The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Net Zero by 2050 is impossible

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, there is no doubt that governments and businesses around the world have made tremendous progress in stemming their carbon emissions.  But we still have a long way to go if we are to reach a goal of net zero emissions by 2050. For certain scientists, business owners, and public officials, net zero by 2050 is a chimera, and the costs associated with denying this reality will be tremendous.  Replacing an entire global economy’s reliance on fossil fuels will take enormous sums of money, a complete reprioritization of natural resources, and an ecological paradigm shift in the global citizenry.  There are simply too many hurdles, some of which high beyond our reach, that will make this laudable goal yet another empty promise.  not only achievable, but absolutely necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Progress towards this goal in the last few years has been consistent. New technologies are on the horizon that will transform how we create, store, and transfer energy, as well as technology that will reduce carbon in the atmosphere.  For the first time, it feels like the lion's share of the global community is pulling in the same direction. And when enough communities and governments are committed to the goal, they can and will move mountains.     Arguing for the motion is Simon Michaux, Associate Professor of Geometallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland. Dr. Michaux’s long-term work is on societal transformation toward a circular economy and he advises the EU on how to best transfer from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.   Arguing against the motion is Tom Rand, Managing Partner of ArcTern Ventures and sits on the board of a number of clean energy companies and organizations. Tom’s focus is on carbon mitigation as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author and speaker. Speaker Quotes  SIMON MICHAUX: “The plan to phase out fossil fuels by 2050 or even go net-zero by 2050 is humongous and not practical”.   TOM RAND: “This is the hardest thing we've ever tried to do, but we're getting some early indications that the economy is going to start shifting in a pretty serious way”. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.     Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/   To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].     To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Jacob Lewis Editor: Adam Karch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracy. Hello and welcome to the monk debates. Every episode we provide, you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener,

with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, net zero by 2050, is an impossibility. This race to zero is a vital step towards managing climate change. But what does net zero really mean? And is achieving it even possible? Humanity has relied almost exclusively on fossil fuels for power, heat and light. Yet today could be a milestone in industrial history, Britain becoming the first major economy to turn its back on fossil fuels. The UK government has released an avalanche of documents, strategies, consultations, research, all based around the drive to reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050. Is a net zero electric grid even possible by 2050? Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard-Griffis. Well, nearly a quarter of the way through

21st century, there is no doubt that governments and businesses around the world have made significant strides in lowering their carbon emissions, but we still have a long way to go as the planet continues to warm, and many proponents are now championing the idea of net zero or carbon-neutral economies throughout the developed and parts of the developing world as soon as 2050. For some scientists, business leaders and public officials, net zero by 2050 is a chimera, and the costs associated with making this energy transition in the space of a few short decades will be out of reach for most of the world's economies. Add to the expense of achieving net zero, the technical complexities of rewiring societies around sustainable fuels, and you have a pipe dream. And that pipe dream is called

net zero 2050. Embracing, enacting and scaling a negative emissions plan to get to net zero is a herculean task. Others believe, though, that while serious obstacles are ahead in terms of achieving net zero emissions in advanced and some developing economies, it is absolutely necessary if we're going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Moreover, technology continues to show that it. It has the capability to reduce the costs and increase the scale of renewable energy at a scope and pace that would have been hard to fathom just a few years ago. In short, while net zero by 2050 is a challenge, it's also something that humanity is up to.

We've proven in the past that we can do big, bold things if there's the will and the way and the combination of the realities of climate change and the transformative effects of technology, make net zero by 2050 within the grasp of humankind. On this installment of the monk debates, we're going to discover what it would take to avoid climate catastrophe and achieve net zero by 2050 by debating the notion, net zero by the mid-century mark is an impossibility. Arguing for the motion is Simon Michaud, Associate Professor of Geo Metallurgy at the Geological Survey of Finland.

Dr. Michaud's long-term work is on societal transformation towards a circular economy, and he advises the European Union on how best to manage a transition from a fossil fuels-dependent economy to one powered by renewable energy. Arguing against the motion is Tom Rand, the managing partner of Arctern Ventures, who sits on the board of a number of transformative, clean energy companies and organizations. Tom's focus is on carbon-mobile. mitigation as an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, author, and debater. Well, Tom, Simon, welcome to the Monk debates.

Hello, thank you very much. Good to be here. Looking forward to today's debate. Simple, succinct to the point resolution, be it resolved. Net zero by 2050 is an impossibility. Simon, you're arguing in favor of the motion. So let's jump right in here. A couple minutes on our program clock.

open up this debate for us with your opening remarks. Okay, so my work was to look at the feasibility of replacing the existing system as it is now, or actually in the year 2018, is when the numbers that are used, where the entire system is completely replaced with non-fossil fuel technology and units. So a number of cars, number of trucks, number of trains, that sort of thing. And if we were to phase out fossil fuels completely and replace them with, non-fossil fuel systems as per the policy makers of the European Commission thought they were going to do, right? That this was what they thought they were going to do. Obviously, there are now

new solutions on the books that they might be able to do in there, but the plan to go to phase out fossil fuels by 2050, or even go net zero by 2050, is humongous and not practical. The second part of the work was to look at the amount of metals that we would need and what kinds and to actually determine how much metal that is and then compare that against what mining capacity we have at the moment and what geological reserves we have at the moment. And the conclusion I came to was the green transition plan as per our strategic leaders will not go to plan and we have to think of a new plan quickly. Thank you, Simon. Some interesting remarks to open up this debate. Tom, your chance now to weigh in with your opening statement against our motion, be it resolved

net zero by 2050 is an impossibility. Sure. I appreciate the opportunity. So I'm not a standard techno-optimist. I'm not going to say this is going to be easy, although I will argue that it's possible. And as a matter of fact, this is probably the hardest thing humanity has ever tried to do, frankly, rebuild our energy system soup to nuts in 25 years. I'll make four quick points about how hard we try and where we're headed.

The first is tactical. We see in the United States the Inflation Reduction Act, which is nearly a trillion dollars when you look at it, soup to nuts, which is the U.S. saying, we're going to rebuild this economy and we're going to go for a zero carbon state and we're going to make it a competitive play. That indicates someone's taken this seriously, finally. Technical cost curves do one thing over time. They come down. And performance curves do one thing over time. They go up. This is battery technology, solar technology, as we move to a solid state distributed energy

system replacing a resource-based economy to a technology-based energy system. Those curves are economically locked. Nothing any policymaker can do to change the cost curve of solar or the cost curve of battery. So that's working in our favor. And the last is just anecdotal. I mean, when we started our turn back in 2009, there were maybe five. climate tech funds in the world that did what we did, which is invest in these technologies, there are probably 100 now, and there's more every week. So capital's beginning to flow.

So those kind of indicate to me that we're going to start trying really hard, maybe, and encounter probably some hard physical limits, which I'm sure we'll hear more about. But I'll point out the winds of change are heading in our direction. This is the hardest thing we've ever tried to do, but we're getting some early indications that the economy is going to start shifting in a pretty serious way. Thank you, Tom, for that opening statement. Okay, let's go to rebuttals now. Simon, your chance to react to what you've just heard from Tom, another couple minutes on the show clock. The unfortunate thing here is I largely agree with everything he just said. We will, society, when we actually see the prize, we're going to go for it. We're going to go for

it as hard as we've ever done before. I'm actually looking at physical material flows, as in this is what we actually need to actually get on the ground. Now, where things start to change, where my work was to show, the system as it was in 2018, where we have 1.41 billion cars operating, that's what we're trying to replace. The smart money is, when we hit these hard limits, that number will greatly reduce. That's our problem solving. Society will reduce its consumption. on all fronts. The difference here, though, is our policy makers are making plans as if we will expand to roughly four times the size by the time we get to 2050. They think we're going to expand. They think we're going to get more complex, right? And they think they're going to use it with,

you know, solar panels, wind turbines. They recognize that there is some power storage buffer needed, but I think they've seriously underestimated the amount of power storage buffer. And the number of tech investment companies, yes, it's going to go through the roof. Once we understand this is what we have to do, instead of having, say, tens of companies, we'll have hundreds of companies and thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of companies all going for this. My work is to look at the long-term objective, can they hit the target that we think that we tell ourselves this is where we're going. Now, the limitations are our ability to bring things to the market. Now, there's a number of bottlenecks.

The first bottleneck we will hit is Chinese industrial capacity. As large as it is, it needs to be many times larger to make this number of solar panels, wind turbines and cars. That's if they were to cooperate with us. The next bottleneck was our existing mining production cannot deliver enough minerals to supply those metals, to hit those targets. And recycling, I'm also part of the recycling world,

recycling can only happen once we've constructed for the system. About 1% of the vehicle fleet is EV. The rest is ICE. And renewable energy represents about 4 or 5% of the energy pie in the primary circuit. So the non-fossil fuel system has actually not been constructed yet. And as it hasn't been constructed, it can't be recycled. Right. So it must come from mining. This is a mining problem, at least for the first generation. So mining production can't do it? And then so can we expand our mines? And so that goes to reserves. All right, Let's talk about reserves. Remember, it takes about 15 to 20 years to open a mine.

And for every thousand deposits we discover only one or two become mine. So the ability for the mining industry to expand fast is difficult. I think the root of the problem here, and I'd be interesting your opinion here, Tom, the commodities industry at large has been misunderstood by the economic and techno developers. Like technology development has a cycle of about two to four years. demand is there and then two to four years later supply appears, the commodities industry moves much slower, much slower and the returns are much less in terms of the amount of capital you've got to put in to get anywhere. Thank you, Simon. Fascinating debate here. Love the deep

insights from you both. Our motion today be it resolved net zero by 2050 is an impossibility. Tom, you're arguing against the motion. Let's get your rebuttal to Simon's opening statement or what you've just heard now. Yeah, I think these are good points. So I'm still going to make the case it's possible, even though I agree with a lot of us being said. But I think there are some really important points here that people need to understand about what we're kind of up against. So the first sort of optimistic point about lowered growth and changed behavior, that's the wild card. My nephews don't want cars. When cars are self-driving, we can share them. So I think there are some social changes that may come into play. But that's a while. I mean, if everyone

stopped eating meat tomorrow, we'd solve a lot of this problem. Is that going to happen? Probably not. Is it physically possible? Yes. Is it socially possible? Probably. So there are some social metrics that I think are the wildcards here. But on the more practical notes, like, so industrial capacity is a big problem, right? And I agree, this isn't like an app where you write a piece of software and it replicates itself virally and you solve this problem. We have infrastructure we need to rebuild. And on that point, I'm very sympathetic. One of the things that I've been very interested in since I began this investment path back in the early 2000s was How is it that we find technologies that can scale by orders of magnitude inside of a decade in order to be relevant, not just to my returns as an investor, but to the climate problem?

And to that, I sort of said, well, you need to tap existing supply change. You need to tap existing commodities and essentially turn existing industrial production away from one thing and turn it towards another. On the mining side, yeah, I think techno optimists vastly overestimate how fast that can happen. And there my answer is going to be a bit of arm-waving. But look, in batteries, for example, sulfur ion batteries are coming down the pipe. Sulfur-ion has a very different supply chain than lithium ion. Solid-state batteries are coming down. I mean, there's scale-up issues there for sure. Where does the capital come from to scale them?

At what point do non-venture-type investors deploy the hundreds of billions that you need to scale them up at a rate that's measurable? Those financial players are skittish. And so I think you have business constraints, but those are, Those aren't physical constraints. And so I would point to technology curves changing over time to replace what's hard to get out of the ground with something that's a bit more easy, for example. So you're not going to solve the world and get to net zero with an app. You need to do it with wires and wheels and mining and machines. And we need to think hard about where they come from because the task before us is much bigger than a policymaker might think.

Thank you. Tom, you're listening to our debate today. Be it resolved. Net zero by 2050 is an impossibility. let me join the debate now, think of some questions that are top of mind to our audience, tuning into this conversation. Simon, I want to come to you first. The purpose of these debates, if anything, is not simply to disagree, but to learn. So explain to us a little bit more where you see the real bottleneck as being. I want to really understand a little bit more what you think might be the key vulnerability in the current thinking and approach to achieving net zero, which makes you conclude that it is an impossibility to reach this goal.

by 2050. There's two basic difficulties that are actually coming in to talk about here. First is the power storage buffer. Wind and solar is highly variable, right? Power supply is very, very variable, but our power supply has to be exactly the same as demand. They have to match up to a millionth of a second. Otherwise, you know, power spikes will come and this is what cooks our computers. The problem here is current thinking.

believes that we only need about five to seven hours buffer supply. And that came down to a Princeton University study called Netsio, America, and they did a very nice job at actually analyzing day-to-day differences. Sometimes supply exceeds. Sometimes it's less. And they take the top of the peak and they keep it when supply exceeds demand, and then they keep it for a couple of days later when it's the other way around. If that's all we were looking at, then that's all we would need.

But watch this. solar power, solar radiance, the strength of the sun is less in winter than it is in summer. That is, solar power will be less effective at generating electricity in winter versus summer. Now, the IEA believes the solar and wind will have 70% of the energy mixed by 2050. That's like their base case scenario. So now we've got 38%, between 35 and 38% of the global, energy mix is now solar, so large that we can't balance it off against something else. It has to be internally self-sufficient when we've got those kind of swings across the seasons. Now at the moment,

we balance our power by trading power between power grids in nation states. And like Denmark generates power with wind, but it balances that out with power from Sweden and Germany. Thus, everything comes out. Fossil fuel systems can operate on any weather. The gas industry in particular is very, very good and balancing up our power supply. Take away those fossil fuel systems and now we've got to have these massive renewable energy systems that are so large. We've never had to do this,

which is why we've never really thought about it. We've now got to balance up that power buffer. And that hasn't really been in anyone's thinking. Now the answer, so I use 28 days as a very conservative estimate. It turns out the number is actually larger than that, but the answer is not to flog ourselves trying to find more power storage. The answer is to make an electronic technology that can cope with variable power supply.

Right. Variable voltage, variable current things that go up and down, shut off, come back on. If we can have technology that's tough enough to survive that, we don't need the buffer at all. And if you don't need the buffer at all, a lot of the material requirements of my analysis won't be needed. Right. So the innovation is not to find more resources. It's actually to find a new technology that doesn't exist yet. It's not part of current thinking. Either one of those. Now, the real problem, this is the real problem, which I'd be very interested, Tom, how do you think you can get around this? Mostly, like a century ago, across the six continents, everyone had essentially the same industrial capacity.

We all mined, we all smelted, we all manufactured. Now, a lot of that is concentrated in Southeast Asia, China in particular. It doesn't really happen much in Europe, right? A lot of the industrial capacity that happens in Europe uses components, manufactured in China and then imported. And what we do manufacture is a very, very small boutique part of the market. One of our bottlenecks going forward is not only does China not have enough manufacturing for us to go forward, but we don't have enough at all.

We've actually got to develop our own local industrial value chains. And the appetite to do that, the attitude associated with that, is really hard to get going. And so the value chains of, we're going to make batteries out of something else, that's obvious. The current thinking is we're going to go to lithium ion chemistry, and that includes solid state batteries now. They all require lithium. Right. And so, but we can make batteries out of zinc, zinc air, or sodium, or fluoride. And these things don't have resource constraints, but you've got to develop the value chain to actually do this. You've got to take it just from conceptual all the way out to a factory that's pumping out these batteries. And that is not

what we're doing. And it takes time to do that and capital and all that. So these are these are the basic problems I'm having at the moment with what I'm seeing. Could you please fix it? I can I can arm wave out of it. Sure. No, I think we agree on the problem space. And I'll argue for the for the possibility. On storage, you're right. It's a matter of switching to things like like zinc. And so the question there switches from one of physical possibility to financial and political possibility. There are trillions of dollars floating around in money markets. There's pension funds trying to figure out how to play a role and take a position in this race to low carbon. There's hedge funds like Tiger and Co2 who frankly never cared about climate

until they saw it as being inevitable this transition. So they're placing billions of dollars. So the money's there. We just got to incent them. that's why I think the Inflation Reduction Act is important. It's an early indicator that there may be some political hammers and levers to pull here in moving that capital to these kinds of places. I mean, the problem though, so now we're moving from physical to sort of social, financial, political, the downs, that's still not trivial, right? So the attitude of the finance world is such that they'll always, I think as you've pointed out in some of your previous work, they'll always love to dance second, right? So no one wants to be.

get on the dance floor first, you take all the risk of looking like an idiot, why not wait till the dance floor is half full, then you can join the party. And so again, there are solutions to that, things like the Inflation Reduction Act, which put a bunch of carrots out there and bribe people to get on the dance floor first, I think is part of that solution. Whether that political robustness remains, whether we will see a continuation of that kind of effort, I don't know. But I would point out that we are now talking about political and financial possibility, right? Social political financial dynamic can change overnight if someone passes the right law. It's like everyone's stopping eating meat at the same time. It's unlikely, but it's physically

possible. So now we're in the realm of policy and finance and so on. And so I think my position is simply open up a set of options on things like zinc air and sodium and fluoride and all the rest of it. And that's our job in the venture world. And then at some point when we get serious about scale, if you've done your job right in my world, you've enabled other actors who write bigger checks and above my pay grades, so to speak, you've built a system that can leverage existing supply chains and don't require new mining.

So that's on the storage side, yeah, look, I think you're absolutely right. There are now more attention being paid to long duration energy storage, so now they're finally looking at eight to 12 hours. This is where hydra store plays. These are the plants we're building in California. and Australia, essentially we're going to provide

base load power in Australia to a big mine using solar and hydrostore. Good solar resources there, so you don't have some of the geographical constraints, but that's certainly, now, up to 28 days, yeah, that's getting a bit more difficult. There are some technical solutions like there's a company called E-Zink, which actually stores energy in the form of physical zinc. You then dissolve it in an acid to get the energy back

and you precipitate it out. So you literally store tons and tons of piles of metal for stores. So there's possibilities there, but again, the constraint now is not technical. The constraint is going to be scale and how fast we can get financial partners and political partners and utility partners. I mean, utilities are enormously conservative. How do you get a utility to start backing technology that haven't been around? So that, but that's, now we're good. Now we're in the realm of the physically possible as opposed to physically impossible. And it's starting to play kind of my game now where super hard but possible.

Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program. It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long. And it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk debate, simply access via our website, triplew monk debates.com.

Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program. Just pick up on something you said at the opening this debate, Simon, which you said that you agreed with Tom that humanity, mankind, is going to have to get on the proverbial bandwagon of an energy transformation,

simply out of reasons of necessity, reasons of the threat of a fast warming planet. So I don't know, square that analysis of yours, Simon, with Tom's seemingly sensible, calibrated optimism here that there are viable technological solutions. Yes, they will require significant changes, but necessity is the must. Mother of invention, and Mother Nature is going to be pushing a lot of necessity onto human decision-making between now and 2050. So we will go for this really hard, and if we can find a way through, we will. And the substitution systems, like zinc, for example, all right, let's say that works.

There are some elements in this that we can't replace easily. So we've got to make the stuff out of something. The problem is the quantity. The technology itself works really well and all of these things. It's when we scale them up to be available to everyone that the trouble starts. The metal that worries me the most is copper.

If you're going to electrify anything, we're going to need lots of copper. Now, you can use aluminium in some applications, but not all. And the copper industry is already having trouble raising capital to maintain existing production. We're not running out of copper resources like the entire Andy's Mountain Range is one big job.

gigantic copper deposit, but our ability to do it economically viably is taking a hit at the moment. But the amount of copper we need to electrify everything with no substitute I've actually seen to replace copper in that electrification is woefully, it's about 18% of stated reserves are actually, stated reserves are about 18% of the copper we need just to replace what we have around us now. So the obvious answer to reconcile what Tom is suggesting with my report and the need to get to net zero by 2050, what happens is society goes without. It actually shrinks consumption and capacity on all fronts, whether it likes it or not. And we're not talking about doing it willingly. It'll do it because it will not be available, either on the market or even in strategic

context either. And that's obviously the way we're going to go. It won't be very pretty, right? But the people who control our society and who actually control the narrative of the way we're going are talking growth. More complexity, more size, four times the power grid size and consumption by 2050 compared to 2018. And so that's what I'm saying.

The narrative of what they're telling us doesn't reflect reality. And so people like Tom need to. to be given greater bandwidth, if you will, to problem solve and let these wankers in charge at the moment take a back seat. I love it. So, Tom, let me just interject you because this is, I think, a key thing of interest to a lot of listeners right now is this idea that we can have our cake and eat it too, that we can achieve net zero, and in fact, our standards of living will improve, our economies will become larger.

where do you come down on that part of this debate? Well, now we're at a meta-narrative, and I think it's really important. What do we mean by standard of living? I see no reason to give up a happy life and a secure life and make my kid happy and give him opportunities in this world. I don't need four times the size of the economic pie to do that. So I do think it is a matter of us thinking about what our priorities are. I mean, I'll give you a very practical example.

So if Europe decided it was really important to get off Russian gas, we could, there's a company called Woodland, it gasifies cellulosic material and can produce renewable natural gas. We did a quick back of the envelope calculation. Just the construction timber being sold from Europe turned into renewable natural gas could replace 50% of the Russian gas, never mind the pulp and paper. So it's physically possible, but that's an economic decision. Do you want to make money selling construction timber or do you want to make money? renewable natural gas. That's going to be expensive renewable natural gas because the opportunity cost is selling timber to somebody or selling furniture to somebody. So these are tradeoffs. And I think Simon is right to point out that we need to think about in advance what those tradeoffs are going to be. To me, the notion that we're going to build four times our energy system, have our cake you need it to and get to net zero by 2050 is nonsense. If we had started this

project 25 years ago, yeah, maybe, but we've wasted a quarter of a century. So we are now at the point where we have much more difficult decisions to make. And I do think it's a reasonable thing to ask, what is it that we want our economy to do? But to pretend there are no trade-offs, I think is probably naive. And asking about what those trade-offs are and doing it today is probably a pretty good poll position to take.

So that's sort of a, that's why the men and Arabs important. We don't have a lot of time. We will face hard choices, just like Europe could face a hard choice about renewable natural gas or selling furniture. But physically, it's possible. It's all about politics and social change now, I think. So, Simon, come back on this. Is net zero by 2050 possible on the basis that people's attitudes, their expectations, their understanding of what it means to reach their own individual potential will necessarily change as climate impacts our lives? lives and ever more complicated and negative ways, we will do this because we have to do this.

There's not a choice. So the only way we're going to do it is if we shut down a lot of our industrial actions at the moment. So we can stop it all if we want, right? But the actions our current industrialization does allows us to live the way we do. So our ability to hit the net zero by 2050 is actually a reduction in some form. What that looks like. I don't think we are not in a fit state to do that easily, but that doesn't mean it won't be done.

I would say net zero would be possible if humanity contracted its industrial consumption accordingly. you know, for example, if our fossil fuel consumption shrunk to say one-tenth of what it is now, or whatever the number is. We're talking about not at one or two percent here and there. We're talking about a massive contraction, right? And then we've got to work out, most of our system at the moment is fossil fuel dominated. But all our manufacturing, or not all, but most of our manufacturing is dependent on coal in China. Like they use coaking coal to make solar panels.

You've got to heat the silicon waferes up to 2,200 degrees Celsius. You can use biofuel as a substitute, but how much biomass do you need to remove the coal and do the same targets? We don't, for example, know how we're going to mine using solar panels and wind turbines as a power source. Like the mining method would look different, and the costs would be different, and production would be different. We still don't know what any of that looks like. right and so the simple answer to hit your targets that all three of us come into agreement you me and the moderator is if humanity actually contracts its consumption regardless of what that means for human society well that's why it's a meta narrative

and it's a really i mean i here's a very practical example before covid people flew halfway around the world for board meetings every quarter they thought that was necessary It turns out it's not. We replaced it all with Zoom. And it turns out most of those chips are just away games for people who wanted, you know, three or four days out of the house, go have a dinner somewhere. That's a very simple example of a fundamental energy change that took nothing away from one's lifestyle or one's ability to do something. I think there are many examples of that, you know, particularly in sort of the business world. And when we talk about reducing energy consumption and industrial capacity, it can sound very dark. It can sound like we're all going to live in Havels, and this is a narrative that I don't want this to descend into, because I am enlarged in agreement we need to think about trade-offs. We either hit three or four degrees and we take trade-offs there, which is Mad Max, or we begin to talk seriously about what our economy is for, what kinds of things we want to produce and why we produce them. And again, if you have those conversations now, we're better prepared for this transition. We'll mitigate it with technology and all the rest of it. So from that perspective, I think there is this interesting and hard. problem to solve, which is figuring out what the physical constraints might be and how we work within those physical constraints to continue to operate our economy where we don't live in cardboard boxes sitting in the forest. Because I think that's not where this ends up. When we talk about economic constraints, I do not think it leads to a lowered lifetimes and sort of a life of

scarcity. I think we rethink what we want and if we act accordingly, we can still have it, but we won't be able to, for example, fly halfway around the road for a board meeting. We're not going to be able to sit on our private jets and fuel it with biofuel and think we're green. We're not going to all have our own cars and drive everywhere we want. Like those are choices to make, but they don't affect who we are, whether we're happy, whether our kids are going to be healthy. Final question before you go to closing statements. I mean, China is continuing to build. massive coal-fired energy power plants ad nauseum.

They've just announced a whole new slew of these, you know, large-scale energy plants. Where does that take us in terms of 2050? That's actually one of the elephants in the room. Incidentally, Tom, what you're saying there about how we should actually change our priorities and decide who we are. That means we've got to, we will grow up as a species. and we will take our place as a genuinely sustainable species that's more internally balanced. But what we're suggesting is very, very, very far from the plans being rolled out of how are we going to do this.

And that was the purpose of my work. And once that has been agreed upon, my work becomes obsolete, and now we actually move into the future to make something else. So thank you. As to the question of China, that's a nasty one. Both China and India are consuming vast amounts of fossil fuels. at the moment they're using those fossil fuels to make us stuff, which we then buy. We buy it because we don't make it ourselves.

So while we must use less fossil fuels, you often see, for example, here in Finland, a general refusal to allow a mining lease to go ahead. But the people advocating against that mining lease will then go down to the shop and buy a computer made in China. Mine in areas that, in ways that we, we would consider it illegal and not very nice. So we're making choices that are not conducive to becoming more sustainable and ethical.

How do we convince China and India? They want to actually get their middle class up to the point where they're getting access to the same technology. And so that's billions of people. And they're outside our political authority. And so two things. we've got to become self-sufficient and get off. They'll continue making the stuff while we want to buy it. And we'll want to buy it while there's no alternative.

So first we've got to work out that problem. Then there is the problem. How do we actually convince these two countries to come to the party, recognize these problems and do something about it themselves? And at the moment, we're very combative. We're very aggressive in how we interact. We like sanctioning people and telling people what to do and then they respond in kind.

And so now we've actually got this dynamic between all these nations. That's really, really not very nice at all. And it's getting to the point where they're going to stop talking and will go kinetic. That's not helpful. So we've somehow got to change the dialogue between nation states where we can be a little bit more grown up and actually have a frank conversation about what the real challenges are. You know, one of the great successes of the past couple of decades, depending on how you engaged success was the ability of capital to own institutions like the WTO. So WTO was set up. I was in

Seattle during the famous battle of Seattle when the WTO was being formed. And the people that were in the room negotiating that deal decided the priority was the free and easy flow of capital and the protection of the assets that capital bought once it had flowed into jurisdictionally. And the WTO was very successful at that. I've argued extensively that rather than rebuilding from the ground up, One of the best things we could do is capture existing institutions like the WTO, to whom we've already given up a great degree of sovereignty, and turn the WTO into a climate hawk. So one of the ways in which we can regage this dynamic between nation states

is have the WTO act as essentially climate referee. And so full cost of carbon accounting and all the rest of it could be incorporated into our economic decisions, whether or not citizens are virtuous climate hawks. or whether they just want to buy a stereo, inside that economic activity, you could embed all kinds of signals about how much carbon is there. So I do think there are institutions that are set up

that can better mold and shape these relationships and better shape how consumers transmit information to places like China in order to give them the signals that they want to abide by, which are economic signals, to lower the carbon intensity of those products. and so on. Yeah, let me just be conscious of our time here, gentlemen. You've been very generous today with yours. So you're listening to our debate, be a resolved net zero by 2050, is an impossibility. I'd like to go to closing statements, an opportunity for both of you to kind of sum up your key

arguments and ideas. What we need to do is actually recognize biophysical reality. We've got to bring our entire enterprise into alignment with the physical reality of the resources we're consuming, both now, and in the system we might go to. We've got to establish a new relationship with energy, a new relationship with materials, resources, a new relationship with the environment, and a new relationship with each other.

Now, it sounds complicated, and this will involve different technologies, but it's actually one relationship. It's actually one change. And as a species, we've got to decide to do this. I don't think we're there yet in recognizing widespread what we need to do. We've got the bits on the ground. We can see the shape of it roughly, but we're not quite there yet. But that's what we need to do. And existing leadership seems to be either incapable or

inappropriate in how to get there. They're all still thinking like it's 1950. Fascinating. Tom, you've been arguing against the motion. Sum up this debate for us. Whether we hit net zero by 2050 or not as almost academic, what we need to do is try as hard as we can. I mean, these are, These are kind of somewhat arbitrary limits. What we're going to do is heat up, and we're just trying to lower the temperature as much as we can. I mean, frankly, 1.5, 2 degrees, I think is in the rearview mirror now, and we're really just trying to batten down the hatches and mitigate

as much as we can in order to avoid adaptation, which is going to be really, really difficult. That requires having hard conversations about priorities. It's hard to talk about scarcity, and so the job of technology providers is to minimize the scarcity that we might need to encounter in order to mitigate this problem as best we can. And so, you know, temperature targets, they're the wrong focus. I think what we need to do is having an all hands-on deck moment, as Simon points out,

and just say, how do we expand the art of the possible? So whether or not we hit net zero by 2050, I think it's a target worth racing for, and I think the kinds of topics that Simon is brought up about resource scarcity, time to mine things, economic priorities are exactly, the kinds of questions we need to layer on top of the techno-optimist, let's build a low-carbon economy kind of arm-waving stuff that folks myself often get caught in because we're trying to expand the art of the possible and we're trying to bring people on board and build a bigger tent and talk about economic possibility. I'm going to continue to do that, but I take

at face value and I take quite seriously the idea that we need this conversation to move past techno-optimistic possibilities into facing resource scarcities and beginning to make hard decisions. Well, thank you Simon and Tom for a terrific debate. This is often a very kind of febrile subject with incoherence and rank speculation, but the two of you have approached it with really a great sense of listening to each other, acknowledging good ideas, smart disagreement. I've certainly learned a lot and I'm sure our audience has too.

So thank you so much both for coming on the Monk Debates today. It was a pleasure. You're a real pleasure. Appreciate the opportunity. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Simon Mischo and Tom Rand. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us email to podcast at monkdebates.com.

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