[kragen]

they will continue rising until the late 02020s because ramping up pv production is a relatively slow process and because transport mostly can't be electrified without syngas or something similar

of course syngas will happen but it's not an overnight thing, especially if what gets adopted is hydrogen instead of something like fischer–tropsch-sourced diesel

[graeme]

As the original poster noted, energy is useful. Carbon won’t decline unless electric beats it for baseload, with batteries or somesuch.

Merely being cheaper won’t do it. As long as more expensive sources are useful, and as long as solar is supply constrained, no reason that solar growth would cut into carbon usage.

[kragen]

'unless electric beats it for baseload' seems like an error; perhaps you meant 'unless renewables beat it for baseload'

the cheaper/useful/constrained trichotomy seems like a similar error; supply constraints manifest as higher prices, and the usefulness of a fairly fungible commodity like energy is entirely relative to its price

pv with batteries is already cheaper than fossil-fuel sources in much of the world, and largely as a result, fossil-fuel consumption for electrical generation is already slowly dropping in much of the world; this has already resulted in a rash of bankruptcies of coal companies

overall fossil-fuel consumption is not dropping, but will be within a few years