The Atlantic: There's No Scenario in Which 2050 is 'Normal'

[femmedem]

There’s No Scenario in Which 2050 Is ‘Normal’
The two paths to avoid the worst of climate change would still dramatically change the world as we know it.

By Robinson Meyer

"...But the energy-system models used in the most recent IPCC report tell us something else too: The path to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change requires something impossible. Well, not actually impossible, but exceptionally difficult to imagine.

Of the hundreds of scenarios that the IPCC analyzed, all fell into one of three buckets. In the first bucket, every scenario forecasts that the world will soon be removing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. Carbon removal is still a bit of a dream. Not only is it technologically unproven at scale; it is extremely energy intensive. But the IPCC report implies that within the lifetime of children alive today, the world might be spending more than a third of its total energy production removing carbon from the atmosphere...What's more, this mass removal will need to happen while the world does everything else that decarbonizing entails, such as building wind and solar farms, expanding public transit, and switching to electric vehicles. Every climate plan, every climate policy you’ve ever heard about will need to happen while tens of gigatons of carbon removal revs up in the background.

SNIP

"That may sound unbelievable. But now let’s turn our attention to the second bucket of scenarios. They tell a different story, one in which the world rapidly curtails its energy usage over the next two decades, slashing carbon pollution not only from rich countries, such as the United States, but also from middle-income countries, such as Brazil, Pakistan, and India.

By “curtailing energy demand,” I’m not talking about the standard energy-transition, green-growth situation, where the world produces more energy every year and just has a larger and larger share of it coming from zero-carbon sources. Rather, these scenarios imagine a world where total global energy demand collapses in the next few decades. There’s a good reason for this—as far as the models are concerned, this tactic is one of the best ways to crash carbon pollution within 10 years—but it is not how any country approaches climate policy..."

The article goes on to talk about what slashing total energy use means: for example, halving the number of automobiles on the road by 2050 even though current predictions are that they will increase by 70%.

Oh, and what's that third bucket of scenarios? It's that we don't meet limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

More: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/ipcc-report-climate-change-2050/629691/

[hatrack]

1. ExxonMobil recently posted my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE "carbon capture" story

Last edited Thu Apr 28, 2022, 07:23 PM - Edit history (2)

It's on their Twitter feed, and it's bragging all about how their experimental carbon capture project at Strathcoma (Scottish refinery, I believe) "could" - that's a quote from the Tweet - sequester 3 million tons of carbon/year.

That's nice. That's less than 1/100th of 1% of the +/- 40 billion tons of average annual carbon emissions from human activities. It's even less of a percentage of the +/- 55 billion tons of CO2e we busy little primates produce every single year.

So, yeah. Whoopee, I guess.

On edit - Strathcona is actually in Alberta.

[femmedem]

3. It's incredibly depressing.

I'm not going to give in to fatalism and stop doing my part (I've made it a priority to live within walking distance to work for over twenty years because of climate change) but even the best-case scenarios are terrifying. And I'm about to turn sixty. It's so much worse for the generations coming up behind me.

[Uncle Joe]

2. I'm imagine that by 2050 with ever more automated automobiles combined with

increasingly urbanized societies, car splitting will become a norm.

(snip)

Take these scenarios’ assumptions about car ownership, for example. Today, there are about 1.3 billion cars and light-duty trucks on the road worldwide. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that this number will reach 2.21 billion by 2050—a 70 percent increase—of which less than half will be electric vehicles. But the low-energy scenarios require the global vehicle fleet to nearly halve during the same period of time, shrinking to about 850 million cars and light trucks by 2050.

Don’t get me wrong: This sounds fantastic. I’d love to live in a world where most people don’t have to own a car to make a living or participate in society. Yet it also does not strike me as particularly likely, and it is not the only life-altering shift imagined by the low-energy scenarios. These scenarios envision a similar revolution in energy-efficiency technology sweeping through other aspects of society, such as building construction, residential heating, and manufacturing. Historically, energy efficiency has improved by about 2 percent a year; the low-energy-demand scenarios require much faster shifts.

(snip)

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/04/ipcc-report-climate-change-2050/629691/

Thanks for the thread femmedem.

[femmedem]

4. You're welcome, Uncle Joe.

Thanks for adding to it. And you are likely right about car-sharing, if for no other reason than income inequality.

I have a car but I haven't driven it for a few months. (I live in a small, walkable city.)

The subject is hard to look at, for sure, but even harder in the long run if we don't.

[hunter]

5. Wind and solar will only prolong our dependence on natural gas.

Natural gas is the power source that will destroy what's left of the world as we know it.

We need to be replacing fossil fuel power plants with nuclear power plants as fast as we can. We need to abandon car culture.

These things are not technically impossible. In some places they've already been accomplished.

With the human population approaching eight billion we've worked ourselves into a pretty tight corner. We are dependent on high density energy sources for our survival.

If we don't accept reality, if we refuse to look at the math, billions of us are going to suffer and die before we are old.

[Mickju]

6. I agree with you.

But will it happen? Frankly, I don't think so. Most people are terrified of nuclear power. I hope I am wrong.