How excellent, so that's climate change dealt with then

Isn't this just wonderful news?

Falling costs of electric vehicles and solar panels could halt worldwide growth in demand for oil and coal by 2020, a new report has suggested.

A scenario that takes into account the latest cost reduction projections for the green technologies, and countries’ pledges to cut emissions, finds that solar power and electric vehicles are “gamechangers” that could leave fossil fuels stranded.

Polluting fuels could lose 10% of market share to solar power and clean cars within a decade, the report by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Carbon Tracker Initiative found.

As Bjorn Lomborg pointed out two decades ago all that is necessary to avoid the terrors of climate change is that non-fossil fuels become competitive with fossil. As the Ur document of the whole discussion, the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios also pointed out. If our globalised and capitalist society moves away from coal and toward those renewables then we move from the dread A1FI to A1T. The effect of this being, in their own terms, that climate change moves from being a serious problem we must do something about to one that could have been a problem but we've already done something about it.

Do note that this is all within the mainstream of that climate science. Get off coal and onto solar and we're done.

Now, we might want to cavil a little and think that maybe it won't work at night and so on but as we say, this is entirely within the mainstream of standard climate science. Get solar, and or wind, cheap enough and we're really pretty much done. Just sit back and watch as the standard technological and capital replacement cycles move from emitting to non- such energy sources.

And thus we're done.

Oddly, those at the Grantham Institute seem not to realise all of this which is why we need to remind them. As we are. All that we ever needed to do to beat climate change, from those usual and mainstream climate science sources, is get non-fossil power cheap enough. And as their report today says we've done that.

Hurrah, eh?

 

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