Can we slow our use of coal as we rapidly ramp up our use of electric vehicles? And can the rest of the world — and the rest of the U.S. — back up rhetoric about the climate?

"If you think about the need to bend global emissions by 2020, it really boils down to coal — we have a coal pipeline of coal-fired power stations under development, planned, all the way to under construction, which is way out of whack with the Paris agreement," says Andrew Higham, chief executive of Mission 2020, an international campaign launched by former UN climate head Christiana Figueres. By 2020, the group argues, no new coal power plants can be built, and any existing coal power plants will have to be in the process of retirement. Renewables will have to make up at least 30% of the world energy supply.

That transition is underway. Nineteen countries, including the U.K. and Canada, have pledged to phase out coal power plants. Economics, more than policy, drove one in seven coal plants around the world to fully or partially phase out coal between 2010 and 2017.

Meanwhile, compared to renewable energy, electric vehicles are a smaller piece of their respective market. Mission 2020 argues that EVs will need to make up 15%-20% of new car sales globally by 2020; they only make up around 1% today. It’s a stretch, but Higham points out that past predictions of electric vehicle growth have dramatically underestimated what would happen, and change could happen quickly and exponentially.

Read the full article about how we can make climate progress in 2018 by Adele Peters at fastcompany.com.