Net-zero commitments could limit warming to below 2 °C

Imho it will all depend on China and India coming to the party, and considering cheap oil and coal funds their expansion i can't really see that happening any time soon

"I can retire by 65... I just need a budget."

Catching up to meet some goal no one understands isn't possible. The world will get warmer and warmer until some market/military/survival barrier is reached.

"We need to pass this law so that in 1000 years sea levels will be X" is complete farce.

I'm not saying the science is wrong. I've read the ipcc reports and im convinced of human caused warming. I'm saying being right about the science says almost nothing about what changes need to be made in the world.

Humans dont care about altering the environment to meet our needs. The Holocene Extinction carries on.

Can we as a HN community stop downvoting comments because we don't like the reality of what is happening?

I know the reality of unavoidable climate catastrophe is uncomfortable to talk about, but aggressive denial is really a problem in the HN community.

I can completely understand people who haven't studied this topic in depth not being aware of how dire the situation is, so asking questions or debating is healthy and expected. Downvoting a comment consisting of a statement of fact combined with a logical hypothesis derived from that fact, backed up by 3 well known citations is not a healthy direction for this community to develop in.

Denial is a part of dealing with this reality, but as a community we should work a bit harder to move towards better acceptance and understanding.

Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today, there's climate lag and feedbacks. Temps would keep rising for decades if not centuries.

> Meeting the goal will require taking coal, oil, and natural-gas capacity offline before it was designed to shut down.

This doesnt sound that impossible? It's already happenening.

> The use of coal for electricity generation in 2021 was intensified by record high natural gas prices

High natural gas prices sound like a good thing for renewables?

Is that under "realistic" economical assumptions? I.e. phasing out fossil fuel while keeping our political system and economy reasonably intact? Or is it even impossible if we stop emitting all CO2 tomorrow, because the warming is lagging behind?

Last I heard, we could still physically achive 1.5 degrees, but we would have to switch completely to command economy immediately and take a big reduction in economic activity (a couple times larger than during the peak of COVID). Which I believe is still better than the alternative.

Yeah, we're along for the ride at this point. We are definitely not going to start treating this seriously until it's an immediate catastrophe.

There's a special breed of alt-right people who are actually well informed on the issue, don't deny climate change but because they are doom&gloom minded libertarians they passionately advocate for de-regulation because "we won't make it, so lets just have a good time when we can". I'm not accusing anyone, it's just that I know such a person with phd in a related field and he is very active online, pushing for alt-right agendas and culture wars in spite of "leftist who cant stop lying". Went offline for weeks when Trump lost and he doesn't like the guy.

I really can't understand this mentality. So what if we probably won't reach the goals? What is the proposed action here? Increase the limits on carbon emissions? Evacuate the places that will go under water?

For some reason, the arguments I see online revolve around the idea of "we can't make it, just don't bother" as if it is a investment opportunity that failed.

I think 2020 was an unfortunate lesson: the painful crises that we _can't_ control can change consumption / emission more than all the intentional actions and programs by our governments. A giant pandemic, and a shutdown of a lot of normal economic behaviors resulted in a sharp drop in emissions, which was totally reversed in 2021. What if what the world needs now is a hard, damaging recession and perhaps another (or several more) disruptive disease outbreaks? I'm not saying that this would be _good_ exactly, but so far it seems like the only thing that really works.

But importantly, even if this take is true then:

* the cheapest way to generate new energy is still renewables

* the biggest bang for buck change governments could make would be to stop subsidizing fossil fuels

* phasing out the fossil fuels would also increase our global health

So, even in this pessimistic scenario, we should still be phasing out coal as quickly as possible, it's a no-regret strategy.

Did we keep the temp change below 2C? No we just saved millions of lives, Trillions of dollars.

vs

Did we keep the temp change below 2C? Yes, and we saved millions of lives, Trillions of dollars on top of that.

What basic human rights were violated through COVID?

It didn't help that German politicians intentionally tied themselves to Russian gas in a foolish bid to try and pull Russia westward and to avoid having to rely further on the US for energy. It's also worth noting that a number of German politicians either went to work for Gazprom or were in the case of many Greens funded by Russia. Germany really fucked up.

Basic human rights were never cut back, they were just balanced differently between freedom to assemble and freedom of harm. The US just increased interest rates, as did the EU, so no more money printing.

Considering that the Greens are the most stabilizing force in the German government right now, I doubt that all the current mess is caused by "environmentalists". It was rather unchecked capitalism that got us here.

And nuclear energy has nothing to do woth a gas shortage, Germany is heating by gas not electricity.

COVID is over. The Ukraine conflict will end eventually.

But unchecked climate change is an extinction-level threat.

For some reason the media often focuses on sea level rise, but I think the heatwaves and droughts will be the real threat.

Short of a bigger plague than COVID or nuclear war, the static population numbers in developed countries will be dwarfed by population increases in the rest of the world.

> We might not need to do anything else

That's just for the 2c part of the story. Because what you describe will be hell on earth for the transition generation(s) in every other aspects

He also talks about how in a deglobalizing world the one power source most every nation has access to locally is coal. So you could see a reduction in industrial activity and consumption, but still end up with increasing emissions due to nations switching back to coal just to keep the lights on.

> If you believe in the evidence supporting that claim, then I think we'll be able to hit the IPCC targets simply by waiting for half the world's population to age out over the next 20-30 years.

That might work in theory if 20-30 years weren't at least 10 years too late.

Many countries are expected to see population decline which will have negative economic effects, but the actual change in population isn't that great. For example Russia's population is projected to decline 18% over the next 30 years, and they're one of the worst cases. Overall world population is projected to continue increasing, leveling out around 11 billion in 2100. Many of these people will be born into nations that are in the process of industrializing, or immigrate to the developed world, either way increasing their carbon footprint. The odds are extremely against demographic shifts alone decreasing emissions in this century.

More generally, Zeihan's population projections generally discount immigration. While that might be reasonable for some particularly immigration averse societies like Japan, most developed nations have a positive feedback loop where the more young people they need, the more young people they welcome. Quite a few countries with very low birthrates like Germany are nevertheless expected to still see population growth over the next 30 years driven primarily by immigration.

Why would you expect population to grow endlessly? Looks like it was a Ponzi scheme, a bubble that needs to be deflated carefully.

>What confuses me is that everyone is pledging net-zero by some date but emissions keep rising. So somehwere someone is "laundering" emissions.

Nah it's way simpler than that. They're just setting targets and not following them.

>Climate Action 100+, a pressure group formed by 700 investment funds, aims to ensure that 166 of the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitters align with the Paris targets. It said this year that 69% of them were committed to reach net zero by 2050 or sooner. However, only 17% had set medium-term targets or produced quantified decarbonisation strategies. Almost two-thirds of oil and gas companies are still pursuing projects inconsistent with limiting global warming below 2°C, it noted.

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2022/07/21/internal...

> "Net-zero" includes the use of systems that capture carbon directly out of the air, either all mechanical or with plants part of the system.

"Plants" are very inefficient at CO2 capture. Most of the CO2 captured in Earth (by anthropogenic action or just by natural causes) is by algae/bacteria action.

> If the goal is "stop burning fossil fuels" there is a large precedent of non-fossil power sources such as solar, wind, hydroelectic, nuclear, etc.

> All of those systems need somebody to spend money for a product they don't want to meet an externally imposed requirement. It's going to be very hard to put a system in place to move the money around because of the perception (and reality) that anything that concentrates money in one place is going to be a nexus of corruption.

If a conflict in Europe happening right now isn't a good enough incentive to make Europe immediately carbon-free, not much really is.

In the ideal form of net-zero, the direct air capture of CO2 is only needed to offset the hard to abate emissions—ie. jet fuel, global shipping, embodied carbon (like concrete). That future is dependent on wide scale decarbonization (in progress, albeit slowly) and, as you mention, an externally imposed requirement—from either governments or consumers.

However, that period of net-zero should be a waypoint on the path to sequestering historical carbon (the real goal) but the only way to get there is to first decarbonize everything that we can.

In a way, carbon credits/offsets might actually be a deterrent to that future. There is a notion of a “circular carbon economy” where CO2 is made into useful products in addition to sequestering for carbon credits, but you are right that the dominate use case for captured CO2 is enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Put to that end, there are very few practical long term benefits to sequestering carbon.

That said, one benefit of offsets, tax credits, etc. is funding the creation of the carbon dioxide removal technology we will need by 2050 to offset the hard to abate emissions, but that tech is only useful if we first decarbonize as it hard to imagine it can be scaled up to the 40 gigaton level based on the data today.

> just as it was when the term "global warming" that people understood got replaced with "climate change" which is much muddier.

If by muddier you mean accurate then yes.

We also replaced Newtonian physics with the much "muddier" theory of relativity.

> money ... money ... money ... money

Well that might be the problem, money won't do shit when 2B people will flee to the north. "We can't do X because my stack of magic paper with numbers on it will be smaller if we do so"

> just as it was when the term "global warming" that people understood got replaced with "climate change" which is much muddier.

For the record the "climate change" phrasing is attributed to republican consultant Frank Luntz and pushed by the Bush administration allegedly as a way to make it sound less frightening. [0]

Some climate organizations are correctly using the expression "climate emergency" which is more apt given the current circunstances.

As a sidenote "Carbon footprint" was also a concept fabricated by Ogilvy & Mather a PR company hired by BP, with the purpose of deflecting attention away from Oil&Gas industry and onto consumers. [1]

[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/frank-luntz-the-man-who-c...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

> we haven't even managed to stop (or greatly slow) the growth of global emissions

We definitely have managed to greatly slow emissions growth, and it seems pretty likely that humanity's greatest carbon emitting year will happen before 2030. https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1517943601124229120/ph...

This is slower than it should be, but there's very promising progress to build from

> I have seen no credible plan for how we would actually do this. Especially given we haven't even managed to stop (or greatly slow) the growth of global emissions much less reduce them to zero.

Given the distribution of responsibilities, and the societal emphasis on specialisation, I think it’s completely unreasonable to expect the people who study the climate phenomena to also define a plan with such radical cultural change implications.

On the one hand, it’s gonna take everyone to make some adjustments. On the other hand “day to day” folk have been making these adjustments for 40years and it’s clear that we need to make bigger ones, faster. The majority of the current suggestions seem to require changes in capital expectation, and extensive supply-chain alterations of the kind where whole sectors of work will need to change. No-one wants to do either because we live in a culture that doesn’t support these kinds of changes.

The world has never developed according to a plan. Things just happen, most of them unplanned, many unforeseen.