In 1972 when I was supposed to be studying for my A levels I was completely distracted by the book Limits to Growth. This book was roundly castigated, especially by industry who scoffed at the predictions of peak oil and gas and environmental collapse. But half a century later, we can see how accurate most of the predictions have proved to be. The one that scared me the most and still does is climate change and that has given purpose and focus to my entire career and now into retirement.
Over the years I became more and more despondent and angry as I saw decade after decade of climate science ignored, as climate record after record collapsed. I saw COP after COP fail ignominiously as commercial vested interests prevailed over the science and the totally bleeding obvious – a survivable future trumps economy because without people there is no economy.
I saw the IPCC doing great science but still failing to give the precautionary advice needed to the UN! The UNFCCC mandates that UN member nations act with precaution on climate even where the science is uncertain, but the academic peer review process stops uncertain science in its tracks and the summary reports are so highly politically moderated.
I saw my own efforts in environmental life-cycle assessment, building and infrastructure rating tools in UK, US and Australia substantially lobbied by commercial vested interests to Greenwash.
I saw how the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals were used by governments and corporations spruiking their progress on 15 nice-to-haves while utterly trashing progress on the two existential threats to our entire species forever – namely climate and ecology (where ecology depends most on climate).
In 2017, when the “Hothouse Earth” research pulled together different strands of research on the compounding feedback loops of the climate system and implied that we needed to be at net zero emissions by 2030 (or before 2°C of warming) otherwise climate change would probably accelerate unstoppably to 4-6°C of warming! Surely climate tipping into accelerated warming due to feedback loops would make our political and corporate leaders wake up.
When Greta Thunberg and the Sydney School Strike for Climate started in 2018 I thought, ‘At last – the next generation gets this and now they will force everyone to wake up and demand the changes we need.’ When XR took over London I thought, ‘It’s started – this will spread globally and we will make the changes needed, but is there still enough time.’
The 2019 bushfires in Australia were unprecedented and I thought that this would be the turning point – mass protest must surely follow and the change must happen, but is there enough time?
Meanwhile, in China, where no protest is tolerated but the government is run by engineers and scientists, Beijing was shrouded in pollution – dust storms combined with horrific pollution from the manufacturing industries that were now starting to provide all of the world’s needs and drag China out of poverty.
China embarked on a radical plan – plant trees everywhere to stop the dust, drawdown pollution and clean the air and transition as fast as possible to decarbonised energy and develop its industry to supply a world with the decarbonised tech that a survivable industrialised future would have to depend on.
So I am a card carrying doomist, with prepper tendencies, for my kids and grandkids. My friend and colleague Prof Peter Newman chastises me regularly for being so negative – arguing that things are changing, but not perhaps as fast as they should.
We are working together on forecasting the lives lost to climate change and the results are catastrophic if we don’t change. In his view we will change just in time, but to me this seems highly unlikely.
For this article I used crude S-curve modelling on the high-level statistics for Australia and globally to explore whether Peter is right – I dearly want to be wrong!!
The main focus is electricity, because decarbonised electricity is the key to a decarbonised future, as Saul Griffith has demonstrated – we need to Electrify Everything. So how fast are we progressing and, if we take the past trend and model it to an S-curve, how quickly are we/can we decarbonising globally?
First the good news. If we look at the historic data for Australia or globally it doesn’t look promising, except that the growth in solar and wind has been phenomenal and modelled to an S-curve it is likely to surprise us all and displace all fossil fuelled power by 2032 for Australia and by close to 2050 globally.
Now the bad news – 2030 is the real deadline for not triggering climate runaway, so a near miss is as bad as missing by a mile for a long-term survivable future and Australia is fairly contradictory on its climate commitments – heading for zero by 2030, but still opening new coal and gas even out to 2070! This surely shows the disdain our governments really have for their Paris commitments.
These fossil fuels are for export, of course, with little to no net benefit for Australians who don’t hold shares in these companies, so it’s a pretty potent question why any government would approve such projects.
I’m no financial advisor but it seems to me the writing is on the wall – fossil fuels will be completely stranded assets by 2050; the end of the fossil fuel gravy train is in-sight.
As to our governments, I want some of what they are smoking because it seems complete folly to be opening or extending fossil fuel projects or funding an oil refinery when everyone, everywhere will have transitioned to EV’s and our freight has also transitioned to electric before the refinery is even commissioned.
S-Curves say Australia can kill coal by 2032. The world can’t. That’s the problem
Crude S-curve modelling of historical electricity data suggests Australia’s grid could be carbon-free within six years – and that global electricity could follow by mid-century. Good news, except the climate clock runs out in 2030.
I’ve spent a career in environmental life cycle assessment and carbon accounting, watching decade after decade of climate science get diluted by the time it reaches policy. So when I ran crude S-curve models over Australia’s and the world’s historical electricity generation data, I expected another exercise in disappointment. Instead I got a result that surprised me — and a result that should worry us even more.
The good news: renewables are already on the steep part of the curve
Technology adoption rarely follows a straight line. It follows an S-curve: slow uptake, then a rapid, self-reinforcing climb, then saturation. Solar and wind in Australia’s grid have quietly entered the steep middle section of that curve. Coal — black and brown — is already in terminal decline, and once an S-curve turns, it turns fast.
Model the trend forward and Australia’s electricity system is on track to be running almost entirely on wind, solar and storage by around 2032, with fossil generation pushed to the margins well before then.
Source: [DCCEEW], author’s logistic S-curve projection.
Converted into emissions, the same modelling implies Australia’s electricity sector could be close to zero-carbon by 2032 — a genuinely startling number for a country that spent the 2010s arguing about whether renewables could keep the lights on at all.
Source: [DCCEEW], author’s logistic S-curve projection.
This is the case my colleague, Curtin University’s Professor Peter Newman, has been making to me for years: the transition is happening faster than the doom in my head allows for. Running the numbers myself, for the first time, I have to concede he has a point — at least for Australia’s electricity sector.
The catch: the world isn’t on Australia’s curve
Here’s where the good news runs out. Apply the same modelling globally and coal and gas don’t get displaced by wind and solar until close to 2050 — nearly two decades behind Australia.
Source: [EMBER and other sources via OWID], author’s logistic S-curve projection.
Global electricity emissions follow the same lag, only falling to near-zero somewhere in the 2040s.
Source: [EMBER and other sources via OWID with life-cycle conversion factors from UNECE and IPCC], author’s logistic S-curve projection.
That gap matters more than it looks. The scientific consensus behind the “Hothouse Earth” work of 2018 was that the world needed to be at net zero before roughly 2°C of warming — effectively by 2030 — or risk tipping the climate system into feedback loops that accelerate warming largely beyond our control, toward 4-6°C. If that threshold is real, a near miss in 2050 is not a partial win. It’s as good as missing by a mile, because the planet doesn’t grade on a curve.
Electricity is the fulcrum here, not a side issue. As Saul Griffith has argued, decarbonised electricity is the precondition for decarbonising everything else — transport, heating, industry. Electrify Everything only works once the grid itself is clean. So the pace of this S-curve effectively sets the pace for every other sector’s transition too. Australia racing ahead on electricity while the world lags is a genuine achievement, but it’s an achievement inside a system that is still, on the whole, running late.
Australia’s own contradiction
What makes this harder to stomach is that Australia isn’t just a bystander to the global lag — we’re actively feeding it. While our own grid heads toward zero-carbon electricity by 2032, Australian governments have kept approving new coal and gas projects with approvals stretching out to 2070. That’s not a minor accounting inconsistency with our Paris commitments; it’s a wholesale contradiction.
Almost none of this production is for domestic use — it’s for export, delivering little direct benefit to Australians who don’t hold shares in the companies concerned. Which raises the obvious question: on whose behalf, exactly, are these approvals being granted?
The economics here are not subtle. If wind and solar genuinely displace fossil generation on the timeline this modelling suggests – 2032 in Australia, mid-century globally – then coal and gas assets built now, or approved out to 2070, are being built directly into their own stranding.
Financing a new oil refinery, or expanding a gas basin, on the assumption that today’s demand patterns hold for 40 more years looks less like a bet on the market and more like a bet against the model. I’m not a financial analyst, but the direction of travel here isn’t ambiguous: fossil fuel demand curves down, faster in some places than others, and the assets built against the old curve are the ones left holding nothing.
What Peter is right about, and what he isn’t
Peter Newman would say this is exactly the story of change happening in time – that the doom in my head has been consistently wrong about the pace of the technology, and he’s not wrong about that. The S-curve for Australian electricity is genuinely, unambiguously good news, and I’d rather be proven a doomist than be proven right.
But “in time” has to mean in time for the climate system, not in time relative to how bad I expected things to get. On the numbers here, the technology curve and the climate deadline are running on different clocks – one arriving around 2032 for Australia and 2050 for the world, the other closing in 2030. Getting the electricity transition right and still missing the climate deadline isn’t a win with an asterisk. It’s still a loss, just a much closer one than I used to think.
That’s the debate worth having, and it’s not really about optimism versus pessimism. It’s about whether “faster than we thought” is the same thing as “fast enough.” The S-curves say we’re capable of the first. Nothing in this modelling tells us we’re on track for the second.
Nigel Howard is Principal of Clarity Environment, with a background in environmental life cycle assessment and carbon accounting across the UK, US and Australia. He is currently working with Professor Peter Newman (Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute) on modelling climate-related mortality.
