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….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.”
