3 ms·

2050. 26 years away from Net Zero. Vaclav Smil doesn’t think we’re going to make it https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/25/magazine/vaclav-smil-interv

• ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  Well that's good news as he's not great at predictions.
• ben_w 2y ago
  Having run the numbers myself, at current trends I'd say there's a 50-50 chance we'll reach electrical net-zero by 2032, and add heating and transport to the net-zero bucket by 2038 (and one of the things which may prevent the former by 2032 is the increasing electrification of the latter; I am much more confident that we will reach ~2 TW-years/year of renewable production by 2032 than I am that this will balance electrical demand in 2032). The rest of the emissions are things like "Can we stop cow methane? And get a replacement for cement that don't inherently emit CO2 as part of the chemistry of the stuff itself?", which I have no frame of reference for with regard to the difficulty, and may or may not happen concurrently.