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Originally Posted by PostandIn
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At the risk of sounding condescending and combative, this is actually a pretty awful paper with nothing but flimsy smokescreens.
Firstly, I like to get an idea of where these kinds papers are coming from. This is from the "Global Warming Policy Foundation", which is a think tank funded by Oil industry. The author himself is from the laughable "Friends of Science" group that is also funded by Oil and Gas.
Inherent bias aside let's look at what it's stating. The author states that decarbonisation isn't possible and even calls the paper "A Transition to Reality", as if those who are working on it aren't based in reality. This is a pretty obvious bit of trolling here and kinda speaks to the depth of argument the author actually has here. He's saying that not only an arbitrary timeline of complete decarbonisation by 2030 (which not one important person is advocating) isbn't feasible, he's arguing that decarbonisation itself isn't feasible. Starts with a complete straw man argument here to try and cast aspersions on something that is feasible.
His first argument is that historically, electricity generation energy technologies take a median of 43 years to reach commercialization, therefore that's too long to reach decarbonisation in any meaningful timeline. The first communication technology commercialisation changes took decades too. Now it takes months/years. We know decarbonisation won't happen in 11 years, that's impossible. That doesn't mean we can't start seriously decreasing carbon emissions.
The next argument is a political one, and I'll give him some of the argument here. Governments will need to "pick winners and losers" in order to generate the changes necessary and that is inherently difficult. However, he fails to mention that the government already does this in every single sector except now they'll need to pick different ones and that's what the author and his benefactors have a problem with. While this will continue to be a persistent barrier to conversion to renewables, economic realities may make some of these concerns moot. For example, both wind and solar have become much cheaper than coal and these technologies are still in early on in the development stage and will become even cheaper.
The next barrier he discusses is where current generation is and how far it needs to go to get to decarbonisation. It's a significant step yes, but it's kind of the whole point, right? I mean, yes, the switch will need to be significant. It's a large change. Yup
I'm not going to go through the rest of the paper point by point on here, but it really lacks any sort of critical thinking. Complete decarbonisation is impossible in 11 years, so he's right I guess. But we do need to significantly decrease carbon emissions and soon, so what exactly is this paper trying to explain? This is transparently a paper put into the ether to push against decarbonisation policies by those who do not want them