energy is everything and solving climate change is hard
energy is at the heart of improvements in human flourishing; our ability to harness greater non-human energy to meet core needs of humans (via food production, transport, building, illumination, refrigeration and heating) has contributed to incredible improvements in human lives.
fossil fuels are extremely useful, dense energy carriers to accomplish valuable work.
climate change is a very difficult problem to solve because of the tension between the value of energy to expanding human flourishing and the impact of using fossil fuels on the stability of earth systems.
climate change is not going to be as bad as we feared because we have made substantial progress towards decarbonizing electricity generation and transportation (hell yeah - go team humanity!).
we still need to dedicate substantial resources to addressing it because we care about the wellbeing of people (domestically & globally), we care about ecosystems, and there are substantial tail risks (ex. AMOC collapse) and wide uncertainty bands on how earth systems will respond.
all serious decarbonization pathways involve massive increases in electricity demand. we will need lond duration storage and/or clean firm power sources like nuclear energy (advanced fission like SMRs/Gen IV and fusion) or enhanced geothermal that are dispatchable and have high capacity factors will be essential to balance out massive deployment of intermittent generators in solar and wind.
we are probably going to need large scale carbon capture & carbon removal.
because fossil fuels are very useful, flexible, dense energy carriers, it’s going to be very hard to replace them in long haul trucking, aviation, marine transport, petrochemical products (see good points by Jack on the utility of oil).
some core products of human civilization, like cement, currently produce CO2 as a fundamental chemical product of the reaction (CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2). 1 very clever people are trying to use other types of rocks to make cement, but that technology is still very early stage.
net zero models do not assume we reach actually zero emissions and assume some amount of CDR to balance or exceed the residual emissions (IPCC).
decarbonizing the global economy is going to take longer than we’d hope to limit warming to safer levels.
climate change involves a massive transition in the physical infrastructure of almost everything in the world. whole new networks for charging cars instead of filling them with gas. replacing every gas furnace in the world with a heat pump. this is going to be very expensive, and even more expensive if we accelerate the retirement of fossil assets before the end of their economic utility.
the gap between where we are and where we want to be combined with time constraints means we should expect serious discussions in the coming decades about geoengineering like sulfate aerosol injection to buy us a little more time for decarbonization.
buying ourselves 50 more years to turn over the stock of passenger vehicles and integrated steel mills and all sorts of other capital intensive infrastructure makes the problem a lot more achievable.
people hate this, for understandable reasons (very unknown risks and impacts, especially regionally).
that said, we are already geoengineering the atmosphere through our collective greenhouse gas emissions. we are already creating policies with very similar impacts to geoengineering.
we have been creating cooling, unintentionally, through sulfate emissions, especially from maritime shipping. the IMO shipping regulations (good for human health and air quality) will create a net warming impact through the reduction of sulfur in shipping fuels (analysis by Zeke Hausfather and Piers Forster).
