No, that is not true. We know how to produce energy without fossil fuels. All carbon emission can either be completely replaced by such means, or adequately reverted.
Yeah we do. Nuclear, solar, wind. If you absolutely can't do something without releasing carbon (concrete and air travel are an example that comes to mind), you use carbon-free energy to suck CO2 from the air and sequester it. That just costs money.
Less than 1% of energy comes from wind and solar and we aren't looking at more than 3-4% in 2030. Wind and solar require either nuclear, gas, coal and oil as backup. Nuclear is completely out of vogue and will take years to build.
It's not just concrete and air travel it's ships, trucks, steel production, anything that require large amount of heat.
You can't power a hospital based on solar and wind etc.
Fossil fuels are not going anywhere until we either get fusion or some sort of fuel cell technology, but they require som fundamental breakthroughs we aren't close to meeting just yet.
The problem is doing things at scale not just proving in some lab what is theoretically possible.
It's that simple going up to maybe 70% of energy consumption. As you note we're still in single digits. Until we reach critical points where large scale storage becomes truly necessary we still have time to get things that work in small scales up to mass production. For example batteries and Power-to-X technology. The only thing missing is political will to address the problem.
No it's not that simple and if it was we would already have done it. It's not just a matter of political will it's a matter of what makes sense from a market perspective. It doesn't make any sense to rely on wind and solar. The are not and will never be the primary source of energy for our needs.
We will have fusion before we have wind and solar covering just 50% of the worlds energy consumption.
If we don't have wind and solar covering more than 50% of the world's energy consumption in the next twenty years the climate will be fucked beyond repair.
It's not physically impossible to cover 2-4% of the land with solar panels and wind turbines, replace ICE vehicles with electrics and home heating systems with heat pumps. It just costs money. And as the COVID response shows, when we want to, trillions suddenly become available.
Money, and space, and natural resources for the CCS membrane / infrastructure, etc. No guarantee that none of those will run out if we try to do this at the required scale.
I've worked in one industrial plant, and they mostly just needed power and steam to run the processing equipment.
If you need oil as a chemical input, you could offset that carbon or likely synthesize it. But even just reducing our fossil oil use to ingredients and not fuel would make a massive difference.
> not if you want to live a modern life with all the benefits that comes from that.
That seems like a rather imprecise and thereby meaningless refutation of the parent's point.
IMO a more honest statement of that idea would be:
"Not if you want to live a totally unconstrained life, drawing on all currently available benefits, whether neccessary or not".
I do think, that "modern life" would be compatible with zero CO2 emission (for some definition of "modern life"), people would merely have to face more constraints and regulation.
You're right that a sustainable economy will demand change. I think the problem is thinking that all the change will be bad. Some things that will have to change:
- More pubic transit on trains
- Less packaging and throw away plastic utensils so you might have to carry a fork with you or employ more dishwashers at restaurants
- Less meat and fish consumption, returning America to its more traditional diets modulo beyond meat type substitutes.
- More local production and transport instead of shipping things across the world
- Less non-essential work and the travel accompanying it
- More urbanization to make ecological systems more efficient
- Use of LED lighting systems
- Less "fast fashion" and wearing more durable clothing
- Use of electric heat wherever possible
- Widespread battery production
- Global solar network to ship sunlight power around the world
- Emphasizing power efficiency in electronics
Some of these changes are fairly disruptive, but extremely mild compared to the challenges humans have faced in history such as war and starvation.
Keep in mind that these so-called "modern lifestyles" that are most carbon intensive are lived most vibrantly by the wealthy (e.g. private jets, endless consumption of materials). Many people will not be hugely inconvenienced compared to their current life circumstances.
