Climate Reality Check!
Written by Ben Boyang
Here in 2026, 16% of our global energy comes from renewables.
So 84% comes from oil, gas and coal. To reach our target of Zero Net Emissions by 2050 we must replace those fossil fuels with renewables. We have been trying to do this ever since we first learnt about climate change nearly 40 years ago. In that time we have managed to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels by just 4%. Renewables have increased 1000 fold, but that barely covered the increase in energy use….until today!
For the first time in history total global emissions have plateaued, so we can finally begin our quest, but because we have left our run far too late we have set ourselves up to fail. Way back In 1980 annual emissions were 20 billion tons. They are now 40 billion tons. In 1990 The Australian Greens were formed. They were committed to begin drastically reducing our emissions immediately. No one took them seriously. If we had taken them seriously we would have reached zero emissions long ago. But we did not listen to them then and we will not listen to them now. At the eleventh hour we still feel there are so many more important things to worry about than climate collapse. Are we waiting for it to collapse in front of our eyes, like a melting glacier?
At present a meager 16% of our energy comes from renewables. To reduce fossil fuel use to zero we must increase renewables from 16% to 100%, an increase of 525% We have 24 years left to do this, so we must increase renewables by 22% every year. To that we must add the predicted 2.2% yearly increase in energy use. As renewables only provide 16% of our energy needs, that means a 13.75 % increase in renewables as well as the 22% yearly increase required, bringing it up to a staggering 35.75%.
But don’t despair, that number will go down by 1/24th every year, so it will get ever so slightly less impossible.
(Then we have data centres, predicted to need somewhere between 2% and 4% more electricity per year. I don’t know if the massive jump in electricity demanded by data centres has been factored in yet, but some of their owners say they will need an extra 60% of our electricity when they are all up and running)
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To put this in perspective, last year we increased our renewables by a record 15%, so this year we must more than double that record. That’s like Usain Bolt running 100m in 5 seconds. If we fail to do that we must add the difference to next year’s target. So if we can only manage say, a 25.75% increase, next year our target becomes 35.75% + 10% = 45.75%….and so on. Every year becomes more and more impossible. (is it possible to become more impossible?)
….and that is the easy part. Even if we manage to achieve this herculean task against all the odds, we are still less than halfway to our target. We still have the 60% of our emissions that lie outside the energy sector, that is the hard part!
We have as yet, no viable way of reducing most of these emissions, including things like methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture, and co2 from cement production and aviation. We do have some vague untested ideas about how to tackle these problems, let’s hope they all turn out to be a goer, or we are fucked!
Economic Decline
At this point I imagine some of you will be feeling more than a little disheartened, but this is no time to wallow in despair, all is not lost, I have a plan! There is still a pathway out of this nightmare. You see, there is a very simple way to dramatically reduce our emissions, a way we have not yet been willing to contemplate. We just have to fly less, use less concrete, eat less meat and buy less discretionary items, basically adopt a less consumerist and materialist lifestyle. But we are not going to do that are we? No way! We have had nearly 40 year to do that, but we did not. In that time consumption has not dropped, it has risen 2 and a half fold, and emissions have more than doubled. So we can forget about that option altogether, banish it from our minds, not going to happen! We decided to ignore the fear-mongers and the doomers and gloomers and have one hell of a party…to celebrate the end of ‘civilization as we know it’ perhaps?
So we have made it absolutely crystal clear that we refuse to change our lifestyles in order to prevent some unimaginably terrible future that we don’t really believe is ever going to happen, it is just so far out of the ambit of our collective experience. We just can’t get our heads around it, so we have given up trying. But that terrible future becomes more real every single day, as the glaciers collapse and the fires burn.
But even if we refuse to compromise our lifestyles voluntarily, they will change fundamentally and irrevocably anyway, it is inescapable, so let’s just go with the flow!
The free market economy has had a good run, but it is beginning to stall, and is badly in need of palliative care. The stats are undeniable: global growth has halved in the last 20 years from around 5-6% annually twenty years ago, to less than 3% today, and heading South. A slow but inexorable decline, despite every government in the world doing their utmost to prop it up. Then just when we need a pick-me-up, the weather kicks in and kicks us in the guts – wave upon wave of disasters, each one more awesome than the last. It’s already becoming a drag on the economy, an anchor weighing down a leaky boat, and when our crumbling hulk finally succumbs, we will be left to fend for ourselves as best we can. The tech broligarchy (tech bros) and fellow billionaires have already snaffled the life boats: buying up gold and fossil fuel assets, hoarding gold bullion in their bunkers under the mountains, assembling private militias, prepping for collapse. They know what is coming, and who will get the blame, the perpetrators!
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Ben Boyang September ‘26
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All the data for this article can be found at Our World in Data
Here is a good place to start…
