Its all well and good to say that the transition will take time, I don't disagree with the point that there is a lot of capacity which needs to be replaced. We have been warned about climate change and we have known the causes for decades.
The problem is we took no notice and now we don't have the time.
We can take decades to transition, but there is a price: more warming, more unstable weather, more weather related disasters. more difficult to try and mitigate the inevitable damage that more warming will cause.
This has to be done quicker, we wasted the transition time we had and now we will have to make the transition a lot quicker.
DS
This is the perfect example where words make this sound much simpler than reality actually is.
You are right, there has been decades of policy failure from governments around the world, unfortunately we cannot go back in time and right the wrongs of the past, so we have to find a way forward towards a cleaner society, but your post addresses the issues that people around the world have with green initiatives.
Everyone wants everything now due to multiple government policy failures, but due to that, we also cannot expect it to be quicker.
You mention we need to transition urban vehicles quicker. There are about 80m new cars produced each year, as of 2019 (this has probably grown since then) there were around 1.1bn cars in the world. Its not about replacing capacity, to do what you want, you need to significantly INCREASE capacity. So to do that we need more factories (therefore we need to produce more concrete), you need more steel (so we need more iron ore / met coal), do you see the issues we have around urban vehicles. On top of that, you cannot forget the price differential. At this stage, electric vehicles are a premium product on the market, the cheapest Tesla car on the market is the Tesla 3 which costs around A$65k, significantly more than a petrol / diesel option. If you wanted to make that price competitive, you would likely need to drop $20-25k off the price via subsidies, so lets say we converted all car production across to the Tesla 3 and governments provided a sibsidy of A$25k / car, subsidies for these cars would cost around A$2tn / year. Maybe there is a better way to spend that money, maybe electric vehicles are purely going to be a premium product and we should be pushing more emphasis on transitional fuel vehicles for the time being like hybrids.
Just 1 example, but an example where IMO words are cheap, actions are going to determine what changes and for me, the vehicle industry isn't 1 of those low hanging fruit areas that we should immediately focus our attention. The electricity grid is that (and I have gone into why I believe the ALP's policies are a failure at this - and their price caps are ridiculous that they just brought in, another knee jerk reaction due to policy failure of the state governments in the past when signing production contracts with coal / gas companies - they would be far better to recover money via the royalty system and ensure that these royalties are provided back to households as rebates if they want to reduce power bills.
BTW - not the above where I spoke about cars, it doesn't even cover the more heavily polluting vehicles such as heavy goods vehicles etc which are unlikely to ever be able to move towards battery technology. Its why I'm fully behind people like Andrew Forrest (I know a lot on here don't like him for whatever reason), but he has made it clear what he sees as the fuels of the future and is pushing forward with it, and thats hydrogen. Funnily enough, the UNSW just released a study where they have converted a diesel engine into 1 that takes a combination of diesel / hydrogen and can run on this mixture at an 85% decrease in emissions. IMO these types of fuels (hydrogen / ammonia) are a much better focus than any sort of subsidy on electric vehicles, because they are 1 - a better option and 2 - have much wider application and hence can be monetised much easier and therefore costs of production will reduce much faster making it more economical to go this route in the long term. In a similar time frame to the UNSW study, Rolls Royce have also released a jet fuel engine that was also running on hydrogen.
This is a great graphic and explanation by Our World in Data that shows the transport industry. 16.2% of all emissions come from the transport sector, where 60% of 12% of road transport comes from passenger vehicles (the only real concept where electric vehicles will work, so thats about 7.2% of worldwide emissions, where in order to accelerate the sector, we might need to subsidise electric production by A$3.2tn annually for around 15-20 years. I personally think there are much better scenarios that we can focus on in the short term, and that means for passenger vehicles IMO, we need to be pushing as many people towards hybrid vehicles, yes its transitional but its the best option that we have that is economical.
The media also, is always up in arms about the airline industry about how they need to change / we need to fly less etc, but they make up less than 2% of total emissions, again when you are coming to low hanging fruit, we are looking in the wrong place.
The above graphic is a good illustration of why our focus needs to be on energy use that we use to power and heat our homes / businesses. Energy use in industry is 24.2%, energy use in buildings is 17.5% and the other areas which we should be focusing on is agriculture 18.4% (including waste 21.6%).
Those 3 areas amount to 63.3% of our energy usage and should be where we focus. Take agriculture for example, based on our shop prices, beef is generally the cheapest meat we can buy but cattle are also 1 of the largest producers of methane. Why not make this a premium product via adding tariffs to the sale of all beef material? There are ways that you can push people into eating differently, and the biggest mechanism for that is price.
We've already discussed the benefits of a targeted change to farming practises around the world and the benefits of this, and it would have a far quicker (and larger) impact than focusing on urban transportation does.
This is why the rhetoric around environmentalism needs to change, much of what is discussed in public is around easy to see emissions but many of those are the hardest to fix. We should be focusing our investments on easy to change, large scale emitters in the 1st instance and at this stage that emits urban vehicles, sure lets try and reduce the impact by pushing people towards transitional vehicles like hybrids, but lets not kid ourselves that we can speed things like urban transportation change, its just not possible with current capacities and the focus / investment $'s is better spent elsewhere IMO.
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