It's all so tiresome. When German leaders went online to celebrate turning off their last nuclear plant and instead turned on more coal I learned it was all theater by woke fools. They are not fools because they are woke but just because they are foolish. The dutch seizing farms in the name of global warming. Where are they going to get food from? Ukraine? China? Giving power to foreign possibly enemy nations like they did with Russia. It's all political theater that will weaken the west and do nothing to accomplish it's goals.
Africa and Asia are going to want the same standard of living as the west so carbon use is only going to go up. You don't intentionally cripple industries in your country in the face of global competition.
* A global carbon tax/cap/trading/limit system, with sanctions for any country that does not comply.
* A realistic risk that a global compulsory carbon cap/tax/trading system will be implemented, and that any carbon emissions tracking will be backdated - such that any extra emissions today might disadvantage your country in the future.
With neither of the above two, it is in every countries best interests to emit as much carbon as possible and use free/cheap carbon based energy to produce goods/food/whatever, while doing only a few highly visible environmental moves.
How often do these economic sanctions actually work? From my limited perspective they seem to only hurt the poor, whilst the rich find loophole after loophole and are largely unaffected.
Isn’t that precisely the course correction we find ourselves having to make now? Decades of anti-nuclear sentiment calcified into regulatory opposition that needs to be unwound. Yeah, real funny. If there’s a lesson here we should all take to heart, it’s this: beware of letting bandwagon sentimental movements dictate policy.
Nuclear is not a solution that will save us. In fact it is counterproductive to build nuclear. I know it hurts the sensibilities of many of the technerds here on HN, but renewables are already several factors cheaper than nuclear and are still on an exponential cost reduction curve.
So if you build a nuclear power plant you have less CO2 reduction than if you use the money for renewables. And no we don't need nuclear for baseload (hint renewables are baseload) and nuclear costs are not dominated by regulation any more than other power sources (Nuclear had >50 years, of development and government subsidies, that's 30 more than solar. And they still did not get onto an exponential cost reduction rate).
We're nearly at the point where geoengineering is necessary. People will oppose this like nuclear power, but there's not many alternatives left. Even if we do have a solution to stop climate change, it is simply not going to happen in time.
You're concern trolling, and what you're doing is a great disservice to those trying to make a change. Lets attack a few misguided attempts, spread some FUD and remove the focus from things that matter, all while brewing hopelessness.
Friend, I'm expressing myself on a thread that maybe a couple hundred people will read. If I set back climate reform then it was doomed to begin with. I have no idea what "concern trolling" is. I think nuclear is required to offset climate change. I think western countries shutting down farms is immoral and idiotic. I think expecting western countries to willingly handicap themselves in hopes it will make a difference while upcoming nations including China go full speed is dumb. If that's concern trolling then sure, I'm that.
> Seizing farms is not happening here, only a few farms have been sold by the owning farmers to the government.
That’s some rather disingenuous spin. Look, I’m not at all interested in the merits of the buyouts (maybe they’re entirely justified, I don’t care) but don’t misrepresent what’s going on there - buyouts are being taken under duress, “voluntary” today with statements that they will become mandatory if enough volun-told people don’t step up. Again, I literally don’t care about the propriety of the motivations - not my circus, not my monkeys. In the US we have something called eminent domain that amounts to the same thing: “move and take this bag of cash that we deem to be the market value, or we’ll come with brickbats and make you move.” Sometimes it’s abused, sometimes it’s justified, but it is what it is - the government taking (seizing) property. The fact that there’s some compensation makes it mostly equitable at least. As far as I understand the offers from the Dutch (funded by EU?) are above market. What can never be quantified and captured adequately in a buy-out price, of course, is the legacy of multi-generational ownership, sentiment, and the cost of occupational rehabilitation. Given the variable factors that would go into such things, it’s probably a fool’s errand to even try to calculate such things anyway.
> The Netherlands is a net exporter, apparently, so we could stand to loose some food production.
The countries importing that food will now have to import from somewhere else. It doesn’t seem to be solving any climate problem, just shifting it elsewhere.
Nobody has to pickk this up. It's unnecessary surplus that only does damage. A third of all the food in the world is thrown away. European food production is too high because of the way agricultural subsidies work, and the surplus is dumped, often below market price, on the global market, driving farmers in Africa and India out of business.
Literally the only reason not to reduce this excessive production is in order to protect established business interests and not rock the boat.
That doesn't meam buying out farms is necessarily the way to go. A lot can be done to reduce nitrate pollution by changing the feed for cattle, letting them roam outside as much as possible (the biggest polluters are factory farms woth thousands of animals), and other measures. But reducing the food production won't cause any problems; it will solve them.
EU farm subsidies shouldn't be rewarding production at any cost, but sustainable production and care for the environment.
Cheap abundant clean energy will make a change. Some say it's about to happen, I think we need to do more research. Maybe some of that super intelligence will help us.
You are misinformed. Dutch don't seize farms because of global warming, in fact they haven't seized any farms so far. The problem in the Netherlands is about nitrogen depositions. Furthermore, we currently export more than two thirds of our agricultural output, and import two thirds as well.
The possibly maybe eventual seizing of a couple of large and polluting meat farm / factories close by natural reserves won't have any effect on our ability to feed ourselves, at all. The problem is mostly about unsustainable ways to produce ungodly amounts of meat and milk, not 'farms' in general.
> Dutch don't seize farms because of global warming
This isn't true. A major goal of nitrogen cutting programs (started by the UN Environment Program) is to reduce climate change. You can read about it here:
Yes, but this is really not the main (or even a) reason why there is the threat of farms having to close shop or mandated to become more sustainable: this is based solely on nitrogen emissions damaging nearby nature reserves.
If that was actually true we would need to talk about it.
It’s not, so here we are. Solar and wind do nothing for base load generation - except distract people from talking rationally about energy. I don’t know where people think all the power to charge electric cars is going to come from. And what transmission lines are going to carry the miracle of power either.
Aren't electric cars thought to be a big part of the battery/storage solution? You can charge the cars at night and draw power when other consumers are peaking?
I think the trajectories for solar are so strong that we will stop talking about any lack of energy in one or two decades.
Case in point: Germany will build 13 GW of renewables this year, which offsets those last 4 GW of Nuclear which were switched off this year.
But the fact that they move away from nuclear rather than coal is the big problem. More renewables is great of course, but it's useless if it's done to replace only nuclear and not oil and coal.
Last winter's reduced gas useage was a big positive, though. We really need to build on that.
Ohio passed a law that allows one of counties, townships, and cities to ban "green" developments. I'm not sure if other states have passed similar laws, but I wouldn't be surprised. This makes it trivial to stop any new solar or wind development (ofc, natural gas and coal are not impacted by this law). This has made it so that major solar developers have stopped even considering the state for new developments.
So it's completely possible that people are going to be willing to pay a price premium to ensure the demise of civilization and perhaps humanity.
Only for the 'easy' things... A gas furnace works out far cheaper per unit of heat than a heat pump... A plane is far cheaper to fly with jet fuel than batteries. Steel is far cheaper to make (not recycle) with coal and a blast furnace than direct reduction. Cement is far cheaper to make with gas than electricity...
I just recently read that heat pumps are beating gas furnaces already and on the price trajectories of renewables will be winning easily in the future.
We won't need to focus on the hard things as long as we have sufficient easy things to get done first. For instance I don't think replacing jet fuel is something we should be prioritizing over bringing renewables to developing countries.
> I just recently read that heat pumps are beating gas furnaces already
In general, no. For a few select usecases, yes - particularly highly insulated newbuilds which need very small systems (heat pumps miniaturize better than furnaces).
Renewables aren't cheaper than fossil fuels if you consider the cost of grid outages. This is an externality that is normally not considered when arguing they're cheaper.
I've never experienced a grid outtake in my life. And most of this gas is being burned in big power plants anyways, which have the exact same grid problem.
Well no, the grid is pretty stable today because fossil fuels are very predictable and base-loady. The point is that renewables aren't, so if you push too hard on renewables then you will have more outages due to losing control of the supply/demand balance.
Maybe because I live in a municipality known for hydro power, so I don't consider that an issue. But it's a renewable that's just as easy to control as gas. Even better, can pump up water and store energy when solar or wind have excess power.
Yes hydro and geothermal are exceptions, but also irrelevant on a global scale. Hydro sources are already tapped and won't take us any further. When people say renewables in this context they mean the sources that can be scaled up. Pumped hydro is nice when you can get it but again there isn't enough.
Re-reading I didn't quite understand your original point. What do you mean big power plants have the exact same grid problem? The issue comes from the dispatchable nature. You can tell a combustion plant to set output to a particular level and it will do so. That's what you need to keep a grid stable. Wind/solar can't do that.
When people talk about gas and the grid, I often feel them talking about some external factor shutting down the grid (weather etc), and thus how having gas for heating is better than electric because you're not as dependant on the grid. And in that context it doesn't matter if it's a gas plant or a solar farm making the energy anyways.
Well, there's that too yes but I think that's not the main thing people mean in this context. The issue is that in most parts of the world a 100% renewable grid can't satisfy demand on a still night, and storage tech isn't there to ride you through - but even if it was, long stretches of cloudy still days are easily possible. Also the grid is very hard to restart once it has a big enough outage. Even once power is available at all the stations again, a black start is no joke and most countries have never been through one ever.
Why would anybody need a 100% renewable grid? Renewable grids will be 150% grids, that provide 50% more load than you normally need and 100% for 98% of the time. The remaining 2% of time where renewables can't deliver (windless/sunless winter days) will be covered by gas peaking power plants.
The goal is to avoid CO2 emissions at reasonable economic prices.
You can't build 2x the generation capacity (which is what you're suggesting) at economic prices anyone would today consider reasonable. Remember you have to be able to cover 100% of demand from non-renewable sources. It's not just the gas plants, it's the pipeline network, the gas wells, the LNG import terminals, the ships, the whole shebang. It's extremely expensive to have it available but not actually use it.
The economic incentives (in a sort of basic example) are in favor of fossil fuel plants. It takes too long for traditional nuclear plants to have a return.
Energy generation is sadly more complicated than I had hoped as a laymen. The sources have to compete on variable demand basis along with amortized costs over years.
Nuclear needs novel designs with better economic returns, or to be given assistance by government to be more competitive on this amortized basis.
Portugal, Spain, France, Sweden, Finland, the UK, and other parts of Europe are running on renewables or low carbon nuclear for a substantial amount of time. As oezi mentioned in a sibling comment, the cost of renewables is rapidly approaching a point where they are cheaper than fossil fuels. The solutions are clear, we just need to lean into them harder (and make it painful for those who choose to continue fossil BAU despite the cost reversal).
https://yle.fi/a/74-20032375 (Finnish nuclear plant throttles production as electricity price plunges) (My note: Estonia and Finland just signed an MOU to build an additional 1GW interconnector, "EstLink3", to import more clean energy from Finland but it won't be done until early 2030s)
Germany only had 5% nuclear, those have been replaced by renewables not by coal[1].
Those reactors were at the end of their lifespans anyways. Would nuclear have been great if we never stopped investing in the technology? Maybe, but as it stands now it's much cheaper and way way faster to install renewables than to install nuclear. (Nuclear power plants have lead times in decades and cost overruns in the billions.)
As for your farming claim. Netherlands is reducing milk and meat production, products that have been artificially propped up EU wide by subsidiaries.
Meat and diary are one of the biggest contributors of greenhouse gasses and the major driving force behind deforestation (more than 80% in terms of area).
Nobody is going to starve without meat or diary, in fact you are much less likely to have certain diseases on a vegan diet. As for vitamin deficiencies, almost everybody is B12 and D deficient, including omnivores, so you should take vitamin supplements anyways. In fact most cows are B12 deficient too (not enough grass feed), so we inject them with vitamin boosters, so you might as well cut out the middleman.
Are there any environmentalist schools of thought which accept human nature for what it is, make pessimistic (realistic?) assumptions about the (un)likelihood of global coordination on this topic, and use that as a starting point for research, modeling and recommendations? So much of what makes its way into politics and mainstream media on this topic seems to be naive pipe dreams, mindless posturing, or political opportunism. The scientists seem to often make the same mistake.
The people who are attracted to geo-engineering are probably the closest fit for what you want. You can argue that geo-engineering still requires global coordination.
The types you ask for are quite rare. If you accept human nature for what it is, you have to admit the possibility that claims are being exaggerated for political opportunism, fame, grant money, clicks ... and due to the huge cost of all proposed solutions, you'd want to double check. But if you ever double check any of this stuff you're doomed because environmental research is so riven with fraud. You end up a skeptic and be immediately excluded from politics, media, and academia. That's why you can't find many of that school of thought.
Thanks! As mentioned in a sibling response, I think I'm in the "invent our way out of it" camp, but even here there are the both top-down approaches (e.g. geo-engineering) and the bottom-up approaches (residential solar, commercial solutions which do not rely on government subsidy), and I hope that we can find successful bottom-up approaches... mainly because bottom-up approaches conserve individual agency while top-down approaches are more likely to be used as political and civil cudgels against the majority of the population.
I suppose many of the institutions responsible for national security are making worst-case analyses all over the world. Of course that research wouldn't be public.
As for the "naive pipe dreams" as you put it, I suppose being more pessimistic will soon lead you being labelled as a doomer and ignored. There is some material though, like Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It's a depressing read.
Thanks for the reference. I watched some of his Joe Rogan episode to get a sense of his thesis, and it sounds like he's hoping for either litigation or a popular opinion shift to open the door to government intervention (taxes or policy) which significantly alters the incentives around emissions. He seems to mix realism (acknowledging that there are probably deeper desires at play, not just societal or governmental conventions) and wishful thinking (government policy as climate deus ex machina, countries imposing their climate agendas on other countries via war within 30 years). I suppose I belong to what he calls the "invent our way out of it" school of thought... also possibly very naive!
Cars get ever more fuel efficient, there's more investment in public transit than ever, Britain is interested in nuclearizing again, carbon offsets are widely purchased and many of our most energy hungry companies are finding ways to go to less or zero emissions.
Continuous carastrophization and disrespect for things people actually are working quite hard at doing, with implicit blame for "those other guys" to boot is how you make people try less.
Large efforts to transform the economy are quite difficult and take a long time. Transitioning away from fossil fuels entirely may be the single most complex international effort ever attempted.
You can say that all the bad guys at oil companies want more cars and more profits - but the reason they are so profitable is that energy consumption is directly related to quality of life, and until 10 or 20 years ago - fossil fuels were the way to get it.
We've spent 40 years congratulating ourselves on having done nothing, and it's not worked so far, but anyone who points that out is engaged in catastrophization...
I dunno about you, but the billions of dollars spent on renewables in my country don’t suggest ‘nothing’ is being done. And emissions in the west are slowing down. I’d say we’re almost there!
Its just like hitting snooze on an alarm clock for 2 hours straight. One deludes themselves that they will have the willpower in 5 minutes, and the end result is getting a terrible sleep AND missing class/work.
> China is also investing heavily in reducing their dependency on fossil imports.
Sure they want to import less LNG because of increased cost and unstable geopolitics. But they are continuing to build huge amounts of new coal plants (which is largely domestically sourced).
What's the purpose of denying recorded averages[1]? It's a given 1.5 will happen, as none of the drastic measures have been acted on and most goals have not been hit.
Denying recorded averages in this case is unfortunately very reasonable, because temperature graphs don't show recorded averages. That is a common misconception that governments are happy to encourage.
Modern temperature graphs are the output of models. The raw data isn't reported. This results in strange artifacts like record breaking temperatures that later become un-record breaking due to revision of historical values. In fact, the "recorded" temperature for every month in history changes every month:
NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values.
I think the track record of climate predictions using Co2 etc have been all wrong, so a reasonable person would assume that the chance of additional predictions being wrong is quite high. Additionally, the actual science (by objective scientists) demonstrating human generated cO2 having any impact on global temperature has not been found, and arguably, the theory not behaving in the way the promoters of it have predicted over the last decade with all the models being wrong is quite good evidence for the theory not being true. Its hyper political actually, so a good question for this would be why? Similar things happened with the science of Covid, it also went political, and again, why?
1. If you mean what 1.5 degrees is above, it's an anomaly, which is defined as the difference from an average computed over a somewhat arbitrary time window. I think this one is defined as 1850-1900, which is defined as "pre industrial" times. Britain and America might disagree about that classification, but this is how it's done.
2. If you mean what 1.5 degrees is below, the answer is nothing. A 1.5 degree limit is a goal designed to motivate politicians. It's not justified by any particular research. It is discussed in this interview in Der Spiegel with an IPCC climatologist [1]:
SPIEGEL: Why then have you, as one of the creators of the two-degree target, imposed such a magical limit to which all countries must slavishly adhere?
Schellnhuber: Politicians like to have clear targets, and a simple number is easier to handle than a complex temperature range. Besides, it was important to introduce a quantitative orientation in the first place, which the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change managed to elegantly wangle its way out of. And let's be honest: Even if we aim for the two-degree target, we'll end up somewhat higher. Whenever there's a speed limit, most drivers tend to go a little faster.
[...]
And of course the world won't end if temperatures go up by 2.01 degrees, let alone end suddenly. From today's scientific perspective, we could possibly live with a warming of two to three degrees
The problem is that for every politician you motivate by making things up, you also motivate another politician to stop listening to scientists in general. Maybe those other politicians are out of power at the moment, or not even in politics yet at all, but that can change. It's a recipe for deepening the divisions in society. And if / when those other politicians do gain power, they may lash out at the people who were manipulating them.
Thanks, raising 1,5 degrees on a average of 13,9 it's really a lot.
In my opinion the only way to slow down involves changing this growth oriented economy. I hope the EU conference "Beyond growth" is a start of a new movement.
You can't look at temperatures like that. 1.5° is a lot but as a ratio it's meaningless (what if the average temperature were 0?). You'd have to convert to Kelvin.
But I'm not even sure ratios matter here. The earth is a sensitive system and the amount of change it takes to knock it out of wack is peculiar to it. I don't think you can just look at ratios of (absolute) temperatures.
If the average temperature were 0°C there would be no life on earth because all the water would be frozen. No humans, at any rate.
If the average temperature were above 40°C there, again, would be no life on this earth, because proteins start coagulating at about that temperature, weird vent hole creatures at the bottom of the oceans exempted.
A temperature change of 1.5°C is a big change in the context of temperatures that support life, let alone temperatures that allow humans to have the foods and outdoor fun that we’ve enjoyed this past few hundred thousand years.
How sensitive exactly is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). Climatologists compute it using global climate models and different climatology groups have different models, so they produce different numbers. Unfortunately the span is wide and has been getting wider with time as the simulations become more detailed, so confidence in this value has been falling. This isn't meant to happen and we're rarely directly told it is, actually we're told the opposite (that there is consensus on everything).
IPCC 2013 AR5: "No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence".
The most recent IPCC reports try to solve this by de-weighting the models that compute a high ECS i.e. a highly sensitive climate. They do this because they know the models must be wrong, as they conflict with observational data. The climate can't actually be all that sensitive to CO2 relative to what some climatologists try to claim. Unfortunately most climatological research does not do this and assumes all models are equally valid, so justs averages all of them. It's clearly not valid when error bars are so wide.
Also, this situation leads to the obvious question of why not simply compute ECS from observed data to begin with? Unfortunate answer: because if you do, you get a very low value indeed (see the work of Lewis). With ECS values that low CO2 stops being a significant environmental problem and is probably less important than other environmental problems like e.g. clean rivers, biodiversity. Climatologists don't like to do this and prefer to continue deriving values from models, even though they know that at least some of them cannot be correct.
tl;dr - what you state as fact is actually one of the most bitterly argued and controversial aspects of climate science. They have a way to express it numerically but nobody can agree what the right number is.
> Reflecting the long-term warming trend since pre-industrial times, observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) for the decade 2006–2015 was 0.87°C (likely between 0.75°C and 0.99°C)
higher than the average over the 1850–1900 period (very high confidence). Estimated anthropogenic global warming matches the level of observed warming to within ±20% (likely range). Estimated anthropogenic global warming is currently increasing at 0.2°C (likely between 0.1°C and 0.3°C) per decade due to past and ongoing emissions (high confidence).
Nobody ever expresses it that way because various sources of that baseline temperature have absolute offset errors and uncertainties, but with consistent methods you can ignore the absolute offset and work with the delta over historical average instead.
Arbitrarily selected with little to no scientific basis. Check the siblings, it was some random “scientist” that pulled a number out of who knows where, under the consideration “politicians like limits and people tend to go over speed limits, so I said 1.5”. There’s no science to it, just fear mongering and grant seeking.
When this happens in any other “scientific” field HN is quick to jump on it, but when it comes to climate change we love to toe the party line.
1.5° was a good guess as to what we could achieve and what would avoid a good deal of harm. Was there a dictum from objective reality to stay below that threshold? No. It was mostly a cost benefit decision on the part of politicians and scientists.
The baseline was chosen because it had good data and was prior to the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions.
Pretty much all baselines and goals are chosen to some extent based on circumstances and possibility. That doesn't make them arbitrary. using 1970 as a baseline would ruin the pre-industrial comparison. Aiming to say under 5° would be ridiculously dangerous.
> The baseline was chosen because it had good data and was prior to the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions.
We have data going back literal hundreds of thousands of years via ice cores. Of course if we picked that data the numbers would look incredibly dumb: depending on what 57 year chunk you took as “baseline” at we’d be a delta of anywhere from -2 to 8 degrees, and where exactly on that range we’d fall would vary more or less randomly with the time of the chunk’s start.
We’re looking at the most minuscule (~100yr) chunk of 500,000 year time series and getting worried about its slope. It’s laughable.
> Aiming to say under 5° would be ridiculously dangerous.
Dangerous how? Because that’s the exact temperature range we were at ~0.4mya, and look how well we’re doing now! Civilization and everything.
> We have data going back literal hundreds of thousands of years via ice cores. Of course if we picked that data the numbers would look incredibly dumb: depending on what 57 year chunk you took as “baseline” at we’d be a delta of anywhere from -2 to 8 degrees, and where exactly on that range we’d fall would vary more or less randomly with the time of the chunk’s start.
You're ignoring that the thing we are trying to track/correct is man made warming. If that's the goal, what's a good anchor? How about the period where we have the most data prior to us causing warming? That'd be the late 19th century.
Furthermore, that data going back hundreds of thousands of years is exactly the reason we know 5° Celsius would be dangerous: we are changing the planet faster than any of those records would indicate has happened previously, outside of massive extinction events. The speed of the change is as important as the degree, so reversing 400k years of cooling in a few hundred seems like an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
> The 1.5 ºC number was chosen in an attempt to limit the severity of the impacts of warming, taking into account factors such as food security and extreme weather events.
I don't think we need more "dramatizations" on this topic but rather realistic and pragmatic analysis and solutions. Frankly, while facing this just watching a show to pat yourself on the back as being part of the solution, isn't really appealing.
It's not a "limit" of course. It's like asking when, if I put the car in gear and stand on the gas, will I go crashing through the back wall of the garage? You can figure it out but it doesn't really matter.
A bit pessimistic though right? Carbon capture through both natural and engineered methods is a thing that could have more investment/incentive if that were the case which counters the idea that just because CO2 hangs around a long time doesn't mean there's nothing to be done about it.
Obviously, it'd be great to limit the production of more CO2 going forward but I don't believe that everyone will collectively just give up.
I can not understand how carbon capture can be proposed as a solution for reducing the atmospheric CO2 levels. At best, it can be used at high-intensity production sites to reduce the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere.
We are currently pumping every day 35 billion tons of carbon into an atmosphere that already has umpteen billions of tons of carbon that needs to be removed. We are never going to have machinery or technology that can remove carbon at the necessary scale. And not only is the volume an impossibility, the energy requirements are, too: it will require more energy to remove the carbon than it provided in the first place.
Best I can figure is we need to use fast-growing solar-powered organics. Replace corn with hemp, or grow algae, something like that, and sequester the mature product at an active subduction zone. Return it back into the deep earth.
If you're curious about this, the recent IPCC report publications on mitigation have great meta-analysis on the component of carbon capture and as someone who also had put some mental stock in this (don't we all wish we could engineer our way out of this one easily?), I found it sobering. And then consider that many people found the reports too soft on CC.
It's the speed of warming that makes our current climate change so harmful. 5 degrees of warming over decades is much more harmful than the 10 degrees of warming over millennia that your link predicts. Over millennia species and ecosystems can evolve.
Not to dismiss your paper, but a lot of people hearing your comment or reading the link will think "If going to zero won't help, let's not bother going to zero".
Africa and Asia are going to want the same standard of living as the west so carbon use is only going to go up. You don't intentionally cripple industries in your country in the face of global competition.