Is Net Zero Mostly Wrong?

Post 30 | Bring on Healthy Skepticism

The scientific method is an empirical process of objective testing, experimentation and analysis. It has contributed to humanity’s development and progress, helped evolve our understanding of and relationship with the world around us, and guarded against dogma.

Yet this seems to have been suspended when it comes to climate change and the push for a carbon net zero world by 2050, as we have been told the science is clear, the science is settled and there is scientific consensus. And we are being driven to accept a narrow narrative of an impending human-created catastrophe on earth and assigned a fixed prescription to address it.

Net zero refers to the elimination of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions globally by 2050, measured against a 2010 baseline and with a step goal in 2030 to assess our progress. This global edict is pushing to limit the increase of temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrial levels (considered to be 1850-1900), in hopes this will fend off projected catastrophic climate effects.

Yet despite spending and efforts to date, the world is currently tracking poorly to a 10% emission increase by 2030 rather than the goal of a 45% decrease by that date.

The need for skepticism

Climate behaviour is a complex phenomenon with multiple contributors, confounders and interactions – many we don’t fully understand and many we simply don’t yet even know. The issues surrounding climate change and the push to net zero are neither clear nor settled and thousands of dissenting scientists argue against there being a consensus opinion.

But the UN and western governments are relentlessly pressing a net zero storyline while driving prescriptive industrial, economic and societal change that will resonate generationally. And while this movement grew out of genuine environmental concern, we would be willfully blind to not acknowledge the impact of big money now in the mix with trillions of dollars at play, and that it has shaped the approach, messaging and intolerance to dissent.

Policy solutions to redress the projected impacts of a changing climate are mostly narrow in scope and their success largely measured by volume of money spent, with prayerful hopefulness for a desirable outcome. They ignore many realities of our physical world as covered extensively in Post 12 (Plastics and Ammonia), Post 13 (Steel and Concrete) and Post 17 (EV Batteries). And as

Bjorn Lomborg

points out in his book, False Alarm – How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, and Fails To Fix The Planet, “there is no official estimate of what the Paris Agreement will actually achieve”. 

Stated another way, it is unlikely we’ll hit the carbon targets, while being unsure of the material outcomes if we do, and unable to know what will really happen if we don’t - despite relentless hyperbole.

Cue skepticism.

Skepticism is an act of suspending judgment when evaluating claims and arguments. It allows for consideration and further examination of reasonable possibilities and is foundational to the scientific method. Meanwhile, we live in a time where claiming something to be denial is an easy way to dismiss it, and a fast way to relegate someone to irrelevance is by labelling them a denier. This has tamped down healthy skepticism at a time we should be increasing our scrutiny of transformative public policies based on towering claims.

Just as the judicial process demands reasonable doubt before conviction and sentencing, so too should we apply a strong rigour of doubt to climate change.

To remove doubt from science, it becomes religion. [Dr. Scott Tinker]

From her 2023 book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, climatologist Judith Curry muses, “How many skeptical papers were not published by activist editorial boards? How many published papers have buried results in order to avoid highlighting findings that conflict with preferred narratives? I am aware of anecdotal examples of each of these actions, but the total number is unknowable.”

To be skeptical one needn’t deny the impact of carbon dioxide on a changing environment, or deny that humans are driving some of that change, or deny that we are in a warming trend.

But there are viable questions about the contribution and severity of each, along with credible challenges to current scientific conclusions, and preferred response prescriptions to better balance humanity’s economic, social and geopolitical complexities.

The messaging problem

Proving the adage if it bleeds it leads, mainstream media (oh, how I shudder having to use that term) have been one of the greatest enablers of the climate change story, with years of breathless climate talk linking every major weather event to climate change. And making damning connections with scant evidence for almost any plant, animal or natural phenomenon concern. I level no accusations at them of evil intent and acknowledge they are seeking clicks and eyeballs in a competitive news world, though such absolution doesn’t make them less complicit or journalistically lazy.

Words are powerful weapons.

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Heavy rain is often upgraded to the scarier atmospheric river.

Wildfires are blamed on climate change rather than poor forest management or human carelessness, and apparently foretell a burning planet.

Flooding is blamed on climate change despite our having built on historic flood plains or increasingly near coastal waters.

Our warm winter this year, significantly induced by El Nino, is being reported as the hottest – not warmest or mildest as would previously have been written.

Last year saw the addition of global boiling to the journalistic lexicon thanks to the ranting of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

And last July Guterres made unforgivably irresponsible statements that were splashed across the media as he thundered, “For scientists, it is unequivocal, humans are to blame. The air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable, and the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable”.

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But it was barely reported when Jim Skea, incoming head of UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) admitted last July in a moment of candour that, “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees. It will however be a more dangerous world.”

You likely didn’t hear that China just experienced its coldest winter in 70 years - Reuters. And this in a country responsible for nearly 30% of global carbon emissions and operating more than 3000 coal fired power plants.

News stories about California’s Sierra Nevada region having their second consecutive year of record snowpack that will helpfully recharge water reservoirs are not reported as positive weather examples or attributed to the credit side of the climate change ledger. But you will surely hear it trumpeted loudly in the media if floods or landslides occur from runoff.

Recency bias amplified by breathless news reports of deaths from floods, hurricanes or other weather events may have you convinced there are more climate related deaths than ever. In fact, we have fewer than any time in history and the number is decreasing.

Meanwhile as Lomborg highlights in his book, heat related deaths in the US slightly decreased since 1985 as they hover around .5% of total deaths, while cold weather mortality rose from about 5.5% to 6.5% in that same period. And this data stands as a reasonable global proxy as cold far outstrips heat as a driver of temperature related deaths.

There are countless data points that reliably push back on the extreme climate information we consume daily – which can often be relegated to the now popular categories of misinformation and disinformation. But only scant bits cut through the daily barrage of torqued climate news unless you choose to search it out.

Intelligent opposition on the rise

There will be those whose first response when you share a book, article, data point or dissenting opinion on this topic will be to question the source, with a version of – What’s their background? Are they a climate scientist? – as though only a select few can opine on the matter, while hoping to dismiss them outright for lack of creds. It is worth noting that much of climate work revolves around modeling, manipulating and analyzing available data, but also involves conducting meta analysis on thousands of published papers. So while science credentials are often warranted, they are far from the only required background to intelligently contribute. And let’s not forget that millions have been swayed by Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, John Kerry and so many other politicians, celebrities, talk show hosts and activists who opine from their bully pulpit, supported by often limited knowledge.

Nonetheless, the following should provide some assurance that a vast army of learned and credible sources have been weighing in with scholarly work the past years - and disagree with where the IPCC is steering the world.

Summaries and conclusions from the UN’s IPCC are read as omnipotent by many. But while there are top notch experts populating the ranks of that body as they review and assess thousands of papers contributed by global scientists, from which they create summary reports and recommendations - they are far from infallible. Nor are they immune from groupthink.

Thousands of other scientists assess the same data and reports to generate alternative models, tease out different results and arrive at different conclusions. Additionally countless analysts, researchers, data geeks and journalists uncover valuable information and insights through their probing work. They should not be lightly dismissed.

Meanwhile, there are now more than 1,900 signatories from 36 countries to the Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) foundation – a group of scientists in climatology, environment, mathematics, geophysics, astrophysics, geology, economics and more – including two Nobel laureates.

They hold five fundamental positions:

• The degree of manmade contributions to climate change are overstated

• Carbon dioxide is more beneficial than detrimental and is not a pollutant

• Global warming is slower than currently being modeled

• Climate policies are relying on inadequate models and challenged data

• Global warming has not increased natural disasters

They propose that “Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities” and “The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times.”

These powerful positions are in opposition to many core conclusions of the IPCC. And they are each worthy of exploration in separate articles, though have been covered extensively in many publications. Anyone who wishes can readily find an increasing body of academic papers, books, and journalism pieces addressing these topics and more. A few quality sources are as follows:

Vaclav Smil’s, How the World Really Works | The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going, outlines realities of our material world including the virtual impossibility of achieving 2050 net zero based on our reliance on concrete, steel, plastics and ammonia.  

Bjorn Lomborg’s book, False Alarm, as referenced includes exploration of the massive penalty net zero places on the global poor who number in the billions. And he promotes a more balanced approach focused on promoting prosperity through GDP improvement, and the need to prioritize adaptation and mitigation policies.

The aforementioned, Climate Uncertainty and Risk | Rethinking our Response, from Judith Curry provides an insightful examination of the problem from the perspectives of uncertainty and risk - with consideration of probability, morality and more while examining pragmatic positions and options.

I further recommend Steve Koonin’s book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, and further reference him below.

This presentation from Scott Tinker provides a data-driven view of the world’s energy needs, challenges and realities.

Koonin, a physicist who was Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Energy Department, is an experienced climate scientist. In his book he provides ample data disproving that floods, fires, droughts, or hurricanes have been increasing since 1900. “The bottom line,” he writes, “is that the science says most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influence on the climate.” The work from Lomborg and others echo this.

On rising temperatures Koonin also writes, “The annual number of high temperature records set shows no significant trend over the past century nor over the past forty years, but the annual number of record cold nights has declined since 1895, somewhat more rapidly in the past thirty years.”

Put another way, summers are not getting hotter on whole, but winters are getting milder. Weatherstats is an interesting site with data since 1999 that seems to bear this out in a medium term Canadian context, providing min, mean and max temperatures for 14 cities.

While no one sensibly claims the climate isn’t changing, it seems that recency bias is playing tricks on us as we selectively remember significant weather events, catastrophize them, and assure ourselves it’s a trend - and prodded along by a steady diet of climate change news we deduce it must be climate related.

Except that it seems rarely so.

Will money solve the problem?

Our conscience and anxieties are often assuaged by hearing of big money being thrown at a problem, as though the very act of spending confers a solution. Yet while money can be an enabler it can also be badly wasted in a competitive scramble to get a piece. And government money is habitually wasted faster than most.

With quoted values for what the world will or must spend now reaching beyond $100 trillion in some estimates, it’s worth putting this into perspective.

In 2023 the 500 largest companies in the United States created a combined $18 trillion in annual revenues and $2.6 trillion in free cash flow (FCF). If we liberated all their FCF we’d be less than 3% to the target spend.

The US government collects about $4.5 trillion in tax revenue annually, so we’d require the equivalent of 22 US annual intakes to meet the mark - or more than 220 times Canada’s annual tax revenue.

In 2021, the Royal Bank predicted that Canada would need to spend $2 trillion by 2050 to meet its net zero targets. Canada already spends more than it takes in annually and suffers declining GDP, so absent a massive productivity boost that finds four more times our annual national revenue production, we’d triple our debt.

How is this money being spent? 

Currently the world is hyper-focused on converting from internal combustion engine (ICE) passenger vehicles to electric (EVs), though fossil fuel powered vehicles represent only about 10% of emissions. In Canada’s case, if we count the estimated $44B to be sunk over ten years into three EV battery plants as part of our contribution, I suppose it gets us to 1/5 of our presumptive spending target.

But what will it actually do for global net zero targets, or healthy planet outcomes?

Given Canada’s 1.5% contribution to global carbon emissions and passenger vehicles contributing about 10% of that total, we could make a maximum .15% impact on global emissions through a wholesale move to EVs. Whether it will move the needle in limiting global 2050 CO₂ by the target .01% (100 ppm) or mitigating temperature increases and whether that will make a difference to our world, will be known only when the time comes – but the math is not in its favour.

Post 17 | Inconvenient Truths About Electric Vehicle Batteries

Reality is that the climate change phenomenon remains elusive. Our target goals focus on temperature as a proxy for a healthy planet with few solid outcome measurements beyond that. And we are not entirely sure what solutions are needed.

It means the world will be spending tens of trillions of dollars in hopes it will do something positive.

There are many costs – and it’s not just money

Innovative research, development and production is being done with some of the net zero resource inputs in areas of energy, agriculture, transportation and more. These will surely drive beneficial outcomes to serve us positively in the future. And some resources are fortunately being applied to mitigation and adaptation actions, seen by many as a critical element in speculative future proofing.  

But the cost benefit of our planned actions and outlays are currently impossible to calculate. If our alarmism came with only modest investment, we could put it down to being better safe than sorry and assume it will all balance out in the future. But the costs are immense, and current policies will echo for decades.

What are some areas of concern?

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Massive national debts will be borne mostly by western countries who are jumping in feet first. The impacts will be sweeping on top of already declining GDP, crushing carrying costs, plummeting productivity, excessive social programs and more.

A major shift of the geopolitical landscape driven by the planned elimination of our fossil fuels industries will imperil our energy security and cause unknown changes to political and macroeconomic dynamics.

The hyper focus on EVs and destruction of ICE vehicle manufacturing will have far reaching impacts on raw metal rights, manufacturing decline, energy security and more.

Anticipate major loss of jobs in foundational industries with an inability to match them in quantity or compensation with any green economy or just transition being proposed.

The diversion of focus away from biodiversity health – water, air, rainforests – is the darkly ironic result of a carbon centric view of planetary health, as we propose to spend more than 100 times per year on net zero versus broader biodiversity promotion and protection.

The western world’s arrogant demand for net zero will apply an incalculable penalty on the prosperity of the developing world’s majority who currently live under an energy deficit - where energy is one of the greatest drivers of prosperity and directly contributes to improved education, health, and mortality rates.

Net zero waste may become a popular term in the future (you heard it here first?). EV battery recycling does not yet have viable solutions but will soon face a tsunami of demand. We read estimates of nearly 10 million metric tons of solar panels to be discarded between 2030-50 with limited available recycling options. And thousands of decommissioned wind turbine blades are already being buried underground due to a poor recycling business case. Watch for this to become the cause célèbre of environmentalists in the years ahead, along with the evils of mining.

While almost singularly focusing on the EV supply chain, we ignore the low hanging fruit of climate mitigation and adaptation prescriptions that cost much less, yet provide exponentially greater human benefits.  

Pressing extreme-case and unyielding positions can produce the opposite of desired effect, by turning people off even the best of causes. The our way or the highway approach of climate activism particularly with the huge related costs is causing sensible, well meaning people to tune out as the messaging stretches credulity - and will result in many rejecting the cause altogether.

Militant views on climate change that propose limits on vehicle and air travel are currently fringe - but we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of net zero on future policies that may infringe fundamental rights and freedoms.

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Finally, let’s ponder opportunity cost.

Pretend that climate change and net zero didn’t exist and ask yourself where, in your own country, would you apply trillions of dollars along with the related human resources? Healthcare, food security, national security, small business innovation?  

How would you apply it globally to raise the prosperity of billions - addressing water and sanitation, education, healthcare, malnutrition, and agriculture perhaps?

Now ask whether you’re entirely positive that net zero by 2050 is the most important and nearly singular focus of humanity - acknowledging that we might be wrong about its severity, outcomes and current solutions.

Indeed, some will still say that our climate faces an existential threat, that current net zero policies are the only path to planetary health and worth any cost. To them I have nothing more to say.

But I hope others will increasingly apply healthy skepticism to this issue that is consuming us, but which I pragmatically propose is grossly oversold.

Stay tuned and  stay pragmatic.