I’m quoting her bc she represents the Liberal position taken this week 
She’s a deadset moron though like the majority of the party she happy claps
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What would commiting to net zero look like if done properly? It would mean that every Australian would need to curtail their lives drastically. No more big utes, no more 100 inch Oleds, no more mangoes in July, no more o/s holidays, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Electoral suicide. We are a very selfish species.
It will be BAU until we are forced to geoengineer. And then we will need to deal with the unknown unknowns that will come with that.
Fun times ahead.
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Long may she continue deluding the Libs and alienating the voters.
Removing coal from the Australian energy mix gets us most of the way to net zero. This is quite achievable on the timeline.
Over the next 25 years the current car fleet will naturally be replaced with new vehicles, with most of them being EVs.
Any industry that uses electricity will become green by default, purely by the grid becoming renewable. The challenge becomes how to replace natural gas as the source of industrial heating. There are already electric or hydrogen options for many of these processes and these will be optimised over the coming decades.
Finally there’s transportation. Green ammonia is probably the fuel for long haul, with batteries for shorter distances. This is a hard to abate sector, but advances are happening.
So down to your conundrum… How to keep building and stay consistent with net zero. I’ll break it down to the key products…
Concrete and steel - currently uses gas for industrial heating. Pivot to hydrogen or electric heating.
Aluminium - shift to green electricity and adjust plants to predominantly use energy during daylight hours.
Bitumen roads - NFI
Diesel vehicles and equipment - probably happens last, but expect to see battery or plug in stuff rolled out in the next few years and get rapidly better over time.
Basically, we get rid of coal and most of the work to get net zero is done. The last 15% is going to be a bunch of small difficult challenges, but 25 years is a long time for R&D. 25 years ago rooftop solar was unheard of, now you would be crazy not to build a house with it.
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Big change is happening but will be at a cost which has to be passed down.
I know we are in the process of having our whole fleet of 20k of cars, vans, trucks and bikes changed over to electric but it’s coming at a massive cost to us so over the coming years we have to increase our prices substantially to cover it.
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Really interesting, thanks!
Those first adopters will pay the premium, but get a green advertising advantage for the short term. Those that adopt later will get cheaper and more refined vehicles.
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Since we started rolling out EV’s we have reduced carbon emissions by 17%.
Another batch of 500 EV bikes to replace the petrol bikes has arrived and they are currently being integrated into the system.
That takes us to just over 5700 EV’s in our various fleets.
The first batch of Merc vans are arriving soon and another 100 on order at around $100k a pop. The trucks are taking their sweet time though so that could be 10-15 years away and at a massive cost
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My point is both sides of politics give out subsidies whether it be fossil fuels or renewables !
And you’d understand that if this were to eventuate, it wouldn’t be even remotely close to being fast enough, right?
The GMST reported by the WMO/IPCC for 2021 was + 1.1⁰C over baseline.
In 2022 it was + 1.2⁰C over baseline.
In 2023 it was + 1.55⁰C over baseline.
In 2024 it was + 1.58⁰C over baseline.
This year, 2025, looks like it’s going to average out at about 1.46⁰C, and that comes during a La Niña year.
We are now at 1.5⁰C over baseline. That’s a jump of .4⁰C in just 4 years. A rate of warming of .1⁰C a year.
The WMO are predicting we will get an El Niño in the next few years with a sustained (Over 6 months) 1.9⁰C GMST.
With all this in mind we just smashed the record for emissions in 2024, and 2025 isn’t looking much better.
We are out of time for diddling around. Net zero in 2050? What will our planet look like then if we don’t take seriously drastic action now. And what about feedback loops, none of these are factored into projections. You may have read recently that scientists think that our coral reefs have already tipped.
Globally that’s around 2 billion vehicles. We just can’t.
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I really do get ya on the global warming trajectory. It’s scary and not going the way any of us hoped.
On the cars, I’m really confident that the existing fleet will be replaced by 2050. This was the highest selling car in 2020 and I personally can’t remember seeing one of the curvy OG Commodores around in the last month. 25 years is a long time in car lifetimes, so there’s plenty of time for EVs to scale up and take over. It won’t be complete on a global scale, but it will be pretty dominant.
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I’ve been wondering where all the Mazda 3s have gone.
They’re getting stolen en masse and broken down for parts or else shipped to collectors in the Gulf, according to the cops who my old man talked to after his got nicked.
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Sorry, I wasn’t clear when I said that we just can’t. What I meant by that was we can’t afford all the emissions building that many cars would cause. 8 billion tyres, etc. We need to be thinking about less, not more.
It’s not going to happen, but the only way we get out of this is degrowth on a massive scale.
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Australia’s output of co2 has no effect on the planet and exporting that small output to other countries with lower standards is worse for everyone except those making money off it, all while we continue to make electricity unaffordable for manufacturing and households
oooo get him benny
Nearly 20 years since Howard went for re-election with an actual policy, and the Coalition is still struggling to stay coherent on this issue.
Great news!
Tell that to the many companies and organisations who have already achieved net zero or are on their way to this goal well before 2050.
Our household is probably nett zero already.
Obviously still some challenges, but as @Benny40 points out it is achievable. Reality is that if we don’t take action then it confirms the path to destruction.
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That would be a waste of Benny
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