Implementing International Agreements: Paris Accords, Montreal Protocol, Kigali amendment…
It was now possible to make decisive inroads into International agreements that had been long debated but never actually enacted. The frameworks were there, all had truly been said, and all that had been missing was the political will to walk the talk. Within 6 months of the launch of GR1, and after some rapid adjustments that would remove caveats, exceptions, grace periods and conditional clauses that were now making 90% of the agreements, all the necessary changes to the laws were enacted in all member countries. The hounds had been unleashed and they had made short work of that whole business.
Enormous inroads had been made to adhere to the Paris Agreement, the pathway to maintaining the world to a temperature rise of less than 1.5C. Those achievements were possible because enforcement had been pushed and deadlines tightened. Since the inception of Mock Cop 26 in 2021, the gap between what was needed to keep within the climatic bounds set by the Paris Agreement and what had been agreed by the previous Conventions Of Parties had been exposed by the young delegates of the alternative movement. Mock Cop had become the preferred medium for discussions and for moving forward constructively. Ambitious programs for switching to renewable energies as a palliative step towards weaning humanity of its dependence on energy had been deemed a necessary evil. Eventually the real mitigation lever, and the one that would be emphasized by the general resource crunch which the recent Gaia Roadmap had unveiled, would be for humanity to heavily reduce its overall energy use, and eventually end all its industrial scale production.
The switch to renewable energy was putting out the fire that the burning of fossil fuel had lit, but the dependency on energy, the extractive industry and consumerism at the core of the thermo industrial civilization would soon need to be questioned once again. That other fire would need to be put out as well, some other bottlenecks had just been shifted to a later date. In the meantime, the planet’s climate could be stabilized, carbon sinks could be created or enhanced, and mitigation could start to even reverse the trend for increasing Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Between 2021 and 2024, it had been full steam ahead for the renewable energy sector, as long as every kWh produced came as a replacement for a kWh produced by burning fossil fuel. There was already a world cap on energy use, set at the 2023 level.
Soon, in fact as soon as the renewable sector could provide a certain percentage of that energy use, total energy use would have to start decreasing. This would mean shutting down coal plants, gas plants, even biomass-run plants which had never come as a substitution to fossil fuels, but had certainly caused the losses of valuable carbon sinks, not to mention the loss of biodiversity.
In fact that requirement to cap, then decrease total energy use had been inscribed by Mock Cop very early on, even before the Gaia Roadmap confirmed it. Renewable energy production was always dependant on the extraction of finite resources. It does not matter how efficient your system is or how much you can recycle, there will always need to be an extraction, and in a finite world, that is always going to be an endgame. The second law of Thermodynamics, the one that forbids 100% efficiency, is a bitch indeed!
Thermal power plants actually had to start shutting down whilst energy production was capped. The vast amounts of energy needed to build the infrastructure required for renewable energy generation needed to come out of somewhere to balance the books. As renewable energy generation came online, there had to be a corresponding decrease in other energy generation from fossil sources.
By 2024, renewable energy generation had reached the 25% target for overall energy production. It was now time to lower the energy cap, shut down more thermal or nuclear power plants until, by 2040, total energy production would only come from renewable energy, with therefore total energy production now a quarter of what it was in 2020. Then would come the next phase of the plan, running the renewable energy generation infrastructure into the ground until, by 2100, humanity would no longer produce energy on an industrial scale. That would give time to transfer power generation to smaller artisanal structures that could be operated in the smaller communities that would by then be the sole remnants of a world once called the thermo industrial civilization.
That last part of the plan had been worked out earlier on, during the development of the Gaia Roadmap in 2024. Up until then, the uptake of renewable had indeed been remarkable, and the world was indeed on the verge of starting to reduce energy use. That set of circumstances had only been possible with the approval of the Davos Boys, but they could never have let total energy output fall. It had stabilized as a result of a plateauing economy, and efficiency improvements had even allowed to increase industrial output for a while. The Davos Boys were going to tolerate a small dip for the first year of their revolution, but the plan was for a raft of coal plant developments in 2025 to renew the ailing stock they had let run down and which had become decrepit for a number of years.
The path to decreasing energy use was a steep one, but with a methodical approach and soon without the underlying rule of the rich, completely achievable. Up until then, the path followed had suited the rich boys, enormous amounts of money had been spent on insulating buildings, on decommissioning obsolete heating installations and installing more efficient heat pumps. Cycling infrastructures had been boosted, large scale solar farms had been developed and complemented small scale domestic installations. Global goods output had actually increased for a while in an energy constricted world.
There had been enormous investments into the transition from fossil fuel to electric cars, and to make petrol cars much more efficient. Even the airline industry would soon rationalize its routes and suppress flights when the journey could be undertaken by train or bus in less than a few hours. For the time being there was a grace period for the building sector as train and bus lines were being expanded, generating good business.
Regulation had just started to be rolled out on the temperature allowed for domestic and office heating; things had indeed started to get personal before even the roadmap. Now there was talk of introducing maximum square meterage per household, as a function of the number of the people in it. Up until now, energy consumption had been steady, but emissions were falling due to the replacement by renewable.
Now it was time for the downward phase of consumption. People would start to have restrictions imposed on thermostat settings, on the efficiency of cars you were driving. You had to either open up your doors to more people or move to a smaller house. And the restrictions on births meant the overall occupied surfaces would start to decrease as deaths overtook births and population would start to decline. The enormous amount of energy needed for new buildings would vanish almost overnight as there would now be an oversupply of well insulated and energy efficient dwellings.
Up until now, greenhouse gas emissions had been steady despite the increase in infrastructure building, as more renewable had covered the extra energy needs. Now emissions would start to fall dramatically as the building of new dwellings had virtually stopped, as plane routes started to be slashed and aviation would start to shrink, as people started to need less energy for heating, from a combination of thermostat restrictions, better insulation and efficient heating and cooling.
Agricultural practices had started to change to less carbon intensive methods, new carbon sinks were developed that would further offset the decreasing amounts of Greenhouse gases being released.
The Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol meant the CFC substitutes that had allowed a reduction in the damage to the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere could no longer be potent greenhouse gases which were causing problems of their own. Within a month, the grace period that would allow those dangerous gases to be used as refrigerants until 2030 was revoked, industry was given 6 months notice to lift its game.
For once, it looked like the world was starting to make progress on saving what was left of the environment, there was a true way forward which made sense and which had acquired the means of its ambitions.