Pat Hynes ends her July 8 column (“Human-made problems can and must be unmade”), which advocates stopping the use of all fossil fuels, with the question, “Why aren’t we doing it?” The answer is provided in a recent Vaclav Smil report: “To eliminate carbon emissions by 2050, governments face unprecedented technical, economic, and political challenges, making rapid and inexpensive transition impossible.”
Smil’s 2024 report, Halfway Between Kyoto and 2050: Zero Carbon Is a Highly Unlikely Outcome, published by The Fraser Institute (https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HALFWAY.pdf), observes that progress on the Kyoto commitments made in 1997 has not been significant and that we do not have a viable path to get to the net zero finish line by 2050. He points out that from 1997 to 2022, on a relative basis our share of fossil fuel use declined from 86% to 82% but on an absolute basis we used 55% more energy from fossil carbon.
He writes “[B]y 2023, after a quarter century of targeted energy transition, there has been no absolute global decarbonization of energy supply. Just the opposite. In that quarter century, the world has substantially increased its dependence on fossil carbon.” He makes several other interesting observations, and I encourage those interested in the topic to read the report, particularly the section “Realities versus Wishful Thinking.”
To address some of Hynes’ other points, I suggest reading posts in Roger Pielke Jr.’s Substack, “The Honest Broker.” He has a “Weather Attribution Alchemy” series that explores the link, if any, between climate change and extreme events. He has also written about the scarcity of metals needed for the switch to green energy production (“Heavy Metal — Is an energy system transformation even possible?”).
Massachusetts recently blinked on implementing the forced conversion to EVs, and I think the state will blink again. Clearly, the costs of getting to Net Zero 2050 are too high and voters will not tolerate this. It is wasteful, and if implemented, the CO2 reduction will be minuscule, not even a rounding error, when considering the magnitude of China’s and India’s emissions.
Daniel Lyons
Florence