Another Self-Important Middle-Aged White Guy’s Pragmatic Climate Reset – CleanTechnica

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Another middle-aged white guy is offering a pragmatic climate reset, me. It seems to be the season for it. Bill Gates has pivoted from “zero carbon at all costs” to “improve human welfare first.” Tony Blair has decided that hard climate targets are too idealistic and that a more rational plan is needed. Michael Liebreich is arguing for an “affordable first 90%” instead of chasing perfection. The language shifts, the presentation slide templates change, and yet here we are, back at the beginning. Everyone is rediscovering practicality, and apparently, we’re supposed to be grateful that reason is back in style.

So, in the spirit of the moment, I’ll offer my own pragmatic reset. No grand reinvention. No billion-dollar breakthrough that will arrive in 2040. Just a calm review of what a realistic path actually looks like. Call it middle-aged realism, with coffee instead of cocktails, not that I remotely object to a decent cocktail.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Electrify everything. Cars, buses, trucks, furnaces, cooktops, and industrial heat where possible. Electricity is the most efficient energy vector humans have ever used. It doesn’t care what’s spinning the generator blades. When the power grid decarbonizes, everything connected to it decarbonizes. The cleanest watt is the one that never passes through an engine block or a smokestack. This is not theory anymore. The physics are simple, and the economics are lined up behind it.

Once you commit to electrification, you have to build more renewable generation than you think. Overbuild it. Maybe 25% overbuild, just as every other form of generation except deeply inflexible nuclear has been built knowing it won’t run at maximum capacity. That’s not waste; that’s insurance. Energy abundance makes the transition politically viable because people stop worrying about scarcity. Solar and wind are already the cheapest sources of new energy across most of the planet. More turbines, more panels, fewer excuses. Every gigawatt of extra renewable capacity is a down payment on stability and affordability.

Then, connect it all. A pragmatic world is an interconnected one. The power of electrons is that they move faster than any fuel train or pipeline. Build continent-scale grids, high-voltage direct-current lines that move energy from where it’s blowing or shining to where it’s needed. North America, Europe, China, and India all have enough geography to smooth out daily variability. The technology exists, and the payback in reliability is enormous. Integration is cheaper than isolation.

Once you have renewables feeding the grid and wires spanning regions, you need to store what’s left over. This is where real-world pragmatism lives. We already have storage at scale: pumped hydro. It’s old, boring, and works every time. Complement it with batteries where fast response matters and it’s cheap, which is everywhere in this age of cheap cells. Use thermal storage where heat is useful, which once again is all over the place. Don’t fall for the fantasy that a miracle molecule or a new reactor design will solve variability. Storage isn’t exotic; it’s infrastructure.

Industry, of course, is the tough nut. Cement, steel, and ammonia account for a large share of global emissions. Yet here too, solutions are visible. Electric arc furnaces are already replacing blast furnaces. Alternative binders and carbon-mineralized concretes are moving from pilot to production. Biomethane direct reduction of iron is TRL 9. Ammonia made from renewable hydrogen is an obvious step. None of this needs to wait for fusion or moonshots. It just needs focus and investment.

A real reset also includes the land beneath our feet. Plant trees, yes, but more importantly, manage soils intelligently. Restore peatlands, rotate crops, reduce tillage, and build carbon into the ground. Agriculture is both source and sink, and it responds to practical incentives. Nitrogen fixing agrigenetics, drone seeding and spraying, no till agriculture and precision agriculture are basic and proven tech. These aren’t romantic gestures. They are measurable carbon and resilience gains that feed people and stabilize ecosystems.

Now for the part that economists have been repeating for decades. Price carbon. Stop pretending pollution is free. When we make people pay for what they emit, they emit less. It’s not punishment; it’s math. At the same time, end subsidies and financing for fossil fuels. Every public dollar spent on propping up declining industries is a dollar not spent on the future. If you want to see pragmatism in action, look at where money flows when it’s allowed to find efficiency.

Then there’s the part everyone avoids talking about. We need to shut down coal and gas plants. Not in theory. In practice. Every megawatt of coal that closes makes space for a cleaner replacement. Every retired gas turbine is a step toward resilience. Create strategic plans for stopping using fossil fuel plants daily that keeps them around for the rarer and rarer occasions when they are needed. That is what real transition looks like: not burning fossil fuels all the time, not press releases.

And while we’re fixing obvious problems, eliminate the short-lived climate pollutants. The Kigali Amendment to phase out hydrofluorocarbons is the quiet hero of climate policy. It targets chemicals that trap thousands of times more heat than CO2. Deal with methane too, with its 20 to 30 year residence and high global warming potential. Cap high emissions oil and gas leakage. Pivot biomass to biofuels, returning nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) to the soil as they aren’t required for energy for fuels. This is the kind of pragmatic win that rarely makes headlines but matters enormously.

If you add all of this together, it’s not radical. It’s the same list engineers, modelers, and policy wonks have been building since the early 2000s. It’s what works. It’s affordable, scalable, and politically survivable. Everything else is distraction. Direct air capture sounds exciting, but it’s an energy sink. Nuclear remains a rounding error, even in China’s megaproject for breakfast economy. Small modular reactors are endlessly delayed. Hydrogen for cars is an answer to a question no one is asking anymore. Fusion is always just around the corner, which is another way of saying it isn’t here. Pragmatism means ignoring these glittering VC- and recidivist-funded diversions and sticking to what can actually scale.

The funny part of this supposed “reset” is that none of it is new. We knew two decades ago that the future was electric, renewable, and interconnected. We knew the same carbon math, the same technology curves, the same physics. What changed is that fashionable voices rediscovered the old truths and gave them new names. Call it the circle of consultancy. This article just restates my short list of climate actions that will work, that haven’t really changed since I first published them six years ago, not claiming that they were in any way innovative or unique.

The current wave of pragmatic climate resets isn’t all equal. Michael Liebreich’s version is by far the most constructive, grounded in data and tempered by hard-won experience. His argument that we should focus on decarbonizing the first 90% quickly, affordably, and politically securely is a useful correction to both ideological purity and defeatism. He still believes in building things, measuring outcomes, and calling out nonsense when he sees it. His “reset” is the most grounded in political and thermodynamic reality, mostly calling for a rebranding and reframing of communication and politics.

Tony Blair’s reset, on the other hand, feels like resignation wrapped in gravitas. His appeal to realism mostly just licenses delay, offering a soothing vocabulary for staying comfortable. Bill Gates has wandered even further, reframing climate change as something secondary to welfare or health, as if stability in the climate and prosperity for people were separate goals. His new humility toward warming sounds reasonable but quietly lowers the bar. Of the three, only Liebreich’s version still treats pragmatism as forward motion rather than surrender.

So yes, this is another middle-aged white guy’s pragmatic climate reset. Except it isn’t a reset at all. It’s the same short list I’ve been repeating for years, and the same one many others have been repeating since the beginning of this century. If it sounds new, that’s only because a lot of nonsense has been dominating the airwaves in recent years, hydrogen and SMRs chief among them. Pragmatism never went anywhere. It just waited for attention to return. The only real reset is remembering what already works and finally doing it at scale.