I wrote in my last column on David Wallace-Wells' best-selling book on climate change, the Uninhabitable Earth.
It begins with the sentence "It is worse, much worse, than you think". Wallace-Wells then rigorously and convincingly spells out 12 cascading catastrophic upheavals in 12 concise chapters ranging from heat death to economic collapse.
For most climatologists, climate change is happening faster than we had imagined. The New York Times writes that "It's true that we have already warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels for a century and a half ... But the future isn't set in stone. There are many futures possible, ranging from quite bad to really catastrophic. Which one plays out is up to us to decide."
As David Wallace-Wells insists, such measure must be legislated. Individual actions are not enough.
Our Government has committed to zero emissions of all greenhouse gases other than methane by 2050. And a 10 per cent reduction below the 2017 emissions - by 2030. That will take a considerable effort.
According to Statistic New Zealand, "Households contributed 71 per cent to New Zealand's total carbon footprint in 2017. Transport accounted for 37 per cent of the carbon footprint." Transportation efficiency is an urgent priority.
Clearly electric and hydrogen cars are the standard of the future. However, for now, anxiety about limited driving range, high purchase prices, battery issues and an insufficient charging infrastructure are the main challenges for electric vehicles. Their availability is limited. Electric cars made up only around 2 per cent of new-car sales in 2019. Hydrogen cars are still experimental.
One notable paper from the right leaning German Institute for Economic Research suggested that electric vehicles, when including battery production, are barely efficient, that "the CO2 emissions of battery-electric vehicles are, in the best case, slightly higher than those of a diesel engine".
On the other hand, most recent studies have concluded the opposite, such as the Von Fahrzeugen study which concluded "that emissions from EVs have emissions up to 43 per cent lower than diesel vehicles". Electric cars are certainly the way forward.
The clincher is the source of electricity. Outside of New Zealand, Norway and a handful of other nations, electricity is largely produced by fossil fuels. That too will need to be changed quickly for electric cars to be successful … and for carbon targets to be reached.
One intermediate solution for the 2030 target is the mass use of hybrid cars and trucks.
Production of hybrids began 23 years ago. Affordable used hybrid cars are now reasonably common. They cost little more than their counterparts and are available from a small Prius to large SUVs. They have engines that dance back and forth between both an electric and petrol engine, achieving one-third better gas efficiency.
Once they were deemed to have been inefficient due to the excessive production waste. No longer.
A meticulous study by the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory demonstrated that they (particularly the batteries) use more energy to produce. However, "the conventional vehicle requires far more energy to operate and emits far more greenhouse gases over its lifetime, significantly cancelling out any imbalance during the production stage" [source: Burnham et al]. The laboratory ran their study with two sets of cars - one hybrid, the other conventional. Including energy to produce the vehicles, "the conventional vehicle requires 6500 Btu of energy per mile compared to 4200 Btu per mile for a hybrid".
Imagine … with one relatively simple solution globally is that we can now, relatively inexpensively and within years cut our household transport carbon footprint by one-third.