The United States will need to take additional actions to meet its nationally determined contribution to the Paris Agreement on climate change, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Authors Jeffery Greenblatt and Max Wei, both of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, considered the U.S. policies included in the U.S. NDC, in which the government pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 1990 levels by 2025. “With all modelled policies included, the upper end of the uncertainty range overlaps with the 2025 INDC target, but the required reductions are not achieved using reference values. Even if all modelled policies are implemented, additional GHG reduction is probably required,” the report says.
Greenblatt and Wei suggest additional policies that could help the U.S. fill the gap between current policies and its pledge. For example, “[i]n the electricity sector, an aggressive phase-out of coal and natural gas generation, with accompanying increases in renewables, energy efficiency and possibly nuclear generation could be enacted,” the report says.