What if achieving Net Zero by 2050 and/or reaching 1.5ºC climate targets now has a <3% chance of success, for reasons that cause decision-makers to backtrack, and instead focus on climate adaptation and broader competitiveness? This 14-page report reviews the challenges. Can our Roadmap to Net Zero be salvaged?
The goal of research is neither to cheerlead for what you want to happen, or to whine about what you don’t want to happen. It should be to predict what will happen. Even when you don’t like the predictions.
Hence every December we have attempted to distil our research from the previous year, into a Roadmap to Net Zero, which suggests the most likely trajectory where the world could reach zero net CO2 emissions by 2050, thereby limiting climate change to 1.5 – 2.0ºC of warming.
Unfortunately, this year, we increasingly fear our Roadmap to Net Zero is not what will happen. The purpose of this note is to explain why.
The first challenge is that we are seeing lower willingness to pay for decarbonization than we expected, per the evidence on pages 5-6.
The second challenge is a more adversarial world, where issues such as defence, self-sufficiency and competitiveness threaten themes such as coal-to-gas switching and climate coordination, per pages 7-11.
The third challenge is slow progress with CCS and CDRs. We find it unlikely that gross emissions will fall below 30GTpa by 2050, but can anything close to 30GTpa be captured and/or offset, per pages 12-13?
Hence our most likely scenario is now for Net Zero to be delayed by 2-3 decades and for 2.5-3ºC of warming by 2100. Around 1.3ºC of this warming has already happened.
What could still salvage a 1.5-2.0ºC Climate Scenario, versus the 2.5-3ºC world that increasingly looks more likely, could be some game-changing technology, emerging at the bottom of the cost curve: AI breakthroughs, thermo-electrics, solar + battery costs collapsing sharply, fusion, electrochemical DAC.
And maybe we should not fixate too much on achieving Net Zero by 2050, or the precise level of warming in 2100, which no one really knows anyway. If you can find good opportunities, which boost competitiveness (and are not overly reliant upon fickle policy support!!), then these are the ways to improve the world’s energy system from the bottom up.