Mississippi
Back to mapTo get to zero by 2050, Mississippi must cut emissions by 3.8% a year
Emissions in Mississippi
Million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent (MTCO2e ) emissions
Note: Grey area indicates missing data due to processing delays.
Source: WRI, Mar 2021
This is how we're going to do it
- Boilers and furnaces with heat pumps
- Gas stoves with electric induction stoves
- No-till farming to keep CO2 in the soil
- Capturing methane leaks from landfills
- Capturing CO2 to make emissions-free concrete
- Burning green hydrogen to make emissions-free steel
- Plugging methane leaks from gas pipelines
Decarbonize Our Buildings
4% of Mississippi's climate pollution comes from buildings.
We burn fossil fuels to heat our air, water, and food.
To cut this pollution...
Let's electrify our heat!
We'll replace...
...in all of Mississippi's 1.5 million buildings.
In fact, 55.4% of appliances in buildings in Mississippi are already fossil fuel free!
That means we only need to electrify the remaining 672,000 dirty buildings in Mississippi. That's around 26,000 per year.
Source: Microsoft, Mar 2021; NREL, Dec 2021Electrifying all buildings cuts 4% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Transport
35% of Mississippi's pollution comes from cars, trucks, trains, and planes.
But mostly from cars.
To cut this pollution,
your next car must be electric.
Or consider going car-free with public transit, bikes/e-bikes, car share, or other alternatives!
There are 788,000 vehicles in Mississippi and 780 are already electric (0.1% of the total).
We need to electrify (or replace) the remaining 788,000 gas-powered vehicles. That's around 30,000 a year.
Source: DOT, Feb 2021Electrifying all transportation cuts 35% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Power
30% of Mississippi's pollution comes from burning coal, gas, and oil to make power.
That's because of how power is generated in Mississippi today.
Power Generation in the State of Mississippi (2020)
But there's already 11% carbon-free electricity generation in Mississippi!
To clean up the emissions from the polluting power plants we need to replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and wind farms.
...and find good jobs for those workers.
Current Fossil Fuel Power Plants in Mississippi
1 coal plant
25 gas plants
2,229 MW
1,328 MW
1,216 MW
1,183 MW
1,004 MW
904 MW
899 MW
851 MW
840 MW
801 MW
781 MW
600 MW
551 MW
511 MW
349 MW
306 MW
251 MW
171 MW
141 MW
137 MW
55 MW
34 MW
25 MW
7 MW
5 MW
2 oil plants
Source: EPA, Jan 2021But wait!
It's not enough to replace our power plants with wind and solar farms.
To power our electric cars and buildings, we need two times the electricity we have today.
In all, we'll need to build 4,000 megawatt (MW) of wind power and 5,000 MW of solar power.
Since the average wind turbine provides 2.75 MW of peak capacity, Mississippi would need to install about 2,000 turbines.
Since Mississippi already has 0 MW of wind and 51 MW of solar, that's 4,000 MW of wind power we need to build and 5,000 MW of solar power. That's around 160 MW of wind power and 201 MW of solar power a year.
Source: EIA, Apr 2022Decarbonizing all dirty power cuts 30% of the pollution.
And gives us zero-emissions power we need to eliminate pollution from buildings and cars!
Other Emissions
The last 31% of Mississippi's climate pollution comes from other sources...
This includes farming, landfills, industry, and leaks from gas pipelines.
There's no one solution to solve these problems, but there are lots of great ideas:
That doesn't mean there's no solution, it just means that clean electrification doesn't help with these problems, and you could fill a whole book with covering all of them. We need to encourage our politicians to invest in researching new solutions and implementing existing solutions to these problems!
Ready to do your part?
Learn how to electrify your own machines and pass local policy to electrify the rest
Take Action