[marcosdumay]

Define "catastrophe".

Are we already in one?

I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade, and for carbon capture to become a practical thing on the next one. But depending on what you want, even this isn't enough.

[wiz21c]

I won't define catastrophe, but :

> I do expect our emissions to get almost halved during this decade

That's really good news ! I mean it's so far away from what I know that I sure have missed something. Could you give a few pointers that illustrate your expectation ? (honest question)

[marcosdumay]

I am more optimist than normal here. Most people take different conclusions from the same data.

But I do expect electrification to increase a lot this decade, and for renewables to take over the electricity generation so completely that other sources will only be able to compete with batteries, not with original renewable electricity.

If you extend our current trends, you will get into more than half of the energy being non-polluting. But most of it being new consumption, instead of replacing older sources.

Most sources on electricity agree to an unsettling level, so they are probably repeating each other. Here's one as good as any:

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/electricity-g...

For vehicle electrification, it's harder to find data, but everything has a huge rate of growth that will probably saturate on this decade:

https://www.iea.org/articles/global-ev-data-explorer

What will change on this decade that people usually don't take into account on their conclusions is that wind to a small extent and PV for a huge extent are already cheaper than most electricity sources, and getting cheaper by the day. The limits on PV price are so low we probably won't even be reach them this decade.

That places a real force on every process that heavily uses energy to take advantage of that cheap PV energy, or get outcompeted. Or in other words, the economic reality that have always got in the ways of renewables are now getting in the way of fossil fuels. So I expect the fossil fuel infrastructure to become obsolete and that new renewable energy that we will get to replace it instead of adding to it.

Notice that this is already happening on that data above. On a linear trend it's not fast enough to replace half of our emissions this decade, but on an exponential trend, it's more than fast enough. Well, the change into renewables has been exponential for decades already, that's how immature technologies work. Given that the limits on PV price are so low, I still don't expect it to change this decade.

[wiz21c]

Thx for this answer, it's quite convincing. I'll look at the trend in electrification instead of the trend of CO2 emission !