The kinds of energy policies we'll have to adopt in the coming decades are already on display in New England, the mostly liberal northeastern corner of the US.
The region barely uses any coal, and the six states there are embracing renewables like it's 2050.
All of New England combined uses less coal than each of the 35 most coal-heavy states did on their own.
According to the most recent data available from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), this is how much coal each state used per person in 2013:
Coal is mostly used to generate electricity in power plants. Nationally, coal generated a whopping 39% of electricity in 2014, according to the EIA. But in 2014, the dirty fossil fuel was responsible for only 4% of New England's electricity— down from 18% in 2005.
Most remarkably, New England was the only region with two states that didn't use any coal at all: Vermont and Rhode Island.
Nick Ucci, chief of staff for the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, said he's never known the state to use any coal.
"I'm a lifelong Rhode Islander of 37 years, and I am not aware of any point in my lifetime when we’ve had coal generation," Ucci told Tech Insider. "Over the last couple of decades, [the region has] seen the retirements of coal and oil-fired resources, and those resources have been replaced in the generation sector by natural gas and obviously increasingly renewables, which is a key part of not just Rhode Island's but all of the New England states' policy goals."
The clean sources of wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear together make up about 40% of the region's energy these days.
Another 40% comes from natural gas, which is a fossil fuel that emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Natural gas burns cleaner than coal does, but it's a stopgap measure on the way to 100% renewables. It will tide us over until we can store all the energy that renewables like wind and solar generate so we can actually use it all. But we'll eventually have to ditch natural gas just like we have coal.
And that's what New England's planning for.
The states are all part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a cap and trade program that sets emission limits the power sector has to pay fines for exceeding. Almost all of that money goes into renewables and making energy more efficient in the states.
"If you look across the New England states, there's obviously a strong and long-term commitment to renewable energy," Ucci said. "I think increasingly so over the next decade, we're going to see further displacement of fossil fuel-based resources with zero emission resources like solar and wind."
Every New England state has also set some sort of goal for the amount of energy that has to come from clean sources by a given year. Vermont leads the pack with the ambitious goal of 75% renewables by 2032.
The rest of the country can adopt future-forward policies like New England. We'll all have to sooner or later, so why not start now?
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