Disruptive technologies and societal change could allow us to reach net zero much quicker than anticipated – if we make the right choices now
The publication of the latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has driven home, once again, the gravity of humanity’s predicament on planet Earth.
As demonstrated in parts one and two of this series, we have tended to consistently under-estimate the scale and pace of climate change and, as a result, are always playing catch-up as new scientific insights reveal how close we are to the climate system spiralling out of balance irreversibly. The evidence is mounting that the Earth is already in the climate danger zone.
The IPCC has called for transformational change of the global economy, hitting all levels and all process of all societies. But the idea of achieving such a colossal scale of transformation in such a short period of time seems impossible.
It has caused many in the environment movement and beyond to feel a sense of despair as the lack of political will, and the inertia among global political and corporate leaders, reinforces a sense of apathy and disillusionment.
Yet, we are also told that this scale of transformation is going to come at a cost, at least for now – that it will hurt consumers, hit our wallets, drive-up prices for households, and significantly increase taxes. That we have to take a hit in the short-term, to reap the long-term benefits.
But these longstanding beliefs are based on a lack of understanding of the nature of the systemic transformation required. In reality, more and more evidence is emerging that transformation is coming – and that by understanding its dynamics, we will be positioned to benefit today not only ecologically, but economically and socially too.
The Dynamics of Disruption
This year, I was involved as an editor in a new report published by the San Francisco-based technology forecasting think tank RethinkX. The report offers what I believe is the clearest evidence of how, despite the gravity of our current situation, we can solve climate change by transforming the entirety of our civilisation in as little as 15 years.
The report is co-authored by my colleagues venture investor James Arbib, environmental social scientist Adam Dorr, and serial entrepreneur and Stanford University lecturer Tony Seba. Unlike conventional siloed, linear approaches, the report is based on the Tony Seba Disruption framework – a complex systems approach to understanding the interplay between disruptive technologies and societal change.
Seba’s framework and RethinkX’s application of it are particularly significant because they have been used to successfully anticipate a wide range of developments, from rapid declines in costs of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, to the collapse of the coal industry and oil prices.
The report finds that the most powerful fossil fuel-based industries in the world – oil, gas and coal; livestock farming; and combustion engines – are going to become obsolete well within the next 20 years. The driving force of this transformation? Economics.
Robust empirical data confirms not only that these industries are entering economic death spirals that will make their business models increasingly unsustainable, but that in the next decades, they will be increasingly disrupted by a cluster of existing clean technologies in the energy, transport and food sectors, which are rapidly becoming cheaper, more efficient and more ubiquitous.
If societies recognise this dramatic shift and make the right choices, humanity will be able to eliminate 90% of global carbon emissions within the next 15 years and reach net zero by 2040 or even well before 2035 – far faster than conventional analysts believe is possible and ushering in a new era of post-carbon prosperity.
But, if we choose to obstruct this coming transformation, the Earth will find itself stuck in the climate danger zone: going above 2 degrees Celsius and breaching the ‘safe limit’ ratified by governments around the world under the Paris Agreement.
How Disruption Drives Change
Previous disruptions provide a compelling context to understand what’s coming.
Horses were the dominant mode of transport for millennia. Landline phones and analogue cameras were in place for over a century-and-a-half. But cars, smartphones and digital cameras all achieved mass adoption within as little as 10 to 15 years.
In all of these cases, disruptive technologies experienced a virtuous cycle of exponential cost reductions and exponentially-improving efficiencies, enabling them to fundamentally threaten the economic viability of incumbent products.
Simultaneously, the latter were driven into a vicious cycle of economic decline – becoming more inefficient, expensive, and less profitable in comparison. Eventually, it simply made no economic sense to buy the old products and their business models became obsolete.
The accelerating feedback loops between these vicious and virtuous cycles drive the mass adoption rates of the disruptive technologies along an ‘S curve’: adoption increases slowly at first, then accelerates toward an exponential growth rate that levels-off as the product dominates the market. At the same time, previous technologies enter death spirals of economic decline, and rapidly become relics of history.
These are not simply one-for-one substitutions. Cars didn’t simply replace horses – they completely transformed the entire landscape of society, from commuting to logistics, trade to war, retail to how we designed our cities.
This pattern of transformation is now empirically well-documented by several studies. The new RethinkX report uses it to identify the most promising disruptions with the biggest transformative impact.
The End of Big Oil, Big Motors and Big Ag
Today, just three overarching sectors of the global economy – energy, transport and food – are responsible for more than 90% of global carbon emissions. But, in each of these sectors, disruptions are now taking place that will lead a suite of clean technologies that will not only become cost-competitive with prevailing industries, but cheaper.
Over the next two decades, the report finds, conventional power plants run on oil, gas and coal will be replaced by solar, wind and batteries (SWB). Privately-owned automobiles based on internal combustion engines will be replaced by electric and later autonomous vehicles (A-EVs) operated as an on-demand service. Industrial livestock farming will be replaced by precision fermentation (PF) in microbial protein factories and cellular agriculture (CA).
The driving force of this huge transformation in our fossil fuel-dependent production system is economics.
Our research shows clearly that SWB, A-EVs, and PFCA have already begun their virtuous cycles. Over the past decades, empirical data reveals cost curves confirming that they are experiencing exponential improvements in performance, efficiency, price and returns, that in turn is driving feedback loops of vicious cycles in incumbent industries.
If this pattern continues at its current rate according to the predictable pattern of technology disruptions, then the conclusion is unavoidable: this cluster of technologies is on track to become not merely cost-competitive, but two to 10 times cheaper than incumbent carbon-dependent energy, transport and food industries over the next 20 years.
As this takes place, they will increasingly penetrate markets, making conventional carbon-intensive industries obsolete and leading associated carbon emissions to decline dramatically.
In the energy sector, which currently accounts for some 57% of global carbon emissions, RethinkX’s research confirms that solar photovoltaics, wind power, and lithium-ion storage batteries will be capable of providing 100% of a society’s energy far cheaper than conventional power plants in most regions of the world. At the current rate of improvements, they will become cheaper than fossil fuels by 2030.
But that’s just the beginning. There are optimal and poor approaches to SWB deployment.
Modelling by RethinkX in 2020 demonstrated that, by building over-capacity of solar and wind to decrease reliance on batteries in the winter, the new clean energy system would be capable of producing extremely large quantities of surplus electricity for free, generating at least three times the amount of electricity as the fossil fuel system produces at near zero marginal costs all year round. This is a conservative estimate – one study by Swiss Government scientists found that solar over-capacity could generate worldwide as much as 10 times the current levels of energy consumption. Such a vast increase in the availability of clean, cheap electricity would enable the complete transformation of the energy system, making it possible to cleanly power a vast array of public services, from wastewater treatment to recycling.
A similar revolution is underway in transportation, which accounts for 16.2% of global emissions.
Based on the rate at which self-driving technology is now improving, we expect autonomous electric vehicles to further disrupt and ultimately replace gas-based cars within around a decade. But, even without autonomous tech, RethinkX has found that because electric cars last seven times longer than gasoline vehicles, costs per mile of transport especially for ride-hailing and freight will plummet, making the model of transportation-as-a-service so cheap that it will no longer make sense for most people to have their own car. Costs will drop even further when electrical vehicles remove the labour cost.
The third major opportunity is in the food sector, currently responsible for 18% of global emissions.
RethinkX’s previous research has shown that the entire dairy and cattle industries will be replaced by rapidly advancing precision fermentation (PF) and cellular agriculture (CA) technologies. PF uses microbial hosts such as yeast or fungi as ‘cell factories’ for ingredients like proteins and fats. Dairy protein DNA sequences are programmed onto the microorganisms, such as yeast, which are placed into fermentation tanks like those used to brew beer, where they are fed simple plant-based nutrients and sugars to grow. The fermentation process causes these microbes to produce proteins identical to those found in dairy milk – without the cow. This process can be used to create a vast diversity of animal proteins without needing the actual animal, and even to replace the agricultural cultivation of staple crops with greater efficiency, while using less energy, land and water.
Driven by improvements in biological and information technologies, the costs of these technologies have dramatically declined. In 2000, the cost of producing a single kilogram of one type of protein molecule was around $1 million. By 2020, it was around $100. According to RethinkX’s work, it is projected to fall below $10 by 2025. By 2030, PF will become five times cheaper than livestock farming, and 10 times cheaper by 2035. The new report confirms that this is already happening faster than RethinkX previously predicted: we are now on track for proteins produced via PF to cost $1 per kg as early as 2030. As this process unfolds, it will disrupt the diary and cattle industries at an accelerating pace.
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Between Collapse and Renewal
RethinkX is not the only group to have arrived at such conclusions. In a separate report, the Carbon Tracker Initiative – a London-based think tank looking at the impact of climate change on financial markets – drew on RethinkX’s systems framework to examine specific trends in the energy sector.
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