The much wider political view, page-7

As far as merit is concerned, surely the greatest merit is in reducing emissions and averting the destruction of the human habitat. I think the energy transition itself deserves closer scrutiny in this light. My current thinking runs something like this: electric cars don't improve the climate crisis. They make it worse, just at a slightly slower rate than petrol/diesel cars.

Just about all renewables are in the same category as EVs: you have to burn a lot of coal or gas to make them. We are still a long way off from replacing all those fossil fuel smelters and blast furnaces with hydrogen ones to make our battery metals, wind turbines and solar panels. And where are we supposed to get the electricity to power the electrolysis to make the hydrogen?

If easing the climate crisis is the goal, there is more merit in transitioning to NO cars, less electricity, less industry, less consumption, fewer Chinese ghost cities full of empty apartment towers, less Ikea cardboard furniture, more heirloom furniture that can be passed on to your grandkids, less demolition and replacement of of 30 year old Sydney buildings that should stand for 300 years.

The engine of economic growth is planned obsolescence, waste and CO2 emissions.

If climate disasters increase at the rate they have in the last couple of decades, then eliminating useless consumption and industry will become the new goal, replacing ideas like net zero, offsets and CCS which are based on extremely dodgy assumptions with very little merit. In fact we should act before the disasters happen, but we don't seem to have the good sense to do that right now.