Yves here. I trust readers will kick these tires a bit. We’ve been critical of ideas like the Green New Deal and Net Zero because they rely too much on techno-hopium and not enough on very serious energy diets. This piece is admittedly a thin sketch for Oil Price readers, but even in that there’s a lot not to like. It presupposes that most (all?) housing will be recently built from eco-sparing materials. It envisages that all cars will be electric, and returning as well as taking power from the grid wirelessly. Lordie. I know that advanced economies are vastly bigger power hogs per capita than developing or middle income countries, but anyone who has been to Southeast Asia will know this is na ga happen in a generation if ever. Just look at the huge tangle of electric wires over even 2-way streets in mid-sized cities.
And let us not forget the burning. Crops here are burned before the next planting, generating lots of PM 2.5 pollution for 6 weeks to 2 months in the northern parts of the country down to Bangkok. Even though the coastal city I am in is a mixed income-wise (middle to slight better than that housing and amenities hard by shabby working class buildings), there are few homeless but a lot of slums just a bit off many of the streets. The air is often moderately bad in the mid-later evening (you can check on a pretty granular basis via IQAir)….again either due to cooking with fire (using Lord only knows what combustibles; the slums do not have electricity) or illegal burning of construction materials from building sites.
Oh, and the only sacrifice envisaged is cutting back on beef, lamb, and dairy. Not even air travel!
By Haley Zaremba, a writer and journalist based in Mexico City. Originally published at OilPrice
- To achieve the Paris Agreement’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, significant changes are required across all sectors of the global economy.
- Homes will be powered by renewable energy, transportation will be electrified, and diets will shift towards more sustainable options.
- A net-zero future will rely on widespread adoption of green technologies, including solar and wind power, hydrogen fuel cells, and advanced energy storage solutions.
In December 2015, 196 national representatives met in Paris, France to establish a strategy to combat climate change at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21). The result was one of the most critical pieces – if not the most critical – of climate legislature ever inked. The 196 parties entered a legally binding agreement to limit “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and endeavor “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
Experts agree that in order to reach these goals, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. This represents a massive shift from the way that the world’s industries, economies, and trade relationships function at a base level. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes, “implementation of the Paris Agreement requires economic and social transformation, based on the best available science.” Achieving the legally binding goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement will require international coordination and cooperation at a scale never before seen.
What exactly will a net zero world look like? What will getting there require, and how will our day-to-day lives change in the process? “Our descendants will live in a world that will be a very different place to how it is today, with wholesale changes in their homes, modes of transport, and the landscape that surrounds them,” RBC Wealth Management promised in a 2022 report. The details of those changes are hard to predict, but experts have speculated at length about the broad strokes.
In a decarbonized world, homes will be powered by solar panels and temperature-regulated by heat pumps. The materials that the houses themselves are built from will also be sourced from supply chains that are vastly transformed away from today’s carbon-intensive steelmaking and shipping industries. A large part of this could likely be a move away from the profoundly dirty fossil fuels used in these processes – coal and heavy fuel oil – toward hydrogen, which can be combusted in a similar manner to fossil fuels. In a 2050 world, our steel may be made by burning green hydrogen rather than coking coal, and the ships that connect the different nodes of global supply chains may be powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And none of our new houses will be connected to the gas grid. That’s right – we will no longer be cooking with gas.
As you may expect, almost all of us will be driving electric vehicles in a decarbonized 2050, but they won’t be the same as today’s EVs. These EVs will function as grid storage batteries, feeding energy back into the grid when they are sitting idle, thereby helping to regulate and balance energy grids that are reliant on variable energies including wind and solar. An EV is able to store more energy in its battery than the average household uses in a day, turning them into powerful energy storage solutions. They will also likely be able to charge wirelessly, dramatically improving functionality and easing infrastructural needs. Our public transportation and even airplane flights will go free of fossil fuels as well, relying on both electrification and hydrogen fuel cells to get from point A to point B.
Even our diets will change. It is estimated that to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, consumption of beef, lamb and dairy will have to decrease by 20%. Meat and dairy alone account for approximately 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Within this category, beef is by far the biggest culprit due to methane emissions from the cows themselves, as well as deforestation caused by increasing land needed to raise cattle and grow animal feed.
Our landscapes, too, will transform. Mass-scale wind and solar farms will continue to proliferate in rural areas. Our cities, too, will change, with more green areas to serve as carbon sinks. Electric wires could begin to pop up above our highways to power electric transport, much like cable cars. And the way that we store and transmit energy will change in ways both visible and invisible to us. Some researchers even contend that we may be able to look forward to a North American super-grid spanning from Canada to Mexico. Such a grid would allow the regions of North America to function off of all or mostly renewable energy by, as “dividing the regions into 20 interconnected sub-regions, based on population, energy demand, area and electricity grid structure, could significantly reduce storage requirements and overall cost of the energy system.”
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This is insane. Everyone needs to go back and read, or reread, the Energy Destinies series that was provided by NC. Can these people even do math?
Almost everything in this cannot be done without massive governmental commitments (don’t exist), massive financing and rule changes. The scale of the issue cannot be met with blind trust that it will happen, period.
Where do the metals and minerals come from? There aren’t enough to do this.
In the last few years The NY Times ran a really good analysis of the transition to EVs. Basically they used the average life of a light vehicle on the road (the replacement cycle). As I recall, we get to something like 35% EVs in 2050 in the US, or thereabouts.
Once again, we can achieve these goals without massive increases in costs and without major lifestyle changes. Infuriating.
That is the kicker, the assumption that we can “achieve these goals without… major lifestyle changes.” There is just no way to satisfy personal transportation desires with EVs—the planet lacks the resources to do so.
In short, if the current civilization is to survive, vast changes are necessary across the board, agriculture, transportation, housing, etc. If they were applied gradually, they could be successful, but if abruptly, there would be unrecoverable chaos.
The kicker: military and war CO2 releases aren’t calculated in the CO2 output of countries. So Ukr war is what? carbon neutral? The US doesn’t want you to drive an ICE car or use a gas stove in your kitchen, but is happy blowing up tons of ordinance in far away countries.
NATO countries are destroying their domestic economies, their manufacturing base, their own food supplies in the name of net-zero while releasing mega tons of CO2 in war.
“In a decarbonized world, homes will be powered by solar panels and temperature-regulated by heat pumps. ”
UK just shut down is last coal fired power plant. yay. Except, electricity prices and heating prices are going through the roof. Energy prices are going through the roof. The Starmer govt is reducing winter heating assistance to pensioners. “If the poor be like to die let them do it and decrease the surplus population.” – Scrooge.
I’m for conservation, cleaning up pollution, working toward less pollution. The current net-zero mania is a scam, imo. It’s not sensible. It is making a few people very rich. How many mansions does Al Gore have now? What has he invested in?
I was with you until you mentioned Al Gore. Gore comes from a patrician family and had mansions well before he got involved with climate change. If you read Naomi Klein’s DISASTER CAPITALISM you will learn how predatory capitalism always takes advantage of any and all disasters for pecuniary gain (with a twist of ideology). The problem is not just capitalists and the PMC, but workers as well, all who are convinced that their way of consumerist living in This Modern World is the only way. Few have dramatically instilled doubt of this conviction than Al Gore et al.
Er. um. me thinks your Al Gore reference is exactly what I reference. / ;)
I think Tedder mean to say few have caused consumers to doubt such a conviction more than guys/gals like Al Gore.
e.g. Germany officially for now not going back to NPPs (they prepared for years to shut them off), not going back to RU pipeline natural gas, instead increasing coal&LNG. That’s the Green Party. You have 80 mn bikes but 50 mn cars. train public transport worsenes…
one regenerables project failing after the other…
and then u got Pentagon as the what – largest single polluter world wide?
Why the Pentagon Is the World’s Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter
A new book explains how the US military came to consume more fossil fuels than most countries—and what we can do about it.
2022 (!)
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-climate-change-neta-crawford-book/
“Since 2001, the military has been responsible for 77 to 80 percent of federal energy consumption.
The DOD maintains more than 560,000 buildings on about 500 bases around the world, making up a large portion of its emissions.”
“Mass-scale wind and solar farms will continue to proliferate in rural areas”
I think the people who use the land in rural areas for food production might have some issues with this. Here in France there is open revolt over solar farms on otherwise productive land and very few new wind generators are being set up unless the utilities manage to bribe a landowner.
Pipe dream stuff. Start by replacing every new install furnace with a subsidized heat pump to start. Not a means-tested tax credit, give me the money. My hvac guys refused to install one because they were convinced that we had to replace all the pipes and radiators, so I ended up with heating oil again. I can’t afford a 100k electric car that does what my 4×4 does but replacing it with the 2024 model incurs a €60k tax. So I’m keeping it. Farmers can’t afford to pay consultants to deal with environmental rules so they sell out to big ag and work their own land as contractors.
But now bottle caps stay attached to the plastic bottles (I actually hate plastic bottles but show me where I can get glass ones) and when I complained about it in front of some thirtysomethings, I was told “mais c’est pour la planète”, like I’m some retrograde ignoramus.
Make it make sense.
I saw this yesterday while mindlessly browsing Oil Price for a reprieve from the screaming nieces and nephews.
I audibly laughed at the grid storage EV bit. The youngins heard me and came scrambling over to see what was so funny.
“Uncle Gravy let us see!” Oh poor children, you will see soon enough.
New York State has changed PV and wind siting rules largely removing local control. As a consequence tens of thousands of acres of ag land is being transformed into utility scale projects. I have yet to see large renewables on brownfields, parking areas or big boxes. Solar panels are mounted close to the ground and land is useless for any other purpose. There are proposals locally for 680 foot high wind turbines (there are dozens of 300 foot turbines now). Needless to say all of these are either PE or non-regulated subsidiaries of utilities, benefiting from outright subsidies and production tax credits. Residential and small commercial solar has huge barriers.
Of course New York State owns the largest state owned electric utility, the NY Power Authority. Under Cuomo it was actually banned from renewable projects and it was only recently removed. The state built huge hydro and transmission facilities between the 50s and 70s. Instead of “cheap” intermittent renewables, NYPA could be building pumped storage, but none is planned.
Meanwhile voracious consuming data centers and chip fabs are being built.
What’s wrong with this picture?
If this is pushed far enough, one wonders whether rural people might begin luddiform campaigns of mass destruction of solar panel farms imposed upon farmland.
” Food not electrons!”
This misconstrues how the solar farms make money. They don’t make money selling electricity. They make money selling tax credits. The panels only have to be there once for them to sell it all forward…
‘Just look at the huge tangle of electric wires over even 2-way streets in mid-sized cities.’
Here is one example from Thailand but I have seen much, much worse-
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Tea-Leaves/Bangkok-grapples-with-sky-spaghetti-in-modernization-push
Any attempt to reduce carbon will mean a lot of money and that is when the grifters turn up with their pixie fairy dust to make everything work – until they drain that money dry with their fees that is. And in any case, as Mikerw0 asks above, just where are all the metals and minerals suppose to come from? I think that in the end we are going to have to revert to the lifestyle of previous generations so if we are lucky, it will be like the life we had in the 1920s but we may be reduced to a lifestyle from the 1830s. Doesn’t mean that we still can’t have modern medicines and modern gear but the average lifestyle will be amazingly retro. And probably our homes will have very little plastic in them anymore.
I was under the impression that overhead cables were used in places with higher risk of natural disasters like cyclones, earthquake, tsunami, etc. because it’s much easier to cut off during the incident and restore and restring later during recovery. I’m sure someone here knows a lot more about this than me. Japan has only above ground cables, for instance.
“Japan has only above ground cables, for instance.”
That appears to be changing. Fred Mills of The B1M in his recent video “Japan’s $100BN Plan to Disaster Proof Tokyo” had this to say about overhead cables in Tokyo:
I agree. Bring the dried beans in by mule train. I know that’s a long shot, but yes at the same time we could get a little more serious about safe up-to-speed drugs and vaccines (like Cuba, oh the irony). Keep dairy; cut back on flying.
None of the wires in the linked photo are part of a power line. Just a bunch of fiber optics and telephone cables that have nothing to do with net zero.
Google’s AI told me this…
Telephone poles…they make you think of railroad ties, which I believe China is making out of concrete. Then Google’s AI told me this…
I was listening to a podcast with Doomberg, who is not a net zero fan, but he pointed out that if people are serious about transforming the entire planet to an energy system based on renewables with battery storage, it would be a wonderful idea to create a test volunteer community of 50,000 people off the grid and see how the community functions with renewables and batteries, especially since its unclear how much battery capacity is actually required. Wouldn’t it make sense to conduct a smaller feasibility test before you commit the entire planet to a particular strategy with significant downstream consequences? You would never bring a sophisticated engineering product to market without a prototype.
It’s easy to do. The utilities know exactly the power and energy requirements for any given minute/hour/day/month. They need to know this ahead of time so they are not short and they have the actual usages to learn and refine their models going forward. That information then provides what you need to design the peak watts and kwh/day for each day of the year.
To doombergs question, you have to go a lot further, and ask #1 where? What requirements for Seattle are not the same as Tucson, or Michigan or Maine, or florida, its 100% site specific because the sun hours per day vary greatly. So any numbers for one are not accurate for the others. Then you have to ask #2 what are the loads exactly. EV, electric heat, AC or is there natural gas/propane for heat, cooking, water heating? And the list goes on. It’s a pretty simple spreadsheet to just add up #3 all that is on at one time and cumulative over the course of a day/week/month.
There is another question utilities must ask and answer: what will it cost them in terms of energy generation inputs — coal, gas, oil, wind, etc to generate that power, and how much will that cost affect what is charged to the consumer. See also, Germany and the UK for examples.
And also, there’s the question of weather robustness. Who in the US Midwest can forget this following event of unexpected winter weather affecting Texas? None of us in the Midwest energy consortium grid who suffered rolling brownouts in bitterly freezing weather to help Texas through its unexpected winter weather. And saw our winter electric and heating bills climb due to the Midwest consortium having to buy energy inputs on the spot market, always the most expensive, to cover the increased demand from Texas.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2024/12/09/after-4-years-and-billions-of-dollars-the-texas-grid-is-not-fixed/
There is basically no connection from the mid west grid to Texas grid. Texas is isolated except for part of the panhandle.
Here is a link to a map
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmission_grid
The storm in question was a problem because Texas didn’t moisture proof their gas pumping stations which froze. They have more than enough gas and nuclear to cover all of their normal loads.
Their peak summer loads from AC is greatly supported by wind and solar.
No, I am sorry, Texas’s electrical power grid is not entirely isolated, no matter what Wiki says. There are cross over points, which in normal times are not active and are shut by electrical switches, so to say. The Midwest energy consortium was shunted a great deal of power to Texas during that event when the cross over points were opened.
To your point about Texas failing to moisture proof its pumping stations and which froze: I agree. This is the sort real world “shake down cruise” of any new system to manifests weaknesses. In this case, the real world didn’t comply with the computer models that “assumed” x or y.
You do get the joke about the word “assumed”. / ;)
typo, should read: “shakedown cruise.”
That makes a lot of sense. In the IT world there’s a strategy of running new systems or programs in parallel with older existing systems and comparing the outputs in order to work out the bugs in the new system/programs before final transition to the new system.
There was a saying, supposedly, among the US the daredevil wing walking stunt performers: ” Don’t let go a firm hold you have until you have next got a firm hand or foot hold for the next step ahead.” Or something like that. / ;)
Does the notion of shareholder primacy make this talk nothing but fantasy anyway?
As someone who has been living off grid for most of the last 30 years, I can say that it was difficult and required a lot of sacrifices when solar panels cost $7 a watt and required a half ton of lead batteries that needed to be replaced every 4 or 5 years. Now days, with panels costing closer to $.50 a watt, cheap lithium iron phosphate batteries that can last 20 years, all in one inverters, and efficient ductless mini-split heat pumps, living off the grid has never been so easy and satisfying, and doesn’t require sacrificing any modern conveniences, if one is fortunate enough to live in an area with ample sunshine, which I’m guessing comprises somewhere around half of the USA.
Our current economies are wedded to endless growth. Reducing material consumption, and thereby conserving natural resources, would appear to be a necessary component in achieving any kind of sustainability. Even with zero emission energy sources, how to turn around the obession with shopping will be a tall order. And “shopping” includes all the senseless armaments the world is producing, seemingly in an effort to speed along our extinction.
I don’t consider anything like this credible that fails to mention huge military squandering of carbon (think of all the energy wasted on the kill bombs of Gaza and Ukraine) moving to universal public transportation, rebuilding housing. This is just Temple Grandin calming techniques as the population moves down the chute to the kill room at the slaughterhouse.
What Would a Net-Zero 2050 Actually Look Like?
Dunno, you can’t see anything……
My eldest daughter is now in her 30s. When she was very young, I naively wondered if she would ever need to learn to drive. But little has changed in terms of private and public transport. Except the latter is privatised and more expensive. Fossil fuel vehicles are supposed to be phased out by the 2030s. There are more electric vehicles on the roads but huge price differential and patchy charging infrastructure make them either unaffordable or unpractical for most people, so old bangers will remain on the roads.
Some enthusiast recently told me private car ownership will be gone within 20 years. Instead you will be able to summon a driverless EV to your doorstep to take you where you want to go. I very much doubt driverless will ever work in practice unless huge sums are spent to totally separate roads from cyclists and pedestrians. Money that wont be forthcoming under neoliberalism.
The rich will continue with their private jets, private yachts and multiple houses while the rest of us futilely cut back on flights, cars, meat, dairy etc., and shiver in energy inefficient old homes that cost too much to heat and would cost too much to replace with no massive public spending support that is outlawed under neoliberal rule. And yes, the west will continue to spend on environmentally devastating military toys and wars that somehow are never part of the equation when it comes to calculating carbon neutrality. In effect, nothing will fundamentally change. Easter Island here we come.
Simply the soft climate denial of eco-modernism, accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change and then come up with utterly delusional forecasts of a future that is very much the same as today except the energy system has been miraculously decarbonized. Anything but accept that degrowth and fundamental socio-economic changes are required. This is part of the ruling ideology of our time.
Does the author of this post truly believe these fantastic visions of the future? If not, then who, or what organization, supplied the content for these fantasies? Is the author of this post slyly undermining this post in offering these absurd fantasies?
To mention a few:
“Experts agree that in order to reach these goals, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.” The year 2030 is a mere five years away.
Reaching net zero will require “…international coordination and cooperation at a scale never before seen…”. Will this “international coordination and cooperation” bring an end to the many wars ongoing and threatened by present international contention and competition for power?
The u.s. cannot house its people, let alone supply the magical homes of the future “decarbonized world,” The wonder-Grid supporting the post’s all green electric power everywhere, offers harshly comical contrasts with the existing electric-Grid serving the u.s. presently.
I suspect this post presents satire of net zero in subversive rebellion against directives handed to the author from above by unknown sources.
This is basically a summarization of a 2022 RBC Wealth Management Report (the one the author refers to). Go read the report, its blindingly obvious – glossy propaganda from a very interested party! Greenwashed through an environmental journalist. This is very disappointing from ZH.
I meant NC of course, not ZH.
The solutions proposed are all quite nice, but impractical and frankly, unnecessary for the most part. Right now we could decarbonize 50% in just a few years by changes in agricultural practices, transportation, and consumption, while ending war would be even better. If there were any will to do so, we could tackle the carbon/smoke pollution problem. But there is not, only thought experiments that do not go far enough.
By sticking to our neoliberal, financial-capitalist consumerism, we will be doomed as a civilization.
Electric wires could begin to pop up above our highways to power electric transport, much like cable cars.
It sounds a lot like an eLECTRIC TRAIN>
Just make personal use autoss undesirable in most cases and take a train or the Metra, etc.
And EV’s are expensive in the USA because there is a 100% tariff on Chinese EV’s. North American auto manufacturers have no real need to produce cheap EVs.
It sounds more like trolleybus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
If you want to read a sustained attack on greenwashing, read Jem Bendell’s 2023 book “Breaking Together” which is available as a free download. We need to do what we can to slow and soften the collapse, which Bendell thinks was underway before 2016. I symbolically mark the beginning of the end with Donald Trump’s 2015 descent down that infamous escalator. Bendell thinks that with our combined technical and political problems that the only real question is how hard and how soon will we fully crash as western civilization.
Some of the things we need to do are actually low tech and very popular. People love walkable cities, and these save a lot of car trips. We need to increase pedestrian access to our shops and services, and rewrite zoning laws to encourage more neighborhood business districts. There is even a movement encouraging this, the 15 Minute City. Of course, for some people this is just another excuse for conspiracy theories!
“NetZero” (or thereabouts) would look like Canada circa 2000 (before the elites started forcing the population up).
Roger’s right re propaganda, and I think Rev Kev has a point about the 1830s.
I think communications phenomena are relevant, yes propaganda. What do AI, the tech bros, and surveillance mean for us? They mean the centrists might very well come to bend more and more humans over and into to their zeitgeist [“The Centrists Cannot Hold”; when Patrick Lawrences uses those words, he’s on to something!]. And among the centrists too many fatuous metaphysical assumptions are held on to. How do those assumptions impact environmental policy? I think unconsciously they provide a backdrop for trendy nuggets of anti-wisdom; like for instance we should accept Jacques Ellul’s words from the past [or words like his] when they were negative re hope for environmental homeostasis, but reject any hopeful words he offered on that regard. The mindset that does this, once one looks at it objectively and dispassionately, helps one see the superiority of almost anything different…for instance even a Gaia freely making decisions (not deterministically)…and executing “creative acts.”
Russia is getting too bad a rap, and IMO Nikolai Berdyaev is getting the worst rap any writer who deserved better’s ever gotten…IMO he’s getting this by virtue of being ignored. You can call me woo woo, I don’t care. It’s amazing the stuff that’s still on the net, or it’s amazing Berdyaev’s basic orientation that I still haven’t forgotten. I forget a lot of things. One little search, and look what I found (read as much as you can, cause Medium might withdraw 90% of it the next time you turn around?) https://medium.com/@erikrittenberry/the-meaning-of-the-creative-act-a2c520fe8e64
A lot of things relevant are brought to bear right here at NC, brought here creatively. It’s indicative of hope. In my case I’m partial to hope. At the same time we have to recognize the quasi inexorable momentum of industrial consumerism. IIRC, it was some sweeping generalization he made recently about Russia or Putin I couldn’t agree with, but in the past Alfred McCoy’s been very much on the money…
This below from Ellen Brown…
What exactly will be the exports??? Again, I think it wouldn’t hurt to look at Cuba’s example.
Just read Kim Stanley Robinson’s the Ministry for the Future.
The basic model is Impact = Population * Activity * Technology. Activity gets the short stick, because that would require changing economics systems and changing how people live. Heaven forbid an American or Canadian lives on the energy budget of the Dutch or Japanese.
Net Zero? – Not going to happen.
You can fool all of the people some of the time.
You can fool some of the people all of the time
But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.