Research Publications

Chapter Summary: This chapter describes work on decarbonizing cars and light trucks through electrification. It then moves on to a discussion of the much more challenging problem of decarbonizing heavy freight. It describes a workshop we conducted with experts on this topic and then describes the extensive review Lynn Kaack and we performed of strategies to decarbonize freight, focusing heavily on moving trucks onto the railroads. The final portion of the chapter summarizes work on reducing emissions from ocean shipping and aircraft. One strand of this work focused on plugging ships into the electricity grid when they are in port, instead of using on-board diesel generators to supply the rather large quantities of power that many vessels consume. The work on aviation was done in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund. It analyzed and proposed improvements to a mechanism that requires airlines to offset a portion of their growth in greenhouse gas emission relative to a baseline year.