Climate change represents a profound policy challenge to America and the world – requiring a response at a sweeping scale and with unprecedented speed centered on remaking the energy foundations of our society. The move to a clean and renewable energy future must be advanced at the same time America works to recover from the most serious pandemic in a century and the parallel economic collapse triggered by COVID-19. The Zero Carbon Action Plan (ZCAP) presented in the report responds comprehensively to this multidimensional policy imperative.

The ZCAP lays out a strategy for putting Americans back to work building a vibrant 21st century U.S. economy based on advanced technologies, good jobs, clean energy, climate safety, and economic security. It offers a pathway to achieve net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 – thereby providing a basis for a dramatically ramped-up American contribution to the Paris Climate Agreement. The ZCAP agenda would promote efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the ambitious goal that the 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report tells us that society should adopt to avoid the worst effects of global warming including sea level rise, increased hurricane damage, and changed rainfall patterns that might dramatically affect agricultural productivity as well as resulting in more floods, droughts, and wildfires.