It's far too little, far too late

**“The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast.”** *- Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba.* The observation could apply to almost anything. But Smil, who has written more than a dozen books about energy and society, is concerned with the gap between the aspiration to fight climate change and the immense on-the-ground effort entailed in actually doing so. ***Smil argues that studies that purport to show how the world could radically reduce or eliminate its carbon emissions by one date or another, tend to presuppose what they claim to be proving.*** **To arrive at the conclusion they want, they rely on a variety of unreliable assumptions. The most common are these.** \- That existing technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates. \- That nonexistent technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates \- That humanity’s ever-growing appetite for energy will suddenly be curbed and everyone will voluntarily adopt a “low energy” lifeway. Smil labels such studies “the academic equivalents of science fiction.” **To say that amazing work is being done to combat climate change and to say that almost no progress has been made is not a contradiction; it’s a simple statement of fact.** *At the time of the Rio summit in 1992 , fossil fuels provided roughly eighty per cent of the world’s primary energy. Thirty years later, fossil fuels still provide roughly eighty per cent of the world’s primary energy.* **In the meantime, total global energy use has increased by almost two-thirds.** This is really important to understand because the “hopium” Climate Writers always want to breathlessly tell you how “cheap” renewables have become. How “the market” has priced fossil fuels out of competition with renewables. They always want to convince you that it’s inevitable renewables will replace fossil fuels over the next 30 years. **The reality is that all of the renewables installed over the last 30 years. Haven’t reduced the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from fossil fuels even 1%.** **All of the renewables installed over the last 30 years haven’t even kept up with the massive increase (of about 70%) in electricity usage.** ***As long as demand for electricity keeps increasing, our current level of renewable replacement for fossil fuels will keep falling behind. Until that 80% number starts coming down, we aren’t winning, we’re just running in place as things get worse.*** Here’s a really important example. **The U.S. power grid has been called “the largest machine ever built by man.”** It comprises more than eleven thousand generating plants, more than six hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and some six million miles of distribution lines. **Several recent studies claim to show that decarbonizing the grid in the "nearish" future is feasible.** All of them, involve a certain amount of “science fiction”. **They describe what is technically possible while glossing over the barriers to implementation.** These barriers, are huge. Some are economic, some are legal, some are logistical, some are political, and some are legal-logistical or economic-legal-logistical-political. **Take what’s been called the “transmission quagmire.”** To clean up America’s grid, it’s not enough to build new generating capacity, or even new generating capacity plus new storage capacity. Power has to be transported from places that have a lot of wind and sun to urban centers that use a lot of electricity. **Decarbonizing the grid will, by one estimate, demand more than a million miles of new transmission lines.** **JUST the cost of stringing all these lines will, by another estimate, come to more than two trillion dollars.** *Does that give you a sense of how laughably inadequate the great victory of Biden’s IRA “win” is?* *Biden went to COP27 and touted the US commitment of $375 Billion for infrastructure projects as “massive”.* **We are on the brink of Global Warming causing catastrophic failures in the global food supply. We don’t have time for this “penny ante” investment.** Reaching net zero in the U.S. will require building out the transmission system while, at the same time, expanding its capacity so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity. It will require installing tens of millions of public charging stations on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages. The challenge of electrifying vehicles like trucks isn’t necessarily the electricity, as even under worst-case scenarios electrifying vehicles won’t put a massive dent in the electricity supply. The acute problem is how to deliver that electricity to them. It’s estimated that a new truck recharging station might require a connection to the grid that can handle 5 megawatts. Which would take years to build and cost tens of millions of dollars. ***If we electrify the trucking industry as planned. In 2030, a highway plaza charging stop will require about the same amount of electricity as an outdoor sports stadium, and by 2035 could require as much electricity as a small town.*** Just assembling the electric cars and trucks planned will necessitate extracting massive amounts of nickel and lithium for their batteries. Which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad. The new cars and trucks will themselves have to be manufactured in an emissions-free manner, which will involve inventing new methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon. The list goes on and on. The fossil-fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed. Concrete production will have to be re-engineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries. Currently, ammonia, a critical component of fertilizer, is produced from natural gas, so the fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned. Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns. The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry. Farming is responsible for roughly ten per cent of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions, mostly in the form of nitrous oxide and methane. (Nitrous oxide is a by-product of fertilizer use; methane is released by rotting manure and burping cows.) These emissions, too, will have to be eliminated. **All of this MUST be done in the next 10–25 years on a Global scale.** We waited until the very last minute to start and now we have to do everything “all at once”. Because if don’t do this together, we will ALL burn together. **Officially, the U.S. is committed to reaching net zero by 2050. But no one really knows if this is possible in the real world.** *Because Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy completely.* **Right now, we are up against the wall and things are going to get worse.**