Future graphs will show accelerated use of greenhouse gasses until 2015, than a decade of the acceleration slowing down and (however it all ends) a steep increase again at least for 2025.
📢 📢 WE ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY!
This might be not seeing the forest for the trees. The fact of the matter is that solar and wind are the cheapest form of electricity today. EVs have fallen in price to the point that they can somewhat compete with combustion engine cars. Not quite cheap enough, but with political support they can take over. Heat pumps are taking over the heating sector in a lot of places. Especially in new construction.
A lot of big trends are anti fossil fuels. It really is a matter of implementing them. This is a setback, but steel is among the hardest to decarbonize.
New and improved technologies are definitely making a very positive impact, but at the same time the overal energy consumption is still rising. So is are use of fossil fuels. We continue to emit more greenhouse gasses year after year. That increase is slowing down, we’re doing good things. But in the US for example data centers (AI) ask for so much energy that the added renewable sources can’t replace the old fossil power plants.
There is a also a lot being done to promote the use of EVs, I agree. In my city for example, at the end of this month it will be prohibited to enter the city center with a van or a truck with a combustion engine. All deliveries etc have to made with an electric truck or van. Those things really do push us forward, but those batteries are partly charged with energy from plants ran on fossil fuels.
At the same time, a lot of industrial processes are not getting greener. This wasn’t so bad at first because there was a lot of lower hanging fruit, but most of that low-hanging fruit has been picked by now. And instead of trying to reach the higher hanging fruit, a lot of western governments are easing the goals they set for themselves. In my country they wanted to have cut back the emission of greenhouse gasses to half of what is was in 1990 in 2030 but they decided it would be realisitic to change the target to 2035.
On an individual bases these decisions aren’t so bad. It doesn’t really matter that much if one steel production facility takes a few extra years to decarbonize. So you are right, this news article is a single setback and the large technology trend is positive. But governments and industries are shifting to a lower gear and not for the right reasons.
We need governments to continue pressuring the industries. Oil companies want to continue selling oil. They want ships and airplanes to use their products instead of green hydrogen (or whatever will turn out to be the best solution). We can’t allow them to put us back to sleep and say we’ve come far enough now, we’ll get to that green future even with them continueing to do business as usual.
So maybe this steel producer isn’t really the problem. But I really believe they likely would make different business decisions if the political landscape was different.