“Net Zero by 2050" Get the Joke?
The punchline is, “Extinction of all life on Earth.” LOL
We insiders—by which I mean anyone paying attention — know that the plan to mitigate the climate catastrophe with Net Zero by 2050 is complete bullshit. But maybe you’ve absorbed the knowledge without really understanding why. So let’s talk about it.
I am no climate scientist or expert. I’m just a reasonably intelligent person paying attention to the news and accepting reality. I didn’t recognize Net Zero as a scam at first, but it didn’t take long to understand.
What does Net Zero actually mean? Net Zero is the point at which the CO2 burden in the atmosphere is no longer increasing. We’re still putting some up, but we’re also taking just as much out.
This definition immediately tips off two major problems.
The “still putting some up” part is a major issue because the fossil fuels industrial/political complex hears that part and stops listening. The “still putting some up” part is their job, and somebody else can do the “take just as much out” part.
The fossil fuels companies feel the responsibility to preserving our industrial civilization by continuing to supply the fossil fuels it relies on. But it does not feel responsible for preserving life or the climate. In other words, business as usual for fossil fuels, including continuing growth. Someone else can do the preserving-life-and-the-climate part.
The second obvious problem with Net Zero is the very idea of “taking just as much CO2 out of the atmosphere each year as the fossil fuel industry is adding to it each year”. We know of only two ways to reduce the CO2 load of the atmosphere. One is time. But CO2 stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so time is not on our side.
The other way to reduce CO2 is carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS. Carbon is “captured” from the atmosphere (or smokestack emissions, or oceans) using a chemical solvent that absorbs CO2, after which it can be buried in the ground where the CO2 will stay safely out of the atmosphere virtually forever.
CCS technology both does and does not exist.
CCS does exist in that there are many ingenious systems for doing it, including several pilot programs demonstrating direct air capture (DAC), the holy grail of CCS. Many fossil fuelled electricity generation plants have been removing CO2 from their smokestack emissions for decades.
Unfortunately, much of the currently captured CO2 is being injected into played-out oil wells, forcing more of the remaining oil to be recoverable, to burn as fuel. Totally self-defeating, as far as reducing the CO2 load in the atmosphere.
But CCS also does NOT exist in terms of a significant contributor to Net Zero. They remove so little CO2 from the atmosphere, and at such a cost, as to make them completely impractical.
To make a dent in carbon emissions, hundreds of thousands of CCS plants are needed, if not millions. The cost is prohibitive. Not to mention the carbon costs of manufacturing all of those plants.
The Biden administration recently added more than $2 billion to invest in CCS, despite the poor results from the $7 billion of taxpayer moneys already spent. (See Biden administration sees carbon capture as key tool in climate fight.)
But we’re still in early innings of the climate catastrophe, right? Surely CCS technology will improve over the next decade or two. Maybe someone will even find a miraculous break-through that will make it truly practical?
Sorry, but no. It’s not that there hasn’t been enough research into CCS. It has been heavily researched and the science is known. It’s actually some pretty simple chemistry. We can tweak around the efficiency edges, but there are no breakthroughs waiting in the wings to be discovered.
But don’t take it from me. Take it from Medium author Michael Barnard in articles such as Direct Air Capture Figleaf Carbon Engineering Stops Pretending To Be Climate Solution.
We haven’t even talked about timeframe yet. The Paris Agreement of 2015 set the goal of reaching Net Zero by “the middle of the century,” hence, 2050. Let’s assume (a very bad assumption) that we reach that goal.
The Net Zero goal literally means that we agree to keep pumping more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses (GHG) into the atmosphere, in excess over what little we may remove, for another quarter of a century.
In other words, in Paris, we agreed to not stop the behavior that is causing global climate change for another twenty-five years.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the climate has been deteriorating pretty badly and rapidly for the last few years. What do you think twenty-five more years of even worse deterioration will lead to? It will lead to extinction of pretty much all life on earth, including ours, that’s what.
But why even worry about that? No country is visibly on a path to meet its Paris commitments anyway. However bad we agreed to let the climate disaster become, it is going to be much, much more terrible than that.
And that is why Net Zero by 2050 is worse than a joke, it is a tragedy. It is an agreement to end, not just civilization, but humankind, as well as pretty much all other life on our dear mother Earth.
Let’s not do that, okay? Let’s stop using fossil fuels immediately, instead. Let’s let some life survive.
— Lannie Rose, September 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
