At the heart of attempts to halt damaging climate change is a pair of ideas: decarbonise electricity and electrify the economy. So, how is it going? Badly, is the answer. Will things change soon enough? Not on today’s trajectory. Worse, the politics, always difficult, have become even more so: people just do not want to pay the price of decarbonising the economy. Here is a sobering fact: in 2023, the production of electricity generated by fossil fuels reached an all-time peak.
It adds that the largest losses will be inflicted on poorer countries in “lower latitudes” , who are not responsible for the trap in which they find themselves. One does not have to believe any such specific analysis. But one does have to believe in the not particularly sophisticated physics of global warming and the folly of running irreversible long-term experiments on the only habitable planet we have.