What is some good news

Reading time: 4 minutes

TL;DR

Hot take

There’s a lot of doom and gloom but there’s also a lot of reasons for hope.

We’ve already done a lot

We are deploying renewable energy at a massive scale already. It’s not fast enough, and we also need to set some deadlines on the fossil fuel infrastructure but we can still be amazed at how much renewable energy has been deployed to date.

The electric vehicle transition is starting to get underway. This will take time as people don’t replace their vehicles every 12 months, we need to wait for the entire fleet to be replaced.

All those things have already made a difference. If we’d just expanded fossil fuels to cover that extra energy demand, we’d have increased carbon emissions even further. So we are already slowing it down.

Despite all the attempts at delays we are still making progress. I really enjoyed Ketan Joshi’s book Windfall which chronicled some of the climate action delay history of Australia, because it showed that we made progress even despite all the inept attempts to stop progress. Yes it would have been better without the delayers adding a handbrake to the progress, but we triumphed eventually.

So that takes care of some major things - the electricity network and ground transport. There are other sectors that we don’t have all the answers for yet, like agriculture, manufacturing (steel, concrete).

We have most of what we need

Renewable energy mostly in the form of solar and wind - we just need more of it. Complimented with batteries and clever management.

We’re not pinning our hopes on nuclear fusion, or solid-state batteries or small modular nuclear reactors. If any of those things come along while we roll out the known solutions: fantastic. But we can’t and aren’t waiting, we are on a time-critical mission.

Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels. That’s it, that’s the tweet.

California recently ran on 100% renewable energy at the peak of the day (so a short period of time) for 17 out of 18 days (in 2024). This is only at the peak of the day for now, but it’s something we’ve been told was impossible for decades now.

A lot of people want climate action

More people than you think want climate action. They’re just not talking about it because it’s not a thing you bring up everyday. At the same time, there’s a faith that “they” are taking care of it - the usual suspects like governments and industry. That’s why we vote governments in, to take care of the hard stuff while we go to work each day.

So we’re well past the point of having to convince people that we need to take climate action … but we still have a lot of work to do to cut-through the delay propaganda and to actually change people’s habits.

We’re starting to ban fossil fuels

In 2023 the ACT in Australia became the first jurisdiction to ban fossil gas connections in newly built houses and was then followed by the state of Victoria. This is the beginning of the end of the expansion of fossil fuels. It’s a starting point but it will hopefully snowball in the years ahead.

We’re starting to build better

In additional to all-electric houses, more and more people are aware of the need to be energy efficient - choosing heat pumps and double glazing, maximum insulation and other techniques to reduce the heating and cooling costs of new builds.

Unfortunately it still takes a savvy consumer as a lot of builders need to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing things differently for only a moderate cost differential. (I am of course speaking from an Australia context where our houses are built with little regard to living comfort and thermal efficiency.)

Greenwashing is rampant but it’s being called out

Citizens and governments are becoming increasingly aware of greenwashing techniques and are calling them out. Companies are hiding behind weasel words and flimsy schemes that appear to be doing good but the wider community is starting to see through this. Organisations like CommsDeclare are waging successful campaigns highlighting greenwashing.

Government regulators are also starting to take action against greenwashing.