Skip to main content
Climate
Search

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
MIT

Main navigation

  • Climate 101
    • What We Know
    • What Can Be Done
    • Climate Primer
  • Explore
    • Explainers
    • Ask MIT Climate
    • Podcast
    • For Educators
  • MIT Action
    • News
    • Events
    • Resources
  • Search
PostJune 28, 2022

The world will need dozens of breakthrough climate technologies in the next decade

Photo Credit
Chad Hagen

We’re living in a pivotal decade. By 2030, global emissions must fall by half, mostly through massive deployment of commercial solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But emerging climate technologies must come to market during this decade too, even if they don’t make much of a dent in emissions right away. The International Energy Agency forecasts that roughly half the reductions needed to cut emissions to nearly zero by 2050 must come from technologies that are not ready for the market today because they’re too expensive to manufacture, haven’t been tested at scale, or both.

Only a handful of clean technologies, such as silicon solar panels, onshore wind turbines, light- emitting diodes (LEDs), and lithium-ion batteries, have graduated from scientific laboratories to mass deployment. And it took decades for them to reach a scale where they could significantly reduce global emissions. Those timelines must be compressed for the world to have a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, which world leaders agreed at last year’s Glasgow Climate Conference would offer the best chance of avoiding catastrophic effects.

Read the full story at MIT Technology Review.

by MIT Technology Review
Topics
Buildings
Carbon Capture
Energy
Finance & Economics
Industry & Manufacturing
Transportation

Related Posts

PostOctober 17, 2025

School of Engineering welcomes new faculty in 2024-25

MIT News
Top row, left to right: Masha Folk, Sophia Henneberg, Omar Khattab, and Tania Lopez Silva. Bottom row, left to right: Ethan Peterson, Daniel Varon, Dean Price, and Raphael Zufferey.
PostOctober 16, 2025

Book reviews technologies aiming to remove carbon from the atmosphere

MIT Energy Initiative
“Carbon Removal,” by MIT Energy Initiative Senior Research Engineer Howard Herzog (pictured) and Professor Niall Mac Dowell of Imperial College London, explores the history and intricacies of removing carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.
PostOctober 15, 2025

MIT engineers solve the sticky-cell problem in bioreactors and other indust...

MIT News
To test their setup, researchers allowed algae cells to stick to the surface of the photobioreactor. When they applied a voltage, the bubbles separated the cells from the surfaces without harming them.
PostOctober 15, 2025

Why some quantum materials stall while others scale

MIT News
MIT researchers have developed a system for evaluating the scale-up potential of quantum materials. Their data-driven framework combines a material’s quantum behavior with its cost, supply chain resilience, environmental footprint, and other factors.

MIT Climate News in Your Inbox

 
 

MIT Groups Log In

Log In

Footer

  • About
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Accessibility
  • Contact
MIT Climate Project
MIT
Communicator Award Winner
Communicator Award Winner