> Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried.
If a country does this today, they will be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to a neighbouring country which continues using coal. All their manufactured goods will end up more expensive, nobody will buy their exports, and their population and economy will suffer.
Only a few countries have done this to any extent, and they are countries who either don't have many fossil fuels, or whose main exports don't involve energy.
The only real solution is for all countries to agree to limit/stop digging up coal/oil/gas at the same time, and to apply punitive sanctions to countries who do not adhere to the agreement.
There isn't really any other way. OPEC could do it if it had a few more members. The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. Nobody else can really do it.
That may have been true a decade ago, but today renewables provide the cheapest electricity.
We have a clear tech path that leads to cheaper and more abundant energy, we just need to choose it and stop listening to the fossil fuel interests that don't want the transition to happen.
Technology development accelerates the more we produce it. Accelerate the purchase of storage and renewable tech, and the quicker we will get to a future of abundant clean energy.
> That may have been true a decade ago, but today renewables provide the cheapest electricity.
I think that depends on where you are. Certainly in the US I’ve seen articles claiming that new wind is cheaper than running already built coal plants, and fully believe it. That seems unlikely to be true everywhere, though. Why would China be building expensive coal burners if renewables are so cheap?
Planning processes from five years ago or ten years ago don't always get updated. And corruption is still a problem in China. Perhaps not as bad as, say, India, but still an issue. Which is to say, that not everywhere makes cost optimal decisions all the time.
Even the IEA, a huge skeptic of renewables, that consistently makes ridiculous claims limiting the potential for solar and wind, acknowledged that solar is cheapest:
Decision makers often have huge biases from past data and cultural influences. The bias against renewables and storage in the energy industry is absolutely oppressive. And in most infrastructure decisions, decision makers don't have to answer to shareholders about getting outcompeted by a smarter decision maker that made a better choice.
It is most definitely the cheapest way to heat houses and run cars. At least on raw economic costs; some utilities inflate electrical costs relative to natural gas costs in a way that makes a heat pump more expensive than natural gas heating, but that's just a distortion of the underlying economic costs, and only for some people.
We don't yet have electrically driven steel or concrete production methods, but this is a great opportunity for startups and new technology.
Steel will be more straightforward to decarbonize, but even if decarbonized steel is 50% more expensive, it will have negligible impact on the cost of downstream projects. And the industry can then apply their profit margins to a higher base cost. It's likely that either electrolyzed hydrogen, or with more direct electrical application with new methods that are more like aluminum refinement.
For concrete, it will be far more difficult, as a base chemical reaction to produce concrete releases carbon. However, there's significant room for improvement and new chemistries other than Portland cement, but worst case we will need to do carbon capture and sequestration. This will be more expensive, but it remains to be seen by what factor.
In any case, the extra expense of these most difficult to decarbonize areas will be offset by new opportunities from abundant, cheaper electricity.
The suggestion I've seen is that key countries will put a price on carbon, and then add tariffs to imports from countries that lack a carbon price. That at least goes some way to removing the economic disadvantage.
There is unfortunately still a lot of scope to game such a system.
A country can sign up to the carbon pricing scheme, but then subsidise disadvantaged industries by almost the same amount as the carbon taxes they pay. See the EU carbon trading scheme for example - companies are given (for free) credits representing the carbon they emitted in past years.
A multi-country carbon taxation scheme gives every country a strong incentive to either collect the tax badly on their own companies, or make policies to effectively reimburse companies the tax collected.
It's probably still the best approach despite this shortcoming.
If a country does this today, they will be at a severe economic disadvantage compared to a neighbouring country which continues using coal. All their manufactured goods will end up more expensive, nobody will buy their exports, and their population and economy will suffer.
Only a few countries have done this to any extent, and they are countries who either don't have many fossil fuels, or whose main exports don't involve energy.
The only real solution is for all countries to agree to limit/stop digging up coal/oil/gas at the same time, and to apply punitive sanctions to countries who do not adhere to the agreement.
There isn't really any other way. OPEC could do it if it had a few more members. The US could do it if they were prepared to threaten sanctions or millitary force. Nobody else can really do it.