Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low Antarctic ice. We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken.
Soaring temperatures. Unusually hot oceans. Record high levels of carbon pollution in the atmosphere and record low Antarctic ice. We’re only halfway through 2023 and so many climate records are being broken.
There are lots of good programmes, of course. But the fact is that global emissions continue to rise year on year. We haven’t even managed to stabilise emissions yet, let alone cut.
Of course not. That isn’t remotely possible for well over a decade. That doesn’t mean that there is not a massive effort to build new sustainable infrastructure that will replace what we currently have. We spent 50 years building the current infrastructure that depends on fossil fuels. It’s not going to be replaced overnight, or even in a few years.
What people don’t realize is that when emissions finally start dropping year after year, the reduction will happen relatively quickly after that. That part of the change will be dramatic and observable. The hard work being done right now not so much.
Think about EV cars and trucks; once adoption rises to over 50% a year, the transition to 90% EVs will happen very quickly because no one will want to invest in the old tech and the manufacturing will have scaled up dramatically and be much more mature. What people don’t realize is how much of the hard work was done before EVs were being mass produced. Developing and building the battery and car factories and establishing all the supply lines is the hard part, not building cars in the factory.
The same timeline will happen with many other sustainable technologies that are where EVs were in 2005 or 2010.