In a lively and far-ranging conversation Tuesday at the United Nations COP28 climate talks in Dubai, Newsweek's Better Planet guided discussion about a more climate-friendly economy in an event titled "Pillars of the Green Transition."
Panelists tackled some of the most challenging aspects of reducing greenhouse gas emissions: radical change in the transportation of commercial goods, the deep decarbonization of heavy industry and how to address emissions from fossil fuels.
To address those challenges, panelists talked about bringing the energy and creativity of youth to the climate challenge and providing clear-eyed analysis of the progress made to green the economy.
Here are some highlights.
Amazon's Approach
Chris Roe, Amazon's director of worldwide environment-carbon, said his company is working to reduce emissions across the range of its business activities.
Amazon has an enormous need for energy for its air, ground and oceanic transport of goods as well as powering its grocery stores and distribution and data centers. Roe said Amazon is now the world's biggest corporate consumer of clean energy.
"Last year, we hit 90 percent renewables across our whole operations, and we realized we could reach 100 percent by 2025, and not 2030 as initially planned," Roe said.
Amazon also launched the $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund to invest in emerging clean technologies that Amazon might later use.
"We're looking for solutions where they exist, and where they don't, we're looking at how we can invest to help make them possible," he said.
Roe said Amazon has also entered a partnership with marine shipping companies to use its purchasing power to try to spur clean fuel alternatives for cargo vessels at sea.
Building Better
Mashael Bin Saedan, CEO of the Saudi Arabian company Al-Saedan for Development, stressed the need to build with fewer emissions.
"Construction is considered a dirty industry, and we can change that by searching for best practices in manufacturing and materials," she said.
The built environment accounts for about 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete alone is responsible for about 8 percent. Her company is working to reduce the embedded carbon in buildings through smarter construction planning, resulting in less need for concrete.
"We reduce 20 percent to 40 percent of the usual use of concrete through our 3D printing and other processes," she said. "Let's take current processes and make them environmentally friendly, without reinventing the wheel."
Capturing Carbon
Claude Letourneau is president and CEO of Svante, a Canadian company developing technology for carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
CCS uses chemical processes to strip carbon dioxide from the smokestack emissions of a power plant, refinery or industrial facility. Svante's technology uses a solid sorbent in that process, a system the company claims can absorb the CO2 with greater energy efficiency and lower cost.
Cost concerns have been the big challenge for CCS since the technology was first proposed to remove CO2 from coal power plants. But Letourneau said it's important to put costs in perspective.
"It is much cheaper to remove CO2 early on in the industrial process, rather than let it go into the atmosphere and deal with it then," he said.
The scale of the challenge is daunting, Letourneau said. If CCS is going to play a significant role in decarbonizing the economy, it will have to rapidly scale up.
"We currently have 40 plants around the world working at a capacity of removing one million tons of CO2 per year. We need 10,000 plants if we want to remove a quarter of man-made CO2 emissions," he said.
Youth Action
Abhiir Bhalla, a sustainability advocate on the board of the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council, started his climate action at just 15 years old when he was inspired to do something about the air quality in his home city, Delhi.
"We need to talk about climate in the context of people's health," he said.
Air pollution is the world's greatest environmental health threat and leads to an estimated 8 million deaths globally each year. The health burden is especially severe in Asia, and much of the soot and smog comes from burning fossil fuels.
"Air quality in Delhi is proof that decarbonization needs to happen now, and not in 10 or 20 years," Bhalla said. "The health impacts can already be felt now."
COP28 was the first of the annual U.N. climate talks to devote a day to health and climate change connections. Bhalla said that was heartening, but now his focus is on ensuring that there will be funding to bring action.
Tracking Net Zero
Angel Hsu is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, where she is the founder and director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab.
Part of Hsu's work keeps tabs on how many countries, states, cities and companies have pledged to reduce emissions to net zero and whether they are delivering on those pledges.
"According to our Net Zero Tracker, launched three years ago, companies have been the most active pledging net-zero targets," Hsu said. "We have just passed the 1,000-company mark, leading with services and manufacturing."
However, when it comes to whether companies are fulfilling those commitments, the news is less encouraging.
Hsu and her colleagues measured companies' action against criteria laid down by the U.N.'s Race to Zero campaign. The criteria included covering all emissions associated with each company's actions and products, and beginning reductions immediately.
"Only 3 percent of companies meet the criteria," she said.
Newsweek's Better Planet event, produced with knowledge partner Investment Reports, came on the sixth day of the nearly two weeks of U.N. climate talks in Dubai.
COP28 negotiators have so far agreed to a fund for poorer countries dealing with the worst effects of climate change, committed to tripling the deployment of renewable energy, and forged an agreement among oil and gas companies to reduce emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
However, core issues remain unresolved, especially the challenge of phasing out the use of fossil fuels.
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