By Fred Krupp / Source: HuffPost

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When it comes to climate action, it’s a good thing that smart people keep building scenarios for cleaning up global energy production. Those visions of the future are necessary — but they tend to lack an essential ingredient.

One team of researchers recently reviewed 11 such studies, all of them offering plans for “50 to 90 percent reductions in global CO2 emissions by mid-century.” But as the writer David Roberts observed last month in Grist, “most decarbonization scenarios are thought experiments, not practical roadmaps…We need to start thinking in practical terms about how to get the technologies we need ready.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, for the past, year Environmental Defense Fund has been drawing up a short-term blueprint for climate action, part of new strategic plan that will guide all of our work for the next five years.

We came up with a program to accomplish something audacious: stopping once and for all the centuries-long rise in global greenhouse gas emissions and seeing them peak, level off and begin to decline within the next five years. We call it turning the corner toward a stable climate.

Of course it won’t be easy and EDF can’t do it alone — it will take hard work by people all over the world. But the window of opportunity is open. Though global CO2 emissions from energy use are still going up, in recent years their rate of increase has been cut in half.

To capitalize on that and turn the corner once and for all, here are four of the big levers we need to pull now:

1. Focus on the biggest emitters: The U.S., China and Europe.

For the United States, turning the corner by 2020 means seeing through the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed limits on carbon pollution from power plants — our single biggest source of carbon pollution — while making sure the billions of dollars that will be spent on upgrading our electric grid are invested wisely.

In the U.S. and Europe alike, it means sweeping aside outdated regulations that are getting in the way of clean energy and energy efficiency — which is why our fastest-growing program at EDF is devoted to doing just that.

And for China, where EDF has been working for 20 years, it means, by 2020, capping half of the nation’s carbon emissions, improving energy efficiency by 25 percent and shifting the country’s energy mix to one-third renewable energy, natural gas and nuclear — up from 15 percent in 2013.

In November, the U.S. and China made a historic announcement about cutting global warming pollution and committing themselves to the clean energy path. Now we’re going pedal to the metal down that road.

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