Note, I'm not arguing that we can't reduce carbon emissions. What I'm arguing is that we'll never succeed at altogether ending anthropogenic emissions. The easy part is decarbonizing the electric grid. In places like the Netherlands this will be hard to achieve with wind and energy alone, but decarbonizing the electric grid is just a fraction of what we have to achieve.

Electricity is responsible for about 40% of anthropogenic global CO2 emissions. Let's just agree that we somehow decarbonize the electric grid altogether, overnight. 40% of our carbon emissions, gone. In the real world solar has a carbon footprint of about 10% of that of natural gas and that's without counting emissions involved in storing the electricity. In the real world the electricity production will also have to be dramatically increased if we want people to have the electric heating/cooling and transportation that we're now planning, but let's handwave that away too.

But now let us take a look at some of the other sources of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, for which we don't have good solutions. Underground coal fires, some of them that have been burning for centuries, are responsible for 3% of our emissions. Good luck extinguishing them all.

Climate change has already resulted in an increase in forest fires. That's estimated at 3.4 gigaton of carbon, compared to total human emissions of 37.8 gigaton total of human carbon emissions. Good luck getting rid of forest fires altogether. That's another equivalent to 9% of our carbon emissions.

Humans like to fly around the world. There's no sign of this stopping anytime soon. Electricity and hydrogen just don't have the energy density you need for flight. You need petrochemicals. They want to use biofuels in theory, but the cost and the land use involved are enormous. This is another 2.5% of current carbon emissions you're looking at. Every scenario has air travel at least doubling between now and 2050 by the way. Include the non-CO2 effect of air travel and you're looking at 4% of overall global warming right now.

Our soils are eroding due to our unsustainable use, which means carbon is being released from the soils. This is estimated at 1 gigaton of carbon per year. That's another 2.5% of our carbon emissions.

No industrial scale alternatives currently exist for the Haber-Bosch process of fixating nitrogen from the air, for the production of fertilizer. That's about 1% of all carbon emissions. Green steel production doesn't seem to be a success, because most iron ore grades are now too low for the technology. That's estimated at 8% of carbon emissions.

Then there is tropical deforestation, which is now an effective inevitability in places like Congo due to the committed population growth (the DRC has a fertility rate of 6). This is estimated at 6.5% of global anthropogenic carbon emissions. Theoretically a lot of this deforestation could be eliminated if people stopped eating beef and palm oil, but I don't see any signs of that happening.

Then there's plastic. Theoretically we can produce plastic with something other than fossil fuels, in theory we can produce them from food crops, but that just has the effect of worsening our other problems. I see no realistic trajectory where we stop using plastics made from fossil fuel anytime soon. That's around 3% of our carbon emissions. The expectation is that plastics production will double between 2020 and 2050.

So if you consider it reasonable that we're not all going to stop flying, that we won't extinguish all of the world's coal fires, that we won't have a global vegan revolution, that we will continue to produce fertilizer and steel and will continue to produce plastic, then you're looking at 33.5% of anthropogenic carbon emissions that will continue. Some of those, like plastics and air travel, are more likely to continue increasing than decreasing for the foreseeable future.

There's another 0.6 gigaton of carbon annually released from the melting permafrost right now, that's another 0.5% of our carbon emissions we can't easily solve. That leaves you at 34% of our emissions.

There's another 5% of global emissions you can add to this, if you can agree with me that we're not going to have zero carbon heavy duty trucks at any meaningful scale. Short distances in Europe? Sure, we can have electric trucks, if the electric grid can handle the huge temporary spike in demand whenever these cars charge. What happens to the old trucks is that they'll be exported to Africa and burn carbon there.

We have somewhat realistic decarbonization plans, for the electricity grid, for the heating of buildings and for the transportation of people on the road over relatively short distances in densely populated parts of the world. Whether we can implement those solutions within any meaningful timeframe on a global scale is another question.

But I would argue that for 39% of carbon emissions, we just don't have meaningful solutions. Biofuels that consume 30% of global available biomass by 2050 just for air travel are not realistic solutions. We'll have enough trouble making sure everyone has to eat by then.

We've only looked at carbon emissions here. That's estimated at 72% of the greenhouse effect. It's generally thought that the non-carbon emissions are even harder to phase out. It should be clear from these numbers that we don't have any technologies that make net zero by 2050 realistic to achieve.