Current climate policies will take almost 200 years to reach the 2050 emissions targets and require almost $100 trillion in investments. By attempting to meet unrealistic targets we’ll leave future generations with failed policy and the debt to go with it. Jan Emblemsvåg, Professor in the Department of Ocean Operations and Civil Engineering at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, argues that nuclear energy is the only viable solution to our climate crisis, and that the excess heat nuclear energy generates can create cheap, plentiful water that can be used to convert carbon into agricultural land and forests.

The world has decarbonized by 10.2% over the last 20 years. Most people believe that this is the result of current climate policies; however, as shown in a new scientific and peer-reviewed article, it is not.  Only 5.2% of decarbonization is attributable to current climate policies. The rest comes from cleaner fossil fuels, cleaner fossil power, and the expansion of hydroelectric power. The stagnation of nuclear power during this time, which makes up less of the energy we use than it did 20 years ago, has been a major mistake.

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Current climate policies will take almost 200 years to reach the 2050 targets and require almost $100 trillion in investments.

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The OECD also identified a large gap between policies and results, and that the implementation of climate policies by governments is slowing, widening the gap between policy action and climate commitments. In fact, global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.1% from 34.75 billion tonnes in 2022 to 35.13 billion tonnes in 2023, leaving the world 13.4% behind the linear progression line towards the Net Zero targets in 2050. Worse, the gap is increasing.

So far, global expenditure on solar and wind power and the associated grid expansion has ramped up to approximately $7.3 trillion, suggesting that each percentage point of improvement costs historically almost $1500 billion. Using simple arithmetic, the meager improvement in greenhouse gas emissions and the large expenditures indicate that current climate policies will take almost 200 years to reach the 2050 targets and require almost $100 trillion in investments without accounting for population growth or a rise in standard of living.

Moreover, the amount of mining and its impact on biodiversity will be staggering. The amount of waste will be almost equally large due to the low degree of recycling and reuse. The only answer the proponents of the current policy paradigm have offered is that humanity will innovate itself out of these challenges. In this case, it is certainly time to start because the current policy path cannot be pursued in the long term from a resource constraint perspective for two reasons.

First, a thorough bottom-up analysis of what decarbonization using today’s policies will imply shows that a basic shortfall of materials is expected within a relatively short time. In fact, by 2040, the International Energy Agency forecasts that the current extraction of materials from the Earth must quadruple, with some demand for some at 30-60 times today’s extraction rate. These facts are so dramatic that innovation is basically insufficient—nothing short of revolutions on multiple material segments will do.