The progress on EVs, solar, and batteries has been nothing short of stunning. It has to continue, and will spread in any place where people use brains over ideology. But it won't solve everything. We don't have emissions-free alternatives for jet travel and many industrial processes. Carbon-neutral maybe, by synthesizing hydrocarbons, but not emissions-free. And we have to undo the last 100 years of damage.
Not wrong, but we're mostly locked in on the light vehicles and electrification front, the rest (as you mention) can continue to be worked towards. There is no silver bullet, just lots of work towards all the problems at once. Half of marine traffic is moving fossil fuels around the world, for example. That evaporates in the future. India and Africa will buy electrification and light vehicles from China, versus locking in a fossil fuel based economy. Everyone who needs fossil fuels is racing away from them for obvious economic and national security reasons, and everyone selling them is going to be desperate to sell them to the shrinking demand for them. There was $800B more capital invested in clean energy (~$2T) than fossil fuels globally in 2024.
To your point, the most important part is going to be how to rapidly remove the CO2 industrialization has injected into the atmosphere. This remains to be solved for at reasonable cost, but importantly, we're going to need a material amount of low carbon energy for that process.
“This is not inevitable. We have the tools, the instruments, the capacity to change course,” Guterres said. “There are reasons to be hopeful.”
