Yves here. Net zero is still an insufficient objective to prevent Seriously Bad climate outcomes. Even so, governments look set to fail to meet even these targets. The posture towards AI tells all: if we were serious about protecting the planet, we’d drop the hammer on serious energy consuming, dubious social gains activities like AI.
By Irina Slav, a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry. Originally published at OilPrice
- Net-Zero transition targets touted so proudly in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. are proving to be a lot more challenging to hit than expected.
- Euronews: three of the biggest economies in the EU—Italy, France, and Germany—were falling short of the EU’s targets.
- Rhodium Group: The U.S. will fail to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030.
The push to a net-zero emissions future has made governments pledge billions, potentially trillions, in funding for various initiatives, projects, and whole industries. Yet transition targets touted so proudly in Europe, the UK, and the U.S. are proving to be a lot more challenging to hit than expected.
Earlier this month, Euronews reported that three of the biggest economies in the EU—Italy, France, and Germany—were falling short of the EU’s targets and on track to be penalized for that. The warning comes from a climate NGO, Transport & Environment, and shows that Germany was going to miss a 40% emission reduction target for 2030 by a whole 10%. And this is Germany, perhaps the most ambitious of the ambitious EU members when it comes to energy transition efforts.
Meanwhile in the UK, an energy consultancy has also warned that the country is on a path to missing its climate targets. According to Cornwall Insight, the country will be deriving 44% of its electricity from wind and solar by 2030. Yet this is nowhere near what the UK needs to be generating from wind and solar, per Cornwall Insight, in order to meet its net-zero pledge for 2030. That amount, the consultancy says, as quoted by the Financial Times, is 67%.
The latest red transition flag comes from the United States, where reality is falling short of expectations as well. According to an analysis from Rhodium Group, a left-wing consultancy that focuses on energy and environmentalism, the country will fail to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 50% from 2005 levels by 2030, which was the stated goal of the Biden administration.
Instead, the think tank estimated, emissions will decline by between 32% and 43% by 2030, but then accelerate and possibly reach 55% by 2035, the Financial Times reported. Apparently, this is not good enough because, according to Ben King, associate director of the consultancy’s energy and climate practice, per the FT, “it’s not putting us on a long-term trajectory to decarbonisation.”
There appears to be a divorce between climate targets and reality. In fact, this divorce has been a hallmark of transition efforts, which have seen governments make ever more ambitious pledges regardless of what it is possible to do within the physical constraints of the world we live in. Most climate plans appear to disregard these physical constraints, leading to sub-optimal progress on the goals. What the above analyses show is precisely this: the physical world, the free market, and the energy transition are not really compatible right now.
Take Germany, for instance. The country that has already spent billions on its transition and continues to spend a lot is discovering it cannot keep it up forever. Earlier this month, reports emerged that Berlin planned to change the rules of its subsidy regime and start offering wind and solar developers a bulk grant upfront rather than guaranteed minimum prices for their electricity. Days later, more reports came out saying the German government was going to axe even current guaranteed minimum prices—because of negative electricity prices. The reason for those negative prices? Excessive wind and solar output.
Then there is the UK case, where, per Rhodium Group and most other climate outlets, the buildout of wind and solar needs to accelerate substantially if the country is to meet its net-zero goals. Yet what this stance appears to miss are some facts, such as the availability of raw materials and construction costs—factors unrelated to regulatory regimes that the new Labour government has pledged to change in order to facilitate growth in wind and solar.
Then there is the case with the United States, where the Inflation Reduction Act turned into the biggest transition tool ever crafted by a U.S. government, offering several hundred billion dollars in subsidies to companies willing to do transition work in the country. The IRA indeed attracted a lot of companies—but it couldn’t make what they do more appealing to the end consumer. Local opposition to wind and solar installations is on the rise, EV demand is slowing down, and federal agencies just lost the privilege to devise rules and regulations based on their own interpretation of the law, known as the Chevron deference.
Perhaps the most problematic part of the transition situation right now is that there is little that governments can do to turn things around. They can certainly ease permitting regulations to enable more wind and solar construction—until opposition from local communities begins mounting, and it will because these installations will be encroaching on farmland. They can certainly keep subsidizing EV makers, but only up to a point. Some, such as Germany, have already reached that point, and subsidies are being axed just like guaranteed minimum electricity prices. Subsidizing loss-making enterprises can only last a while, but not forever.
There are two big problems regarding public acceptance of needs to change. Firstly, the long-term use of ‘global warming’, instead of perhaps the more accurate ‘climate change’. Any cool and wet summer, as being experienced in Britain this year, gives the sceptics opportunitities to scorn notions of Britain becoming like Spain etc.
Secondly, the fact that politicians and celebs pushing net zero, still fly by private jet and drive gas guzzling limos, which gives the impression net zero inconveniences are for thee, not me. This week, the new King Charles has announced his fleet of tank like Bentleys will be converted to run on biofuel, a mere drop in the ocean, not to mention the pros and cons of growing biofuels rather than food etc. Oh and he is getting 2 new helicopters, often used for very short trips. The so-called Royal train, that costs millions to upkeep annually, was apparently used just the once last year.
Mind you, “public acceptance” is not equal to authoritarian rule, which I see as a problem on the horizon at least here in the us. Our “leaders” never let a crisis go to waste. Look for more erosion of liberty and self determination in the name of “fighting global warming”, likely in the form of privatization and restricted public access.
IMO the horse is long out of the barn here even if we were to take serious measures to combat our already much changed climate. Yet, we can’t even drive 55 as a nation. Instead, we were shown that it was ok, even good, to ridicule an effective and public action (because freedom, of course).
“public acceptance of needs to change”
To have this, we would need first to have plans (detailed, realistic, comprehensive, interventionist…), instead we have goals which instead must be understood as “desires” rather than goals because to have goals you first need to devise plans and decide the goals of each project within that plan. Besides the desires, we have the posturing: mere PR actions that show how much they are compromised with climate change fight. Let’s admit it, our so called “leaders” are unable to lead in anything. You don’t lead by posturing or expressing desires as if these would magically turn into outcomes. Our “leaders” live in fantasy land.
The “net zero” idea seemed like a gimmick from the start, designed to assuage consumer guilt. For instance, using “carbon credits” to magically erase emissions doesn’t seem above board. What of all those hectares of forest burned by wildfire linked to carbon credits? Here’s a short commentary about just that, “Fire threatens the integrity of California’s forest offset program”.
Although Republicans (mainly) will deny that which they intend to do. or, accuse the other side of that which they intend to do in order to put the other side on defense without admitting their same intent is a political ploy to leverage discontent.
The intent has been to give more power to the executive and to finance capital/private control/corporate control of the body politic. It was good to see Biden quote the B Franklin ‘do we have a monarchy or a republic? – a republic if you can keep it’ — good but his actions have been in keeping with accuse other side of that which they intended to do – I am hopeful that this did indeed signal a pivot by the Dem party and also hope that by making the repubs defend their awful policies spelled out in the 2025 that the american public can be informed- good to see many not attend Net at congress.
I do hope that dems will turn to hammer Trump on issues where he had taken stands and, that are clearly referenced in the —Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise
Project 2025 PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION PROJECT
© 2023 by The Heritage Foundation —
In my view, the whole of it is a map to put extensive power into the hands of the executive and private corporate finance control. I have pulled out many points to quote as I read through the entire beast – am going to be away for the next eighteen days but – a few quotes from 2025 about Trump and repub views regards the environment.-
“The NSC staff and principals should work in tandem with the National Economic Council and OMB at all levels, presenting a united effort to achieve the President’s goals and drawing on the latter’s statutory authorities to guide the bureaucracy.” “To accomplish national objectives effectively, foreign policy should fully incorporate the economic instruments of national power.” “The NSC should rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting to serve in defense of our liberty.”
“Similarly, the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding. As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas, and scientific excellence and innovation should be restored as the OSTP’s top priority.”
“The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–20307 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement;”
“Like all U.S. federal bodies, DFC should be restored to its original intent of deploying its commercial risk-reducing financial services instead of its current misuse as another global vehicle to promote economy-killing climate programs, meet irrelevant diversity objectives, and overfocus on low-impact or misguided gender-based activities.”
“Repeal Davis–Bacon. Congress should enact the Davis–Bacon Repeal Act and allow markets to determine market wages.”
“Increasing timber sales could also play an important role in the effort to change the behavior of wildfire because there would be less biomass.”
“Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke “diversicrats” and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces.”
“Stripping public funding would, of course, mean that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, and the other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting.”
Sorry for the length – this site is the absolute best –
“Net-Zero” is “free market”.
P.S. Also, there is no “we”. I drop my hammer only on my own two feet. This whole collective guilt tripping is only effective in getting culprits get away.
The article makes a rag-bag of claims and assertions which need unpacking, although to entirely unpack it would require an article would require several essays.
First off, EU targets are a collective target (albeit one that is nowhere near as ambitious as it should be), set up in such a way that countries that fail their individual targets have to compensate those who exceed the targets by buying up spare credits. At current levels, Germany will be paying a lot of money over to Spain, Greece and Poland (these countries are already ahead of their targets) on this basis. However, it is exceptionally hard to judge the targets according to current trends, because many investments will take several years before they come online.
One of the complications is actually due to the unexpected success in some areas. The rate of uptake of solar power and batteries is far in excess of what was expected a few years ago, and staggering drop in cost of solar and batteries shows no signs of slowing down. This is why Germany is changing its incentives – they are suffering from an extreme duck-curve of having far too much solar power during the summer, which they are compelled to purchase at market rates. Europe is in fact overflowing with super cheap electricity right now, but this has seriously unbalanced both internal energy markets and the management of the grid. It will take time to sort this out.
The issue with wind is not one of resource availability as the article implies – wind energy has fallen off primarily due to unexpectedly high interest rates, which is a killer for capital heavy investments. There has been a knock-on effect of supply chain issues from covid, but these mostly appear to be resolved now. A major element of uncertainty for the industry is that much of European turbine manufacture is being displaced by Chinese systems, and this has added an element of uncertainty into investments due to possible new tariffs. A lot of permitted wind farm schemes are on-hold because of these uncertainties, but it seems likely many will go on-stream before 2030.
Energy efficiency is another area of huge uncertainty – a lot of progress has been made, but the Ukraine war (plus unexpectedly low oil prices) has changed a lot of industry calculations. One unfortunate result may be to displace many energy intensive industries (such as steel or fertilizer manufacture) to oil/gas rich regions such as North Africa and the Middle East.
The US is of course in flux – the big question being whether the investments triggered by IRA come to fruition or if a Trump presidency sets everything into reverse. Its easy to overlook the fact that there have been huge successes in the US – the rapid transition of the Californian grid has far exceeded expectations, and the link between growth and CO2 emissions has been broken with respect to electricity (and arguably also in energy use overall, although the trend is too recent to be sure this isn’t a blip). This isn’t to say its all rosy – but you cannot dispassionately analyse where we are without looking in depth at what is happening in individual energy markets, and much of the news is surprisingly good.
Even the whole data centre/AI issue is more complicated than it first appears. Depending on location and usage, data centres can be either an enormous drain, or can act as a counterbalance within grids and so increase efficiency and renewables penetration. In Ireland, CO2 emissions from electricity are in steady decline (around 1-2% per annum), despite a huge increase in power demand from data centres. So CO2 emissions are declining while electricity demand goes up (the big problem in Ireland is transport emissions – i.e. too much driving, not enough EVs). In the UK, there has been a striking drop in electricity use over the past 10 years, despite a huge rise in data centres. The reasons are complex and likely specific to each and every localised electricity market. There are no simple correlations.