Net Zero by 2050 Is 'Impossible,' UK Tory Leader Badenoch Says
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:What_if_it%27s_a_big_hoax...
Energy Independence isn't an inherent good. What people often mean by it is we won't be reliant on a number of states some of whom are allies with very different value systems and some of whom are enemies (Russia, Iran). While I'd love for Russia and Iran to be weaker so they cause less trouble I think that many of our ackward allies and even some self declared enemies like Venezuela may get worse not better if they are poorer.
There's also an isolationist/self sufficiency argument which is just stupid. Trade is good especially with friendly neighbors. The only country that tries to be self sufficient is north korea, NK is a hellhole and even they don't achieve self sufficiency.
Its also lumping in a lot of separate environmental issues that are not climate change.
My understanding is that carbon energy production isn't responsible for most of the rainforest loss especially compared to logging and agriculture industries.
Sustainability/renewables isn't convincing. Sure we will hit peak oil someday but due to economic factors it keeps getting pushed back. If there was no global warming there would be much less effort to stop oil use/extraction. Sure it can have some extremely negative local effects but if it wasn't for global warming that wouldn't be enough.
Healthy children and clean water. Well global warming has some effect and maybe living near a coal mine might be unhealthy but in general other non carbon energy pollution/environmental issues have a lot more to do with keeping water clean and children healthy.
Environmental regulation can have real costs. Even as someone who thinks we regularly undervalue the positives of environmental regulation we shouldn't totally ignore some of the negatives. Besides there's no need for the stupid why not just do it anyway message. Global warming is a real thing. A massive global thing that will effect everyone in an extremely costly negative way. Some actions governments may two fighting global warming may have negative economic consequences that are not made up by clean energy job/industry growth. That's OK because the massive costs of not preventing global warming from getting worse are significantly larger then minor economic issues today
Burning fossil fuels is the big driver if climate change but deforestation and agriculture are reasonably large chunks of the problem that needs to be solved for net zero. See IPCC reports for more details.
In the actual world we inhabit, everything has a tradeoff. A more accurate description would be "what if we spent an untold sum of resources that have alternative uses, each of which may have resulted in an even better world, in pursuit of this green goal?"
Maybe net zero is a waste of time because in 20 years we will crack cold fusion and have infinite energy and then literally suck pollutants out of the air. Or maybe we don't and we wish we'd spent the last 20 years not razing forests, polluting air and water, and so on
If you want specific goals that don't include reducing carbon you should chase those goals instead of chasing reducing carbon dioxide as a priority. If carbon emissions aren't a big deal then maybe a better way to improve children's health might be to eradicate hookworm or subsidize school meals more or pay for childrens health insurance or go after local pollutants. Now maybe it makes sense to do multiple but you have to look at cost benefit analysis for the tradeoffs.
Its also a stupid argument because we know and are sure that climate change isn't a hoax. And that costs of climate change are massive and that any cost benefit analysis for doing more to stop it would indicate we should do more.
I go into more depth in my other comment, but the short version is that building everything nice that you listed takes energy, and Net Zero just doesn't have a viable story for how to provide that energy economically and reliably at the scale that we need.
> we wish we'd spent the last 20 years not razing forests, polluting air and water, and so on
You're painting a false equivalence. Continuing to use fossil fuels doesn't mean chopping down the Amazon and belching foul smoke everywhere. Similarly, building wind and solar doesn't automatically mean you are a good steward of the environment; one could just as easily raze a forest to mine coal as to build a solar farm.
In the end, I want those nice things, too! I'm not advocating for pollution and destruction for the fun of it. I just sincerely doubt that Net Zero will get us those nice things.
Again, the investments required in the present day to hopefully and potentially reduce those massive future costs you're speaking of are resources that have alternative uses. One can compare, say, the Germany of today which gave up on nuclear power and built solar panels and wind farms and now is experiencing a decline in its industrial capacity due to expensive and unreliable energy, to an alternate-universe Germany that kept its nuclear reactors and perhaps even built some additional coal and gas powerplants.
The former undoubtedly has lower per capita carbon emissions, but the latter perhaps has the advantage in building sea walls, reservoirs, and such infrastructure and heavy machinery that would help manage a changing climate. Can you really say that one approach is sure to be cheaper than the other?
Consider this: the WMO estimates that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, the number of deaths around the world caused by weather-related disasters dropped threefold[0], even as atmospheric CO2 went from 325ppm to 410ppm and the global population more than doubled. That's not one-third the per capita death rate; it's one-third the absolute number of deaths. Why? Because of improving technology, enabled by increased energy expenditure per capita, that allow people to better master their environments.
It takes a lot of resources to allow weak hairless apes to thrive around the globe; we don't all live in the climate of San Diego or Corfu. And insofar as fossil fuels remain the most economical way to allow increased energy expenditure per capita, I see no reason why we must zealously and immediately stop its use.
I am all for that increased energy expenditure per capita by any means possible. I hope that one day we will have the technology to do so with minimal environmental side-effects. But we must continue to grow to get to that point. I don't believe that Net Zero will get us there; I believe it will forever chain us to the vagaries of our surroundings.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/records/item/57564-wmo-atlas-of-mort...
The trade off is we spend that money on fossil fuels.
And therefore we spend the money on more air pollution, dirtier rivers, dirtier seas, more heavy metals in our soils and air, etc.
So the comic absolutely works even if climate change isn’t real.
The only argument that’s left is the idea that we may possibly spend more money on clean energy than we do on fossil fuels for the same amount of energy.
However, renewables are already on par with fossil fuels pretty much across the world, and their costs are dropping considerably, even if we do not consider climate change impacts. For example, in the U.S., which is particularly unfriendly to renewables from a cost perspective due to expensive labor, new solar energy is cheaper than burning coal in an existing coal plant (so without even considering the cost of constructing the plant in the first place).
But the comic undersells its message even further. Due to the fewer steps it takes to get electricity from the energy of the wind or the energy of sunlight to your outlet, compared to getting the energy of oil or coal buried underground to your outlet, the actual primary energy we need will be lower with renewable energy. So the actual cost will be even lower than a direct calculation of the current total energy supply of the world to meet the same energy demand.
Your concept works in theory. What it fails to recognize is that in the real world, the primary factors keeping fossil fuels around are:
1. The power of the dominant energy companies which are trillion dollar business and include massive governments who have bought politicians to ensure they do not get disrupted. 2. Status quo benefits. The fact that they are the status quo provides benefits like people not being as comfortable with new tech, and the grid and other energy transport systems setup for fossil fuels. For example, gas powered cars being the status quo have led to tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in setting up networks of gas stations, networks of roads to carry the trucks that move the gas to those gas stations, and the many tens of thousands of trucks that have been designed built and are operated to carry that gas around. If we were starting from scratch, it would cost a fraction of that money to beef up the power grid to supply that power to electric cars in the form of electricity instead.
Ultimately the comic isn’t just right, it undersells its case, and the only reason we keep choosing the worse tradeoff even if we don’t consider climate change is due to market distortions caused by politics and the fact that the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies, which are just little startups right now relative to the fossil fuel giants.
> the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies
Do names like Solyndra or Northvolt ring a bell? Renewables companies are also capable of being backed by popular politicians and raising billions of dollars in capital; that alone is no guarantee of success. If you're claiming that the diligence of O&G operatives in the shadows is what led to the downfall of these companies, well, that just sounds cartoonish to me, which I suppose is appropriate given the context.
In general, there hasn't been an incumbent in history that was not more politically powerful than upstart startups looking to disrupt their business. That's what being an incumbent means. Yet Ford successfully put carriage-makers out of business, and Tesla took a lot of established carmakers' lunch money. It's a very dim view of the world to suggest that political power, rather than the real-life economics of a new technology actually being better than the old, drives change.
> renewables are already on par with fossil fuels pretty much across the world, and their costs are dropping considerably
If this were true, German industry would not be having quite such a hard time as they are now.
> networks of roads to carry the trucks that move the gas to those gas stations
Roads aren't built to carry gasoline trucks. That's a complete inversion of logic. There's not a single road that would be obviated in a full-EV world. Even the roads going to and from refineries! Plastics will still need to be made.
> If we were starting from scratch, it would cost a fraction of that money to beef up the power grid to supply that power to electric cars in the form of electricity instead
Some estimates are at $2-4T to go full EV[0]. That's hardly a small chunk of change. Have you tried adding a L2 charging port to your home? I have. It cost me about $550 in just the copper wires alone, and the labor of going around the attic adding conduit and pulling wires was a pain in the ass. Scale that up nationwide and I don't see a cheap or easy solution here.
If you're really pressing the "starting from scratch" bit, well, that's an unanswerable hypothetical.
> in the real world, the primary factors keeping fossil fuels around are [...]
In the real world, a gallon of gasoline is roughly 11 kWh of energy (look up how big and expensive a battery of that size is), and I still haven't found a battery-powered mower that mows better than a cheap gas-powered one.
[0]: https://energyanalytics.org/infrastructure-requirements-for-...
Q: Is "Net Zero" emissions by 2050 possible?
A: That doesn't matter at all! Suppose only "net 2%" is possible by 2050, or even "net 5%", or whatever. Fine, let's do that, and stave off most of the effects of global warming.
Warming is evident now already, both in average temperatures and in extreme weather event increasing in frequency and severity. So, action needs to be taken now, and never mind what's the exact percentage in 2050. That does not mean everything needs to be fixed in a day, and there will surely be changes along the way; but human society, and world states in particular, need to make short-term plans for significant reductions in emissions. And those plans need to be put into practice almost-immediately.
Instead, we have the modified version of climate denialism: From "it's not a problem" to "it's not a serious problem" to "we can no longer do anything about it, it's too late" - with their conclusion always being not to change government policy, not to tax, not to invest public funds in alternatives to what they sell right now, and in short to keep their donors rich and getting richer.
I suspect some amount of carbon capture is inevitable, its not the right answer for basic power usage but we are going to overshoot we need a way to capture and store even if its expensive. We need to get to net negative CO2 production to restore 270 ppm. Its just not the priority right now.
That, in itself, doesn't reduce emissions. When Wind, Solar and Batteries (or other less-carbon/methane-emitting technologies) are deployed _instead_ of other power generation tech, that reduces emissions.
But assuming that's what you meant - then great, but - the effort is not massive, relative to the necessary extent of replacement. And in some places, and by some governments, there's almost no effort.
> We are still on the early increasing investment phase
That is the problem. We are several decades too late, considering the warming effects. We need to be in another phase, now.
If you want to be exposed to that declining production and increasing price market of fossil fuels then off grid with a generator is the opt out answer along with what will become a antique car you'll be maintaining yourself because your grid power is already coming increasingly from the Sun and Wind and everyone is building EVs because they are cheaper. $'s win every time.
“Kemi Badenoch sounds like she's the reverse Tucci. Disgruntled aides are gossiping round the Westminster watering holes that she really doesn't like being asked to do much before lunch.”
Trump's reaction to all this? He immediately announced on trump social what he was doing:
"I just won the Golf Club Championship, probably my last, at Trump International Golf Club, in Palm Beach County, Florida," he wrote on Sunday afternoon. "Such a great honor! The Awards dinner is tonight, at the Club. I want to thank the wonderful Golf Staff, and all of the many fantastic golfers, that participated in the even [sic]. Such fun!"
(needless to say, yes, this is yet another campaign promise that he didn't keep. He would "work for us", and would "not have time to play golf")
The only semi-positive is that while the stock market is down 15% from peak, tech 25% ... and "Tesler" is down over 50%.
So, the UK conservatives align themselves closer to Trump again - what else is new? Ok, Trump is more in the "climate change is a hoax" camp, while Badenoch seems to favour "climate change is real, but we can't do anything about it (ok, actually we could, but it's to expensive, so nah)", but in the end, it doesn't really make a difference...
https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/the-seventh-carbon-bud...
> We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.
Prove it.
Europe should aim for net Zero as soon as China also gets there.
They are supposed to be releasing new NDC targets about now as well.
This means in the longer term CO2 emission has to drop even lower, as this reservoir (the ocean surface waters) saturates and CO2 absorption decreases.
UK emission is about 1% of global emissions.
China is rapidly expanding its renewable capacity, much faster even than they are expanding nuclear.
What? There's a good argument to be made that the current geopolitical instabilities would never have happened without the collective shock of Covid to everyone's psyches. No event was more disruptive in the past few decades than Covid. It's unimaginable to call that "not even too hard".
Its always worth playing with iamkate and looking at what the current power mix is and what it has averaged over the last year and how prices correlate with green energy.
As with everything else, the marginal cost of additional renewable energy and storage will rise. At some point, all the low-hanging fruit is picked; there are only so many locations suitable for wind farms and pumped hydro. It's fallacious to think that the £0.15/kWh price will hold as it gets scaled up to meet more of the demand.
The idea of 'net zero is making energy expensive' is a common but inaccurate catch-cry (I could even go as far as saying 'conspiracy theory' but maybe that's uncharitable), but it is a very convenient one for the oil & gas industry...