Wind farm near Tehachapi Pass, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Ten years after the 2015 Paris Agreement provided a framework to keep average global temperatures from rising 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial levels, the world continues to advance towards climate breakdown. Time is running out on a human-induced Anthropocene: a decade of record high temperatures, more disastrous climate events per year, 428.2 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide (up 3 ppm in 2025). Why can’t we improve our lot rather than making things worse? We have the technology. “Net Zero” is a fundamental concept for good clean living.

Falsehoods abound as vested interests distract from the growing dangers, encouraging business as usual to keep oil sales in the black: Ronald Reagan claiming that trees cause more pollution than cars, George W. Bush rebranding “global warming” as “climate change,” and Donald Trump’s ongoing nonsense about clean coal, cancerous wind mills, and electric vehicle “mandates.” Instead of a change from dirty to clean, the energy transition is becoming an add-on, keeping the cash registers whirling on a 165-year-old petroleum-run world that burns over 80 million barrels each day. The assault on truth goes unchecked, ensuring that a lucrative hydrocarbon-based economy continues to pay out, rather than providing clean green energy for industry, transportation, and buildings.

Others have even done an about-turn, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose 2021 book How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need sounded promising, but has shown himself to be more interested in making money than stopping an increasingly warming world. On the nasty issue of transportation emissions (28% in the US), Gates did note, “It’s rare that you can boil the solution for such a complex subject down into a single sentence. But with transportation, the zero-carbon future is basically this: Use electricity to run all the vehicles we can, and get cheap alternative fuels for the rest.” He also added that natural gas cannot act as a bridge fuel if we are serious about net zero by 2050, stating that such “gradualism” throws good money after bad and locks us into a mistaken direction by providing short-term gain yet long-term failure.

Gates had supported all-out zero-carbon electricity and wide-scale electrification, “everything from vehicles to industrial processes and heat pumps” and for greenhouse gas emissions to reach net zero by 2050 to avoid the “catastrophic” impact of man-made global warming. But the world’s formerly richest person now thinks our “doomsday outlook” on global climate is too focussed on reducing emissions, oddly stating that more spending on health is needed to combat the warming world.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also plays both sides as the progenitor of a clean electric-vehicle future, starting with the 2008 all-electric Lotus Elise inspired Roadster, stuffed full of lithium-ion batteries. Despite having gone off the rails with his anti-government rants (standard billionaire libertarian policy to avoid paying for shared infrastructure) and far-right support (smoke-screen for small, no-regulation government), Musk will be remembered for kick-starting the twenty-first century revolution revolution as well as the global market for chemical battery storage (another potential trillion-dollar industry that conditions power for an intermittent grid). The Ford Motor Co. may have ditched its all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup for now, but is banking on the rapidly expanding electric storage market to the tune of $2 billion (lithium iron phosphate cells, 5 MWh packs).

Musk is also exploring ways to block the sun in an ill-conceived solar radiation management geo-engineering project, literally pie-in-the-sky madness, rather than selling solar for all on hundreds of millions of roofs and thousands of Tesla charging........

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