A colloquium on the status and challenges in science for decarbonizing our energy landscape

Abstract

An Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium titled “Status and Challenges in Science for Decarbonizing our Energy Landscape” was held at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, California in October 2018. The papers that follow in this issue of PNAS (1⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–7) stem from that activity, which addressed a topic of compelling interest and importance to our community from a perspective often not addressed. It is evermore clear, based on incontrovertible climate evidence, that the way we produce and use energy must transition rapidly from what we have done in the past. Population growth, urbanization, and the need for both energy and materials to support this evolution has led to environmental alteration that can only be explained by human activity. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have emphasized over the last several decades, the average annual temperature of planet Earth has been increasing with greater annual increments. The origin of the increase and its consequences are the greater amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere from approximately 284 parts per million at the start of the industrial revolution to 316 parts per million in 1956, when detailed records were initiated, to 415 parts per million in 2018 (8⇓⇓⇓–12). The well-known “greenhouse” gas effect of CO2 for trapping heat has been described in detail and extends to other polyatomic molecules, such as methane, that are present in much smaller amounts (although their respective greenhouse gas effects may be greater on a molecular basis). The … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: eisenberg{at}chem.rochester.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1