• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    That’s simply not true. We don’t even have the technology and resources today to achieve a zero carbon economy. We need a ton of new investment across a ton of industries.

    I think the average person believes that we can just switch gasoline cars over to EVs and we’re done. That’s not even close! Less than 1/6th of emissions come from transport (all cars, trucks, trains, and ships combined).

    Since CO2 emissions grow by about 0.9% per year, even if we eliminated all emissions from transport overnight (but did nothing else) it would buy us less than 20 years before emissions were back where we started.

    There’s no silver bullet that billionaires are somehow hiding from us. Curbing emissions is going to take huge investments across many different sectors of the economy and new technologies in many different industries. Take solar panels for example. We could not have achieved their modern levels of efficiency and production capacity without going through decades of advancement in semiconductor technology. No one was holding that technology back. It has seen enormous investment since the mid 20th century for the development of faster CPUs and GPUs. Solar simply rode on the coattails of the computer revolution. It could not have advanced the way it has on its own.