Updated Net Zero Roadmap offers grounds for cautious optimism
With ambition and international cooperation, the 1.5 °C target remains within reach.
Updated Net Zero Roadmap offers grounds for cautious optimism
With ambition and international cooperation, the 1.5 °C target remains within reach.
OCT 4
Kia ora, welcome to Future Proof. I’m Ellen, thanks for joining me this week.
Image credit: Antalexion / Wikimedia CC BY-SA 2.0.
Clean tech boom ‘grounds for optimism’
In 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released an ambitious roadmap to get the global energy system to net zero by 2050, and limit warming to 1.5 °C as per the Paris Agreement. The pathway for the sector was narrow, but possible, with 400 milestones laid out for countries to hit.
Two years on, the IEA has updated their Net Zero Roadmap and there are “increasing grounds for optimism”. Despite record high global emissions in 2022, “extraordinary advances in clean tech”, particularly solar and EVs, are keeping the 1.5 °C dream alive. The pathway has narrowed further, but remains feasible – if we can muster ambition and international cooperation.
“Keeping alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C requires the world to come together quickly,” IEA executive director Faith Birol said in a statement. “The good news is we know what we need to do – and how to do it.”
What we need to do: Four big asks
The IEA, an organisation with member countries representing 80% of global energy demand, lays out four key goals to rapidly bend the emissions curve downward by 2030. We need to: triple renewables capacity; boost energy efficiency – doubling our improvement rate each year; rapidly electrify transport and home heating; and cut the energy sector’s methane emissions (like those big leaks from oil and gas fields) by 75%.
We’ll also need to see global annual spending on clean energy triple by the early 2030s to US$4.5 trillion. Alongside this, innovation in carbon capture tech and hydrogen needs to ramp up, alongside investment in infrastructure and electricity grids. Innovation is advancing rapidly: back in 2021, the roadmap relied on tech not yet available on the market to deliver nearly half of emissions reductions for net-zero by 2050. That figure has dropped to 35% in the updated scenario.
What we won’t need: more fossil fuels. “There is no need for investment in new coal, oil and natural gas,” the report states plainly, warning that pursuing domestic oil and gas expansion is risky – both climate-wise, and commercially.
And if we fail to act with the “fierce urgency” required? The IEA analyses a “delayed action” case, finding we’d have to rely on “expensive and unproven at scale” carbon capture tech. By the end of the century, the world would end up spending US$1.3 trillion (in 2022 dollars) every year on carbon capture – assuming it even works.
Isn’t this just more of the same?
If the green tech boom has you feeling skeptical, here’s a different perspective: the folks at The Kākā spoke to environmental historian Catherine Knight, who is concerned by the green growth narrative because we can’t fully decouple GDP from emissions. Instead, Knight would like to see acknowledgement of the limits of growth, and a refocusing to sufficiency, wellbeing and keeping within ecological limits.
When this clash between “go faster” green growth and “slow down” degrowth comes up, I always turn to this New Yorker piece from environmentalist Bill McKibben. “We have no choice but to build renewable energy, and its attendant appliances, and to do it fast,” he writes. “But it would be a shame to waste the vast effort entailed simply trying to recreate our current society on a lower-carbon basis, because we’d soon run into the other barriers that the degrowth activists warn of.” In other words, do both. Do everything, everywhere, all at once.