminently achievable. Photograph by Jason Andrew / Redux

Last month’s rollout of the Green New Deal, a fourteen-page legislative resolution, sponsored by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, that called for “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” through a ten-year “national mobilization,” has sparked a good deal of controversy. The resolution was larded with goals not directly tied to the environment, such as guaranteeing everyone a job, affordable housing, and high-quality health care, and even some energy researchers who are enthusiastic proponents of transitioning rapidly to a zero-emissions economy questioned the timetable of a single decade for converting power production entirely to renewable sources.

“I don’t think anybody who is deep inside the substance is talking about that,” Jonathan Koomey, a special adviser to the chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, told me. Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has helped design a number of Green New Deals for individual states, including New York and Washington, said, “I think it is wonderful that the issue is being addressed, but I don’t think this movement has yet accepted that you have to do these things carefully and rigorously.”

Despite these reservations, Koomey and Pollin, as well as a number of other researchers I spoke with, said the drafters of the Green New Deal were perfectly right to urge large-scale action across many parts of the economy, and they emphasized the technological opportunities that now exist to meet many of the environmental goals that underpin the proposed legislation, if not the exact timetable it lays down. In a report released in October, which the Democratic resolution cites and endorses, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that if the world is to contain the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, carbon emissions must be reduced by about fifty per cent before 2030, and completely phased out before 2050. For a U.S. economy that currently relies on fossil fuels for about four-fifths of its energy, achieving zero emissions, or something close to it, by the middle of the century would be a historic transformation. And, according to all the researchers I spoke with, rapidly advancing technology and the falling costs of clean energy make this more achievable than ever.

“Right now, we have about ninety per cent or ninety-five per cent of the technology we need,” Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, told me. In a series of papers, Jacobson and his colleagues have laid out “roadmaps” to a zero-emissions economy for fifty states, fifty-three towns and cities, and a hundred and thirty-eight other countries, with a completion date of 2050. Just as in the Democrats’ Green New Deal, the central element of these roadmaps (and others) is converting the electric grid to clean energy by shutting down power stations that rely on fossil fuels and making some very large investments in wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal facilities. Jacobson said this could be completed by 2035, which is only five years beyond the target set out in the Green New Deal. At the same time, policymakers would introduce a range of measures to promote energy efficiency, and electrify other sectors of the economy that now rely heavily on burning carbon, such as road and rail transport, home heating, and industrial heating. “We don’t need a technological miracle to solve this problem,” Jacobson reiterated. “‘The bottom line is we just need to deploy, deploy, deploy.”

Saul Griffith, a materials scientist and inventor who is the chief executive of OtherLab, a San Francisco-based technology incubator that focusses on clean energy, agrees. In recent presentations, Griffith has sketched out an aggressive plan for switching to clean power and electrifying heating and transportation, which he says could be completed within twenty years. “It’s entirely reasonable to do it,” he said. “The United States is lucky because of its natural advantages. It’s a country with low population density, good wind, good solar, and good hydro resources. The only reason not to do it is political inertia and the influence of the existing fossil-fuel industry.”

Pollin is working on a national zero-emissions plan with an end date of 2050. He said it will combine many of the elements in the Green New Deal, such as stricter emissions standards, extensive public investments, and tax incentives for reducing carbon consumption and investing in clean energy. And, like the Democratic proposal, Pollin stresses the need to provide financial aid and retraining for people currently working in fossil-fuel industries, which would be shrunken drastically under any such plan. “It needs to be done, and it can be done,” he said. “But it needs to be done judiciously.”

Underlying a lot of the optimism is a steep fall in the cost of generating electricity from renewable sources. With the development of bigger wind turbines, the cost reductions associated with wind power have been particularly impressive. Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard whose book “Energy Revolution,” from 2015, emphasized the potential of renewable energy, pointed out to me that doubling the diameter of a turbine yields four times as much power, and that some modern turbines have diameters of a hundred metres. Costs have also fallen sharply in the solar-power industry, where there has been great progress in building more cost-efficient photovoltaic systems, including solar cells, inverters, and transformers. Just a decade ago, Pollin pointed out, electricity generated from sunlight cost about twice as much as electricity generated from coal; now, the costs are roughly equal.

Every year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates a levelized cost of electricity, or L.C.O.E., which represents the average per-megawatt-hour cost of building and operating a power-generating plant over the course of its life cycle. For power facilities that would enter service in 2023, the E.I.A. estimated the L.C.O.E.s of onshore wind and solar at $42.80 and $48.80, respectively, compared with $40.20 for advanced natural-gas power stations. (The L.C.O.E. of nuclear would be around ninety dollars). Some existing coal-fired plants are cheaper, but they are also very dirty. In calculating the future cost of electricity generated from coal, the E.I.A. assumes that new coal-fired plants would be built with sophisticated systems to capture and sequester carbon emissions. Allowing for this requirement, the E.I.A. estimates the L.C.O.E. of coal-powered plants entering service in 2023 at close to a hundred dollars.

These figures suggest that, going forward, electricity generated from renewable sources will be competitive with natural gas, and cheaper than coal and nuclear power. (And these figures don’t take into account the existing tax credits for investing in clean energy. When these credits are included, the L.C.O.E.s of onshore wind and solar are even lower: $36.60 and $37.60, respectively.) In some parts of the country, energy consumers are already benefitting from these trends. Prentiss pointed out to me that Iowa now generates more than thirty-five per cent of its electricity from wind. The retail cost of electricity in the state is 8.73 cents per kilowatt-hour, she said, compared to a national average of 10.48 cents.

Iowa, of course, is a windy state. People need electricity all the time, regardless of the weather. For this reason, among others, the E.I.A. analysis pointed out that care should be taken in comparing the costs of different types of power. Defenders of fossil fuels go further. In a recent article about the Green New Deal, Myron Ebell, an analyst at the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, which receives some of its funding from oil and gas companies, wrote that the electricity grid “cannot operate on 100% intermittent and variable power—or even 50%.”