In the actual world we inhabit, everything has a tradeoff. A more accurate description would be "what if we spent an untold sum of resources that have alternative uses, each of which may have resulted in an even better world, in pursuit of this green goal?"
I'm not sure how you create a better world than one that has sustainable infrastructure, livable cities, healthy children, preserved nature and wildlife (or just rainforests as the cartoon puts it...), clean water and air, ...
Maybe net zero is a waste of time because in 20 years we will crack cold fusion and have infinite energy and then literally suck pollutants out of the air. Or maybe we don't and we wish we'd spent the last 20 years not razing forests, polluting air and water, and so on
The problem with this argument is that its vauge and generalizes a bunch of center left stuff.
If you want specific goals that don't include reducing carbon you should chase those goals instead of chasing reducing carbon dioxide as a priority. If carbon emissions aren't a big deal then maybe a better way to improve children's health might be to eradicate hookworm or subsidize school meals more or pay for childrens health insurance or go after local pollutants. Now maybe it makes sense to do multiple but you have to look at cost benefit analysis for the tradeoffs.
Its also a stupid argument because we know and are sure that climate change isn't a hoax. And that costs of climate change are massive and that any cost benefit analysis for doing more to stop it would indicate we should do more.
I go into more depth in my other comment, but the short version is that building everything nice that you listed takes energy, and Net Zero just doesn't have a viable story for how to provide that energy economically and reliably at the scale that we need.
> we wish we'd spent the last 20 years not razing forests, polluting air and water, and so on
You're painting a false equivalence. Continuing to use fossil fuels doesn't mean chopping down the Amazon and belching foul smoke everywhere. Similarly, building wind and solar doesn't automatically mean you are a good steward of the environment; one could just as easily raze a forest to mine coal as to build a solar farm.
In the end, I want those nice things, too! I'm not advocating for pollution and destruction for the fun of it. I just sincerely doubt that Net Zero will get us those nice things.
You responded to a comic where a guy has a slide saying those things I enumerated — so the response of "what if it is for nothing" is quite literally in opposition to clean water, livable cities, and so on. It seems your comment was more directed to the post's article and not to the thing you responded to
Its a bad argument.
The right argument (which still won't do enough convincing) is that global warming is obviously real, already happening and comes with massive future costs
Again, the investments required in the present day to hopefully and potentially reduce those massive future costs you're speaking of are resources that have alternative uses. One can compare, say, the Germany of today which gave up on nuclear power and built solar panels and wind farms and now is experiencing a decline in its industrial capacity due to expensive and unreliable energy, to an alternate-universe Germany that kept its nuclear reactors and perhaps even built some additional coal and gas powerplants.
The former undoubtedly has lower per capita carbon emissions, but the latter perhaps has the advantage in building sea walls, reservoirs, and such infrastructure and heavy machinery that would help manage a changing climate. Can you really say that one approach is sure to be cheaper than the other?
Consider this: the WMO estimates that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, the number of deaths around the world caused by weather-related disasters dropped threefold[0], even as atmospheric CO2 went from 325ppm to 410ppm and the global population more than doubled. That's not one-third the per capita death rate; it's one-third the absolute number of deaths. Why? Because of improving technology, enabled by increased energy expenditure per capita, that allow people to better master their environments.
It takes a lot of resources to allow weak hairless apes to thrive around the globe; we don't all live in the climate of San Diego or Corfu. And insofar as fossil fuels remain the most economical way to allow increased energy expenditure per capita, I see no reason why we must zealously and immediately stop its use.
I am all for that increased energy expenditure per capita by any means possible. I hope that one day we will have the technology to do so with minimal environmental side-effects. But we must continue to grow to get to that point. I don't believe that Net Zero will get us there; I believe it will forever chain us to the vagaries of our surroundings.
The trade off is we spend that money on fossil fuels.
And therefore we spend the money on more air pollution, dirtier rivers, dirtier seas, more heavy metals in our soils and air, etc.
So the comic absolutely works even if climate change isn’t real.
The only argument that’s left is the idea that we may possibly spend more money on clean energy than we do on fossil fuels for the same amount of energy.
However, renewables are already on par with fossil fuels pretty much across the world, and their costs are dropping considerably, even if we do not consider climate change impacts. For example, in the U.S., which is particularly unfriendly to renewables from a cost perspective due to expensive labor, new solar energy is cheaper than burning coal in an existing coal plant (so without even considering the cost of constructing the plant in the first place).
But the comic undersells its message even further. Due to the fewer steps it takes to get electricity from the energy of the wind or the energy of sunlight to your outlet, compared to getting the energy of oil or coal buried underground to your outlet, the actual primary energy we need will be lower with renewable energy. So the actual cost will be even lower than a direct calculation of the current total energy supply of the world to meet the same energy demand.
Your concept works in theory. What it fails to recognize is that in the real world, the primary factors keeping fossil fuels around are:
1. The power of the dominant energy companies which are trillion dollar business and include massive governments who have bought politicians to ensure they do not get disrupted.
2. Status quo benefits. The fact that they are the status quo provides benefits like people not being as comfortable with new tech, and the grid and other energy transport systems setup for fossil fuels. For example, gas powered cars being the status quo have led to tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in setting up networks of gas stations, networks of roads to carry the trucks that move the gas to those gas stations, and the many tens of thousands of trucks that have been designed built and are operated to carry that gas around. If we were starting from scratch, it would cost a fraction of that money to beef up the power grid to supply that power to electric cars in the form of electricity instead.
Ultimately the comic isn’t just right, it undersells its case, and the only reason we keep choosing the worse tradeoff even if we don’t consider climate change is due to market distortions caused by politics and the fact that the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies, which are just little startups right now relative to the fossil fuel giants.
It's easy to paint a rosy picture of an imagined better alternative.
> the trillion dollar companies who traffic in fossil fuels are way more politically powerful than the future renewable energy companies
Do names like Solyndra or Northvolt ring a bell? Renewables companies are also capable of being backed by popular politicians and raising billions of dollars in capital; that alone is no guarantee of success. If you're claiming that the diligence of O&G operatives in the shadows is what led to the downfall of these companies, well, that just sounds cartoonish to me, which I suppose is appropriate given the context.
In general, there hasn't been an incumbent in history that was not more politically powerful than upstart startups looking to disrupt their business. That's what being an incumbent means. Yet Ford successfully put carriage-makers out of business, and Tesla took a lot of established carmakers' lunch money. It's a very dim view of the world to suggest that political power, rather than the real-life economics of a new technology actually being better than the old, drives change.
> renewables are already on par with fossil fuels pretty much across the world, and their costs are dropping considerably
If this were true, German industry would not be having quite such a hard time as they are now.
> networks of roads to carry the trucks that move the gas to those gas stations
Roads aren't built to carry gasoline trucks. That's a complete inversion of logic. There's not a single road that would be obviated in a full-EV world. Even the roads going to and from refineries! Plastics will still need to be made.
> If we were starting from scratch, it would cost a fraction of that money to beef up the power grid to supply that power to electric cars in the form of electricity instead
Some estimates are at $2-4T to go full EV[0]. That's hardly a small chunk of change. Have you tried adding a L2 charging port to your home? I have. It cost me about $550 in just the copper wires alone, and the labor of going around the attic adding conduit and pulling wires was a pain in the ass. Scale that up nationwide and I don't see a cheap or easy solution here.
If you're really pressing the "starting from scratch" bit, well, that's an unanswerable hypothetical.
> in the real world, the primary factors keeping fossil fuels around are [...]
In the real world, a gallon of gasoline is roughly 11 kWh of energy (look up how big and expensive a battery of that size is), and I still haven't found a battery-powered mower that mows better than a cheap gas-powered one.
In the actual world we inhabit, everything has a tradeoff. A more accurate description would be "what if we spent an untold sum of resources that have alternative uses, each of which may have resulted in an even better world, in pursuit of this green goal?"