ERIC MASANET

Head, Energy and Resource Systems Analysis Laboratory (ERASAL), Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering & Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University

“To get to net zero by mid-century we've got to get going immediately. We've got to make progress on carbon capture. We've got to make progress on low carbon building materials. We've got to make progress on electric vehicles and so forth.”

Eric works internationally. He is helping policymakers figure out how to get large industries to reduce carbon emissions. He describes the complexity of industries, how much energy they use, how much carbon they emit, and how they figure into our global energy use and carbon emissions.

Looking at the entire planet, industry accounts for over a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Eric explains, “that's due to the fuel that's burned at the factories themselves but also due to the electricity that's purchased by those factories to run their equipment, which produces emissions at the power plant, often the grid.  So more than a third of emissions. It’s the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet. So we can't decarbonize the planet without focusing strongly on decarbonizing industry.”