Green Premiums tell us how much it will cost to zero-out emissions in all the sectors

of the economy where fossil fuels are involved — including producing electricity,
manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and heating and cooling. Armed with these Green
Premiums, we can see which zero-carbon tools are practical now, and which ones we still
need to improve or invent. 
There are four areas where companies can make a practical difference. Not all of them
will apply to every business, but there is something on this list for most of them.
The first area involves mobilising capital to reduce the Green Premiums. For some
products — like wind, solar and electric cars — the Green Premiums are already low, but will
go down even further if more companies buy them. By providing low-cost capital and other
financial concessions along multiple stages of a technology’s development, you can help
promising innovators navigate the obstacles that keep them from getting their ideas out of the
lab and into the market. You can also mentor clean energy entrepreneurs, sponsor pilot
projects and put money into innovative funds that prioritise climate impact. 
  The second way your company can have an impact is through the products it buys. If
your company runs a fleet of vans, for example, you can commit to buying electric vehicles.
You’ll not only meaningfully reduce your company’s emissions, you’ll also send a signal to
auto manufacturers that there’s a growing market for electric vehicles, which will in turn
drive competition and push prices down. Procurement is a powerful tool to start building
markets for other products too, such as hydrogen fuels and greener alternatives to steel and
cement.

The third area is expanding research and development. Consider Impossible Foods,
one of the leading producers of plant-based meat, in which I was an early investor. (Cattle are
a major producer of methane, a greenhouse gas.) In 2020, Impossible announced plans to
double the size of its R&D team with a goal of reducing the price of its burgers and
expanding market share.

The final way you can help drive down the Green Premiums is to help shape public
policies. You can make it clear that governments need to invest in public R&D for clean
energy, and call on officials to give the private sector incentives to innovate in this area and
to help clean energy compete by putting a price on carbon or setting minimum requirements
for the use of clean energy.
 Governments should also eliminate unproductive policies that prevent new
technologies from emerging. And they should level the playing field for clean technology by
adopting policies such as clean fuel standards, expanding tax credits for the technologies we
need to develop, and raising the cost of emitting greenhouse gases through a price on carbon.