Thoughts about understating several aspects of the energy problems that, if not present in our thinking, are stirred up by it and left unresolved.
First, about net zero. The idea is that the amount of CO2 we are producing now can be reduced by sequestering technologies that do not yet exist but could be effective in the future. This allows energy companies to claim that they are reaching control of CO2, when in fact, they are merely postponing a problem pushing it off into the future giving them the right to drill and pump and sell as much as they can now. It is a license to expand their activity. The arithmetic is simple: you add up the CO2 you are producing now and subtract from the CO2 that you can sequester in the future and the sum of the two is zero. This is a trick.
Second, time and money spent on wind and solar to limit fossil fuel use are wasted for the purpose of cutting fossil fuel use. Our efforts, mostly around wind and solar, are also destructive rather than helpful. As you may have read, the energy produced by wind and solar projects, instead of replacing fossil fuel use, has been added to it, making the problems worse. The strong statement would be that the money and human effort devoted to wind and solar projects is a waste, a form of Jevon's Paradox.
In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
Third, the banks, businesses and politicians have decided to pursue the path of profit rather than the quality of life. This is strong enough to get most planners and commentators to align with it. This agenda usually mentioned(“how great it is that
we grew our company by a factor of three”) is more wealth concentration through growth that caused the problems in the first place. The drive by business is to continue the extraction of wealth from the land and through careers as long as possible, which could be as short as a few years.
SOME MORE DETAILED COMMENTS
“British companies have already adopted this mindset, and the UK economy has become a world leader in the race to Net Zero. By proactively collaborating with businesses from across the globe”.
The failure to think through what is being said is distressing. How can you have collaboration and a race with the same businesses? It can be done, but would be very hard. They are trying to kill each other.
“that solutions to the climate crisis being dreamt up in R&D centers the world over are affordable and sustainable for consumers.” This is fairly subtle. This implies that the goal is to maintain the current business environment as much as possible, even though all proposed solutions are CO2 producers. There is no sense here of the anguish that will be produced by necessary cuts, and no specific cuts are proposed.
“China, as an active practitioner of the Paris Agreement, attaches great importance to addressing climate change. In September 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced during a speech to the UN General Assembly that China aims to see its CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”
There is no recognition that only a few small companies are on track to meet the Paris Agreement goals. The rest are absent or way behind. I think I will stop here because the argument I am making is obvious. If we do not face the actual conditions we cannot solve the problem. Imagine An aerospace company, that doubles the density of the air in its calculations because its planes cannot fly in actual conditions.
We are in a race between the quality of life in and during climate catastrophes and the extraction of wealth in the short term.