By Jo Nova
The State of Climate Action for 2025 is out, looking like a kindergarten report with red and orange stickers for all the areas the world is failing in, which is everything. Show this report to any MPs who tell you Australia is in danger of being left behind.
Ten years after the Paris Agreement even The Guardian notices that despite the bonanza in new wind and solar power, coal use hit a record high last year.
It’s a bizarre report, surely a product of an industry oozing too much spare cash. It has finger-wagging lectures, chumpy predictions, and cutsie stamps. But who is supposed to be impressed by this (apart from The Guardian) — political staffers in the third world? No one is going to look at forty graphs of failure and think “we have to double our efforts”.
Progress is marked with school teacher lingo like “Well off Track” or “U Turn needed”. As if the world is waiting to hear, and can just, ‘bing’, make planes fly on pumpkin seeds.
The graph of zero-carbon sources in electricity generation rather sums it all up — the outstanding hell-for-leather uptake of renewables is almost a flat line, but in their dreams renewable power is about to launch into space. (“S-Curve likely” they say, which is code for a slow start but with great news just around the corner.)
These kindy-totalitarians have big plans. Wow.
For some inexplicable reason the share of wind and solar power is a key outcome in and of itself, as if the world needs windmills and photovoltaic panels to be whole, or fix holes in its Chakra.
This graph is the wet-dream of the renewables industry…
Heat pump sales in the EU are not headed in the right direction:
It’s almost like hundreds of thousands of people tried a heat pump and didn’t like it.
Meanwhile direct carbon capture is… a wasteland:
The acceleration required in direct carbon capture is “greater than tenfold”, they say, on a graph that shows a that what they really want is a 400-fold increase.
It was brave of the team to include global aviation. Especially given that the lifespan of an electric battery in a plane is about three weeks. But look at the fantasy…
Who knew, Climate Action means we’re not supposed to drive our passenger cars as far (even if it’s an EV charged by a nuclear plant?) They are still dreaming of 15 minute cities, saying — “planners and developers must redesign cities to being foods and services closer to where people live and avoid the need for motorized passenger travel…”
…
And this is the current progress on Green hydrogen production, as written by renewables fans:
They don’t say it, but production needs to ramp up by a factor of 662 by 2030.
If anything, the report proves that the world has no chance of meeting its Net Zero target and that the government boondoggles, NGOs and tech giants (like Bezos Earth Fund) have far too much money to waste.
h/t El Gordo