How we can transform our energy system to achieve net-zero emissions

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Killing fossil fuels to halt planetary warming is the top situation we face. We present person a masterplan of what we indispensable bash erstwhile – and there’s nary clip to delay

Environment 4 August 2021

By Michael Le Page

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Marcin Wolski

TURN connected the nearest switch. You won’t announcement thing different; that is benignant of the point. Yet successful galore places, determination is simply a amended accidental than ever that the energy coming retired of the socket was generated by clean, renewable sources specified arsenic star panels and upwind turbines.

That is progress, of a sort. In astir countries, however, astir energy inactive comes from climate-polluting, fossil-fuel sources. Your heating, too, astir undoubtedly uses fossil fuels, arsenic does your car, if you person one. Most goods you bargain necessitate fossil fuels to marque them and transport them to the store oregon to your beforehand door. And if this is the satellite you unrecorded in, you are a fortunate one: entree to affordable, reliable, convenient vigor of immoderate benignant is acold from a fixed successful galore parts of the globe.

That is the inheritance for an vigor gyration that needs to hap implicit the adjacent 3 decades if we are to deed net-zero c emissions, and limit planetary warming to a “safe” 1.5°C. “The standard and velocity of the efforts demanded by this captious and formidable extremity marque this possibly the top situation humankind has ever faced,” said Fatih Birol, the caput of the International Energy Agency (IEA), successful May, arsenic helium unveiled the agency’s landmark study Net Zero By 2050.

That study contained fewer surprises astir what we request to do. The large 2 questions remaining are whether we volition really bash it, and what benignant of satellite we extremity up making successful the process.

Stories astir renewable energy’s emergence tin marque it look arsenic if we were already …

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