Why Net Zero Will be Easier Than You Think - The Five Superheroes of the Transition
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- This week, Michael presents the second part of his two-parter for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, exploring the bear and bull cases for the net zero transition. This week is the bull case: the "5 superheroes" of the transition, 5 forces/trends even more powerful than last week's "5 horsemen", which can prevail in the challenge of rapidly decarbonising the global economy. The 5 superheroes are: Exponential Growth, Systems Solutions, Great Power Competition, Disappearing Demand, and the Primary Energy Fallacy. And stay tuned until the end for a 6th "bonus" superhero!
This audioblog is based on Michael's Bloomberg New Energy Finance opinion piece of the same title.
Links
Read the original BNEF piece on which this audio blog was based: about.bnef.com...
Read the latest IEA Renewables Report 2023: www.iea.org/ne...
Read the 2017 research paper - Limits to Growth in the Renewable Energy Sector: www.sciencedir...
Read Michael's 2018 piece for BNEF - Beyond Three Thirds, The Road to Deep Decarbonisation: about.bnef.com...
Read the research review by Hans Eric Melin on the reuse and recycling rates of lithium-ion batteries: www.energimynd...
Read Michael Barnard's analysis of the proportion of global shipping linked to the fossil fuel industry: www.forbes.com...
View the Lawrence Livermore Sankey Diagram showing estimated US energy flows in 2022: flowcharts.lln...
Read the first part of this BNEF piece on the "5 horsemen" of the transition: about.bnef.com...
Related Episodes
Audioblog 11: Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think - And Easier. Part 1: Harder: www.cleaningup...
Audioblog 10: The Next Half-Trillion-Dollar Market - Electrification of Heat: www.cleaningup...
Excellent piece on the megatrends that will get us to Net Zero. Thank you Michael.
Superb content. Cannot understand why it is not more widely viewed.
Thanks. Me too!
@@MLiebreich It's about soundbites
The average tiktok viewer is not going to spend 40 minutes listening to an audio podcast
If you took the lightbulb & golf/ID3 examples & got it down to ~1 minute it might drive more engagement & traffic to the main podcast
Thanks for your continued efforts.
MIMMIMI, we will manage this: One grows with their challenges.
Excellent podcast, it is rare to find such quality content online. The mainstream media is constantly talking down ev demand and ignoring solar, battery and wind growth. The fact that conventional forecasts are consistently wrong in one direction suggests a deliberate underestimation rather than honest mistakes. Wind solar and batteries and EV's and heatpumps will naturally dominate just from market forces alone, any countries that do not adopt these will be uncompetitive and have much higher energy costs that their neighbours. However some other technologies such as hydrogen storage and carbon capture will not happen without a carbon tax/subsidy.
Reassuring after the Five Horsemen! Another clear exposition of the potential for achieving Net Zero
Outstanding piece! Everyone please send to your MP!
Systems solutions cannot be overestimated
Brilliant comments on these topics, and it's about time everyone catches on. Both the bull and bear cases are carefully reasoned, and presented persuasively.
Very well thought through piece. I have not followed every episode. Do you have one/a comment on why AI-compute-driven data centres will not create a new demand problem?
@@jamesgreenwood6733 They will.
10:41 - Superhero No2: Systems Solutions. Sorry, but to include hydrogen in this section and specifically *exclude* batteries entirely (perhaps you did not mean to say this?) is BONKERS. Battery storage is already massively out-playing H2 for matching supply of renewables to demand. Australia being possibly the 'noisiest' example thus far. Better (ie mainly cheaper) batteries designed specifically for stationary storage (eg redox-flow) are already well on the way to commercialisation and will be (soon) 1000 times cheaper to implement than H2 and nearly twice as efficient!
10:30 Maybe not 100%, but for most purposes it might as well be.
What this ultimately comes down to is crucially dependent on how you see the essential nature of the problem. If you think it is a technological problem to be solved by innovation, followed by deployment, you probably think, as I do, that this will all look totally different in just a few decades. OTOH If you see this as just a projection of a deep spiritual and cultural malaise, then you must be deeply pessimistic, since human cultural change may take many decades or even centuries, and may even revert to earlier patterns, and basic human nature scarcely changes at all in millennia.
With this as backdrop, all the other details, such as those presented so well here, may just like to much window-dressing. But as, I think, Gandhi said, everything you do is guaranteed to be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
A well argued presentation. But what do you mean please when you ask the question “Will we get there in time?”
Do you mean net zero before a 1.5 degree C rise above pre-industrial temperatures or before the next cooling period, as we had during the Little Ice Age, can no longer be concealed?
If the former then I have good news :
Recent history, since the last ice age, which ended just 11,000 years ago, shows temperatures above those of today during Roman times when vines were grown up by Hadrian’s Wall and in Medieval times when the Norse Icelanders colonised Greenland growing crops such as barley for 500 years just before the Little Ice Age cooling period started. These increased temperatures did not lead to runaway warming or for the oceans to boil (Al Gore) or for the planet to boil (UN Sec Gen) as they claim has already happened.
Fortunately for the planet Happer & Wijngaaden have shown that additional CO2 causes negligible additional warming because all the IR radiation emitted from the planet in the CO2 frequency bands is already absorbed (and subsequently re-emitted to space) by the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, a condition described as IR saturation. And in fact the Antarctic Vostok ice core data for the last 500,000 years when both temperature and CO2 have been, as they are today, at historically low levels, CO2 is found to follow temperature and not vice versa.
If the latter then it is clear that net zero can only be achieved by an impoverished planet controlled by an authoritarian world government as there would, for instance be no energy security for the UK when all our infrastructure (wind turbines and solar panels, steel etc) is supplied by a country our security services describe as “hostile”. Neither could we protect all the renewable farms and cabling. In which case it becomes clear that the authoritarian world government is the goal and net zero is simply the means by which it can be achieved.
The last five years of solar panel 'learning rate' is due to a China land grab (Go vs Chess analogy) Every Chinese Solar Manufacturer has either scaled to the max or died. All the CCP care about is manufacturing dependence in key industries (EVs, Solar, Generators, Transformers) each of these being a brittle dependency for the Wests Net Zero Mandates.