How we get off fossil fuels looks very roughly like this:
- Generate electricity without burning stuff (wind, solar, geothermal, storage, and maybe nuclear if it’s cheap enough)
- Electrify everything we can (electric vehicles, elecrified mass transit, ebikes, heat pumps for home and district heat, nitrate fertilizer manufacturing, etc)
- Stop doing the things we can’t (a few industrial processes)
I’ve been saying for a decade now that electrification is the only viable way forward. All our energy efforts should be focused on that.
Electricity can be made in many ways that don’t require burning fuel, and that doesn’t release CO2. And electricity is in many ways the superior form of energy to achieve most common tasks.
For instance a heatpump running on electricity made from burning wood in a power-plant, only requires half the wood to generate the same amount of heat as if the wood was burned to heat the house directly.
An electric car similarly running on electricity from burning oil in a power-plant, still use slightly less oil than a comparable ICE car. Because the power plant is more efficient than an ICE engine, and the EV has very little waste.
When you can produce clean electricity from wind turbines, hydro power, solar panels or even nuclear power plants, the pollution and CO2 generated by that energy consumption, is only a tiny fraction of conventional energy sources, like burning fossil fuel.
Even steel smelters can now be powered by electricity, and AFAIK they are already working on implementing that in Sweden.
Something I was told years back was impossible, which it obviously isn’t.
It is way easier to make electricity environmentally friendly and sustainable, than it is for any form of burning fuel. Even If you can burn fuel without CO2 and pollution, that too can be used to generate electricity.
The future is 100% electric.
Almost everyone have been saying that. Except the oil industry lobbyists.
Well our politicians haven’t, because electricity has been heavily taxed.
And recently there have been problems with the grid having problems keeping up.
If you want people to move to electricity, you would want to make it advantageous for users to switch to electrical sources.
But all we’ve had is that EV cars have been taxed less than ICE cars. But that’s only a single segment of energy use, although it’s a big one.