Five Superheroes of the Net Zero Transition
This week's episode of Cleaning Up is the second of a two-parter, in which I explore the bull and bear cases for Net Zero. This week, the bull case - prepare to be informed and inspired...
Five Superheroes of the Net Zero Transition Transition. Image Cleaning Up / Liebreich Associates
This week’s episode of Cleaning Up is the one you have been waiting for: the second part of my two-parter examining the bull and bear cases for the Net Zero transition. Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? It’s easy to swing wildly between extremes, so I have tried to lay out the case for each.
In last week’s episode, we learned about the Five Horsemen of the Net Zero Transition- five powerful barriers, making Net Zero extraordinarily hard, perhaps impossible. By way of reminder, they were:
The poor economics of clean solutions beyond wind, solar and batteries;
The inadequacy of our current electrical grid;
Soaring demand for critical minerals;
Political and social inertia;
Predatory delay by powerful players who are going to lose out.
This week, we’ll meet the Five Superheroes of the Transition: five drivers even more powerful than the Five Horsemen, which give us reason to be optimistic.
And they are:
Exponential growth;
System solutions;
No more hard-to-abate sectors;
Disappearing demand;
The Primary Energy Fallacy
Will the Five Superheroes of the Transition overcome the Five Horsemen? The bad news is that not even the most powerful of Superheroes (Dr Manhattan, say, or Wonder Woman) could get us to Net Zero by 2050. The good news is that the Five Superheroes have a good chance of getting us pretty close by 2070, consistent with a Paris Agreement “well below 2 degrees C” of warming - but of course insufficient to avoid enormous climate disruption, with implications for adaptation, carbon removal, geo-engineering, justice and lots more.
In any case:
whatever else you’re doing this weekend, make sure you listen to the Five Superheroes of the Net Zero Transition.
If you have not yet listed to Part I - The Five Horsemen of the Net Zero Transition - you might want to do that too. The episodes are designed to work as a pair.
And if you like them, please give them a 5-star review, post them on LinkedIn and social media, discuss them, and recommend them to family, friends and colleagues!
These two episodes are based on a pair of essays I wrote for BloombergNEF, the first of which appeared last September and the second in February this year. As always, my gratitude goes to my former colleagues at Bloomberg for letting me release these audio adaptations.
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