Decades ago, the United States and Europe joined together and won the Cold War. Today, the world war we are fighting is not cold but hot -- global warming. And in this new war, it is time for the transatlantic alliance to marshal the vision, unity and courage need to actually win not just lose less badly.
At the Paris climate talks last year, world leaders agreed that the entire planet must reach zero net emissions in the second half of the century. This means that the world must reduce annual climate pollution to the point where emissions equal the carbon taken out of the air each year by forests and farmlands (and possibly also by future innovative technologies).
Unfortunately, leaders left Paris without picking a specific date for reaching net zero globally or indicating when individual countries would get there. They did agree, however, to put forward after Paris national plans for reducing climate pollution through 2050 and this process represents one of the biggest opportunities for climate action now.
Usually, the follow-up from major global climate meetings can be measured in years or even decades - but in the next several months, a critical mass of major economies will put forward their 2050 plans. The United States and Canada recently said they would complete their respective mid-century plans in 2016, and would encourage other members of the G20 to follow suit. Germany has confirmed it will unveil this summer a plan for slashing carbon pollution through 2050. The United Kingdom will revise its 2050 plan this year, taking into account the Paris long-term goals. And France, China and Russia have all announced that they too will release 2050 low-carbon strategies soon, though not necessarily this year.
While these nations deserve praise for developing 2050 climate plans now, the plans themselves must be sufficiently ambitious. Several years ago President Obama pledged that the United States would reduce emissions 83 percent by 2050. The UK's domestic Climate Act requires an 80 percent reduction. Some German officials have called for a 95 percent reduction but the government has yet to decide officially.
This is not enough. Decisions by the world's wealthiest nations to still emit climate pollution in 2050 would not only be less than science requires but would also miss out on the enormous opportunity to redefine the hot war. Our economies and societies need a bugle call and a date for victory, not just a mile marker.
So far no major economy in the world -- no member of the G20 -- has committed to totally decarbonizing its economy by a specific date. The U.S. and EU should take the historic opportunity to be first by making a date with zero and that date should be 2050.
A date with zero is achievable by scaling up investments in technologies to put less climate pollution into the air and by taking more carbon out of the air. Projects like Mission Innovation, which was announced in Paris by President Obama, Bill Gates and a host of world leaders, are focusing on accelerating the clean energy revolution. Doing a better job of protecting and restoring the world's forests would harness their enormous capacity to store carbon in plants and ground.
The space race of the 1960's was a defining moment in the Cold War. It captured imaginations and defined success. The world would never have remembered if John F. Kennedy had pledged that America would get 83 percent of the way to the moon by the end of the decade. While 190,093 miles would certainly qualify as a long way, longer than a human being had ever traveled from home in 1962, it wouldn't have been far enough to take that historic one small step.
There is no substitute for being the first with a positive bold vision. For the entire world to get to zero net emissions in the second half of the century, the U.S. and the E.U. need to go first. We can choose a date with zero, because the same thing is true now that was true in 1962: an ambitious goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, and that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.