“Zero emissions” requires no diesel, petrol, or gas-fuelled cars, trucks, tractors, or dozers and no burning of coal or gas for electricity generation.
But without nuclear power or a massive increase in hydroelectricity, green energy will not support metal refining or manufacturing, and domestic electricity usage will be rationed.
“Zero emissions” will also force the closure of most cement plants, mechanized farms, and feedlots, and will demand nuclear- or wind-powered submarines, destroyers, and bulk carriers.
In the Zero-Emissions world, there can be no diesel buses, oil-powered cruise liners, or jet aircraft (except fleets of climate comrades attending endless UNIPCC conferences).
Moreover, 7.8 billion humans continuously emit a lot of carbon dioxide – maybe they plan to make the Covid masks airtight?
Zero Emissions would decimate mining, farming, forestry, fishing, and tourism. As exports fall, imports must also fall.
Without diesel fuel and lubricants there will be little surplus meat, milk, vegetables, cereals, seafood, or timber for the cities, for export, or for immigrants or refugees.
Rabbits, kangaroos, possums, koalas, Murray cod, and wild pigs will become staple foods and wood/charcoal burners generating “green” gas will again fuel antique cars and utes. Wood-burning steam-powered traction engines may live again.
But we have the “Net-Zero” loophole, which is green bait on a barbed hook. It provides five escape routes:
1. Buy dodgy carbon credits from dubious foreigners.
2. Cover our grasslands and open forests with carbon-absorbing bushfire-prone eucalypt weeds.
3. Build costly energy-hungry carbon-capture schemes.
4. Chase the hydrogen mirage.
5. Log and replant old-growth forests. (New trees will grow and extract CO2 faster than old mature trees.)
Net-zero has one bright prospect – freeloading cities like Canberra (Australia) must shed population and convert their manicured parklands to lettuce farms, lucerne paddocks, cow bails, and poultry runs.
“Moreover, 7.8 billion humans continuously emit a lot of carbon dioxide – maybe they plan to make the Covid masks airtight?”
The AGW issue is fossil fuel emissions not carbon cycle flows such as respiration.
I think the point is that fossil fuels, in conjunction with the development of an energy system over the past 100 plus years has delivered the modern lifestyle that developed countries enjoy today. Further, there are many more BENEFITS from this than detractions, if you look at this objectively instead of (simply) vilifying hydrocarbons. There won.t be an “Easy Button” with the energy transition, whether the Sierra Club, et al recognizes the facts (or not)…
Good point, Randy, and well stated.
My pet peeve is that if there have been many temperature cycles in the Holocene so far and if climate science knows how to explain them they should explain all of them and not just pick one to explain. That’s called “data selection bias”.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/10/09/a-data-selection-bias/
Agreed. When it comes to climate it looks like a lot of POLITICAL science, not physical science…
Lots of Horse Manure the so called Good Old Days were not that great its just these days we have a bunch of Nit-Wits who beleive everything they read in the NYT’s or see on CNN
Just wind the clock back 150 years, more or less.
Timber shall be king, which could present a real danger to all the tree-huggers. Farm produce shall be largely local (which would not be well received by the smashed avocado loving hipsters in inner Melbourne) and heavily reliant on horse and other excrement as fertiliser (ditto for the hipsters there).
Melbourne would probably need to bulldoze all the suburbs on the old vegetable and orchard belts to free up farmland, which would be doubly awkward because dozers run on diesel.
In short, all the young trendoids with little knowledge of history would find themselves reliving it.
Interesting times…